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YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam
- blondin 7y agooh wow! there must be more backstory to this. finding it hard to believe that whole google accounts got suspended for spamming a youtube video chat!
- wlesieutre 7y agoThis is why I avoid as many google properties as possible. Who even knows what actions might get my Gmail account disabled. And when they do, there’s no chance of their support system fixing it. The ban bot decided a rule was violated, and when reviewing its decision the ban bot unsurprisingly decides the same thing on appeal. So no, I’m not going to start shopping with Google Wallet no matter how many coupon offers they send me.
- tzfld 7y agoI would not rely on a third party (especially a platform with so inconsistent behavior and unclear rules) when talking about an irreplaceable asset.
- wlesieutre 7y agoYeah, switching to a better email provider is on my to do list, but it’s a big project that I’ll get around to “someday”. Easier to fly under Google’s radar.
- falcolas 7y agoI'm sure some of those commenters in the video stream believed the same thing.
- wlesieutre 7y agoThey made the critical mistake of touching a second Google product
- fencepost 7y agoAnd of course the not-stated-but-there "You can never use an Android phone again, switch to iPhone or a feature phone." Sure you could create a new Google account and use that with your phone, but Google's going to know it's the same person (same phone number, places where you have to enter your name, same credit card info if you're purchasing any apps on the Play store, same physical location and movement patterns, etc.) and can simply ban you again. You'd like to have Chrome syncing things between a desktop and laptop? Nope nope nope.
- throwaway2048 7y agoApparently emails were sent by Google to support, to their GMail accounts, which they are banned from...
- abnry 7y agoGoogle's management of YouTube has been terrible the past several years. I don't find it hard to believe there isn't more to the story.
- ganeshkrishnan 7y agoSometimes there is not much back story. Google has banned entire accounts for far less; not using Google wallet, apps similar to each other, using donation links. You lose everything, drive, Gmail, domain accounts, AdWords, chrome login.. wait until they make Google search only to registered users
- Nextgrid 7y agoYou mean YouTube comments are now moderated? That’s very welcome and long overdue.
- Kiro 7y agoThis is about livestream comments.
- LudwigNagasena 7y agoI wish platforms like Facebook and YouTube would stop pretending they can build “communities” with one billion people.
- friendlybus 7y agoYes communities is the wrong word. They are just YouTube viewers, the people watching are not united in a common purpose and may be watching for many different reasons. Youtubers are just mass market celebrity like it's always been. Some of them are barely 'creators'.
- ikrtx 7y agoSpamming on the internet gets you suspended? Long overdue.
- rahidz 7y agoSome black box algorithm deciding you're spamming getting your GMail, Google Drive, Photos, etc. banned for an unknowable period of time, combined with Google's amazing customer service, is a different story than some forum moderator suspending you forspamming.
- throwaway2048 7y agohaving fun spamming stuff in livestream chats is very much a part of livestream chat culture. at the very least, getting your entire Google account banned over it is completely insane.
- kaishiro 7y agoA comment like this makes it very clear you’ve never engaged with a live streaming community - and you also didn’t even view the source video. The “spam” in this case was specifically directed and requested by the live streamer to help him with crowd sourced decision making.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y agoThe real issue here is that (reportedly) the people who spammed got their GMail accounts shut down. That's outrageous. That's your real-life, not just your online-life. Your GMail account isn't even related at all to your YouTube identity. Remember: if you aren't _at least_ paying for your e-mail service you don't own your own mailbox. When was the last time you made a backup of your GMail account? What contingency plan do you have in-place if Google ever accidentally, unintentionally, or in this case, intentionally, shuts it down? (Disclaimer: I pay $20/mo for an Office 365 E3 account for my personal mailbox)
- oneeyedpigeon 7y agoI would also recommend never storing mission-critical stuff only in your email. Losing the contents of your inbox should be the least of your concerns if there’s a chance you might lose access to your account. There are far worse repercussions - e.g. a) how do you update everyone else's record of your email address? b) how many services have you locked yourself out of, or made doing so much more likely?
- chii 7y agoIt makes owning your email address (including the domain name part) crucial. It's time people separated the hosting of email from the interface (the address).
