I'm being votebotted again.

[shanedk]

One of my subscribers PMed me this morning to let me know that I might be the target of a votebot. A lot of my 5-star videos have gone down to 4-stars and even 3.5-stars. Looking at the YouTube Insight pages, it seems he's right.

Here's the page for channel views: http://www.shanekillian.org/files/YouTube%20Insight%20-%20Views%20-%20shanedk%20-%20views.png (I'm linking to these because of the large images.)

Notice that the views have gone up while unique views are steady (possibly dropping slightly).

But now, look at the spike in ratings: http://www.shanekillian.org/files/YouTube%20Insight%20-%20Community%20-%20shanedk.png

And the spike in ratings per view: http://www.shanekillian.org/files/YouTube%20Insight%20-%20Community%20-%20shanedk%20-%20ratings%20per%20view.png

But most importantly, the DROP in average ratings down to 1: http://www.shanekillian.org/files/YouTube%20Insight%20-%20Community%20-%20shanedk%20-%20avg%20rating.png

This comes right on the heels of a couple of moon hoaxtards (or the same one with multiple accounts) posting insults on my channel as well as in videos. Are they now taking the same tactics as creationists?

Anyway, this looks very much like a general votebot. All of my videos are being affected. The most-viewed (and rated) videos, like my entry in the Pwnage Olympics, haven't dropped much, while the least-viewed ones, like my promo for Bogosity.TV, have suffered the most (it's down to 2 stars! I've NEVER had a 2-star video!).

Many 5-star videos have gone down to 4 stars, like all of the ones in my series, How Evolution Is Scientific (playlist: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=7C90EE51FA96E8CE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL ). The same is true of other videos, including both political videos and scientific (and anti-creationism) videos.

Before yesterday, almost ALL of my videos were 5-star videos. Now, NONE of them are. NOT A SINGLE ONE.

My channel link: http://www.youtube.com/shanedk

 

[scikidus]

http://www.shanekillian.org/files/YouTube%20Insight%20-%20Community%20-%20shanedk%20-%20avg%20rating.png

Shane, you've got an unread message.

Seriously man, that sucks. Does downloading the csv stats page give you any further info? If so, can you post it here? I'd like to look at it.

In the meantime, I'll look at some of your vids and see how much I can deduce externally.

 

[Otokogoroshi]

*grumble grumble* Off to vote in proper accordance to the value of the videos...


Consider I LIKE your videos that means a lot of five stars

 

[scikidus]

My first test of my method of determining the extent of the votebot attack:

Did your "Are you a libertarian?" video get about 80-100 1-star votes recently?

 

[shanedk]

It looks like the only thing the CSVs do is break it down by country. Other than that, it's just the information for the graph. But if you think having access to the raw numbers might help, I'll post them. For example, I can tell that there were 16,311 1-star votes from the US on 6/2. So the vote-bots are definitely being run from the US.

 

[shanedk]

My first test of my method of determining the extent of the votebot attack:

Did your "Are you a libertarian?" video get about 80-100 1-star votes recently?

On 6/2, it received 99 of the 16,311 1-star votes for that day. I don't see any other day it received a significant number of 1-star votes.

 

[Otokogoroshi]

Yeah, votbotting seems to be most commonly an American product...

 

[scikidus]

On 6/2, it received 99 of the 16,311 1-star votes for that day. I don't see any other day it received a significant number of 1-star votes.

Then my method works, well within a damn fine margin of error.

Here's what I did:

1. Pull up a cached page of the video. Gather the rating and number of ratings.
2. Pull up the current video. Gather the rating [javascript:alert(ratingComponent.starCount);] and number of ratings.
3. Assume that the votebot casts only 1-star votes.
4. Gather the vote total (avg. rating * 3 of ratings) difference between the old and new video pages and divide byt he change in number of votes. You now have the average rating during that time.
5. Assume that all non-votebot votes average to the pre-votebot rating for the video.
6. Perform a weighted average. Solve.

Hooray! I'm going to go try this some more.

 

[shanedk]

In fact, it looks like most of the videos (at least, all of the ones I've checked so far) were hit with either 99 or 100 1-star votes on 6/2.

 

[Otokogoroshi]

Yipes... I've got a lot of videos to go through to rate!

Oh well I've decided to grind levels in LotRO so I now have something to listen to while I play

 

[scikidus]

In fact, it looks like most of the videos (at least, all of the ones I've checked so far) were hit with either 99 or 100 1-star votes on 6/2.

It seems as if these votebots aren't very creative with the vote numbers.

Either way, I've gone ahead and built two bookmarklets to aid in the calculation of the magnitude of the votebot attack:

1. YT Video Cache Page

javascript:window.open("http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:youtube.com/%3Fv%3D"+pageVideoId,"w","height=600,width=800,status=yes,location=yes");w.alert();

Note: newer videos may not be in the cache.
2. Votebot Calculator

javascript:i=0;r1=prompt("Old%20rating:","4.5");n1=prompt("Old%20number%20of%20ratings:","469");r1=prompt("New%20rating:","3.996");n2=prompt("New%20number%20of%20ratings:","641");r1=parseFloat(r1);n1=parseFloat(n1);r2=parseFloat(r2);n2=parseFloat(n2);a=r1;b=r1;if(r1>1){a-=0.25}if(r1<5){b+=0.25};function%20f(r){t1=r*n1;t2=r2*n2;dt=t2-t1;dn=n2-n1;ar=dt/dn;x=(dt-r*dn)/(1-r);return(Math.round(x))};alert("The%20number%20of%20votebot%20votes%20was%20between%20"+f(a)+"%20and%20"+f(b)+".");

 

[shanedk]

The votebot is STILL RUNNING!!! I had another 5,958 1-star votes from the vote-bot on 6/3, but only 4,746 counter-votes from users! Please spread the word!