YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video | Hacker News Reader

YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

639 pointsthijser370 comments

I knew Google's automated processes were pretty bad from earlier stories here, but today I got hit by it myself.

I participated in the totally legit EthGlobal "Hack Money" hackathon (https://hackathon.money/) earlier this year and one of required submissions of that event was a video describing your work. I made one and uploaded it to Youtube. The hackathon went great and we won some prizes but that's not relevant to this story.

Yesterday evening I received an email from Youtube that they've removed my channel because "Spam, scams or commercially deceptive content are not allowed on YouTube.".

I thought this certainly must be an error so I used the attached appeal link and got a response within less than 15 minutes that they appeal has been rejected and that no further replies will be processed.

I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing.

I would like to think that Google's AI systems are smarter than just videoTitle.contains("hack") && videoTitle.contains("money"), but apparently not.

If anybody has connections who can help get me unsuspended that would be highly appreciated. The google cache of my channel is still available here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gcYJ--...

View on HN

Update: 3 hours after posting and being on the hacker news front page:

Automated email out of the blue: "We’re pleased to let you know that we’ve recently reviewed your YouTube account, and after taking another look, we can confirm that it is not in violation of our Terms of Service. We have lifted the suspension of your account, and it is once again active and operational."

Thanks hacker news for voting this up and clearly triggering something within the GooglePlex. Still a big -1 for Google/YouTube that their normal processes are completely broken.

Ah, the classic. In order for your issue to be resolved you have to make the news. Really sad how this applies to many/most online services.

I guess Kafka forgot to acknowledge the power of complaining on Hacker News.

Google is Kafka at scale. All of the other characters in The Trial besides Josef K have been optimized away and replaced with silicon.

The key insight that made it possible? That responding to front-paged Hacker News complaints doesn't have to scale. This allows them to shaft users in the vast majority of cases which never become high profile.

It’s funny how Google’s automated system will flag a small video like yours but I see tons of crypto scams on SpaceX imposter live feeds with thousands of viewers

Indeed. And what's worse they all appear to have the Space X channel name. They look legit the first time you see them unless you treat youtube the same way you do when reading an email, ie looking for phish. And what's worse is that those channels are recommended by the youtube algorithm!!!

Actually, what happens is a channel you were subscribed to, or one which you have consumed enough content from to influence the YT algorithm.... has been compromised, taken over, the password was discovered by crypto miners.

They take over the channel, change a bunch of settings, etc... then start spewing out the usual Space-X live stream crypto-mining pyramid-scam. Sometimes if you look at the channel hosting the live-stream, you can sometimes still see clues to the old channel you were subscribed. You have to audit through the videos and playlists, old comments, etc...

In the two cases I noticed when I investigated the channel looked like it had no uploads other than what I was watching. And there was no visible subscriber count, which I interpreted as likely almost no subscriber. I think YT algorithm tends to push live streamed content.

If I see it again I 'll check if the channel has been hijacked or anything else I can find. I 'd rather not see it again though :p

If u buy ads from them, you are a honorable and valuable customer, regardless if your ad say "send X btc to this address and we will send you back 2X".

On the last Apple Keynote I wanted to watch the live on YouTube so I looked for it on YouTube directly and the only results I got were older Apple events and crypto scam lives (on channels named stuff like « AppleEvent », stuff like that).

I just couldn’t find the real live, but these fake lives had tens of thousands of viewers.

YouTube sucks.

I was on YouTube and got a whole series of ads about a hat that would protect me from 5G …

i mean, technically true?

Not sure about “protection” … and the other benefits like reducing “brain fog” improved cognition, improved sleep, and the list of bs goes on… whenever you see 5G protection it’s always a rabbit hole.

well the other 'benefits' obviously not but 100% the hat will protect you from 5g :)

I think the word “protection” implies there’s some reason to be protected.

I mean technically your skin protects you so you're protected.

The add says "from 4G and 5G"

At YouTube (or Facebook, or Twitter) scale, correctly assessing let alone addressing abusive content is a near-intractable problem.

One might argue, and I think there's a strong case to do so, that if you can't do a thing viably at scale, then perhaps you should not do it.

At the same time, an acknowledgement of the scope of the problem by those criticising practices ... would be a breath of fresh air.

(I'm a long-standing critic of most of the information monopolists, and have to the greatest extent possible avoided getting sucked into their respective maws.)

Shallow dismissals really don't advance conversation or understanding. Please do better.

What are you trying to accomplish with this comment?

The intractability of the overall problem is a topic of interest, sure. But this thread is pointing out how poor Google’s current implementation/attempt to solve that problem seems to be. The parent comment adds to the dialog by pointing out that while innocent content is getting removed, truly harmful content still exists and is rampant. Is it piling on? Maybe. But Google is earning the criticism.

This doesn’t imply that the solution is simple, but highlights how broken things are. Google is not the only place people can post user generated content, but they have a growing reputation for handling these issues more poorly than most, which isn’t just dismissible because it’s a hard problem to solve.

Before you read the rest of this comment: how many channels do you expect that YouTube removes in year, or a day, or an hour?

My goal is to try to inject some awareness or concept of scale and accuracy being demanded. You've had the opportunity to do so, you've neglected that option, instead doubling down on the emotive argument. The data happen to be readily available online for anyone bothering to look.

The problem with both the original comment and your reply here is the denominator is ignored:

- How many accounts exist?

- How many are removed?

- How many of those removals are appealed?

I happened to look up the numbers for Facebook a few days ago when similar complaints were lodged against them. And again: I believe in large part that the power and influence of these platforms requires an extraordinary level of care.

That said, Facebook blocked 99.8% of fake accounts preemptively before they were flagged by user, in 2021Q3. For a total of 1.8 billion accounts removed. Whatever experience ordinary users of the system had of fake accounts was after that removal of 1.8 billion accounts, nearly 8 billion per year.

https://transparency.fb.com/data/community-standards-enforce...

I'm looking up Google's own transparency report based on your comment. The YouTube Community Standards report is here:

https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removal...

The headline number is that in 2021Q3, YouTube removed 2.4 million channels. That's an annualised rate of nearly 20 million, and the quarterly removal rate roughly doubled from the 2020Q4 & 2021Q1 rate begining in 2021Q2. The cadence is 55,000 channels per day, or about 2,300 per hour.

For comparison, manual reviewers at maximum capacity can moderation about 700--800 items in a day, leaving roughly 30 seconds per item, based on the New York Times comment moderation desk.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv...

I've discussed content moderation in terms to total personal media capacity a few years ago here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53qbx3/estimat...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/informa...

Note that we're taking both FB and YT accounts at face value, that the removals were legitimate. Facebook offers information on appeals, Google (so far as I can tell) does not. But at a first approximation the removals seem to be mostly valid.

A huge problem is that a small fraction of a very large number ... is still a large number. A 1% misclassification rate of 20 million channels is 200,000 channels/year. A 99.99% accurate classification is still 2,000 channels year. For Facebook, with 5 billion removals/year, a 99.99% accurate rate is 500,000 erroniously banned profiles.

And the risk profiles are asymmetric. For the platform. 99.99% success is ... well, pretty good. But for each individual who's erroneously classified, the consequences range from a major annoyance to catastrophic.

And lest you think I'm making the case that this is "good enough" or "acceptable losses", I'm not. I think it would be fairly straightforward to make a strong argument for the heavy regulation or break-up of these services strictly on this basis. They have too much control and influence, both at the macro and micro scales, and even near-perfect operations, management, and policies are not nearly good enough.

You might also want to think about your own actions, and those of formal and informal institutions in which you believe and/or rely, and consider what their own failure rates in judgement and adjudication are. How many false arrests, or evictions, or debt collections, or sentencings, or executions are you willing to live with, transacted in the name of society?

First, there's some great information in this comment. Thanks for taking the time to elaborate. However, we're on very different wavelengths and having conversations about two very different things.

> My goal is to try to inject some awareness or concept of scale and accuracy being demanded. You've had the opportunity to do so, you've neglected that option, instead doubling down on the emotive argument.

You're doing so by highjacking a thread that is unrelated to your end goal. I've neglected nothing, because the point I was trying to make is unrelated. You seem to believe that all exploration of the problem (someone loses access to their account due to bad algorithms taking enforcement actions) must be looked at through the lens of how hard the problem is to solve, or the discussion isn't worth having.

It's fine to raise awareness about the implications of scale and accuracy, and that's an interesting topic to examine, but you've gone a few steps too far and seem to believe that one must look at the user impact through this lens, or they shouldn't look at all.

Treat the problem of moderation as a black box for a moment:

1) Content goes in, moderated content comes out with some error rate

2) Based on the moderation result, some action is taken against the content and potentially the user

3) Due to the inherent error rate, incorrect actions will be taken against some content/users

And assume for a moment that the error rate cannot be improved; it's still possible to have a meaningful conversation about #2 and #3 without delving into the seeming impossibility of changing the error rate in #1.

There are myriad angles to explore ranging from: how to best run a manual review program, to how to improve enforcement actions so they have less impact on legitimate users, to improving the appeals process to ensure it doesn't take a HN front page article to get something done.

Someone could choose not to even attempt improving the error rate, or discover that there are diminishing returns to lowering the error rate at some point. These are tangentially related, but still technically orthogonal to improving the enforcement/appeals process.

Of course it's still completely valid to examine #1 directly! There's plenty to explore: reducing false positive rates in algorithms, optimizing the manual review process, etc. But it's silly to cast aspersions on the basis that someone chose to focus on the customer facing problem without acknowledging how hard it is to fix that problem.

It's just as reasonable to talk about how dangerous "self driving" vehicles are today. Of course it's a monumentally difficult problem to solve. But we still need to have meaningful outcome-focused conversations about these cars despite those complexities.

> You might also want to think about your own actions, and those of formal and informal institutions in which you believe and/or rely

I do often think about such things, but today's discussion is about a common issue plaguing the YouTube content ecosystem. There are appropriate places and threads to discuss those topics.

I'm mostly aligned with what you're saying, and do understand how difficult these problems are to solve. I take issue with the idea that folks are somehow involved in some kind of dereliction of duty or low value discussion for not injecting sympathy/awe at how difficult the problem is to solve.

"Hijacking a thread" is a strong claim to be made against a discussion which begins with a shallow criticism based on an entirely unsubstantiated claim that both false-positive and false-negative claims are both highly prevalent. (Specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29461038)

Among other issues, if you want to solve a problem, it helps to accurately describe it. And the problem description here is not accurate, either directly or by its implied senses.

The far more likely case is that 1) false-negative errors are relatively rare and that 2) false-positive errors are large in an absolute sense, because the true positive case is staggeringly huge, resulting in "small fraction of a very large number ... is still a large number."

The reason to consider these facts is simply that they're integral to the problem at hand and an accurate statement of what that problem is.

________________________________________________________________

In your three-item flow suggestions, what happens as the inputs of appropriate and inappropriate content are varied relative to one another? What happens as assessment costs are scaled? How do you account for identity (and more specifically, identity attribution), which I'd argue is actually central to this case. What is the role of reputation? How would you account for a changed reputational assessment, either because of a baseline change in the individual (betrayal and changes of allegiance are utterly fascinating in fiction and history for precisely this meaning), or because of transfer or misappropriation of identity tokens (similarly)?

What's your napkin-maths for a manual-review process? What budget(s) are you going to consider? What alternatives to exhaustive review might present themselves?

Oh, incidentally, in looking at both the FB and YT numbers, one point that stands out to me is that "wisdom of the crowd" utterly fails to rank against automated (and presumably AI-based) content and activity detection. One point absolutely common between FB and YT is that they are not relying on user-based flagging to make assessments, they're very ahead of this. (I suspect that user flags are used to help establish ground-truth, though even that is problematic.)

