YouTube cancelled my Nextcloud installation how-to
mccormick.cx
mccormick.cx
Yes. Well all know that. We all know that it was some mistake by some AI. Even the author knows that.
But we also know that the only way to get customer support from YouTube is to get some social media outrage.
It's so common, Google should put on their website: "If you need customer support, please try to create some outrage on social media. We do not provide other channels of customer support."
Still the meat of the article is the insinuation that yt removed the video because of some nefarious motives. So either the author knows otherwise and the article is written in bad faith, or the author genuinely believes his theories. Neither option reflects well on the author.
That's a false dichotomy. I see no reason why Google earns any benefit of the doubt here. Letting Google off the hook by saying "it was just am AI mistake" when we don't actually know just gives Google more room to be draconian with no consequences. We really don't know why Google made this mistake and until Google provides a transparent and plausible explanation (hint, that won't happen even if this is decision is reversed), there is nothing wrong with assuming that Google is acting in bad faith.
If Google wants the benefit of the doubt here, they need to earn it back.
If Google gives zero information on what the real problem was and people want to scream about how its a deliberate policy of suppression on Google's fault we should let them and not feel bad about amplifying it.
Google can fix this all just by being more transparent and providing support.
I don't favor the "protecting corporate interests" theory because of this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=install+nextclo... Doesn't exactly look heavily censored to me.
The core problem remains what people have observed before, which is that Google, and the tech industry in general, seals people off from any support mechanism, other than "generate outrage on social media". Little by little, this becomes a bit more abusive every year.
We also don't know what "human review" constitutes. It may well constitute a human simply reading the incorrect transcription and agreeing that it violates policy, without any reference to the audio track. The details of how these tech companies are overdependent on AI are not publicly known, we merely observe the consequences that can only be explained with reference to it. So I can't tell you if there was never even a human involved in the appeal, or a bad human, or one who didn't care, or whatever. We can only infer the possibility space from the outcome, not nail down the exact details.
I believe they're imposing their tyrannical will partially until they're let lose for good when the time is right. They already made obvious how they like to treat our freedom of expression be it discussing political ideas, presenting medical information, researching intel about conspiracies, you name it..
I'd suggest you reconsider using the platform in general or proxy it via an invidious instance until you do.
Lol this is really funny.
Sadly it's also true.
Please compete with other customers for outrage and we will support the winner.Personally I see nothing funny in it. It's been a sad reality for many years. Every time I see a comment here under one of these posts "Hi I'm Eric from Google, I'll try to check it with our X department", it's a sad reminder that you have a chance of solving your problem only if you manage to make enough fuss about it in public.
There should be a rule against using Hacker News for customer support. Also using Hacker News to talk about sites being up or down.
Not only Google, though. I closed my Twitter account a few years back and one of the few arguments in favour to leaving it open was that I had a sizeable number of followers (+6k) and I could leverage that if I needed to complain to some company for one reason or another. Social media is the world's support service, provided you carry enough eyeballs.
Edit: grammar.
As a lone voice desperately holding his bowl out to a corporate giant, like a modern day Oliver Twist - and no army of social media friends behind me...
AI mistake administration, no customer support, hackers and inside connections doing the role of the unlicensed plumber.
For the n-th time, they do and it's called Google One.
It's unfortunately a pattern we see outside digital, in particular with law enforcement. It's a force that undermines society in a very destructive and pernicious way. People need to feel that there is some fundamental fairness in society or they will stop contributing and start destroying.
It's really too bad that these large tech companies haven't maintained their early prioritization of fairness. It's the root cause of frustration with their search engine as well.
A modern folk art drawing I made of a squid was blocked on Instagram for a content violation. I joked that the AI must be afraid of tentacles. The only explanation that made sense was that it looked vaguely phallic in the way that any of nature's "bulbed cylinders" do, but even that seemed like a stretch -- I should think they would have flagged an earlier painting of mushrooms.
The lesson is to make everything look like a butt in a thong. None of the content moderation anywhere seems to have a problem with butts in thongs. Bulbed cylinders: bad. Smooshed jiggle orbs: good. Just no nipples.
Combined with the incessant reliance on AI and no hope of humanity ever connecting with the customers, we have a perfect shitstorm.
The lesson is to not use Google, and to only depend on structures/people you can rely on. Either yourself or a collective without profit motives, for example.
My long term goal is indeed to stop relying on the MAANG and publish first to my own site. I'm not really that interested in building a following. I have a small audience of friends who like to see what I'm up to and I genuinely like it that way.
The major barrier is wanting to set it up in my free time since it's like doing work.
