Recently got into a discussion on YouTube comments about a rather technical issue involving audio levels. I thought it was probably of not much interest to the general audience, so I suggested we take it to email, and provided an address. Very soon, my response was deleted.
Wondering if this was a bot, I repeated the address in a text form: handle, domain etc. It too vanished rapidly, which suggests to me that they have actual humans filtering the posts?
Anyone else encountered this? And if so, why are they doing so?
YouTube does have rules against posting spam in comments (see here—scroll down to the “Comments Spam” section). I couldn’t find anything referring to email addresses, though.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re trying to prevent people from posting other people’s email addresses.
Unless you have a personal domain and you post it in a really obscure way, surely a Google bot can figure out that you are giving an email address however you type it?
I’ve seen comments on YouTube about not being allowed to post links (and I’ve never seen links) and I suspect email addresses are included as pretty much being like a link in html. It’s fairly easy to parse something as an email address - I wonder if breaking it by spaces or putting “dot” for “.” might help. I’ve seen websites for conferences say break email addresses of a committee in a way that they would be hard to harvest.
I assume they meant writing something like “biden at whitehouse dot gov”, just avoiding the format that makes it really obvious that it’s an email adress. But unless you have a personal domain and omit “at” and “dot” and the suffix, it’s still going to be obvious to our AI overlords. Google can probably quite easily predict that you are about to attempt to communicate an email address to someone and delete your comment before you write it.
My understanding is that the default settings will withhold any Internet address to be inspected by the channel owner for moderation. And it seems to me that any attempt to replace the comment also gets held for moderation.
Yup. I guess they don’t want any conversation taken to email (nothing to do with the channel owner, probably) because they think they will lose advertising revenue by "eyeballs and ‘mindshare’ " (remember those memes from early Internet days?
Rather silly, since modern ad blockers are quite able to remove ads from YouTube. But I guess it provides employment for a cubicle farm of workers?
From what I’ve seen from content providers, the mighty algorithm gives credit for engagement in the comments section, so moving discussions to email would decrease this metric. Perhaps YouTube doesn’t want to be responsible for crooks trolling for suckers. There is some content that would be a treasure trove of the gullible. Same goes for links, I suppose.
That’s one possible reason, but I can think of at least two others: (1) an attempt to keep spam out of the Comments section, and (2) to keep people from posting other people’s email addresses in an attempt to get people to flood their inboxes and invade their privacy (as I suggested before).
@blondebear is correct that disallowing links in comments is an option controlled by the channel owner.I don’t know whether or not that includes email addresses.