I tossed out some numbers based on hypothetical false-positive rates. I'd be interested in knowing what such rates you'd be comfortable with.

I also strongly suspect that pursing that line of inquiry is in fact a red herring, though I suggest it Because Reasons. I've a suggested approach in mind, but would be interested to see if you find yourself going there as well.

In the case of self-driving vehicles, one factor which we don't have to consider is the validity of the vehicle itself. That vehicle exists in its environment, and its physical manifestation is a robust assertion of that existence. A chief problem with online profiles is determining which are actual steel-and-rubber, erm, flesh-and-blood humans, and which are mere digital simulacra or sock-puppets. Which is to suggest that online content-moderation has an identity crisis, so to speak.

Self-driving cars would have numerous other issues, but that isn't one of them.

You seem to have missed the point entirely. Let me summarize this a different way.

You can't personally control the lens through which people look at problems or discuss ideas. Someone approaching a problem differently than you is not automatically a signal that they are wrong, but that they think differently than you do.

I may have communicated that poorly through the examples I offered, but bottom line: you and I are having conversations about entirely different things.

You can't personally control the lens...

That sword cuts both ways.

I'm not trying to control. I am trying to shine a light on the issue in an area that seems to be pervasively underilluminated.

You're the one who's lashed out several times now against that. If that's not an attempt at control, I don't know what it is.

If you find yourself in a conversation you're not having, one option is to leave.

Another is to see if that conversation might be one that you would benefit from.

That said, someone's hijacked this thread from a direct discussion of the phenonomenon originally at hand to several levels of meta, and in a markedly uninteresting and unilluminating direction.

> That sword cuts both ways.

Indeed it does. And as I very openly stated, there's a time and place to discuss what you've raised as well! Even on this very post.

> I'm not trying to control.

Numerous times, you admonished me and the other poster for not bringing value to the conversation because it didn't include points that you personally find most important. You effectively communicated "If you don't include what I personally deem to be most relevant and illuminating, you should check yourself".

If that's not trying to control, I don't know what is.

> If you find yourself in a conversation you're not having, one option is to leave.

Another comment that cuts both ways. I should remind you that you joined the conversation you weren't having, only to tell someone else how they should change what they were discussing.

> in a markedly uninteresting and unilluminating direction

Perhaps to you. Again, you seem to only consider the conversation relative to your own point of view, and that continues even in this conclusion.

I do intend to leave this thread, because it’s devolved into something that doesn’t really align with the spirit of HN.

I made an observation, in my first comment to the thread, then answered your question, as my second. In response to that, you accuse me of "hijacking".

Again, a very peculiar and one-sided definition of "control" here.

I don't think this discussion deserves any further attention from me.

Cheers.

This makes sense in a weird way.

The spammers have full time jobs figuring out Google's algorithm and how to manipulate it. Regular content creators don't, so they tend to get clobbered by the algorithm.

As Google continues to tighten the algorithm to fight spam, eventually the only users who will be able to post are the spammers.

If Google were a solo schlub in their basement writing code because they didn't have time to do manual review, that would be understandable, even excusable.

But last I checked, they were the #5 largest company in the world.

You'd think that an issue that's obvious to literally everyone who uses the platform would also be obvious to even a handful of manual reviewers, and they could take the fight to the spammers a little more aggressively. Just a smidge. Like, one full-time reviewer, since it appears on my feed with devastating regularity, I'd even apply for the job myself, if it meant I could keep that scourge out of my own recommendations.

I'm left to conclude that maybe the #5 largest company in the world can't afford one full-time reviewer?

More likely they outsource the review job to a contractor who operates out of whichever country currently has the most lax labor laws. The contractor hires only the cheapest labor they can find and sets a quota like reviewing at least 360 complaints every hour for their 12 hour shift. Also, if the workers allow an actual bad faith objection to go through they get penalized.

I wonder if Google should be using signals outside of YouTube to help their ML detection efforts. This example seems like a good one…if an account has a paid YouTube Music account that’s been in good standing for months/years, that seems like it should be taken into account. How many spammers would be willing to nurse an account through months/years of paid service only to have it pay off in a brief attempt at scamming people? If you added in listening data, you’d get an even clearer signal that the account is at least attempting to stay within the rules.

It feels like Google has it backwards…they’re siloing the fraud detection and banning across different products. If they switched that and did fraud detection across product boundaries and more targeted bans, we’d see far fewer of these AI-run-amok pleas to publicly shame them into getting a human to look into an obvious mistake.

Might not be worth making the accounts themselves, but would incentivize breaking into legitimate accounts, which might be worse optically

I recently got spam in my gmail inbox, something related to a bitcoin opportunity.

Unknown sender, body full of red flag keywords, and an attached .htm file with an obfuscated javascript redirect to the scam domain.

I was honestly impressed they had achieved this. Evolutionary pressure for virii and scams is a real thing, I guess.

Exactly. In my specific case, there is so much fake news related to the Philippines because of the upcoming May 2022 presidential elections. The son of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos is running for the position and is heavily propped up by a fake news machinery, most likely self-funded by their ill-gotten wealth.

Big tech is ruining democracies simply by having so much power yet not having a proper method of flagging targeted misinformation.

And don't forget all the crypto/dropshipping/.. spam advertisement there is on YT.

These probably get flagged away just as often or even more so than some rando legit channel that triggered some "reason". The reason they seem to always stay online though is because, well, the people behind them are scammers, and their daily bread comes from repeatedly thwarting anti-scam efforts by bigcorps and scaling back to thousands of apparent viewers as rapidly as possible. None of this is to deny Google's fair share of deserved shit in its face for its hideous customer and user service, but it's a point worth mentioning.

Time to migrate your life off of youtube now, friend. Don't let them fool you twice

I would only add that the same thing happened to me for entirely mysterious reasons, earlier this year, and my YouTube account was restored by the 'usual channels' [0] within about 3-4 hours, without the need for publicity.

[0] https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=yout...

Great that the process also sometimes works. I also tried that form before posting here and it just lead to an email notifying me of the rejection of my appeal within 10 minutes.

You're lucky you got some attention. I had google kill my adsense account, which I've had for 10 years+, because I logged in to another google business account of mine with the same phone number I used on my adsense account. They declared that I tried to create duplicate accounts. Account killed. Appeal? Yeah right, that was denied too. No possibility of talking to a human being to explain the simplicity of the issue. A major source of income dead because of an algorithm.

If there are any googlers on here who could grant a little mercy and guide me on how to try and talk to someone to resolve this, I'd be eternally grateful.

Oh, it's my life with Amazon.

My Amazon Affiliate account got suspended for "impersonating a popular Android application", turns out I'm the developer and publisher of this application. Now all my applications are now automatically suspended of the Amazon program.

Nice!

So you're telling us you have a bad case of....imposter syndrome?

My time spent on Among Us is finally going to pay out!

I had a similar experience with AdWords. Then they randomly re-activated me about 5 years later.

I'm thinking of chances they've managed to make the process fully automatic. Including all communication, news/social networks analysis and weighing reputation hit if the case go unresolved. Have human factor completely ruled out from the process of ruling on people's lives and careers. Would make it even more disgusting.

Would be great if you edited to update your post about what changes your making to your usage of google services because of this.

I guess HN is the new YouTube customer service department

New? It never stopped

Good outcome, but having to be on the front page of HN doesn't scale.

Really? How long was it between first complaint and resolution, and how does that compare to cases where the victim didn't get social media outrage on their site? (Honest question, I know this sucks and don't want to trivialize it, just not sure if this is proof of needing to appeal to social media.)

To be fair, it's also early Monday morning, when you were suspended over the weekend. Lifting the suspension could just as easily have happened because they now have enough people to actually do a human review.

Somebody is browsing hacker news at work.

The problem is not the content of the video, crypto or not. The problem is not that YT moderates aggressively (it doesn't do enough IMHO) or even how it moderates.

The problem is that there is no serious appeals process, and no third party oversight of moderation decisions. This is true for all the big platforms.

How do we fix that, IDK, but probably at the government level.

I totally agree.

If they had had a message "this is a problem with your account, fix it or else within 3 days we suspend you", that wouldn't have been nice but not completely impossible like the current solution.

How is it not possible for Google to implement that? I understand they also have some very bad cases of spam to deal with, but if I take my account as an example, the 'bad' video was uploaded 4 months ago and has 133 views in total, how can the system not determine there's no harm in leaving it up for another 3 days (in which it probably will get 0 views)?

So sad that the big tech companies can't manage to change from the inside but need to be forced by regulation to do good for their customers.

It could be remunerated. Like: pay 100$ to have a human look at your case. You can appeal (and pay) up to 3 times. This would partially solve the scalability problem + provide partial disincentives for scammers and spammers. I would happily pay 100$ to recover my lost Google account. Of course this would in turn create the bad incentive of having Google not create good models. Ideally the law would require to cap prices somehow. Hard problem for sure.

Why is it my problem that a fair moderation process must be cost-effective for Google, et. al.?

Edit: Google's profit margins aren't my problem. If they want to be such a big, all-encompassing force in the "digital lives" of individuals they need to be held to account with fair policies for dealing with Customers. If that creates an untenable business for them they can either innovate in a manner that results in a fair deal for users and lower expense to themselves or they can suck it up and take the hit on their margin.

I don't use Google's various services beyond search, personally, but it's clear that some regulation is needed. Non-technical individuals don't understand the ramifications of relying so heavily on a platform that can be pulled out from under them with no notice and no recourse. Heck, even technical people don't seem to grasp it.

Because the process requires people and people cost money. And without attaching a cost to it, there would be far more requests for manual review coming in than any team Google hires could handle.

"There are too many safety considerations for us to effectively mitigate, it would be too expensive, so we should be allowed to ignore safety altogether" --average 19th century industrialists

The context here is a proposal on how to make an appeals process viable instead just saying it's impossible.

Google can easily afford to hire a hundred thousand moderators. No number of requests is too many.

Because they're a business, and that's how businesses are run?

So ignoring your customers after they've paid you money is something we should just throw into the bin of "that's just business, folks"?

As cliche as it sounds, YouTube creators are not the customer, the advertisers are.

If you accept money from people (such as the OP, who is a Youtube Music subscriber, a paid service), they are 100% your customer.

I've been paying for YouTube Premium for years. I pay for YouTube TV. I pay for Google Photos. I pay for Google Apps for Business.

In all, I pay Google north of $1,000 every year.

Whether Google likes it or not, I AM their customer.

If you don't like them, it's time to look for a comparable competitor. If there aren't any then this is an object lesson on why there are pending anti-trust suits.

> If there aren't any then this is an object lesson on why there are pending anti-trust suits

I don't think anyone here is arguing with that - it's a pretty widely accepted fact that Youtube has a hegemony (see: near-monopoly) in the space.

Because otherwise in the worst case Youtube can't remain free, which is arguably a good thing.

How is a paid youtube a good thing? What do you win? Less tracking no..

If you want a paid video provider many exist.

I don't take it as a foregone conclusion that centralized free video hosting services are a good thing.

If you legislate a non-cost-effective model you're making it substantially harder for possible future competitors.

If we're assuming that "youtube as a permanent monopoly" is inevitable then, sure, fair enough, but I think if you're making that assumption it's worth making it explicitly.

That's one option. Another would be that you need to pay for your service on a monthly basis.

Some way that for a user to have faith in the appeals process and purchase peace of mind. Just knowing that a backstop is there would help a great deal.

He says he's a subscriber to YouTube music. So he is paying.

OP mentioned that they are a paid YouTube member, so they do pay monthly for the service.

Yes, you're right. I guess I couldn't let go of the idea that an an appeals process should be scalable for paying customers. I still believe that.

