YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

It's time people separated the hosting of email from the interface (the address).

I see this story as Google's equivalent of when Valve would ban people from Steam for crude comments they made on the Steam forums, which I understand meant they forfeited their entire game library - or Amazon banning people for reviews.

If there is going to be any law or legislation - it should be to require service companies like Google, Valve and Amazon to treat the customer's "online personality account" (i.e. forum account, "community" account, etc) separately from their "value" account (i.e. whatever that which has _value_, be it their Steam library, their GMail mailbox, etc) - or at the very least, companies must be required to export 100% of the data in an account and providing that to the customer/user in the event they shut down an account (with reasonable constraints, such as the account having existed for at least 3 months and having been in good-standing until this specific incident, etc).

And under no circumstances should anyone lose their software copyright licenses for violating a community ToS - feel free to ban them from the forums, et cetera, but being banned from the Steam forums must not mean they lose the right to play the copy of Half-Life 2 that they paid for.

By hosting your main email on a custom domain(not a provider) you open a new attack vector for identity theft.

Someone can hijack your godaddy/namecheap/gandi account and point the MX DNS records of the domain to their own server and receive all your "Forgot your password? here is the link to reset!" emails

This a very bad advice unless you actually know what are the risks.

But i was not saying that explanation alone would make suspension ok, i was saying that the lack of explanation is an aggravating circumstance in this case.

>The emote spam in question was not "minor", the accounts affected averaged well over 100 messages each, within a short timeframe.

This is a crazy bad take. 100 messages in a few minutes is totally normal for live-streams. Just hold the ctrl-V button and... oops, your G-Mail is locked.

That. Is. Crazy. I worked at Twitch and the idea of disabling someones Amazon account for spamming emotes (even temporarily) is completely insane.

Google, you're being paid by advertisers for that content. You hold people's entire livelyhoods in the palms of your hands. No individual's ability to access their email should depend on the number of emoticons they're putting into a chat channel.

Step up and put a bit more of your billions of profit every year into making sure you're not destroying lives by empowering poor automation.

A small site like HN can block someone by mistake then apologize and say "Yeah, we definitely fucked up there", but google pushes gmail to make it essential for everything: login to phone, login to chrome, built in password manager in chrome, oauth login to third party sites. So it must handle things much more carefully.

Also, if you're running a service that's grown too large for you to properly manage (which clearly is happening, even to Google), then if you fuck it up, that's still on you! There's no fundamental right to build a really large thing, if you can't manage it properly. So they thought they could get around this limitation with AI and robots, but that doesn't work well at all. That doesn't mean you can go "oh well we're trying, but there's just too many videos being posted!" yeah well DUH that's because you keep on growing while not having the resources to keep up with the videos being posted.

It's like I built a skyscraper but people keep getting hurt in it cause bits are falling off and the floors aren't strong enough. I can't just go: yeah I built this huge skyscraper and I really TRIED reinforcing the floors with duct tape but it just doesn't work well enough. There's really nothing I can do, there's just too many floors, we're doing the best we can and it's unavoidable that some people will (literally) fall through he cracks.

That's not reasonable, I probably just should give up on the skyscraper or sell it to someone who can take responsibility for it.

These cases were to the same person, from the same computer and account - some would go through and some would not, some could be found in spam box, others just vanished -

then I started calculating the time I spent writing some emails that I never got a reply to - like hours of writing - and I though I was just ghosted for a competitor - turns out it's likely they never saw the work I sent.

I have witnessed this with 3 different receivers the past year.

The last back and forth I just resorted to using my personal gmail account to communicate with new business associate as the receiving was so erratic. At first they wondered why google was putting stuff in spam folder that did not belong there - then it just turned to non-stop frustration and delayed thumbs up on work orders.

the algo should know if you sent one email and they opened and read and replied - and you sent another, it should not matter if you put in the second email, 'your desire to do Z with your web site is understood, and can be done, but you may run into a bad SEO issue that could affect where your site displays in search results, so instead we reccomend not doing X and instead doing Y.."

something like that - so many times is seems that the anti-spam seo hating google teams trump and destroy all the things, regardless of false positives - and no transparency which hurts people - but saves the secret sauce of the anti-spam team I guess.

This is a tough place to be in when so many use gmail.

Sure you could create a new Google account and use that with your phone, but Google's going to know it's the same person (same phone number, places where you have to enter your name, same credit card info if you're purchasing any apps on the Play store, same physical location and movement patterns, etc.) and can simply ban you again. You'd like to have Chrome syncing things between a desktop and laptop? Nope nope nope.