- fyp 7y agoI think most people just don't realize how easy this is and you can even keep using gmail. Most domain registrars have free email forwarding so you can forward *@domain.com to your gmail. This by itself is already good enough for signing up for things or resetting passwords. If you also need to send from that domain in gmail there's just a few more steps: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157?hl=en https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157?hl=en
- harperlee 7y agoUnfortunately it is no longer free to use a custom address in gmail; it used to be that just owning a domain would do the trick.
- emilfihlman 7y agoAmazing, HN filled with Google shills. This is real problem and proven time and time again that Google doesn't know how to do account management automatically.
- thinkingemote 7y agoLooks like they are trying to use AI for automation and it's screwed up. Again. And it will and must happen again and again to get better. Actually they call this stressful work and actively explicitly are working towards not getting workers to do this work for their own benefit if you believe HR and the mental health supporters of this policy. I forget the actual term it's something like "Mental Health Ops'. Why should Google make their contactors suffer digging through video chat when they can get an AI to do it for them? This is literally their policy, it's not satire.
- anthony_doan 7y ago> Looks like they are trying to use AI for automation and it's screwed up. Again. And it will and must happen again and again to get better. Excuse me? Why can't they get better data? It seems here they used email spam data to mark chat from stream. Or something similar along the line. If you ever watch Twitch livestream people spam, it's encourage unless it's a oneman spam. Twitch system is much better. Even if it's subjective I'd take that over what Youtube currently have right now. edit: Also they could validate their model better before rolling it out in production and ruining people lives.
- megous 7y agoYes, but just block further commenting, lol. If your algorithm has bad false positive rate, don't hook it to "delete this person from Google" action, but something less intursive.
- chr1 7y agoI wish lawmakers instead of spending time on misguided cookie banner laws, spent more time on things like this. Behavior like this is completely unacceptable, it is equivalent to store owner throwing you out because he thought your hair are red. People whose accounts are being suspended without warning, without explanation, and without a way to appeal, like in this case, should be able to sue the company for a large sum of money, so that company knows that breaching contracts is not a good thing. The job of government is to help people establish contracts between themselves, and to help keeping the explicit and implicit terms of the contract. The random suspension of account is likely a more serious breach of contract than selling private data to third parties.
- alexis_fr 7y ago> without explanation Common misconception. Let’s assume something as bad as a criminal in prison. Well, they still need their emails. Perhaps not in prison but at least for their recovery. Or to access their bank account. Their retirement funds. Their social security. It’s a misconception that there could be a good reason to entirely revoke any account. Youtube is different. It’s a broadcasting tool.
- chr1 7y agoThere can be some special cases when suspending account is justified, e.g. criminal not in prison using the account for criminal activity, someone creating new account and sending spam from it or collecting phishing data. So we do not want to completely prevent companies from banning users who abuse the service and cause financial damage to the company, we want companies to not mistreat the normal users who happened to trigger a bug in some algorithm. But i was not saying that explanation alone would make suspension ok, i was saying that the lack of explanation is an aggravating circumstance in this case.
- alexis_fr 7y agoCorrect, they shouldn’t be allowed to keep using digital means to perform criminal activity. Perhaps a read-only email or receive-only would be an idea. I just wanted to make people think twice about the idea that suspending an account based on ToS is necessarily as legitimate as currently accepted.
- throwaway339 7y agoLet's ban these spammers for life from ever creating another google account and when they can't, let's turn them into the very bots that judged them so on every other site using recaptcha3.
- sorenjan 7y agoConstant news about Google banning accounts for various mistakes, small or large, reminds me of a certain country's social credit system. When will they start banning people that have any kind of contact with accounts in bad standing? Will they start denying purchases on Google Pay depending on how well behaved the account is?
- pixl97 7y agoCompanies are authoritarian dictatorships
- throwaway2048 7y agoWhich is why its baffling to me that lots of people who are deadly afraid of government tyranny are completely ok with privately owned tyranny (even monopolistic kinds)
- chr1 7y agoGovernment tyranny is a far greater danger because government can use force in the form of army and police, and when established it effectively owns everything else in the country. The privately owned tyranny has much less power, and when it becomes bad, government can intervene. So while no tyranny is ok, government deserves much more attention, because it is the more powerful tool, that needs to be protected much more vigilantly.
- logix 7y agoI wish we could ban them too.