I'd add if you win the appeal you get your money back. That solves a few more of the problems I think.

All that does is create a "get free $100" button for Google.

That's a good idea but I can also see it backfiring. "Oops your account got locked by our algo, better cough up some dough so we can take a look at it..."

Without any solid guarantees (e.g. laws), you're just out $300 and back where you started.

You already pay taxes for access to the courts.

This creates a system that encourages bribery.

Historically, such systems are legislated against and are often made illegal.

Example: Suppose you are a cashier working in retail. If at the end of your shift your drawer is short for whatever reason, you cannot make up the difference out-of-pocket. Your managager would be commiting a crime by accepting your money.

Google famously sucks at customer service, mostly because they've figured that they'd have to pay a moderation team more money than whatever they'll lose from the few and far between problem cases there might be.

There is no fixing that without massive corporate reorganization, which won't be voluntary, and thus will take 10x the time with worse results. At this point this is just the Google way to do things, and making smaller fry follow this rules will probably only end up making Google bigger.

The one real way out there might be is making one-click self hosting viable again.

The problem is their monopoly power over video distribution on the internet: disgruntled users have nowhere else to go. All alternatives are stifled by the monopoly.

People have tons of alternatives. The problem is that ad subsidies pay more than most viewers are willing to pay after generations of internet users have been conditioned to think of content as free.

Nobody has been "conditioned" to think anything. If they opted to make things free at the start of the internet era then it's now their problem to figure out how to pivot to actually paying their expenses and turn profit.

It's not the users' problem per se (unless they get aggressively pushed out but then they go to alternatives so that company still doesn't make profit out of them).

Elementary psychology -- one that's studied at 9th grade where I live -- could have told them that it's super hard giving people something for free and then taking it away. People don't react well to that and never have.

They only have themselves to blame.

These are mutually contradictory:

> Nobody has been "conditioned" to think anything. … > Elementary psychology -- one that's studied at 9th grade where I live -- could have told them that it's super hard giving people something for free and then taking it away. People don't react well to that and never have.

That was in fact my point: since the mid-to-late 90s, Internet users have become accustomed to thinking that they pay for internet connectivity but that most of the content they view will be free either because it's been subsidized by investors or advertisers. There are exceptions but they generally tend to be either connected to the physical world or a handful of areas like commercial movies or gaming where the major rightsholders were largely successful at preventing people from getting used to free content.

That puts you in exactly the dynamic I described: very few people think that YouTube-level content is something they pay for but their expectations are set by the kind of resources that billions of ad profits can support.

From what I read they made well over $19 billion in revenue in 2020. They are making plenty of money they can afford to put towards the problem. They just don’t want to take from their own bottom line.

From what I understand what YouTube does is super super difficult to do at scale as well as they do, I do not envy their competitors. Given that, I don't believe ever hoping for an actual competitor to pop up is reasonable, instead we should start thinking about how we can ensure fairness, inclusivity, and democracy(?) on what exists.

I'm not sure what the best way to go about it is, but I know that advertiser and corporate pressure being the only thing that matters is not working (see: dislike count removal). I would not be surprised that if YouTube continues to be unable to regulate itself we'll see governments stepping in and regulating it for them.

An Internet standard for video delivery and ISP edge caching might be a nice way out...

Unfortunately that all seems to be proprietary money making territory right now.

Can we have something like 'municipal fiber' for content? With help of IPFS perhaps?

There are two reasons why P2P has been generally less successful than a lot of us hoped around the turn of the century: the first is largely technical, namely the small number of people with plenty of uplink bandwidth, and something like municipal fiber would actually help a lot there. When people have 1,000/25 connections they have less capacity to share in general and with things like video chat and gaming being common, the amount of idle capacity consistently available is relatively limited.

The other is harder: some ISPs outright blocked or throttled P2P protocols entirely (much to the annoyance of, say, Linux users torrenting ISOs) and most others will have some mechanism to respond to copyright claims. The latter is really hard for a YouTube competitor if it allows anyone to upload content — if the network attempts to auto-mirror content, you are potentially at risk if someone uploads something illegal; if it doesn't, only the most popular public content will be well-replicated.

There's also:

1.) The discovery associated with YouTube and

2.) In addition to being convenient, you don't need to pay to host on YouTube. It would be pretty trivial for people to host their own content--much of which is never going to pay anything to speak of in ads. But then they'd have to pay for the hosting.

#1 is definitely true — I was thinking of that mostly as an artifact of the cost point. There's a really strong ratchet effect: YouTube gets a ton of content because they not only provide hosting for free but also incentivize a ton of creators to direct traffic to YouTube since they get paid that way, which further encourages people to think of YouTube as where they go for video. Even places which self-host tend to report much higher numbers from YouTube than their own website, and that's a very hard thing to compete against.

Advertising is what pays for the hosting. Good luck with your ad-free, free video hosting service.

The problem is an incumbency/network effect problem. Sure, the ad-supported model helped them get off the ground, but it's not what's keeping them #1. The larger your library, the greater your value to viewers, and, thereby, the greater your value to content creators, increasing your library, increasing your viewership, etc. Virtually every tech company out there has massive incumbent advantages. Unless you can offer a differentiated service (eg: Tik Tok vs Instagram), your business is DOA.

There's Rumble, Odysee, Bitchute, Peertube, etc. Just post it there.

to be seen by whom?

I'm pretty tech savvy and have heard of none of these. Not a single one.

I’ve heard of Peertube, it was on HN recently. But none of the others.

Oddly unmentioned are Vimeo and Dailymotion, which have been around much longer and probably have larger user bases and network effects.

Unless you have a following, probably no one will see it on YouTube either. I generally post on YouTube but, if I were concerned about being blocked, I'd probably just host on a VPS.

I've heard of all of those - mostly through my friends.

However, as to your larger point - you're right, most people don't know about these.

I would argue that those who want to escape Google's grasp should be willing to encourage person-to-person sharing as an alternative to the recommendation algorithm. Sure, 99.99% of the population isn't browsing PeerTube, but I bet you that most of them would be willing to watch a video hosted there if it was suggested to them by their friends.

This might be a good idea in general. Think of how much better ecosystems we would have if people relied on their friends to make personalized recommendations to content on any platform, as opposed to engagement-optimizing automated algorithms that exclusively recommend content on a single platform.

By and large, hosting isn’t the issue whether text, audio, images, or video. Yes, video is more intensive than the others but hosting taken by itself is a solved problem. While podcast directories are centralized the hosting is pretty distributed. Not so easy is finding things and the fact that some level of moderation is probably needed somewhere in the system. And you’ll have to pay.

More Plates More Dates, a workout science YouTuber who sometimes talks about 'enhancement', recently got banned off of Bitchute. So it isn't a bastion either.

Does he talk about that in one of his videos? I'm curious to hear more. It looks like there is still a bitchute page up with his brand and videos.

It's possible he got reinstated. Yes, he talked about it briefly in his outro a few videos ago.

Quite frankly, now that YouTube has built its media ecosystem, they have an incentive to marginalize the long tail. The big channels (or rather, their distribution companies) have dedicated account managers who can clear this kind of stuff up. Big channels are easier to manage from a platform perspective since there’s someone you can call to clear up any issues (who you already have a contractual relationship with), so you don’t need to trust an unaccountable algorithm.

If you’re not a YouTube partner? You’re collateral damage that is baked into the design and considered acceptable by YouTube. Your value as an independent content creator is very low to them. The effort required to moderate independent creators is significantly higher than it is to moderate managed partners on a per-view basis. It’s a lot of work for small dollar amounts.

This is a pretty common situation we’ve seen play out over the last century. When a new media paradigm is established, there’s a land rush. But once the initial land rush is over, the industry regulates itself and consolidates for efficiency. The new media landscape eventually becomes the very thing they displaced. Ever wonder why YouTube has as many ads as broadcast TV these days?

Honest question, do you actually get as many ads on YouTube as on TV ? With the former, I am used to 2 10-seconds to 1-minutes ads every 10-15 minutes and that are usually skippable (~16% in the worst case). On TV, at least in France, there are at least as many ads, but they can't be skipped.

Yes it’s gotten pretty egregious. I generally get 30 seconds of non-skippable ads every 5 mins or so. I haven’t watched broadcast TV in probably 10 years so maybe I’m not remembering how bad it is, but I have a hard time watching YouTube with how frequent (and poorly targeted) the ads are.

Wow, if it gets to this level, I can understand. If you don't mind, what country do you live in ? I am kinda curious of if it is related to location.

There can’t be any semblance of an appeals process whilst the law treats social media platforms like privately owned property that you have the privilege of being a guest too.

I don't believe "This is true for all the big platforms."

I saw lots of stories here about Google, but I don't remember see one about how Microsoft blocks user account. Did I miss?

Anyway. Couple years ago, I received several email notifications from Microsoft about someone tried to reset my account password. I got a little bit concerned and eventually sent a feedback to Microsoft asking what I need to do. Surprise! I got a answering call from Microsoft by a real human!

Because of all the bad stories about Google blocks user accounts, I moved all my stuff to Microsoft products and my own NAS.

Hotmail has plenty of stories.

Paid email has many great providers like fastmail..

Microsoft doesn't offer a video platform so it doesn't really apply.

Really? I searched Hotmail here and couldn't find story like this (banning users).

This all could have been avoided if the same algo that detected the scammy title had been applied during the posting process. A warning from YT saying, "Hey this sounds scammy, we're not posting it" was all that was needed.

Corporate appeals processes are watered down arbitration processes which are a loophole to allow a larger company to force a subordinate to give up their rights to the government’s courts.

Sue them in small claims court for the value of your music library.

That is not true.

I produce content for YouTube full-time.

Just a few days ago a well-performing video ended up age-restricted. It was an edge case, and could have gone either way. I appealed, and included the best argument I could put together.

A few hours later I received this:

We have reviewed your appeal for the following content:

[the video title]

After taking another look, we can confirm that your content does not violate our Community Guidelines.

Thanks for your patience while we reviewed this appeal. Our goal is to make sure content doesn't violate our Community Guidelines so that YouTube can be a safe place for all - and sometimes we make mistakes trying to get it right. We're sorry for any frustration our mistake caused you, and we appreciate you letting us know.

~~~

I appeal YouTube's decisions all the time. Sometimes appeals go my way, other times they don't, but that doesn't mean there is no serious appeals process. As far as I know, almost every adverse decision can be appealed.

~~~

About your last comment, the existence of a problem doesn't mean that government stepping in would be better.

By being a content creator, you are a money maker for them. Even so, you probably got lucky. thunderf00t has gotten in trouble loads of times for doing nothing but outing bad science. Same with CoffeeZilla and a thousand other YouTubers. I myself got my channel delisted from recommendations entirely (a shadow ban essentially) for making a Covid precaution video about different types of NIOSH masks..

Both of you would be right at the same time.

You raised high enough to be full-time on Youtube, you have a full history of interactions with their moderators, a track record of videos that performed well, and get to be handle by real humans.

That doesn’t mean it’s the same experience for the vast majority of creators, especially those who upload a video once in a while and have no reputation in the system.

On any Google service I think both sides exist, and the difference is usually pretty stark, like night and day.

PS: on the gov. part, the issue is that Google is economically big enough that there is no counterpart to make them do what they don’t want to. People are turning to govs. because there is basically no other recourse in many situations.

I think the whole point is that OP appealed, got hard rejection and can't escalate or even compromise.

Now their unrelated YouTube Music account is locked

Imagine you, as a full time content producer, have been banned from YouTube for good, just because. Your appeal ended up the same way as for OP "response within less than 15 minutes that they appeal has been rejected and that no further replies will be processed". Would you want the government involvement in this case?

