As of April 26th 2021, I got a bunch of replies on YouTube from totally not bots advertising what appears to be a Netflix wannabe (I'm not going to check their site out). I already showed a few of those comments in the Discord, but even more of them came after I shared them. It's ridiculous.
My inbox of Flixzone comments
Comments 1
Comments 2
Comments 3
Comments 4
Comments 5 (YouTube didn't notify me about these ones)
Notice how all but one of those replies happened on the same day. I went "What the f***?" A few of those comments weren't on my videos like the Bewitched Springfield and Super Monkey Ball videos. I first thought I was being targeted, but then I found that I'm not the only one who got this problem. They generally reply to top comments or pinned comments. Obviously, the people confirming that Flauntzone is totally not sketchy are also bots.
I'd like to imagine this as a way to make YouTube look even dumber than when they tried to mitigate "dislike spam" earlier this year. But it's irritating. Why do I have to deal with this when I already have bots making comments that's just a random timestamp under a minute and then a link to some dating site (or a gibberish-looking URL) every time I upload a new video? I marked all of those comments as spam after the second wave of them, but somehow, a third wave struck. When has YouTube's spam detection ever worked properly? They allow garbage like this to be spammed but block real, ordinary comments? It's stupid.