- privateSFacct 7y agoWonder if the ban related to this rule Repetitive comments: Leaving large amounts of identical, untargeted or repetitive comments.
- willis936 7y agoThis boils down to trust. We need to trust that our email provider won’t turn off. We need to trust that our ISP won’t shut off our internet. We need to trust that our cell provider won’t shut off our service. We need to trust that our power company won’t shut off our power. There is simply far too much on the line here to not have protections. The use contract of email providers needs to regulated.
- dredmorbius 7y agoI've been working on a theory for a few years now that advances in communications technologies fall somewhere on the spectrum of either tending to, or absolutely, reducing trust between individuals and social groups. Note that trust != reliability. Trust is an extension of faith beyond available information. Reliability is a statistical measure. You can achieve higher reliability with low trust through surveillance, enforcement, punishment, and/or a limited-options environment. But that's not engendering trust (and may actually be a reasonably good summary of why tech tends to break down trust -- I'm still thinking this through). Keep in mind that trust is a two- or multi-way street. In our mediated relationships, there's trust between user and provider, provider and user, and third parties. Any or all may be or contain untrustworthy elements. And the channels of information are limited making decisions on who or what to trust challenging. It's complicated. Though I think Google can and should do better.
- dugditches 7y agoAnd he'll make a fuss, a video, and it'll get fixed. They'll all get their stuff back. It'll add to the\ sour taste in his mouth but it'll get fixed. While smaller creators in similar situations are completely out of luck. Throw a support ticket into the ether. And just have to hope more and pray a bigger Youtuber picks up their plea and their video gets popular so that it gets fixed.
- tahdig 7y agoThere are too many people here advocating to host your own email in your own domain. Please be warned that it has its own risks: By hosting your main email on a custom domain(not a provider) you open a new attack vector for identity theft. There was an article on HN just a couple weeks ago about someone getting hacked by exactly this attack form. IIRC it was godaddy having stupid verification process. Someone can hijack your godaddy/namecheap/gandi account and point the MX DNS records of the domain to their own server and receive all your "Forgot your password? here is the link to reset!" emails This a very bad advice unless you actually know what are the risks. Maybe suggesting a paid email provider would be better, does anyone know of any reliable email providers that you pay for what you are getting and they are not selling your account data or block you for some reason?
- Recursing 7y agoAlso, you randomly won't be able to send mails, as google will randomly mark them as spam (for no reason, with no explanation and with no chance to appeal) So you'll never know if any mail you send to a gmail user (which is pretty much everybody) will ever actually reach an inbox https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08806.html https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08806.html https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/103817.html https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/10381...
- stevenicr 7y agoThis. I recently found that even though several emails from my custom domain accounts had gotten through to gmail users - some of them did not get to the main box instead ended up in promotions.. and some of them did not get delivered at all. These cases were to the same person, from the same computer and account - some would go through and some would not, some could be found in spam box, others just vanished - then I started calculating the time I spent writing some emails that I never got a reply to - like hours of writing - and I though I was just ghosted for a competitor - turns out it's likely they never saw the work I sent. I have witnessed this with 3 different receivers the past year. The last back and forth I just resorted to using my personal gmail account to communicate with new business associate as the receiving was so erratic. At first they wondered why google was putting stuff in spam folder that did not belong there - then it just turned to non-stop frustration and delayed thumbs up on work orders. the algo should know if you sent one email and they opened and read and replied - and you sent another, it should not matter if you put in the second email, 'your desire to do Z with your web site is understood, and can be done, but you may run into a bad SEO issue that could affect where your site displays in search results, so instead we reccomend not doing X and instead doing Y.." something like that - so many times is seems that the anti-spam seo hating google teams trump and destroy all the things, regardless of false positives - and no transparency which hurts people - but saves the secret sauce of the anti-spam team I guess. This is a tough place to be in when so many use gmail.
- megous 7y agohttps://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-modification https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-modification "Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time."
- throwaway2048 7y agoWow I'm sure that they are compliant with the EULA is a relief to everyone involved.
- falcolas 7y agoWhat blows me away is that the supposedly manual reviews believe that these Google-wide permanent bans are appropriate for “spamming emotes” in a stream. Google employees, you hold too much power to be so arbitrary with your bans. You hold people’s digital lives (and, with Android, a portion of their physical lives) in your hands. Please be a bit more responsible with that power.