NoWayDude.

We may fix this by decentralizing the original source of the content and making the social end, the account used to post/share that content, ephemerous. How can we still build reputation in this model? Making sure the original source is visible and accessible. It all boils down to reputation management, which needs to be re-engineered.

We don't need the government to step in, we need another video streaming company to come in and really compete with Youtube. The problem is that right now, Youtube has no direct competitors. Sure there is Vimeo and Rumble, but both aren't big enough to really threaten Youtube's bottom line.

The Rumble SPAC deal is interesting because it seems they may be the first company to have the capital to compete with Youtube. I have a strong feeling that once an actual competitor emerges, Youtube will tamp down on their censorship. They censor all day long now because they know creators don't have another option. Once that other option arises, the only thing that censorship will do for Youtube is loosing customers.

"We don't need the government to step in, we need another video streaming company to come in and really compete with Youtube. The problem is that right now, Youtube has no direct competitors"

This is incredibly naive. All that would happen is both services would use similar automated systems for moderation - it is cheaper for them. They would have no incentive to provide good support.

We need regulations that require access to human judgement for digital services. When millions of people use a service, even a 1% error rate in moderation / account disabling has a real impact on a lot of peoples lives.

An easy way to provide good support would be for youtube to charge the content up-loaders for a small fee. That would be a source of revenue for them to provide support in return for monetary value. Else there is simply no incentive. Introducing regulations for every digital human interaction is a waste of taxpayers money and incredibly naive way of thinking.

> that there is no serious appeals process, and no third party oversight of moderation decisions

Yes there is, see [0] - also posted by me in another reply in this thread, where I mention that my own YouTube account was suspended identically to OP earlier this year, but was restored 3-4 hours after filling out the form. The decision may or may not have been AI-driven, but I'm pretty sure there was a human in the loop behind the solution.

Don't mistake me for a Google fanboy - I had my primary Gmail account locked last week for daring to use a VPN, so I'm currently looking at de-Googling myself a bit. But to be fair, I was able to fix both issues within a few hours.

[0] https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=yout...

>had my primary Gmail account locked last week for daring to use a VPN,

yikes I check my gmail behind a VPN semi regularly. Now I'm worried.

I forgot, to be honest, that I had two other Gmail logins running on my headless tower at the other end of the room, so requests were coming from my country and from the US simultaneously.

Since I wasn't trying to evade geoblocking, I now use a VPN that's set to my own city AND I shut down the applications on the headless machine. But that still leaves my phone sucking in mails on a non-VPN connection, and that's not so easy to fix, because I'm damned if I'll switch it off every time I need a VPN, or trouble myself to use a VPN on that too.

So, yeah, in general I'm worried too. Personally I think we'll look back on VPN use in five years the way that early 20thC cocaine addicts fondly remember when you could just buy the stuff over the counter without a scrip in pharmacies. Sorry to see China setting the pace on this one.

People talk about creating an appeals process like it's something Google could just snap their fingers and do, like the commenter in this thread who suggested they should just "hire 100000 moderators". The problem is, scaling a human system like this is extremely difficult and human appeals are notoriously weak against social engineering attacks. It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling billions of users and reliably producing the correct outcome is even possible at any kind of plausible cost.

Think about how much a court case in the US costs - orders of magnitude more than a company could possibly afford to spend on moderation. Does everybody really think it's possible to design a process that's orders of magnitude cheaper without also being orders of magnitude less accurate?

>It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling billions of users and reliably producing the correct outcome is even possible at any kind of plausible cost.

I would hope that the reason that scaling is hard is because violators would spam the system. If there really are so many legitimate users losing access, then this is a huge problem that we need to hold companies legally accountable for.

What we need is a system that disincentives large companies from having too many false positives while disncentiving bad actors from using the appeals process.

> Think about how much a court case in the US costs - orders of magnitude more than a company could possibly afford to spend on moderation.

You shouldn't need a full court case, it seems like a small claims court type approach would be sufficient.

One answer is a solution is used in many places already is to allow the judge to assign court costs to one party or the depending on the facts of the case.

> Does everybody really think it's possible to design a process that's orders of magnitude cheaper without also being orders of magnitude less accurate?

I absolutely think it is feasible to build a system that doesn't cost too much vs. the level of supplementary accuracy it would provide. I also don't see how we have a choice. In this era where we own nothing and everything is a service, we absolutely need to be able to have accountability for the companies that provide those services. We can't just allow them to cut the services off at their whim with no legal recourse.

> … this is a huge problem that we need to hold companies legally accountable for.

Legally accountable for what? They do not owe anyone free access to their service. If you're a paying subscriber then they do owe at least their choice of a refund or continued service until the end of the current subscription period—unless they can demonstrate that you were the one that broke the contract—but they are have no obligation to let you renew, any more than you are obligated to continue subscribing.

Google doesn't have a monopoly on much beyond their own brand and reputation. All the services they offer, including video hosting, can be found elsewhere. If you want to build your income stream on their brand ("Oh, but no one will be able to find me if I host my videos on PeerTube!") you do it on their terms.

> Legally accountable for what?

The legally accountable for providing a product that doesn't cause undue harm to the population.

> They do not owe anyone free access

I pay for services from Google, so does the entire customer base of the play store. The user in the published article was a paying YouTube music customer.

> but they are have no obligation to let you renew,

I would disagree. When companies are allowed to become large enough that they have a significant effect on the ability for alternatives to compete in the marketplace, they assume an obligation to provide access to that marketplace to everyone. I absolutely do not buy that large service providers have the right to deny service to someone simply because they don't like them.

Additionally, when you form a business relationship, even when that relationship consists of exchanging your product for their data, there is am entirely reasonable expectation that the relationship won't be severed without cause. This is an expectation that enables commerce and it is to the benefit of a nation to enable those expectations where possible.

> When companies are allowed to become large enough that they have a significant effect on the ability for alternatives to compete in the marketplace, they assume an obligation to provide access to that marketplace to everyone.

I would disagree. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." There is no obligation to keep doing things the same way they've "always" been done. Every interaction is decided on a case-by-case basis. One does not forfeit freedom of (dis)association through mere inertia; one retains the right to make exceptions or to change one's mind.

> Additionally, when you form a business relationship, even when that relationship consists of exchanging your product for their data, there is am entirely reasonable expectation that the relationship won't be severed without cause.

I might be willing to buy that, to a point. The usual rule is that the expectations need to have a reasonable basis in the contract and any liability is limited to the direct impact of having those reasonable expectations disappointed. However, even paid services routinely disappear on short notice, for various reasons. Assuming that a paid service will be maintained well after the current subscription term elapses is not reasonable. Neither is assuming long-term access to a free service.

> … it is to the benefit of a nation to enable those expectations where possible.

Then "the nation" can very well lead the way by offering its own services (on a voluntary, non-tax-supported basis, naturally) and not by, in effect, nationalizing a private service by imposing its own terms.

> One does not forfeit freedom of (dis)association through mere inertia; one retains the right to make exceptions or to change one's mind.

We are not talking about a person, we are talking about a corporation. While there is certainly a value to freedom of disassociation for large corporations, I see no reason that freedom is not bounded by the right to have access to services that are available to the general public. We don't allow service to be terminated to people of a protected class, we don't allow service to be terminated explicitly to interference with your ability to compete.

> nationalizing a private service by imposing its own terms.

Regulating a business is not the same thing as nationalizing it. Trying to conflate such terms is not debating in good faith. Please try to think outside of your black and white partisan rhetoric and participate in a real discussion.

There is value, to Google, in those expectations being possible. Those expectations encourage people to do business with Google and trust Google with their data. Similar to the value of a stable currency or an incorrupt judicial system, these are expectations that enable the flow of commerce to the benefit of all. Creating a government run AppStore or YouTube fails to accomplish those goals and does nothing to enable commerce.

There is value in free enterprise and not restricting people's ability to find new ways to solve problems. That does not mean that large corporations have the right to treat people disposably. If we don't let ourselves get trapped in ideologically rigid thought we can find a way to balance these needs and rights in a fair way.

I would also note that these large companies don't actually want to terminate service to the users who would win on appeal. It is just that these companies don't want to pay to process appeals for spammers and fraudsters. Creating a system of fair and properly incentivized account adjudication could improve things for everyone.

It's terrifying that the punishments are so draconian (because one false move and you lose access to the entire Google account, and possibly become persona non-grata and lose the ability to create another one even in a company context), it's hard to understand what the rules are, the appeals process generally won't help, and even being a paying customer won't save you.

It seems like best practice for any professional who needs to use Google anything would be to avoid Google to the greatest extent possible except in professional contexts, lest some inadvertent mistake (or something malicious like a hack) cripple your career.

I wouldn't mind if the appeals process was legitimate but it's clearly not. 15 minutes to say "nope, appeal denied" how much background research could that person (assuming there was a person) have done?

Appeals process is somewhere between Kafka's Process and 1984.

As far as I understood, the entire Google account was not suspended. Was that the case?

The user cannot log into their Google account. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29458794

Sorry if I was unclear, only Youtube is blocked for me now, gmail & rest of the account is fortunately still working.

>> It seems like best practice for any professional who needs to use Google anything would be to avoid Google to the greatest extent possible except in professional contexts, lest some inadvertent mistake (or something malicious like a hack) cripple your career.

Talking from my company's perspective, this is very real. It gets worse when out of the blue a customer rep from them want to schedule an interrogation about why to do you use their cloud services, which is because the absolutely vital part ML bit of your business is there. We are currently decentralizing and moving to a local cloud provider with real people subject to local laws, better for the environment.

I once got a new phone number and I tried to register to Twitter; apparently it's already used, by an account that is banned.

I managed to login to the account but there is no way to ask what's up. I followed the procedures, even wrote them an e-mail that as a EU citizen, I'd want them to forget anything related to me and my phone number. No reply.

Still probably doesn't work, don't care all that much though. Wasn't a Twitter user before, wasn't one after.

Twitter is great isn't it...

"We need your phone number to post"

short time later

"We have leaked your phone number linked to your account to the entire planet"

This is what works for me: I open a new personal account (using a fake name) every few months, when I open the new one I delete the old one. Obviously I don't use Google for anything important e.g. email.

Basically, at any given time I'm using a throwaway account. It's like Docker for Google accounts.

It's good because I could not care less about losing the account; another welcome side effect is that every few months I get a blank slate, that way I avoid becoming a prisoner of your own bubble e.g. in relation to Youtube suggestions.

PS when opening a new account Google will ask for SMS verification and recovery email address, I use those services that give you a throwaway email address and phone number - that way Google can't "follow me" across accounts.

OpSec is hard. I'm not going to risk that Google won't be able to connect the shadow accounts.

Sure but even if they connect the dots, basically nothing is at stake, at least in my case. The only reason I have an account is for small things like Youtube's "watch later" list.

YT subscriptions and watch later could be entirely done in a JS userscript so that no account is needed at all any more - food for thought.

This strategy does not work for somebody trying to publish and monetize content.

good point, these systems got worse when they decided to create an iphone app. apple loves censorship calling it “moderation”, sounds like a fair word until you realize it’s typically done on the wrong videos leaving the actual scam videos up. (there’s plenty of those still up)

And use a different account for each google service, firefox containers helps with this.

> It seems like best practice for any professional who needs to use Google

Use single-purpose Google accounts for each professional need, so only one thing gets "banned" or logged out at a time.

Preferably for those accounts you should have email-forwarding to a different "human" account you can check even when logging in to the account is suspended.

Basically an unusual variation of defence in depth?

Presumably, many Googlers who are directly involved in designing and implementing content moderation are active readers of Hacker News, as is evidenced by the fact that having a story hit the front page is an effective way to solve problems like these.

