Ask HN: YouTube shutdown my account with private channel of my kids memories | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: YouTube shutdown my account with private channel of my kids memories

75 pointsyhujkiop35 comments

I had memories of my kids stored for 6 years as private yt videos. I uploaded yesterday a video of my son elongating his eyes and mouth with funny face. I think that caused my YouTube account to be shutdown. I lost the appeal too.Please advise if there is any hope to recover

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Perform a Google Takeout, all my videos were there from my banned YouTube account.

Thanks for the tip! I hope this works, as YouTube banned all my private christmas videos from the 80s.

Must've been a pretty wild Christmas party.

By the standard at the time, probably lame.

My parents had until couple of years ago photos and 8mm film from my early childhood where I staggering around in just shoes. I hated clothes even in winter.

These days that would be classified as child pornography and likely land them in prison. They were upset about destroying innocent memories but.. well..

Times change, not always for the better.

I wish! It's me as a child running around in a t-shirt, waiting for Santa. Apparently that's not allowed.

Thanks for giving the OP some firsthand advice that answers his question and might actually work, rather than chiding him with some variant of "You shouldn't have trusted YouTube in first place ('you big dummy', implied)". That type of "advice" accomplishes nothing, other than maybe boosting the ego of the person making it.

probs talking about me. My replies works as a warning to someone reading the post. The Google download is actually a nice tip tho.

People don't make these posts to serve as cautionary tales for others, they're usually asking for help.

You’re right, we need more tech support requests on HN.

They tend to get moderated away most of the time, which you can help by flagging them or emailing them to hn@ycombinator.com. Supercilious PSAs don't do any of that.

It's very common on HN. I do it too. Mostly because we spend a lot of effort avoiding these platforms, and when something bad happens to a person because of it, we can shout, "Ha! My paranoia is justified!"

If you're working day to day as an engineer, you end up mostly thinking in unhappy cases and 99.99% uptime scenarios, so it actually seems like helpful advice.

Exactly this. My actual comment emerges more from fear rather than ego.

> That type of "advice" accomplishes nothing, other than maybe boosting the ego of the person making it.

That depends on whether anyone other than OP ever reads the comment thread.

In this kind of cases I always bring up POSSE[0] (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)

Never use someone else's platform as the only location for anything you're not prepared to lose at a moment's notice.

[0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Peloton has no way to recover secondary account passwords and thus my wife lost all her workout history. I couldn’t believe it when customer service told me. All you can do is create a new account.

> Not having backups

Lesson learned I hope.

Never leave your treasures in the house of someone you literally don't know.

Is this a warning against banks?

Yes, that too.

I can't help with the account closure, but I can guarantee you that your account was not closed because of a face your kid made. That's not something any automated tool would detect, and if it was private nobody should have reported the video either which would have triggered anything.

I can tell you that YouTube is not the right place for storing family videos. Google Photos is more appropriate for that, and you should be using Google Takeout on a regular basis to back everything up to a hard drive or secondary cloud service.

We should all be aware by now that what in 1995 was "my hard drive stopped working and I lost all my data", is now in 2024 "my account got closed and I lost all my data". As consumers, we now back up primarily not because disks break, but because we lose access.

(I'm not condoning Google here, just saying that this is the sad reality with any cloud provider.)

Frankly I don't think any Google service is the appropriate place to be storing irreplaceable family data.

I think it's as fine as any other major cloud service as long as you have a backup.

And for irreplaceable family data, you should always have a backup. That's the main point here.

I would even go further and say: why store the pictures in the cloud at all? Keep them local always (with backups). If you want to share photos with others, send them explicitly (via email or chat). Many advantages:

- access is forbidden by default to everyone except you

- you don’t know what the platform providers will do with your photos anyway (you cannot trust them anymore)

- you can access your photos offline

I don’t think you’re wrong, but also consider the costs associated with trying to setup and manage your own backup. Easy for many of us here, but the “average” person faces not only the technical barriers, but the actual cost of devices. People don’t have $400 for an emergency [1] but need to spend $100-$300 for a level backup - and it’s just an insurance device.

Google is offering to painlessly, invisibly backup your photos. It’s not hard to see why peeled go with it, and trust it to be there.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/shed.htm

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