- brenden2 7y agoThings like this are a good argument for breaking up the tech giants. It's an example of how monopolies hurt consumers.
- pja 7y agoGoogle’s approach to coping with bad actors, i.e. immediately cutting off people from their entire Google presence for anything that trips their automated systems on any individual platform, is incredibly abusive. People can have years and years worth of data locked away permanently simply because they post a line of emojis on a YouTube video? Simply astonishing. Why would anyone trust Google with any important part of their lives based on this kind of behaviour?
- bluejellybean 7y agoJust absurd, the damage of having my entire google account being banned is seriously non-trivial and would easily cost thousands of Dollars worth of time and energy to deal with. I remember having the fear of what's happening here when Google originally purchased YouTube but after years of non-issue I forgot about the possibility. For me, this is the last straw with Google, the risk of being banned for such an arbitrary reason is simply too high for me and I'm going to start moving documents and accounts from their services. It baffles me, they hire some of the worlds more intelligent people but the products/systems they produce are constantly idiotic and daft.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zahrc 7y agoGoogle seems to be constantly playing with any of their algorithms... I totally understand that it’s their business, but especially YouTube gets worse and worse.
- winrid 7y agoHow does this even get coded? Bug in some rules engine for detecting spam?
- dredmorbius 7y agoMuch of Google's behaviour seems to be AI/ML based. Which effectively means Google's own engineers don't understand what is happening or why.
- dsamarin 7y agoWould it be a reasonable and temporary solution to ban accounts at a service level? So spamming on YouTube bans access to YouTube, etc.
- dredmorbius 7y agoYou'd think that Google would get better at dealing with this situation after, oh, say, six years of having the problems of forced multi-service integration (and abuse countermeasures) pointed out to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731 [1] But no. Just from my own experience, I've been locked out of my Google account[2], my real Google account[3], and of course, when the company, as it on very rare an infrequent occasions does, cancels services, found myself (and a few million others) scrambling to salvage content and communities.[4] Others have had slightly worse authentication/access situations.[5] To be fair: the problem is a complicated one, and Google sees a lot of abuse. Or, as in Mariplier's community's experience: activity which looks a lot like spam, at a multi-billion-user scale, which can make assessment difficult. (Though as has been pointed out: if scale of operations makes reasonable levels of service provisioning prohibitive, perhaps you shouldn't be operating at that scale?) Google do manage to cull a lot of spam, abuse, and other crud. In my some-time career of trying to get hard numbers regarding aspects of Google+ membership and activity, I found: - G+ communities were being created and deleted at a prodigious clip of thousands per day. Even in the final months of the site, several hundred thousand new communities were added. - A strong predictor for whether or not a G+ profile would be deleted was if it had ever posted public content. By a factor of about 10 over profiles with no visible content. Presumably, many of these were spam or other abusive profiles. - The very most active profiles across a small sampling of recent Communities posts were spammers, and by the time I'd gone back to verify the top few, most or all their content was removed. When you're operating at large scale, it's difficult to make discerning, accurate, fair, or consistent decisions. That's understandable. But you should be aware of this and design systems to recover gracefully from errors. Which includes not discomfitting, annoying, or distressing users excessively. Someting Google have repeatedly failed at. ________________________________ Notes: 1. The day that item ran, the top three items on HN were either directly or indirectly about my experience or frustrations with the then-new Google+ - YouTube accounts merger. https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&f... 2. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_kill_your_google_account_access_it_via_tor/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_... 3. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3mo7l6/that_google_identity_thing_again_who_are_you_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3mo7l6/that_go... 4. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Goals https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Goals 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-e...
- rolph 7y ago"The accounts have already been reinstated. We handled that last night. 2. The whole-account "ban" was a common anti-spam measure we use. The account is disabled until the user verifies a phone number by getting a code in an SMS." Is g00gle harvesting mobile numbers?
- tripzilch 7y ago1. Yes obviously 2. They are lying through their teeth about the accounts being reinstated (many have not been), as well about the SMS thing, given that the video shows actual screenshots of people being denied having their accounts reinstated, so obviously that SMS thing doesn't work at all as they claim it should.