But what I never see is any of those Googlers taking the time to explain why they feel these seemingly-broken approaches are the only ways to solve the problem of moderation at scale. To me, it seems insulting to one's intelligence to receive an automated message that your channel's been banned, be given the option to appeal, and to receive an equally automated message rnd() minutes later that your appeal has been denied. But what do I know? I've never been tasked with solving such an engineering problem.

I know FAANGers here may feel put upon by what appears to be a hostile environment against their companies, but that's at least in part because you've never said exactly which technical and practical challenges lead to this state of affairs. If it's not against your company's NDAs, I challenge you all to try; whether the community agrees with you or not, I think we would all learn something useful from a productive discussion about the problem.

> But what I never see is any of those Googlers taking the time to explain why they feel these seemingly-broken approaches are the only ways to solve the problem of moderation at scale.

They are not broken approaches. They are optimizing for net income. Higher net income for the company means higher compensation for individuals at the company, since they are being paid with equity. Spending more money on labor means less net income for the company means lower compensation for individuals.

> But what I never see is any of those Googlers taking the time to explain why they feel these seemingly-broken approaches are the only ways to solve the problem of moderation at scale.

From my experience with a very large bureaucracy, I believe the answer to this is "the worker bees don't believe this; the requirement to implement automated moderation [in this way] is imposed by managers and/or executives" - and speaking up can get you retaliated against.

Yup. Here’s a good video for what goes on behind the scenes at Amazon’s gaming org for example.

https://youtu.be/aggk93Nazuk

I can verify this is true since I used to work there.

That's apparently based on a Bloomberg article for those who'd prefer not sitting through a 40-minute re-reading of it:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-ga...

It's probably not a singular insane executive who just hates good user experiences, either. It's probably a web of incentives that emerge to produce this poor experience:

- CEO has a goal of getting support ticket resolution times to X

- Some exec is tasked with flagging content, and allowing very little unapproved content through (creates lawsuits)

- Some exec has a budget of Y for resolving support issues

- Some other execc else wants to get a higher level technical win on their resume

Then in total you get someone who builds an automatic flagging system. This creates support tickets. You need to drive them down, but you only have Y budget to do so (so you can't hire an army of high-quality reps). You hire a smaller amount of reps on a budget. They do a bad job from being undergunned; someone builds an internal product that will magically help them resolve issues faster but it basically just helps them resolve issues really fast by identifying the obviously innocent and denying appeal on most cases. At the end of the day an understaffed team closes a huge # of tickets without prejudice. But at no point did anyone say "F those users."

This is actually worse than some tone deaf exec who hates users, because you can't solve it by replacing someone bad.

> If it's not against your company's NDAs

This ^ is nontrivial (maybe impossible) to determine without consulting an attorney.

Technically, you'll need to go to court to get a canonical answer. Without a court ruling, it's just expert opinions.

Honestly, what service do you get for free that is also rolled out to billions of people and has better customer service?

Hiring individual people to address your issues is going to be hard to scale in a way that allows a free service to be rolled out to billions.

I don't work at Google, do work at another company that I have no doubt has the same issue, but not discussing in the context of that company either.

OP did note that he happens to be a YT premium user (for music), so in this situation it isn't a "free" service, they are interacting with a paying customer.

From knowing a lot of Googlers:

- They are extremely self-assured of their competence and the effectiveness/completeness of anything they design.

- Google has nearly two-decade-culture of drive-by product development. People work on something, it becomes a product, the laser pointer of Shiny dances nearby, and they're off to work on something else and the product matures at a glacial rate, if at all.

They also don't care. Money printing machine go brrrrrrrrrr to the tune of $10BN/year.

Yes, bless daddy Ads for bankrolling our negligent product practices.

Can be awful for users, but hey, the company lives on.

I understand the need for automation, and can imagine that the spammers, grifters and crooks would overwhelm any manual review system. I'm suprised that Google has not implemented pay for support. If the issue is really important, can I just pay $50 and speak to a real person? Just because manual processes don't scale, doesn't meam they shouldn't exist.

There is a really simple reason for this: Discussing basically anything with the outside world is violation a of your employment agreement.

I wonder what do you expect to hear? I don't have anything to do with youtube or its moderation approaches. But I had some experience with automatic content moderation. Imaging a system contains of tens (hundreds) of signal sources. Signal might be as complex as ML model resolution or as simple as static list of stopwords. And everything in between. With sufficiently large rate of new content to moderate (and I guess YT has a lot), you don't deal with specific moderation decisions. For you they are just points in your metrics. So you can't treat all blocks as probably false-positive, you react only to drastic change in trends. In such system the only way to solve single false-positive - human intervention. So you have some operators who process appeals. But human operators are not cheap, so first you try to increase their productivity - for example by preprocessing data for them. So they (for example) don't need to watch the video, they get transcript, probably part of it, that triggered the signal. So it might be possible that these 15 minutes were enough for human operator to make a decision based on some substring of transcript, which without context was enough for them to mark author as fraud. Or you can go even further - you can skip operator if content got enough bad signals.

My point here is that the problem is not entirely technical. You can't make ideal model without false-positive. You just try to optimise it by using discovered cases like this as input to bake better one. So the only thing to blame here - not enough human operators. Thats why you probably don't get any answers here from google engineers. The root cause either not technical, or too technical to comment it outside.

I know losing a YouTube channel is horrible, especially after you dedicated so much time, effort and money - and for some people it may be a source of income as well. It is totally unfair.

But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me. Not only email access (and thus, access to every service I use because I have my Google account linked to it), but also Google Photos, with memories from the past 15 years with loved ones (even photos of my mom who passed away). And I am sure a lot of other services that I cannot remember now (by the way, imagine you are hired by a company that uses Google Cloud, you couldn't technically work for them?)

At least there's Google takeout where you can download a data dump of everything they've stored for you, so probably a good idea to do that for your precious photo memories.

Yes, I am thinking in doing that, at least every X months or something like that. Thanks.

You can schedule that from within Google account settings, and even have automatic uploads to different third party providers ( like OneDrive, Box, Dropbox).

I download a new Takeout every six months. One thing to be aware of if you plan on storing these long-term is that their archives are not very efficient. In particular, there is no incremental backup option—each Takeout is a full copy, and there are often many duplicate files even within one download. I take two post-processing steps with each download which significantly reduce the storage space required: (1) I convert the Google Mail data from mbox format to maildir (with mb2md[0]), so that each email is a separate file which can be deduplicated, and (2) I append the new takeout data to a SquashFS[1] filesystem with xz compression. This automatically deduplicates identical files, both within the new archive and against previous archives. The end result is that I now have three ~50 GiB Takeouts stored in a single ~25 GiB SquashFS filesystem image.

My (Linux-based) process also involves ratarmount, bindfs, and fuse-overlayfs. These tools are not strictly necessary but they do reduce the amount of temporary space required, since there is no need to unpack the .tgz files. Access to the resulting filesystem image is through either squashfuse or for better performance (but requiring root) a native loopback mount.

[0] http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquashFS

You have the power TODAY to change that. Do it before you lose access. Start with a Google Takeout and get your email out into your own domain as a starting point. Search "self hosting" for more details, even if you have no interest in running your own servers it gives you lots of good ideas to regain more control over your own data.

My main fear about that is not doing it properly and my email stop working as expected. For the nature of my job (press) I send a lot of emails to people who don-t know me, asking for interviews, etc. If my email starts to fall into spam folder, my job would be impossible. Gmail gives me that and I don't have to worry about if this person received the email or not.

Maybe 1) remove everything else from Google and 2) Start paying for your Gmail account, which will hopefully make it more likely that the appeals process actually works? Gmail's service is clearly something you depend on and that is worth paying for.

It's hard to know what's best in terms of risk management here. The likelihood that you will be hit is small but the consequences are potentially devastating.

I agree the likelihood is small but when you're thinking along these lines[1] I think it's time to start making a move to give yourself some piece of mind.

[1] But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me.

Something like Mail-in-a-box[1] is easy to setup, you can monitor the spam stuff yourself, comes with all the instructions you need to get the DNS side of setup correctly etc

I've not had any issues with email not reaching people - and I'm not sure that other mailservers would put gmail any higher, especially as they are used for a lot of spam

[1] https://mailinabox.email/

I prefer Mailcow. Mail-in-a-box requires the machine to be running a specific version of Ubuntu. Mailcow runs under Docker https://mailcow.email/

you can somewhat limit the downside just by getting your own domain and setting it up as an email. Even still using this linked to gmail is better than nothing. when things go haywire you still control me@domain.com or whatever so you just take it to another service. I did this, and then a few months felt comfortable enough to move to fastmail. recipients have no idea, it's still me@domain.com, had no problems with deliverability.

I can vouch for Forward Email (https://forwardemail.net/). It's easy to set up if you have your own domain, you can continue using Google Mail if you like (for both receiving and sending), their message size limits are higher than Gmail's, you can set up multiple aliases and (optional) catch-all addresses, and they offer a free tier if cost is an issue. The big advantage of the reasonably-priced paid tier is privacy: paid subscribers don't have to put their real email addresses in the DNS records to configure the forwarding. It also helps to ensure that the service will remain viable into the future.

Oh neat, glad to hear about this. Do they have any blogs/content about why to do this for people like the parent of this thread?

While their FAQ seemed great to me, I'm someone already familiar with why this is important and generally how to do it. I could see it being overwhelming to someone just considering the idea. https://forwardemail.net/en/faq#table-of-contents

I don't believe Forward Email runs a blog, but this article[0] has a fairly good summary of how forwarding works and why one might want to set that up. The short version, in the context of this thread, is that it allows you to accept email on your own domain without running your own email servers. And if you ever want to change email providers in the future (or start running your own servers) you just need to edit some settings either in your DNS records or your Forward Email account; the email address everyone uses to contact you remains the same. Whereas if everyone knows you as username@gmail.com then you need to somehow get word out to your entire contact list—potentially without access to your old email account!—to let them know your new address.

Forward Email does a pretty good job with onboarding new users, in my opinion. Yes, some technical know-how is expected (you do need to know how to update DNS records for your domain, for example) but they give you step-by-step instructions both for setting up the MX and TXT records in DNS and for configuring your Google Mail account (or possible others, I didn't check) to allow sending email using your new address. I found it simpler to set up the forwarding itself than to go around to all my accounts and update the email addresses; that part is still a work in progress.

[0] https://medium.com/hackernoon/when-and-how-to-use-2019s-best...

Telling people to use an email forwarder sounds much easier than "host your own email". I'll try it next time.

It took me a couple years to transfer all important online accounts and communications to a new email, one by one. Set up an auto-redirect, change the email in all accounts when you log in, slowly.

I feel free now.

I have the same fear. It's very daunting. It's not that I don't know how to set up an email server, it's that I know just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be reliable.

There's so much nuance and it's easy to let things lapse, or make a small mistake and silently get all your mail rejected, lose/corrupt a bunch of data, etc.

Dude, I'm a non-tech guy. I just frequent HN for intellectual stimulation.

If I can set up a custom domain, you can definitely do so.

I'm a freelance and my livelihood also depends on cold emailiing people. It's just a false belief that we need Google to handle important aspects of our life. No, we don't

If you really care about deliverability rate, there is often some impact from doing that.

If your email is that fundamental to your job you should 100% have a custom domain, so that you can switch email provider without causing disruption to your day-to-day job. It shouldn't cost more than ~$60 a year.

I even wrote a detailed step-by-step HOWTO for people in that spot:

https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/

Do not use the cloud as a storage system. Use it as a distribution system only and keep multiple copies of precious data with you, on media that you control.

