[HN Gopher] YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account
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YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account
Author : Suncho
Score : 278 points
Date : 2020-04-11 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| aritmo wrote:
| What you can do, is upvote the article so that eventually some
| YouTube engineer happens to see it. Not much else to do.
| syshum wrote:
| >>>What you can do
|
| Support Other Video hosting platforms
|
| Advise Creators to upload to multiple Platforms
|
| When Sharing links, if the content it on another platform share
| that instead of YT
|
| YT stays on top because people refuse to move off it
| britneyspears wrote:
| https://www.bitchute.com/
|
| You can have it automatically pull content from your YouTube
| channel to your BitChute channel. Make sure to let your
| viewers know about it in advance, so when Google pulls the
| rug out from under you, for no reason, they know where to
| find your content.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| Yeaaahhhh, bitchute is definitely worse having YouTube as a
| monopoly.
|
| Bitchute is absolutely full of racists, conspiracy
| theories, and just awful people in general. I wouldn't
| touch it with a 2m stick.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Well, you know the drill. First they came for the racists
| and conspiracy theorists...
| throwawaysea wrote:
| This is a great idea I can get behind. We need to
| decentralize away from the major tech platforms in general.
| Is there an index of all such alternative platforms? I know
| there's https://curiositystream.com and am wondering how I
| discover others like it.
| worble wrote:
| There's a list of alternatives for all Google services
| here: https://nomoregoogle.com/
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Correct, it would have to be someone going rogue. YouTube does
| not take action based on content creators publicly making
| statements.
|
| Policy will change if a newspaper article is written about it
| though, ironically.
| Fellshard wrote:
| Google's leadership cares greatly about the opinions of the
| elites around them. Bubble-driven prioritization?
| londons_explore wrote:
| I would guess that someone nefarious got access to the Google
| account associated with that youtube account...
|
| If you can log into an account, it's pretty easy to get an
| account permabanned.
|
| Just paste some links to well known child porn trading sites into
| the description, and the account gets banned within about half an
| hour. Someone at my school modified a chrome extension to do that
| and half the schools youtube accts got banned forever!
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| The co-timed arrival of the email about his GSuite account, and
| the removal of the YouTube (which GSuite support said was
| coincidental and unrelated) seems likely to be the product of a
| malicious activist working through the OP's accounts trying to
| cause trouble.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Give that guy a Blue Falcon award.
|
| Come to think of it, Cancel Culture, itself, is the ultimate
| Blue Falcon award.
| quellhorst wrote:
| You don't own your social media accounts. You need to build your
| own brand with your own domain and collect email addresses of
| your customers.
| govHlthcareLol wrote:
| Emails aren't safe. I have a large following, but if 0.1% of
| people mark you as Spam, you lose your abilities to send.
| kick wrote:
| "Customers" are entirely irrelevant to this post.
| Animats wrote:
| You're promoting a political position which is against the
| financial interests of Google. Why should you expect them to give
| you a platform?
| hubbabubbarex wrote:
| My business is never ever going to use anything that Google
| provides.
|
| But I'm happy people start to notice same .. censorship start to
| make basic business very difficult.
| kmfrk wrote:
| Another fun thing that can happen with YouTube channels is
| getting them banned because you used titles and thumbnails that
| were too similar. This can get flagged as spam, which also
| increases the likelihood of just getting reviewed
| algorithmically.
|
| Basically no appeal process unless you can explore some
| unofficial means of appeal like this one.
|
| How's that for motivation to work on your thumbnails not and
| naming things "Show X #1..n".
|
| Yes, this specific issue might be automated more because of
| coronavirus, but the general issue is not a novel one.
|
| --
|
| The only silver lining is that this doesn' take down your entire
| Google account like some YouTube bans do. (Woo!)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I liked how Google's pro-forma email didn't fill in the blank as
| to why they flagged the account ... but they still sent that
| message. Surely that's a pretty easy failure to capture, I'm
| surprised Google can't spot such failures.
| Others wrote:
| I love Google's products, and I put up with the fact that they
| harvest my data. But to have such terrible support for their
| services is absolutely ludicrous. I've seen too many stories of
| people losing their content, email addresses, services they rely
| on, or livelihoods. All because Google is too cheap to provide a
| reasonable way for customers to talk to a person about their
| problem.
|
| I understand this is expensive and hard, but to be a company
| worth 100s of billions, and still neglect this is unacceptable. I
| think that there is a social responsibility that comes with
| running such a large and important web service, a responsibility
| that Google is neglecting.
| cloudking wrote:
| They have Google One subscription which gives you direct
| support. It's hard to scale free support to billions of users.
