I look at a lot of fountain pen review videos (among others) that don’t get very many comments, and frequently I see what seem like robotic comments, like “Great video, keep up the good work!” or “Awesome content, you deserve more subscribers.” I’m getting so I recognize some of the names too. They never say anything specific about the video or the topic, just some generic positive statement like that.
One video had another viewer comment that one of these commenters was a robot and to ignore him. This tended to confirm my suspicions, but I didn’t understand why anyone would care.
So what is the point of having robot commenters on Youtube videos? The comments don’t have links in them or anything to lead someone astray, just generic compliments.
Just guessing, some “services” promise, for a price, to get you more views on your videos. They set up fake accounts to accomplish this. having generic comments allows them to copy and paste.
Makes sense to me. If I want to find out if I like a new breakfast cereal, I’ll just buy a box for $3. If I want to find out if I’d like a new fountain pen, I’d rather read about other people’s experiences before spending $800.
Pretty sure it’s someone using bots to farm subscriptions so they can sell the account on to people who want to use it to promote their own monetized content.
There’s one currently doing the rounds - a month ago, he was called ‘Tim’, last week he changed his name to ‘Tom’ - and yesterday, changed it again to ‘Todd’ - he uses a linked account with the same name as his main account to spam comments across every video, when you click back to his second account, you see the handful of clickbait videos that belong to his main account - people appear to be clicking through to those (they contain vapid advice on growing subs, getting views, etc). People appear to be subscribing on the basis of these few videos and his subscriber count is growing extremely fast, even though he is producing no new/original content.
Pretty sure YouTube will smack it down at some point.
A couple of months ago, there was an unpatched exploit on YouTube where people with these bot-driven channels could (somehow) inject a chrome session hijack just on the simple action of clicking their YouTube username - not kidding - I wanted to see why one of these accounts was posting the same comment on every one of my videos - so I went to look at his channel, but without wanting to pollute my view history - I right-clicked on one of these bots and opened in an incognito window - even though I had only clicked on the user’s name, it took me to a genuine Google login page, that was halfway through the process to grant access to my YouTube account to another user.
Chrome session hijacking is really evil - most them are in emails (false reports of copyright claim etc) - a single click on the link can compromise your google accounts, if you keep them persistently logged on in Chrome.
People make YouTube content for various reasons - including a) because they love what they are doing and b) because they wish to have a source of revenue income.
Very often, it’s both; that is, they hope that their channel will naturally grow from a hobby into a business. Sometimes, the pursuit of item B means they drift away from doing what they love, and resort to making content with more commercial potential.
And some people just go straight for B.
It’s worth noting that it happens on nearly every platform where there is profit to be made in gaining likes/views/followers etc - any platform where legitimate commercial companies desire a more prominent profile is generally also a platform where less legitimate entities will seek to profit from the same exposure.