I use Smugmug but if they go out of business today I couldn't care less, not only do I keep copies, I also keep the structure of the galleries and could recreate them elsewhere with little trouble.

> Do not use the cloud as a storage system. Use it as a distribution system only and keep multiple copies of precious data with you, on media that you control.

Also unless you are paying for it Google are not storing the full un-recompressed copies of the photo files from your device, so if you rely on them for backup what you restore when your primary copy is lost/damaged is not the full quality you originally had.

I do have my stuff go up to Google but only for easy access. For backup, I rsync (currently via termux) to home and from there the data is copied elsewhere as part of my offsite/offine backups with everything else I can't reobtain easily if lost/corrupt.

The simple solution is never use the same google account for YouTube and Gmail/Drive.

Google correlates all of the accounts that you log in to from the same devices. If you have YouTube on iOS logged in to one account and Drive on iOS logged in to a different one, Google is aware that those accounts are used by the same person.

TOS-violation suspensions are likely to involve all of your accounts at once.

The simple solution is to stop doing business with Google.

They'll also hand all of your shit over to the CIA without a warrant even if you aren't doing anything wrong, so there's that, too.

I've thought about the same. I rely on Google too much. But "too much" is really only e-mail and cloud storage (Google Drive) for me. I only rely on cloud hosting for photos for a select few albums I intentionally want to share a link to, not as a full cloud of all my photos that I then rely on being there. I offload my phone and camera every now and then to local storage (NAS) at home, a hard drive in a safe deposit box at my bank, and then my Synology NAS runs an automated Backblaze backup which is very cost efficient for this use.

So I would only really need to switch

1) my mail provider to something else, which is easier today now that I rely on "messengers" more than mail, so not many people that I need to inform. Just subscriptions and account details that I can update one at a time.

2) cloud storage to something else, and there are oceans of alternatives there, many very capable.

for #1 you can take it step by step. get your own domain, name@domain.com for $10 a year. hook that address up to gmail so you can send as name@domain.com. then get comfortable with that, set it as your default reply from, tell friends, etc. then 6 months later, a year later or whenever youre comfortable you can move off gmail. only send from name@domain, and have gmail forward all your emails to that account. no one you contact will see anything different. then if you ever need to again switch in the future you're free to do so, and you're always name@domain.com.

That is why I have completely degoogled my life. Backup your photos ASAP!

I'm using nextcloud as a google photos replacement. It's not quite as smooth as google photos but it works well enough and I control my data. The official app handles auto-upload of my photos. Yaga is a nice android client for viewing the photos on my degoogled phone. The web app works well for that too and there are even sharing features, so I can share an album or photo with friends, family, or whoever. Nextcloud has suitable replacements for notes, drive, docs, contact backup/sync, and more. It's a little bit of effort to set up but totally worth it to control my data and get privacy.

Fastmail is a great paid replacement for gmail. It has calander, notes, and file storage features too.

There are so many cloud storage options, really no excuse to use google drive.

There are other turnkey google photo replacements as well these days, amazon and flickr come to mind. Google has nice apps but it's just not worth being their product, especially since they nerfed the free storage.

I set up my own mail server following the guide here: https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide/

I also referred to https://www.gmass.co/blog/smtp-server-linux/

I also looked at OwnCloud, but ended up just syncing from my phone to local Mac and doing backups off that regularly.

You could also rsync to other devices. A raspberry Pi with a SSD at home would work fine. If you have a VPN set up on your own network (eg. an ASUS router), you could use it to host photos/backups/music. If you home IP address is dynamic, use a free DDNS provider so you can always connect to your home site.

Just make sure you get a copy of those photos sooner than later!!

> I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber

The saying goes that if you don't paid for it then you are the product. So I subscribed to YouTube Music family plan, thinking I won't be the product. But my wife's account will always return an error saying that she is in a different country or something. I tried to reach the support for help but never got any reply. In the end I cancelled the subscription. Google is simply too big to care about individual users.

I've been thinking the same thing lately. When YouTube released "YouTube Red" and later YouTube Premium, there was kind of a glimmer of hope. Like finally, we can just pay and not "be the product" anymore!

But then stuff like this happens. You get just as little support as when you were ad food.

Definitely makes one want to try and find non-big-tech solutions to things.

it turns out they'll happily accept money from the product.

> The saying goes that if you don't paid for it then you are the product.

So true. This is why I switched from free Linux to paid Mac, and why I've started replacing open-source apps with commercial ones.

I don't think this saying applies to the situation you are in. Perhaps more apt is "you get what you pay for".

For myself, I've switched to paying for Linux and open source software. I believe open source needs to be sustainable for consumers and expecting devs to work for free is insane.

Since I didn't pay for my previous Linux, it means that I didn't get much for it, right?

it's just an analogy

That saying is meant for commercialized products obviously. But it's still kind of true if you stretch it to FOSS software, the allegory would be that you pay for it with your time (by fixing/bringing attention to bugs) rather than directly profiting the devs.

I pay for my mobile phone service. They still sell my location data.

I pay for my TV. It still spies on me.

And so on...

You are always the product, paying customer or not.

You are sometimes the product when you buy something, but it's not a necessary part of that model.

You are always the product in "free" services like FB, YouTube. It is a fundamental part of that model.

There are plenty of shitty companies in both buckets (and seemingly more as time goes by) but let's not pretend there's never a difference.

I'd be happy to see such a counter example. If something can phone home, it will. I've yet to see a purchasing site (= I am the customer) which does not share data with third parties, for example.

How about Fastmail or Posthaven?

A better phrasing would be "you don't get what you don't pay for". The mere fact that you've paid does not guarantee that you receive anything of comparable value in return.

When it comes to open source and other community-based projects, it's true that you shouldn't expect much in the way of personalized service or attention to your particular needs or issues if you're not paying for it. Fortunately, just making a copy of some software (even really good software) doesn't cost much at all, so it's not unreasonable that you're getting that much for free. Improving the software requires an investment from someone, though, one way or another.

yeah thats the tricky thing. Google makes $256/user per year domestically in ad revenue. That's $21/month.

https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

it's really hard not to be the product.

And users who pay for things are more valuable to advertise to.

None of Google's shared plans work cross-country - YouTube, Google Play, Stadia, Google One. All of them error, sometimes cryptically ( e.g. "Can't access payment methods"). It should be clearer what the issue is, with clear, concise error messages, but IMHO it's not a bug per se. Different country legislations, copyright, tax codes, prices, etc. etc. make that a complex matter and i see how they wouldn't want to deal with it.

#BitcoinFixesThis

No it doesn't, you'd still need to declare and pay local taxes, and abide by local legislations.

Sorry if that was not clear, my wife and I live on the same address in the same country. Her billing address is same as mine. I checked the net and Google product forums for possible solutions, checked the billing address, Play store settings, nothing helped.

Ah. In the Play store there's a main country which can be changed once a year[1], then there are payment methods ( you can't share Stadia, for instance, with anyone who has any payment method in a different country). The billing address changes nothing in this regard.

1 https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7431675?hl=en&c...

I have the same problem with Youtube TV. My wife cannot use youtube TV on her devices because of some country related issue. My guess is she made the grave mistake of logging into her gmail while traveling.

Speaking of not being able to use Google services, if my wife plays any music on our Google Nest at home, I cannot stream music in my car because "My Account is being used in another location". Seriously?

It amazes me that HN, and Twitter, is the only customer service for a multi-billion dollars company like Google.

You forgot Tim's email address[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529

No, I didn't. We're talking about Google here, not about all the companies of the whole world with the same, or similar behavior.

The customers are well taken care of. The users are not the customer, they are the product.

thijser is a user and a customer, as you can see when they say 'I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing.'

Google defrauds them just as much as they scam everyone else. The only interest Google is working for is their own.

Twitter should invoice Google et al. for providing those helpdesk services.

That's not true, Google has "Google One", where you pay for stuff like Google Drive, and get access to support via chat and phone.

Wow, I didn't even know that and I am a Google One subscriber for extra disk space as well!

Started a support chat now, let's see if they can unlock my account.

Good luck! I haven't needed it yet, but all i've heard about it is positive ( rapid response times and they managed to help).

Ah OK, that subscription covers all Google services or just a chunk of them?

IIRC Google One support can help with everything Google related, and you get it as a part of some subscriptions like Google Drive.

The problem is that this does not happen often enough to be of any relevance so they simply and literally don't care, even if you are a paying customer. It's a valid reason not to use any Google services anymore, though. That won't harm Google nor will they change anything (the "no relevance" argument) but at least you get to sleep well at nights knowing you'll still have access to your "life" the next morning.

Isn't it just incredibly sad that one of the top 5 companies in our industry has this way of operating?

And is it really true that there are not enough engineers and product people reading stories like this and have a bit of that good old "Focus on the user and all else will follow" to make the system more humane?

I'm sure they exist, they are just too busy playing the 'stay out of the bottom 10% of automatic layoffs' game.

Supposedly, unlike Amazon or others, Google uses stack ranking for promotions and doesn't fire people based on the stack rank.

> It's a valid reason not to use any Google services anymore, though.

I recently got bit by needing a google account to join Google Meet video calls. I found out that only paying GSuite accounts can create Meet invites that allow anonymous joins. Free Google accounts cannot do that.

Meanwhile the actual problem on the platform is hijacked accounts used to show those "live" streams of Buterin or Hoskinson claiming to double your crypto. So the problem isn't the account holders, nothing is solved by banning the original holders of the accounts :/

Turning off "ad personalization" is an eye opener. I was shocked Google allows such fraudulent advertising. Worst once I've seen so far is wide footage of Elon at a conference over dubbed with a voice telling me about this great share trading software he's invented that can double my money.

This is why I have like to have many google accounts. One for personal mail, one for my own youtube channel, another for my 2nd channel with random uploads, another for gmail for the first youtube account and another account for gmail for the other youtube account, plus 2 more gmail accounts for spam or when I need to signup with an email for another expendable service, I use one of these.

I don't do anything on my personal Google account, just mail. Also I use a Google account only for one product at a time.

People need to threat google, apple and facebook accounts as expendible.

This isn't foolproof. Account bans can fan out and ban known shadow accounts you also operate as well, perhaps if you have different mobile phone numbers on each that might give you a bit more of a fighting chance.

It's not foolproof, that's why I consider all those accounts expendable. I don't use them for anything important and I keep them spread. No phone numbers linked to any of the accounts. I'm sure Google can see a link between them, but I'm not too worried about that.

> No phone numbers linked to any of the accounts.

...on your devices.

> No phone numbers linked to any of the accounts.

Whenever I tried to create a Google account, it would ask me for a phone number sooner or later. Is that just me, or is there a way to circumvent that?

All accounts bug me to add a phone number every time I login but I can continue without doing so. These accounts are pretty old, 3 to 10+ years

AFAIU, all current Google property account registration workflows now require a phone number.

I have 20+ gmail accounts, with separate ones for purchases, for communication with friends, for Android development, for check-once-when-you-need-it tasks (occasional 2fa from steam etc.), mailing lists, several spamboxes etc. I don't believe this is a setup for everyone, but it does help me a lot. I know they will try to force me to give my phone number to them one day, but I hope this will take several years still.

I suspect it'll be harder not to give out your number under 2FA that we're all going to get https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/google-wants-every-a...

I'd file a small claims suit for the remaining prorated amount of your YouTube Music payment. Just so an actual human Google rep has to show up for you to vent at.

>totally legit EthGlobal "Hack Money" hackathon

> removed my channel because "Spam, scams or commercially deceptive content are not allowed on YouTube.".

checks out

On Saturday 27 there was a live stream at the top of my recommended Videos.

It was a live stream from "SpaceX", where Elon Musk was presenting a talk "Elon Musk Live | Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission | Launch SpaceX Follow DART Mission".

