Byte’s already overrun with spam, but it’s working on it

Byte, the new short-video service from Vine co-founder Dom Hoffman, has only been live for two days but it’s already full of spam comments, a lot of them profane and generally not very pleasant to endure. 

But the company is working to fix the issue. In a post on Byte’s community pages (via Engadget), Hoffman addressed the spam problem and promised both a short-term fix and a more durable solution for the future.

“I wanted to post an update and make it clear that we’re aware of the issues with comment spam and more widely with certain types of comments. This is our top priority and we’re working very hard to address it. It should be noticeably better than it was 24 hours ago and should continue to improve over the next little while,” he wrote. 

In the “medium term,” Hoffman continued, the company will add the ability to like comments and the ability to block, filter and limit comments on posts. Video moderation should be improved “very soon,” he wrote. 

When all that’s solved, the company will re-focus on new features, “including new discovery and creation features,” he wrote. He also promised to share details of the service’s new partner program pilot — the announcement of which is likely one of the reasons why spammers are swarming all over Byte — very soon.

Byte’s similar to its predecessor Vine (which was shut down by Twitter) in that it enables users to post six-second looping videos. However, the landscape has changed since Vine was shut down; TikTok is an incredibly popular, short-video app, and Byte has seen quite a bit of traction early, a lot of it probably coming from people looking for a TikTok alternative.