YouTube is one of the great innovations of the Web 2.0 era. Two years ago if you told me that there’d be online communities around uploading and viewing videos I’d think you were crazy. It still boggles my mind that we have the bandwidth and power to push websites like this. I tend to look through the top videos every day. Yes most of it is crap, but every once and a while you find something good, and that makes it all worth it. Unfortunately there’s some serious flaws with YouTube’s system, and it kinda makes you wonder. Is anybody there?

YouTube features a most viewed videos feature. All it does is rank the videos by which one had the most views for that day. However, if you view the list frequently you’ll find that it’s been hacked more than once. This first came to my attention when songzzz videos first started showing up on youtube. These blatant spam videos are all about a new website for sharing music. These videos were able to take the first, second, and third places on the most viewed list. It was clear from the get go that they hacked to obtain these positions. However, to add insult to injury YouTube didn’t remove the video for several days! The company has also been able to pull this off on two other occasions that I’ve seen.  It’s become so common you have to ignore half the videos on the page. However, today I got the real shocker. I’m browsing along and find a picture of a girl giving a blowjob.  The video remained on page 2 until the next day.

Now I’m not saying that YouTube hasn’t done anything about this. One of the more commonly known hacks involved simply refreshing your window over and over again. YouTube figured this one out quickly and got around it by ignoring repeat requests from a single IP adress. Unfortunately, YouTube’s best efforts just aren’t enough. There’s not much they can with the current scheme to stop botnets from bumping videos to the top page. The obvious solution to me is to only count views from registered users. The most viewed videos page would be just as useful, but we wouldn’t have as much of the spam. For someone to hack this scheme they’d need to have thousands of user accounts. Improved moderation would also help. After all YouTube is worth over a billion dollars. They should be able to catch these sorts of things before they’ve been on the front page for 3 days.  I’m catching them almost every time I look why aren’t they?  Maybe they should hire me

I’m certain this topic will become more and more interesting as time goes on. When the entire first page is nothing but porn it’s going to be hard to ignore.  It still perplexes me as to why YouTube seems to almost completely ignore the issue.  I’m not the first person to recommend changes like this, but they just don’t want to do it.  Seems like we’re all going to have to just sit here until YouTube gets a clue.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 1:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.