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes but its not that billions of users have this kind of
| problem or at least of this magnitude. But do they care?
| Probably not... they are an basically an advertising platform
| with chaotic products that suddently are cut off and so on...
| falcolas wrote:
| This begs the question: should they be offering a service
| they are unable to support?
|
| Or perhaps we should shut up and be content they offer the
| service at all, no matter the impact to a "minority" of
| lives?
| Non24Throw wrote:
| I'm not speaking on behalf of Google and I'm only speculating,
| but I think what you're proposing could increase the per-user
| cost of service 10x or even 100+x, and could easily invalidate
| their entire revenue model and put them out of business
|
| If a customer makes 1 phone call to support every few months
| because their Wifi is down and they think it's Google's
| problem, they would probably be losing a huge amount of money
| on that customer (relative to per-customer revenue)
|
| Amazon only does this so well because they have so much revenue
| per transaction, and those transactions already necessitate a
| paying relationship directly with the customer, so it's trivial
| to distribute the cost of support across all transactions as a
| minor and unarticulated fee
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| If a business can't survive treating humans like humans,
| perhaps it shouldn't exist.
| maceurt wrote:
| It would be cool if anybody else could make a real competitor
| to youtube then Google would have to actually cater more to
| content creators. However, sadly I think youtube is just too
| far ahead and google has way to many resources and time spent
| in the space for any competitor to even be able to make a dent
| into youtube's market.
| amiga_500 wrote:
| This is why they don't have to care. They have an effective
| monopoly.
| malka wrote:
| youtube is a huge moneysink. not only would it be hard to
| build, it would never bring money.
|
| Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think
| antitrust laws should be applied.
| Razengan wrote:
| YouTube is one of the reasons I will probably always dislike
| Google for.
|
| They bought an existing service, made very few improvements
| to it, actually made it worse in some ways, continue to
| ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially limited
| on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the
| native Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.)
|
| Worst of all, because they are So Big, people are
| preemptively disheartened from even imagining a competitor.
| joering2 wrote:
| Is the business even profitable? They claim youtube made $5
| billion in revenue ads last 3 months but they don't provide
| net numbers. Their typical text ad weights approx 250 kb in
| size (including all JS junk) and ther profit margin is
| "only" 23%. I doubt pushing 4k content for 15 minutes and
| serving one 15 cents ad puts them in green.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I don't think Google is too far ahead. You don't have to
| compete with all of YouTube.
|
| I think LTT has the right idea with FloatPlane. If you can
| siphon off premium users that are willing to pay for premium
| channels you're getting the most valuable part of the system
| anyway (premium content and paying users).
|
| IMHO anyone starting or running a video content business
| should be viewing YouTube as a great way to externalize costs
| while starting up and as a way to generate some revenue off
| users that aren't willing to pay once you're established. The
| goal from day 1 should be to build a following and then to
| move all your premium users to another platform.
| econcon wrote:
| Only channel I like on YouTube is applied sciences, hopefully it
| will never get deleted.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| That channel's probably fine, he works for Google.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The problem isn't so much that this happened. Account
| terminations are usually manual processes, so from time to time,
| a human's going to do the wrong thing. The real problem is that
| there's no recourse, and you get trapped in a customer (or non-
| customer, so Youtubers don't even pay?) service maze.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's quite possible that it was a politically motivated
| complaint. We'd never know.
| [deleted]
| ColinWright wrote:
| Here's a note for everyone:
|
| > _I do have backup archives of many of the videos and they will
| be back online again as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I was
| not diligent enough in keeping backups -- especially early on. I
| am missing the following 21 videos ..._
|
| Another reminder, yet again, not to trust "Cloud Services" and
| always to have a copy of data you care about.