It wasn't SpaceX's channel, even though at a glance it would look like it, and the live presentation was just some old talk being played back.

The giveaway was the doubling of the coins sent to a specific address, BTC and ETH

https://etherscan.io/address/0x5d923a343b99885de0245f3d6bba5...

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1CD1XwABDCpvSYDKwxP3H...

YouTube really needs to be careful about what it allows its platform to stream, so having a "EthGlobal 'Hack Money' hackathon" on the platform doesn't sound like a good idea.

Could one lose access to manage domains registered with Google domains because of some other service like this?

When I try to visit Youtube now I get redirected to https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=youtube which says:

---

Google reserves the right to:

* Disable an account for investigation. * Suspend a Google Account user from accessing a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system, if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated. * Terminate an account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.

---

So you can just be shut down completely for anything.

After privacy couldn't be trusted to big tech companies, now time for another EU law that restricts how companies can handle account terminations?

How do these things work in the physical world?

I always thought we had protections that when someone runs a public service (eg. a restaurant or a supermarket), they can't just turn people away they want for "any reason". But I was never confident this is true (and sure, it depends on the local laws).

Eg. imagine there being the only supermarket in your area where the security person (or the branch manager, whoever) doesn't like you (it could be for a mundane reason, maybe you made the computer nerds club and they didn't :), and never lets you in. Obviously, supermarkets rarely exist right next to each other, so existence of one usually precludes another one existing nearby (sometimes even due to urban planning/zoning), but this would be equivalent to terminating someone's account "for any reason".

Would that be legal anywhere?

With public servants, it is usually clear: they've got to give you a reason for any action they are taking, a reason supported by law (except when endangered, but those are special, edge cases).

It is completely legal for businesses to deny service as long as it's not a protected class.

I, as a freelancer, refuse to work with certain "difficult" clients at my sole discretion for example.

As a freelancer, you are usually not working with "the public".

A bunch of professions require special licensing to be able to deal with the public (supermarkets included, but even one-man professions like public notaries in some countries), and while there is no similar legislation for internet "places", we can easily establish de-facto public services (which most social networks are).

So, if you've got an open shop (retail space), can you forbid someone from entering for "any reason"? Eg. "I dislike your hairstyle" is a reason.

In the US anyway, as the parent said, yes you can deny service for any or no reason except for specific protected classes (e.g. sex, race, religion, etc.). You can, for example, deny service to anyone wearing red. Or anyone who is not an adult (or not a child). You can deny service to anyone named Jeeves.

There are, of course, edge cases. For example, a shopping mall is a private space but not in and of itself a retailer. IIRC, they are held to a higher standard than retailers and must have a real reason to deny entry. And then there are the cases of using one reason to deny service when really you want to deny service to a protected class. Those are common lawsuit material.

Thanks!

If that's the case, we probably need to re-think through those policies if we think that they should not apply equally to "virtual" spaces (like Google/Youtube accounts).

Any ban on any of Google's properties is applied at the top Google account level so you lose the lot.

An example from 2019:

> As he explained, this didn't just kick people out of chat. It affected entire Google accounts -- people lost videos, channel memberships or access to important services they needed, all because they spammed several emotes in one line.[1]

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019-11-10-youtube-reinstates-banne...

Sorry to hear that, but you are not the first nor the last one. See Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...

I remember a few months ago (or maybe a year ago) there was some change to their terms of service which no longer allowed whitehat content. Many people pointed out the obvious flaw in their rule changes but what can we do really?

I hope more people move their variety of content to Odysee, Rumble and other alt tech as that will help YouTube slowly lose their credible users.

While the term "hacking" is used in both black- and white-hat contexts, it's also used to mean simply... programming/making computers do what we want them to :)

Like in "HackerNews".

https://joinpeertube.org/

Youtube Alternatives :

Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller

Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube

Personally I surely would not want to go that route, but maybe suing(or the threat of it) helps, if you know a trustworthy lawyer?

I would imagine just a letter from a lawyer stating the facts of the incident would be enough to get real attention from google.

I mean, you pay for a service - they just canceled without further explanation. Shouldn't there be some rights left for normal people?

Otherwise yes, your story is a good (allmost daily by now) reminder, to reduce google wherever possible.

small claims court, obviously, require them to send someone somewhere to appear.

If the defendant doesn't show up that doesn't stop the hearing. A google lawyer likely costs more than the damages.

right so they get their money back for their youtube subscription.

Large companies typically send paralegals to small claims courts. In those courts the defense counsel doesn't need to be a member of the bar.

A month's YouTube Music sub would be well within the jurisdiction of small claims, that'd cost them at least some lawyer time to respond!

Perhaps you need to mention suing/lawyer in your original response to avoid your plea being automatically rejected.

That might be worth to give it a try.

Unlucky. It might not even be keyword matching, AI systems in use a far dumber than that. AI systems are mostly trained random noise and it can be impossible to know what set them off.

Even if you get this resolved, its not a bad idea to create a new YouTube account, reupload videos you want to keep. And keep good OpSec to avoid them being "linked".

I had my youtube suspended for the same thing for a different ethonline hackathon vid lol. plea didnt work either

Okey at that point i ve got enough scared of that type of posts every two weeks, gmail is simply not viable solution.

I am moving my emails to a sane European provider with a real customer service.

Consider using PeerTube for your videos next time...

..or LBRY/Odysee

How much of the underlying issue reduces to incentive structures? Any large entity (Google being one) has plenty of monetary incentive to reduce the number of customer service professionals. Any algorithm that minimizes human interactions is profitable unless it actually costs the company its customers. Thus, since it's almost impossible for Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple to lose a significant proportion of customers, it is almost inevitable that they'll avoid letting anyone speak to a human being when a dispute arises.

This might be a subtle anti-trust "cost" to consumers that is entirely overlooked in congress?

A lot of YouTube's "customer service" people are poorly trained contractors in India, may of which don't even understand English well. I've gone back and forth with them sometimes being asked for things that I clearly provided in previous emails and one time I got a reply with instructions that included a bunch of You Tube internal network only links (that were in India which is how I know where they are), then when I replied to that without providing anything they asked for (because I can't get to the links) was told I wasn't being cooperative. So its not always AI being dumb.

For those inclinde to condemn, or exonerate, Google and other major service providers for such practices, I strongly suggest considering the actual scale of operations involved.

YouTube bans nearly 5 million channels per charter, 20 million per year. For Facebook it's closer to 2 billion/quarter or 8 billion per year. Even at a daily or hourly rate, the numbers are staggering.

More in this somewhat deeply-nested comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29463957

Its becoming obvious that people shouldn't keep their stuff online on places they have 0 control. Even google's data liberation can't be used to take your data once account is blocked - if they allowed me to just use this one service after the blockade for a limited amount of time, I wouldn't have any problems.

So it seeems that NextCloud and PeerTube should be must in this day and age... Mail seems most problematic but helpfully, you could easily keep local copy in mail clients.

It has been obvious for quite some time now. There still seem to be a lot of folks who need to learn the hard way that a megalomaniac overlord isn't a trustworthy steward of anything whatsoever.

They don't allow scams yet every other pre-video ad I get is about an obvious pyramid scheme and the skippable ad itself lasts at least 30 minutes.

Curious.

Has anyone attempted to sue Google in small claims? For smaller annoyances like losing access to email and/or having a video removed this seems like it might be an option to increase the cost of improper take-downs? That said, not a lawyer and Google probably has a strong case around being a private platform with sole authority to remove content.

Yes, people have tried to sue Google in small claims court.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...

It's not such a bad idea -- even if you don't stand a chance legally, it would force Google to spend a few dollars in legal fees to respond, and you know a real human will look at your claim.

Since "small claims" is usually for actual damages, start with the loss of the music account.

Yesterday we read about Apple suspending an account[1]. Today this. These companies can do as they please, and the consumer has no way to defend. This is not acceptable.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529

> I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing.

It says right in the TOS that the music is licensed, not sold. It was never your music.

Pirate your music and film library instead. Giving these services money is a vote for their way of doing business.

If you consider DeFi as scam (and I do, as they're always MLM pyramid schemes), then a hackathon distributing prizes with DeFi is a platform for scam. That doesn't mean a video about it should or shouldn't be allowed, but it isn't a far stretch from thereon.

>I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing.

I guess when Youtube cancels your service they don't need to pay back any subscription fees for the month or whatever amount of the time you are paid up for?

Welcome to google support. We value our customer so much, we let our developers handle your worries. All we require in return, is you bring us news, interesting things, hacker news.

Only if you attract the interest of the djinn, will he grant you a review or three wishes.

Without class action lawsuits google (and other faangs) won't fix it's censor and appeal process. Maybe even on the European court.

That's it's doable you can see with GitHub, which does have proper support for it's huge userbase.

"my account" - That's the first problem right there. It's google's account and you are donating content to them.

There is only room for one emperor without cloths

Naked co-emperors sounds like a very modern take authoritarianism and body positivity.

What I really hate about this situation is Google profiting from HN users by using us as unpaid human complaint department.

Back up your Google Drive and Email folks! You may one day lose access to your data out of the blue.

I said it before and I will say it again. [0] YouTube does not care about you or small creators and are moderating content like the big media companies who are now on the platform.

It is only going to get worse and YouTube will NEVER change.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439417

What are assuming it’s not your other video “Tulips and water” the issue? :)

Okay. So post the video somewhere else? Maybe host it on your own server.

YouTube has the biggest clown car in executive management.

You could always use Odysee or Bitchute .

Seems like the system is working then.

An example of how HN has turned from a hacker site into a user site.

Why are you using legacy centralized web 2.0 platforms ruled by fiat money? Put your video on IPFS, give it an ens.domain, mint an NFT for it. With an eth<>filecoin bridge it will fund its own censorship-resistance forever. That tech is great and has obsoleted web 2.0. Don't trust Google, self-govern!

I can't tell if this is satire.

I think it is, but I can't tell if this is satire.

Same for me, it feels like it's in a uncanny valley between clearly satiric and something some (not all/many) people (from the Web3.0 & DeFi) community might say.

Just another example of Poe's law

Poe's law: take the absinthe, or the absinthe takes you!

You and several parent comments can't tell it's satire.

That is already telling.

Poe’s law

It must be.

There's an opportunity here. Put the video on both YouTube and a blockchain, make it easy to find on the latter via the YouTube URI, then when one discovers a non-working link you YouTube you can pivot to the blockchain-based backup. Once enough people know about this hack it then, with a browser plug-in, censorship be gone!

This is obviously off-the-cuff, undetailed thinking here, but an approach like this might make sense in the future.

How does a YouTube 404 turn in to a working link? You don't control what You Tube displays on their 404.

Maybe get a mechanism of law passed which makes it difficult for platforms to sweep content from view in cases of changes of moderation. If youtube decies Charlie Bit Me is violent and they know longer wish host it, then they must provide some sort of redirect if video owner provides. I don't know?

Fun fact, Charlie Bit Me owners actually sold the video as an NFT and removed it from Youtube.

Presumably with the browser plugin. This would of course require all your users installing it.

This idea has provenance with SponsorBlock

Easy: Your extension looks at the HTTP status code and if it’s 404, query the distributed hash table for another copy of the video. Then replace the <video> element on the page with a different one that plays bytes from your callback function (Media Source Extensions) just like WebTorrent.

(Note: There are alternatives to YouTube that already use WebTorrent to make videos harder to delete, but their content is incredibly hard to sort through. Instead of improving on YouTube by making filters optional, they just didn’t implement filters at all. So most of the videos in search results are scams or political)

Dead comment that I can’t vouch for asks:

>Why do you need Blockchain for this?

