How can you not sabotage someone's channel with paid views?

[Acerthorn]

Everyone says not to buy views or subscribers on youtube, because (A) it will get you banned, and (B) even if it doesn't get you banned, the lack of views the subscribers give you and/or the low average view duration of the subsequent views would result in your videos being algorithmically demoted.

The websites that purport to sell views and subs give us a rather well-thought-out counter-argument to the first of those two problems. If buying views and/or subs would get you banned, then what's to stop bad actors from simply killing off a channel they don't like simply by sending bot views their way?!

Of course, those sites never address the latter of the two problems: Algorithmic suicide for your channel.

But them bringing up the idea of killing off a competitor's channel does indeed raise an elephant in the room. Maybe Youtube won't actually ban your channel because there's no direct evidence that the views came from you specifically. But couldn't an anonymous bad actor still algorithmically sabotage a competitor's channel by sending low-retention views and/or dead subscribers their way?

How exactly does Youtube safeguard against THAT while still penalizing youtubers who really are trying to simply game the system?

 

[Geoffrey Toussaint]

In the past, people have done that to other channels, along with things like comment bots to both abuse them and then get them banned. You don't hear about it too much now, maybe because the internet is very quickly moving away from the 4Chan-esque wild west culture that lasted throughout the early 2010's(although it seems to linger on twitter somehow). I don't think the dilemma you raised has truly gone away, and I'm not sure if it even can, but I think the culture of today's internet gives us a (probably false) sense of security when it comes to these kinds of attacks.

Maybe YouTube can track IPs or something on their end to figure the origin of the bots, I'm not well-versed on that sort of thing so I wouldn't know, but even if they did that, I'm not sure if they'll ever be able to tell the difference between an attack on another channel, a channel trying to look popular, and algorithm-assisted suicide. There's ways to try and put the pieces together, like looking at a creator's social channels, but seeing as YouTube uses robots to do nearly everything on the platform.

It's a scary thought, and I'm not sure if YouTube will ever have enough human mods to properly police a situation that requires thought and reliance on context clues.