|
| I hope the problem gets resolved and the channel is restored, I
| hope we get to hear what happens.
| quercy wrote:
| Well, don't trust "Cloud Services" unless you're paying them
| $10k+ a month.
| wegs wrote:
| Nah. With Google, the attitude of ad-supported extends to
| B2B. You can pay them a megabuck a year, and still get
| steamrolled by their AI having a random bug.
| ganeshkrishnan wrote:
| You could pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars a month
| and will still be disposable. Amazon knocks out sellers worth
| millions of dollars even if their customer service is
| amazingly good and attentive not the bullshit you hear from
| Google.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I met Alex once in some online chats during startup school a
| couple of years back where he was working on a universal basic
| income system. Very smart and interesting guy. Very disappointed
| that somebody like him has to deal with this, it's probably a
| major blow to his project
| Lev1a wrote:
| > accidentally
|
| Google don't accidentally terminate accounts or remove/block
| videos.
|
| They intentionally left that job to AlGoRiThMs instead of using
| actual people capable of reason/thought. That's no "accident".
| WayToDoor wrote:
| The fact that the only support you get from Google is if your HN
| post is upvoted enough to go to the frontpage should be something
| that would be a red flag to any business. Guess Google don't
| care, support cost money, and you can't add ads in there.
| JPKab wrote:
| True story I had a major issue where a new Google cloud service
| was restarting instances that were relatively expensive and
| billing me for them about 4 years ago. it was doing so
| completely automatically and I would log back in and see that
| these instances have been restarted. Couldn't get anyone to
| help me until I went on the Google BigQuery subreddit and
| bitched directly to their chief evangelist. They finally fixed
| it after that. Lesson learned. That company doesn't know how to
| hire people who don't constantly want to do interesting things.
| it turns out that running a business and supporting customers
| isn't always super fun and gratifying.
|
| And can we admit that while their tech is still top-notch their
| software libraries in the open source realm are not? Compared
| to pytorch tensorflow is a piece of s __*. It 's so so bad now.
|
| They didn't do well in the front end space either. React blows
| angular 2 away. Remember dart? Neither do I. Sure do miss
| inbox.
| wegs wrote:
| Which is why I would never trust Google for any business
| functions.
|
| These things happen all the time with Google. The model is based
| on your value being your ad revenue. If the cost of support
| outweighs your future ad revenue, which it always does, you're
| ignored. Everything is automated, and no matter what bad decision
| the machine makes, you can't appeal.
|
| Unfortunately, that attitude translates to GSuite for Business,
| Google Compute Engine, etc. A non-paying customer gets better
| support from Microsoft (which is built around B2B) than a
| business customer does from Google.
|
| Google gives better technology than Microsoft, but at the end of
| the day, the risk just isn't worth it: If Google's AI messes up,
| you're out of business.
|
| (And Amazon has better support and technology than Google).
| kmfrk wrote:
| One of the sad hacks for businesses nowadays is finding a way
| to throw them money to achieve some grounds for complaining on
| account of being a customer.
|
| With YouTube, you probably want to pay some money for ads so
| they'll look at you differently. I remember working with a
| client for a YouTube channel they had bought ad placements for,
| and it blew my mind that I could actually call a human at
| YouTube who would also pick up the phone immediately.
|
| The two-tiered system of free services is so goddamn awful.
| grishka wrote:
| Actually, when it comes to getting any kind of support from
| Google, connections are of paramount importance. I've seen
| countless stories of people having problems with their Google
| Play developer accounts, for example being terminated for no
| reason and hitting the wall trying to appeal the way they
| suggest. Yet, if you know anyone from Google's developer
| relations, you'll usually have all your issues figured out in
| no time by emailing them. They're really nice guys.
|
| Of course it shouldn't be like this, but that's the way it's
| been for as long as I've been an Android developer.
| downerending wrote:
| That's nice when it works. (Didn't for me.)
|
| But it's absolutely no way to run a business. Pass.
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