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Comment by apecat | Hacker News Reader

Looks cool, but feeling slightly twitchy about going anywhere near that with my Google account after last week's news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759

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That guy was a troll. Many of us have been using youtube-dl extensively every day for years without any trouble.

Why would you think he was a troll? I've had my google account suspended without explanation.

Read the comments. The claimed suspension message was extremely unlikely to be real.

I have read the comments, I wouldn't be so sure.

>First I got an email from Google saying that I was using 3rd party app outside of Play Store to go around Youtube ads

I absolutely do not believe this part, but I'm willing to dismiss this as confusion on the users end.

However, the rest of the comments by the user accurately describe how google account suspensions work. The same user had also created some rather reasonable issues before this one.

I speak Finnish, and if I'm 'google cancelled my main account'-level pissed, I just might pick a username very much like that for a site I don't really want to be on in the first place. Maybe a cultural thing. So that argument is moot.

Agree with ryanlol's comment here next to mine on the rest. I'd really want more clarifications before I touch third party Youtube clients while logged in (which I want to be, for recommendations etc).

FWIW I don't think there's necessarily any link between his account getting suspended and the youtube client. Google suspends accounts for all kinds of weird reasons.

It seems really weird to me to assume that this is a troll, the other issues created by the user over a couple of weeks seem legit. I think this is just some slightly confused person trying to figure out why their account was suspended.

I get lots of legit bug reports from customers with strange inconsistencies like this mixed in, they definitely aren't trolling.

I don't think "confusion" can explain his claim to have received emails attributing his ban to his use of a youtube video downloading software. He's not provided any evidence of such emails and numerous people who've been banned by google seem to think it unlikely that google would deign to explain why they banned somebody in such detail.

I don't think the emailed explanation exists, and I don't think confusion can explain why he'd say it exists, which leads me to conclude he's lying.

(And really, if such bans were genuinely a threat, more than one person would be complaining about it happening. Tons of people use youtube-dl and newpipe (including many youtube creators who do commentary on other youtube videos) and there's this single guy claiming to have been banned for it. It doesn't pass my sniff test.)

IDK, I see weird claims like that from customers all the time! They see non-existent error messages with ridiculous texts. There's constantly weird inconsistencies like this in descriptions of real bugs.

I just assume that these people are very confused and not good at english.

Well, maybe he's a troll or maybe he's just confused or delusional, but either way I don't think the claim that google is banning people for using youtube-dl or newpipe should be taken seriously at this moment. I'm certainly not going to stop using youtube-dl.

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