1. Automatic/ML/AI/buzzword filtering that is, in blunt terms, kinda crappy
2. Preemptively and diligently correct for any such crappy decisions that would result in PR nightmares or credible lawsuits
3. Apply some portion of your effort to reviewing some portion of the cases that appeal. Hope (nudge nudge, wink wink) that those cases that you couldn't review, because you simply don't have the resources to review everything in depth, are those of your "enemies." You're not suppressing them; you just didn't have the resources to help them.
Result: The system punishes your enemies by design and you and your enemies can just blame the AI and your front line support, which everyone already loves to do. People who are suspicious can be painted as nutjobs, because it's obviously just the unfortunate but classic case of the little guy against the giant indifferent bureaucracy.
Thus any sufficiently influential entity can wield Hanlon's Razor as a weapon. You don't event need to plan for this; it is bound to happen. Parts 1. and 2. happening are foregone conclusions. When the opportunity for part 3. arises, I think people in all levels of the organization would quickly and tacitly realize that uneven review is in their best interest, if they don't just do it automatically out of laziness or tribal thinking.
My question is the creator content video space in need of competitors? Some other products are making options available such as Rumble and Vimeo.
However in practice big tech companies either respond saying it doesn’t apply, or that it already has been reviewed by a human - which of course there’s no way to disprove from the outside.
Youtube appeals are either a non-local phenomenon or not decided by humans.
What happens then? If they don't have enough legal representatives and they can't show up they lose by default in many jurisdictions, right?
Eventually nobody who would take them to court is their customer anymore.
Amazon do this. You can only enforce your consumer rights once.
The other option is a boneheaded chatbot that's so scripted it doesn't understand the real issue.
They "have" one, it's mostly useless if you are small channel, akin to a fake panic button. They have that responsibility because they have a huge audience. Only laws could coerce them into having a real appeal process but then it might not be economically viable at their scale either.
This is a complex issue, a significant amount of people have their livelihood tied to some google service, in subtle ways, but Google also provides these services mostly at no direct cost for them. I don't think that internet paradigm with last though.
Google has a net income of well over 20% of revenue in their last quarterly earnings, even over 30% last March. This is ridiculously profitable. So I don't buy that argument at all.
And even if it's not economically viable to have customer support (or just a proper and timely process for appeals of AI decisions), then their business model probably shouldn't exist in its current form to begin with.
In this case they won't lose much income from a small channel and people will continue to use their service so purely financially it's a sound decision.
It's also a dick move to their users but big corporations don't have morals. Just shareholders.
Remember both the content creators and consumers aren't their customers. We're just assets for the real customers, the advertisers. Google is the farmer and we're the cattle.
Some things don't scale well and guess what that is cost of business. Imagine a company suddenly removing seats from cars just to increase their profit margin. People would think they are crazy. So why are we accepting this when tech companies do it with customer service?
I promise you that the man on the street doesn't consider this acceptable. That so many in tech believe it is fills me with despair. Our industry isn't alone in having scalability problems, but we do stand alone in the belief that it's then fine to ignore the customer.
In a way I sympathize with Google, Youtube, Facebook and all the other companies operating as mass scale. On the one hand their algorithms suck for moderation, but on the other hand they are the most advanced created yet and there is simply no alternative. I would imagine in the next 10-15 years the players will get moderation under control and be able to model AI to moderate fairly. But that's going to be a slow process because there isn't any alternative to AI in this case, at least how I see it.
That's not the problem that needs solving. A manual review of the videos that are flagged by the AI snitch is all that's needed. Google can very easily afford this level of manual oversight.
When Google provides dogshit services, you expect people to pay for them to be reminded to fix it ?
Having to refund people in cases where Google’s AI fails would create an incentive for them to improve the AI and set higher thresholds for content to get flagged.
I think my idea would make the system work better overall without making it worse for anyone.
Here's how it would actually go:
* AI flags your video
* You pay 5 dollars to have it reviewed by a human
* Either immediately as it's conceived, or a few months down later the line when some manager figured out they could lower costs this way, an AI reviews your video again, and never finds Google at fault.
Never underestimate Google's absolute disdain for its users.
Doesn't his means they've scaled beyond sustainable? As I read it, it's a good argument for them being broken up.
I think a 'bond' system where you put up money to get human appeal, and get half back if the appeal is successful. Maybe with increasing bond as you lose more appeals. Is a much better system.
I don't. There's another alternative.
If you're growing too big to moderate, stop growing. Turn off signups. It's irresponsible to do anything else but, and "but we'll make less money" isn't a valid argument to this.
Uploaders form associations where if one uploader gets flagged, the union decides to agree with the moderation, possibly kicking the user for repeat violations, but if the union disagrees with the moderation they can threaten to disable all their videos until the decision is reversed.
google will have to listen to suitabaly large uploaders unions, and its mutually beneficial: moderation gets decentralized
Nonsense.
