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Comment by ToastyMallows | Hacker News Reader

I've never had this happen and I've had a YouTube account for a while. This honestly sounds like a bug of some sort. Have you found other people experiencing this?

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Yep, totally happened to me. Lost 100+ subscriptions. Had to find and re-add everything I follow by hand.

Also, had a fun bug recently with the G+ Page/Profile bullshit where I deleted my Youtube Channel account so it would stop asking about G+ integration at the cost of no longer being able to post videos or comments. (However, jokes on me, as they just forcibly integrated my G+ with Youtube ONE WEEK after I explicitly deleted my Channel account to prevent exactly that from happening. Thanks, Google.) It didn't erase all of my subscriptions, but it made them all nonfunctional. My feed was completely empty despite the channels having many new videos, so I had to drop and re-add all of my subs to fix the feed.

I take solace in the fact that this most recent forced integration and re-purposing of G+ posts has been an unmitigated disaster.

It's very entertaining to see videos a few years old just FULL of G+ Posts, not Youtube Comments, from people who don't even realize those posts were public years ago. And now they're getting tons of attention of G+ posts through the Youtube website from mean and vicious Youtube commenters.

It's basically the exact opposite of what Google used to stand for online, with regards to privacy, safety and respect for users.

Yes, there has always been people complaining in forums. I've seen steps to recover some of the lost stuff, but I no longer bother. My original account predates the Google acquisition and I lost everything when they made the username -> Google Account transition years ago.

Probably my fault because I always decline these things until Google forces the integration upon us anyway.

This same exact thing happened to me as well (same scenario, kept declining until I woke up to find that google merged my accounts without me accepting) last week. Although I magically got my lists back after a few days, it still pisses me off that google forced the transition on me.

They did not really. You can still go back by thumbnail>switch accounts.

Could be a bug that was fixed but that was the first thing I tried and it didn't work. Even now I get buggy behavior with things like preferences. I set as many things to private as possible after the merge in addition to my language (don't live in the US). Yet I occasionally get popups asking if I want a new subscription to be shared publically or made private. And I get told that my lang has been set to English for me even though I live in Japan which I'm well aware of cause I set it myself already.

Amateurs :)

Myself, having already been thru a Google domain account merge fiasco, when confronted with the gaccount merge at YouTube just created a new useless account.

you can keep saying no. they keep pleading for me to use my "real" name and I keep switching it back to my artist name.

its amazing that they host video by artists and yet do not allow the artists to use their artist names. all in the name of stamping out comment wars.

You can make a Google+ page with any name you want. If you have a brand that is not your actual name, you can manage it as a page.

I had a good discussion somewhere here about names in relation to medical records. What it boiled down to was that one can never assume that someone has a name that stays the same, is of any set length, has any set format, and restriction on length, number of words, capitalisation etc. These facts cause havoc in unprepared systems (read as every system I have ever used). The fact that Google tries to pin this problem down is laughable - but I guess they have as good or better chance than anyone else at getting it right. <glares at GE, Philips, Kodak, Intellirad>

I was hesitant to share this video[1] on HN, but I came upon this in my research when the same thing happened to me.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs

Edit: NSFW- language/curse words.

Same here, I declined and got "virtually killed", no more playlist etc. Another short story. helped someone unknown become really famous. Got a DMCA takedown notice on all my videos, that's the "thank you". The best part is that the file I uploaded had no license, nothing. As said that artist was completely unknown. I thought about fighting back, then just said.. f* off.. I'll wipe and shut this account down. Not worth it.. She had barely 100visitors or less in total for years, had to delete her vids with some hundred million visits..

If it has no license, that means it's copyrighted. Everything is copyrighted by default.

Thanks for sharing that. Pretty stark example of how Google is screwing up YouTube.

For completeness sake, you should probably have posted her followup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQSaGfsWamw

Turns out she was completely wrong about having lost her data, the UI was just confusing in such a way that she thought she had. Don't get me wrong, that kind of confusing UI is very much Google's Problem, but "confusing UI" and "lost all my videos" are _very_ different in magnitude.

Yep, YouTube accounts are used in the apps shipped with smart TVs. Move to Google+ made it pretty much impossible to populate the playlists in a computer/phone to watch it later on a Vizio TV app. The app doesn't accept Google+ logins, and the data under YouTube login (playlists, subscriptions, watch it later) has been wiped out.

Never happened to me either, but I don't have a G+ account with the Google account I use for YouTube and have said "no" every time they have suggested I change to a real name or when they suggested some other change.

Most people seem to hit trouble when they have a G+ account or have accepted any of the changes that Google suggests. Which is really lousy user experience and Google should really know better.

So far, keeping out of G+ has kept things usable for me on Google. I am heavily dependent on Gmail, consume a lot of content on YouTube and use Keep extensively. There is a different G+ account that I use for Hangouts for work.

But I don't see things getting better from hereon. In fact, I fully expect Google to mess this up even more and I am saying that as a fan of the company. That's the day I'll pack up and leave. It has been a good 10-year run, and all good things have to come to an end someday!

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