YouTube Terminates Popular Retro Gaming Channel Without Warning | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Terminates Popular Retro Gaming Channel Without Warning

timeextension.com

56 pointsmikhael25 comments

Tech companies love scale, but not the responsibility that comes with it.

"We know it wasn’t the outcome you were hoping for, but there’s nothing more we can do"

Nothing more, when they haven't done anything in the first place. What are they there for?

Telling you there's nothing to be done. It's like when a surgeon outsources communicating that the variance of the margin of error wasn't in his or the patients favour today.

The whole policy of "we can't tell you what you did wrong because that'll help spammers" is so dumb. Yeah, that's a good idea for an account that was created last week or had no views. But if a channel has been with you for a good while and generated you money, you owe them an explanation.

Hopefully someone from Google reads HN and can do something or talk to someone.

> Hopefully someone from Google reads HN and can do something or talk to someone.

IIRC, that's pretty much the only way you can get real help from them: have your problem goes viral on social media, and hope one of the elect sees it and has pity.

As they say: you're not their customer, you're their product.

Reading the tweets from “Team you tube” — these companies should be prohibited from saying things that are obviously not true. “These decisions are made very carefully” or “our community guidelines exist to make You tube a safer community for everyone” are flat lies, naked falsehoods that should bring about meaningful sanctions against Google’s management and shareholders. Rich people should suffer for this.

While this passage is more about press-releases, I feel it captures some of the same frustration and Terry Pratchett is always quotable:

> It was garbage, but it had been cooked by an expert. You had to admire the way perfectly innocent words were mugged, ravished, stripped of all true meaning and decency, and then sent to walk the gutter for Reacher Gilt, although “synergistically” had probably been a whore from the start.

> The Grand Trunk's problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance and wilful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management had made mistakes—oops, 'well-intentioned judgements which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error'—but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting 'fundamental systemic errors' committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometrical otherworld, and 'were to be regretted'.

-- Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Ha! Yes, that should be the case, but new supreme leader wants to deregulate.

“It means, Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, cause Kansas is going bye-bye.”

> Ha! Yes, that should be the case, but new supreme leader wants to deregulate.

Isn't he looking to strip the YouTubes of the world of their 230 protections?

Elon is a major beneficiary of Section 230. That’s not going away.

Elon Musk was willing to spend 44 billion dollars just to burn down a social media platform for being too "woke." I don't think he cares, and I don't think Trump cares.

Elon didn’t burn down Twitter. It still has 100m+ users. He turned it into a politically far right echo chamber, gas lighting its users about “free speech absolutism,” and then outright banning, demoting, or drowning out commentary he doesn’t agree with.

Unless you meant “burn down” in the sense of “turned it into the ashes of a trash fire…” but it was always a trash fire. People still go for it, and advertising still happens there.

Twitter is hemorrhaging users and advertisers and is worth a fraction of what it was when Elon let the sink in. It used to be a primary source for media, politics and culture, now it's just a Nazi bar.

I'd consider that burning the platform down, but we may just disagree on semantics.

Ok. I may just be unaware of the actual numbers. “The advertisers came back, and more liberal users were leaving, but businesses still found it valuable” was sort of my last understanding.

I can't imagine the number of times they falsely terminated creators who don't have a big enough audience to get the attention of actual humans. This is one of the issues w/ relying on a specific platform as your source of income.

They can kick you out any time they wish, and there's nothing you can do about it.

An interesting fragment from the article’s comments:

- GlamorousAlpaca

Dude monetizes copyrighted TV programs, uploads the same stuff over and over, sells merchandise of said copyrighted material and posts a note on youtube 24 hours earlier about how he's gaming youtube. Clearly youtube is to blame.

- ThisIsPete

@GlamorousAlpaca I'm going to be charitable and assume that you're simply not familiar with the following:

He provides commentary over edited excerpts of TV shows, not full episodes, making his work clearly transformative and thus covered under YouTube's fair use provisions.

He has collected older work from multiple videos into single compilations that people can "binge". This is standard practice for moderately sized channels, because YouTube doesn't push old videos to new subscribers. YouTube doesn't allow you to upload identical videos, it detects that at the upload stage.

He does not sell any merch, and monetises entirely through YouTube and Patreon. Again, standard practice. He has never claimed to have "created GamesMaster". Any other accusations you want to make up, or are you done?

- GlamorousAlpaca

@ThisIsPete Vomiting Up Old Videos Works, Regurgitated Old Flob are you for real? He posts a guide on how to game youtube via posting the same old crap over and over 24 hours before this happens.

I guess the title-cased part of the last comment is the title of the last video in this channel, not GlamorousAlpaca’s judgement. If that’s true, it creates a slightly different perspective, imho.

Seems yt restored the channel.

If there was ad revenue lost there is an option to sue. There is some precedent there and platforms are more responsive to that because they have to be.

It's almost like a bunch of YouTube channels ought to "unionize", to defend themselves against capricious and extreme (im-)moderation.

Is that what Nebula is?

Probably trained on Nintendo datasets, "decisions are made very carefully"

Trump has at least claimed that he will put a stop to things like this. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xJfUXVOoFBo

WTF its Rose Tinted Spectrum. He has a fantastic series on British gaming TV program Bad Influence called Breaking Bad Influence.

aaand its back! https://www.youtube.com/@RoseTintedSpectrum works

Here we go. It’s groundhog unfair ban day again.

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