[gameswithgabe]

I don't find this argument very convincing. The same argument could be made about security vulnerabilities, but I'm willing to bet (and hoping that this is the case) that Google will invest millions of dollars and man hours per year on security patches and secure systems.

Sure, hackers will always find loop holes. But when that happens we flag that version as vulnerable and release a patch to fix the vulnerability. This is the exact same technique Google could apply to the YouTube spam. They just don't want to spend the money or time to do it.

[TheDong]

There is a difference between the cat-and-mouse game of spam fighting and between fixing vulnerabilities.

Typically, when you fix a vulnerability, things are strictly better. Attackers can no longer do X bad action, but all legitimate users can still do everything they wanted.

Spam fighting is different. If you make your spam classifier broader and broader, it will have more and more false positives as well, and legitimate comments will get deleted too. Without AGI, or at least very good language parsing, it really will be a case of tuning between "more false positives, less spam" and "fewer false positives, more spam".

There's also vastly more spam than there are security vulnerabilities since there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people intently creating spam for profit, while bugs are mostly accidental, and exploitable ones relatively rare.