[x] Child pornography
[x] Violence
Yep, this would work wonderfully!
Which law currently on the books would force them to do this? If there is such a law on the books, don't you think it would be applied to every company?
I often see the "what law says that is ok" argument in response to "we should force <industry> to reform".
People who say the latter are arguing for new laws most of the time.
I submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console and they indexed all my blog articles... except for the one about using Plausible instead of Google Analytics
=> indieweb.org/POSSE
Maybe having one’s own website and use Wistia or similar for hosting the videos?
Probably not.
The biggest problem really is this: A lot of folks have never heard of Wistia (I hadn't until reading your comment). I'm probably not going to go there on my own - you know, unless they advertise on a youtube channel that I'm watching or something similar. And honestly, why would I believe that the smaller place is going to be any more fair to content producers, especially if they happen to pick up a lot of market share and can no longer provide the personal assistance they gave when small?
And a website isn't exactly a substitute either: Who is going to find your website, anyway? Part of what makes large platforms popular is discoverability. Now, you might have some luck with some topics - the sort that people actually search for - but I'm not usually looking up any infotainment topics in a general search engine. I just go to youtube for that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30825144
What is going on in this thread, I cannot explain.
The ideal world would be if video hosting was like websites, where you have multiple separate and competing companies for domain names, DNS, file hosting, database, load balancing, ads, CDNs, email marketing... And if you're not happy with one of them, you can easily switch to another, all while remaining in full control of your contents and where they are displayed.
I wonder what alternative history we could have had if YouTube wasn't acquired. It makes for an interesting short story writing prompt as well.
There was no way to host video cheaper than ad revenue. Video just requires too much compute, storage and bandwidth compared to the few cents you get from an occasional ad click.
Google could offer it cheap bandwidth and storage. They could use consumers love of Google products to force ISP's to deliver YouTube video traffic cheaper when ISP's threatened to block YouTube because it used too much bandwidth. Even with that, it wasn't profitable for 10+ years!
So your issue is probably with the links in your description, it's probably to prevent spread of malwares since majority of youtube users are random people, they'd run what ever .exe/.apk they are told to open
MKBHD made a video today that properly highlights this kind of issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y
The only scaling issue my amateur brain can fathom is the manner in which the information is provided (data in a database then shown in a user interface, email notification, etc). And it's Google -- experts in AI, ML, data, and automation. Scaling sounds like an excuse, not a reason.
I think it is up to the people to educate themselves, promote better alternatives to people they know and use it (audience drop WILL make google change it's ways) .
One of my geeky friend once told me "I am no longer sure if the internet going to the masses is a good thing"
EDIT : to clarify the comment above, I think internet is a wonderful tool, but by our choices/lack of actions, we allowed it to become what it is now.
The idea that even a fraction of YouTube's global audience would collectively choose to make an uncoordinated move - even over time - to something else because of YT moderation policy, is extremely unlikely, when compared to the coordinated marketing effort of YouTube to attract and retain viewers and content producers.
The coordinated side will always win here.
Other than important social issues, when has leaving things "up to the people" ever led to meaningful change?
It's hard enough when we're talking about actual issues that affect people, you think that choice of video platform on the Internet, a luxury if I've ever heard one, is going to shift because of some kind of popular movement?
I agree with you that it is unlikely that even a fraction of youtube audience make the switch. It is up to them.
> Other than important social issues, when has leaving things "up to the people" ever led to meaningful change?
I can only speak for myself here since "up to the people" means up to every single individual, not a collectivity. If youtube goes down tomorrow, I will have to find another source of music, that's all. I do not care if there is a meaningful change or not. And I totally agree that a video streaming platform is just a luxury...
Edit: note that PeerTube is 100% free and funded by a non profit organization.
Might be worth telling Matt Stoller about this. https://mattstoller.substack.com/
A static site + raspberry pi or NAS docker container + home internet + CDN should be enough to be "web scale". Anyone have a how to?
No, they didn't "cancel" your video. They removed it.
It's unclear why that's a defense. There are other business models.
Rand Paul has been starting his recent video's talking about how YouTube is cancelling him (a US Senator) and he advertises for Rumble.
The fact is, we have allowed the government to outsource the enforcement of their stupid laws to large companies who end up taking the blame. Copyright is one, but there are many more.
A better pattern would be to absolve BigCo from responsibility for your copyright violations, and if the government doesn't like what you're doing, then THEY can enforce it against YOU. This would force the government to take responsibility for the laws that it passes, and we would have a clearer idea of who to actually blame for poor enforcement or stupid laws.