I’m not sure if you need blockchain. I’d avoid it if possible because it’s expensive and slow. But you might not have a choice if you need a censorship resistant distributed log.

>Why can't you just cross post on Rumble with the exact same title and make an extension which replaces 404d videos with the equivalently titled Rumble video?

I’ve never heard of Rumble, but many have built YouTube alternatives only to run out of funding and end up on this list: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Deathwatch#Dead_as_a_...

Hell even my team has built a shitty YouTube alternative during a 1-day hackathon. The videos are downloaded peer-to-peer with webrtc and my site has better clustering/search than most *tubes; but of course the site is dead today and all the videos are inaccessible: https://github.com/NavinF/NodeVid.com

But then you're relying on the IPFS version to accurately say which Youtube video URL it is equivalent to. I could upload any number of videos claiming to be the same as your video, right?

True. Maybe that can be solved with an oracle[1] that runs the command “yt-dlp <url> -o - | sha256sum”. So every file you upload must be identical to the YouTube video at the same link.

1: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/oracles/

You can’t store a video on the blockchain. How incredibly bad of a design would that be! The ledger is shared. People typically mint the hyperlink as an NFT.

Right-o.

Like any good satire, half truth.

I would have taken it seriously before the "obsolete" bit gave it away as satire.

Which is sad, because some of that stuff indeed has potential and should be used more (IPFS), but it cannot happen unless people take it seriously.

FWIW: I think that causality is backwards. People "take seriously" things that are used for serious things, never the reverse. The history of technology is that everything starts as a toy or a hack.

Poe's law

Why are you using new web 3.0 platforms ruled by distributed money? Put your video on AWS S3, give it a domain name, and put CloudFront in front of it. With a horizontal load balancer and autoscaling, resource provisioning isn't an issue. That tech is great, and web 3.0 isn't necessary. Don't trust the distributed web, trust AWS!

Now, I can't tell if what I'm saying is satire. But it does, at least, make sense, right? Because they're all terms you know and have familiarity with.

Don't dismiss something simply because you don't understand it. There's a ton of complexity in Web3. There's a ton of complexity in Web2; you just understand the complexity well enough to the point of it no longer being complex.

Maybe its satire. Or, maybe; Then they laugh at you. Its hard to say at this stage.

SAVAGE !!!

I love it :)))

Is this like a parody of the Dropbox thing?

Web3 is beyond the hill of magic vs technology for me currently, it's on the tolearn list. Is that actually the alternative to YouTube?

It's an alternative to centralized video hosting, I wouldn't go as far as call it an alternative to youtube because it's the video platform you go to if you want the exposure, accessibility, and possibly monetization.

That said, there's other (centralized) video hosting solutions you can go to if you're less technically inclined. Vimeo is a popular choice.

I didn't know Vimeo was web3 already. Very progressive :P

It's the web3 part that's not on my radar yet, honestly I'm happy with YouTube as-is until someone figures out discoverability

https://www.pinata.cloud/

this could be a place to start! makes it easy to upload content and host it on IPFS.

If it's hosted with IPFS what are these folks charging for?

Service wise ofc happy to pay for anything that makes my life easier but they appear to be charging by the storage?

I'm wondering that as well so dug into the site.

IPFS is a way to host and distribute files. It's not free. To have files distributed they need to be hosted somewhere. You can do this yourself by hosting an IPFS server at home or in the cloud. On IPFS this is called a "pin". Pinata host and serves your files to pin them on IPFS. That's why their list of services is that of a cloud provider.

From their pricing/plans page (https://www.pinata.cloud/pricing)

Fast Global CDN

100GB bandwidth included per month

Additional bandwidth at $0.05/gb

Unlimited storage at $0.15/gb

Here's a blog article that covers Pinata's primary use case - web3 hosting for NFTs https://medium.com/pinata/the-file-requirements-for-nfts-a20...

Or maybe just use another hosting platform.There are at least 5 good reliable choices that are not from "FAANG"-tier platforms.

Which ones beside Vimeo?

Bunny.net is quite inexpensive way to host videos. Display them on your own platform with the free Video.js.

I'm not sure why people are calling this satire. If you want to host a video, make it available through a URI, protect your ownership rights and then make sure it gets hosted for as long as possible, this is a way to do it.

The satire element comes the fact that doing it that way, while technically flawless, will get the creator as large an audience as piping the video to /dev/null.

"flawless"

I can't tell if this is satire.

Certainly it can't be easier than going to my YouTube account and pressing upload.

Oh, I missed on that. And yes, that is true.

I can't help think that for a hackathon, it's a pretty good use case for something like this. The organizers can then take the files from wherever and post them to their YouTube channel for exposure and monetization if that's what they want.

I'd be furious if I ended up posting some video, mandatory on YouTube, for a fun week-end hackathon and ending up with my entire YouTube account suspended. So if I ever do end up organizing a hackathon or similar event, I'll keep in mind that it might be better to ask for the video files as just files and then handling the posting on my side so as to not expose participants to this risk.

If participants want to ensure their names are linked to the video bits used from their films, they can go through the all the blockhainy-web3-y trouble, if not they can just zip them.

But you don't have to put the video exclusively to IPFS, PeerTube and co.

I'm a professional programmer and like....I understand some of those words? If I had to guess, I'd say this is a joke, purely because of how nonsensical it sounds. Host it on what? Pair it with ETH? Like...the cryptocurrency? How does that work? How does that make money?

Maybe I'm getting old. Scary world out there.

Well, then I guess you can be a professional at something and still be unaware of all the tools at your disposal. Also just because you don't know something as a "professional" doesn't mean anything :D it's more like, oh I don't know what that I'd, im gonna go read the docs. But instead, I've never heard of it, its dumb...

Lol, sorry, I didn't mean to say it's dumb, nor do I mean to use the "professional" title as some sort of badge. Simply that I work with tech every day, and yet I'm completely unaware of those things, that's why I'd guess it's a joke. Obviously it would be a bad guess.

I guess for a different comparison you could be a professional truck driver and still be completely unaware that we have cars that almost drive themselves with the right tech and conditions. It's just not something you normally come across in your line of work.

Also felt it was a scary world till I had the opportunity to read up a bit.

The cryptospace is wild, and web3 is a wild west, but some parts make sense, and they’re a bit awesome!

> Host it on what? Pair it with ETH? Like...the cryptocurrency? How does that work? How does that make money?

You host it in IPFS, which is basically just a bunch of running nodes that store files using a hashing system that results in these identifiers (CID) per file. This CID always reflects the same file, no matter if you store it or I store it or we both store parts of it.

Let’s say I upload my video file, and then send it to you on IPFS so now we both host it.

Then, I decide to NFT it. So I register a contract on the Ethereum blockchain (for which I have to pay in Ethereum, the currency) that points to this CID.

At this point, this particular video, its hash on the IPFS and the ETH blockchain entry under my wallet, give me a distributed right of ownership for those that choose to respect it.

As per how it makes money, I have no idea, it all feels like a giant scam to me. The money aspect is a more cryptobro oriented question than a technical one.

The key is knowing enough about the technology to know that none of that works. IPFS doesn’t solve the storage or bandwidth problems people use YouTube to avoid, so you’re still going to need to pay for hosting, which could be done cheaper without the blockchain overhead.

Similarly, an NFT doesn’t prevent everyone from accessing it so you can’t force people to pay for the cost of their access and it doesn’t protect your ownership — that’s done by copyright laws enforced by the government.

The only thing a blockchain is adding is the chance for people who sell blockchains to make money while distracting you from the real problems you’ll need to deal with either way.

> [...] you’re still going to need to pay for hosting, which could be done cheaper without the blockchain overhead.

IPFS has no blockchain, and the overhead of transferring files is incredibly low thanks to lib-p2p.

> Similarly, an NFT doesn’t prevent everyone from accessing it so you can’t force people to pay for the cost of their access and it doesn’t protect your ownership — that’s done by copyright laws enforced by the government.

By itself it does not, coupled with other mechanisms, it can. Access control to personal files is very much removed from where I expect government to exercise their own control.

> IPFS has no blockchain, and the overhead of transferring files is incredibly low thanks to lib-p2p.

Filecoin does, however, while you'll note was proposed as part of this. The problem with IPFS is the general one with P2P: there aren't enough people who are going to use their storage + network capacity to provide a CDN for strangers, especially with the personal legal risks to do so, and it's slower than a high-quality professionally-managed service like YouTube or Vimeo. That means that if you care about long-term availability, you need to pay for hosting and that likely will also require paying for bandwidth if the content becomes popular and/or you want to provide a competitive experience rather than simply pure archival.

> > Similarly, an NFT doesn’t prevent everyone from accessing it so you can’t force people to pay for the cost of their access and it doesn’t protect your ownership — that’s done by copyright laws enforced by the government.

> By itself it does not, coupled with other mechanisms, it can.

Yes, but that's like saying that if you buy a chainsaw and a loaf of bread you can make sandwiches. Either way you need to build and operate a system to store the video and provide authenticated access so the NFT is simply making that more expensive and adding additional failure modes.

> Access control to personal files is very much removed from where I expect government to exercise their own control.

This is like saying you don't expect the government to control access to your house. That's technically true but only if you define the problem so narrowly to omit the fact that the government provides the legal framework and enforcement which allows you to do so reasonably. For example, if you're trying to get paid for content someone will likely try to snag a copy and present it somewhere else with their ads; blockchains can't prevent that and will limit revenue only to the extent that the viewers care to validate an NFT. What does work is that you can send something like a DMCA request and get a prompt response from a hosting service because they know that the penalties for not doing so are enforced by the government rather than just your personal clout.

Well the post might be meant in satire but I believe that the eyeballs->advertising monetization model is not only inefficient, but also weighs quick to consume crap content over quality content. Earning directly money through gifting/tipping and creator coin investments can be more profitable for the creator if implemented in the right way. There are social blockchains that are not ETH (which I believe is actually not worth it's money) are out there solving the problem right now.

or just odysee

This, but non-ironically, and with distributed discovery.

Why are you posting on a legacy centralized web 2.0 platform?

With "moderators", ie the stalin loving braintrust that is HN, but it's better than Facefuk and Twatter, for now, I said that about twatter though, and I quit that a while back.

Uhh so people might see it?

So you're pushing for DeFi and all things decentralized, but whining that the centralized service has enforced its power upon your content about decentralization there? Nice.

What do you mean but whining?

I'm not DeFi fan (not by a long shot), but complaining about the practices of centralised services seems exactly in line with what a pro-DeFi person would do. There's no hypocrisy here.

It seems to me that an actual advocate of decentralized services would have nothing to complain about, because there would be no way to censor them (cf "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it").

So given that in reality, everything of consequence in the "Decentralized Finance" world still relies on centralized services (YouTube hosts your videos, a lot of cryptocurrency actually held in exchanges, not wallets, etc), charges of hypocrisy may not be entirely without merit.

I assume the hypocrisy is that OP is still using these services

The OP states that it was a requirement of attending something they went to.

I know this isn't going to be a popular suggestion but can we please ban these type of threads from HN? I'm not sure if that's a 'done' thing around here, but they are multiplying in number and really, HN isn't a suitable venue for Google support.

For each one of these threads that reach high in the HN index, there are like 10's or 100's more cases - why is one person more special than another?

Really, we should just do a weekly 'big tech banned my account pls help' and pressure changes to be made, such as legislation, to ensure proper support is given in these cases.

HN isn't meant to replace actual Google support.

Flag and hide stuff you don't like.

No, HN is not a venue for Google support, but when official support says:

>appeal has been rejected and that no further replies will be processed

until there is a weely thread, your suggestion is equivalent of closing it as duplicate, resolved, while the linked ticket closed stale due to people giving up on getting support.

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