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YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account
- ColinWright 6y agoHere'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 6y agoWell, don't trust "Cloud Services" unless you're paying them $10k+ a month.
- ganeshkrishnan 6y agoYou 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.
- wegs 6y agoNah. 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.
- d1zzy 6y agoDo you have an example of paying customer giving Google >=$1m a year and still get steamrolled by AI without being able to get in touch with a human and correct the issue?
- wegs 6y agoI had a very similar one in my career. It's a little bit more complex than that, though -- the value of us as a customer was >>$1 mil per year (Google had several dedicated engineers for the partnership), but it wasn't a flat-on paying customer relationship. The failure happened in a different part of Google than the one managing the relationship. The people who wanted the partnership to succeed were in Google's cloud hosting business. The failure was in Youtube. It wasn't anything like a bad flag; just a straight-up bug (which caused us to move our videos to S3, and scramble to put together our own video player). Yes, we could get in contact with a human. No, the problem couldn't be fixed. Yes, Google did ultimately lose >>$1 million/year in revenue in part as a result of this and other failures (to AWS).
- aritmo 6y agoWhat you can do, is upvote the article so that eventually some YouTube engineer happens to see it. Not much else to do.
- syshum 6y ago>>>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
- throwawaysea 6y agoThis 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 https://curiositystream.com and am wondering how I discover others like it.
- worble 6y agoThere's a list of alternatives for all Google services here: https://nomoregoogle.com/ https://nomoregoogle.com/
- encom 6y agohttps://www.bitchute.com/ 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 6y agoYeaaahhhh, 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.
- londons_explore 6y agoI 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!
- smitty1e 6y agoGive that guy a Blue Falcon award. Come to think of it, Cancel Culture, itself, is the ultimate Blue Falcon award.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoAgreed. 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.
- cosmotic 6y agoAh yes, well known child porn trading sites. Except to the FBI.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wegs 6y agoWhich 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 6y agoOne 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.
- lonelappde 6y agoHow is paying for someone to do work for you a "sad hack"?
- Kliment 6y agoIt's a sad hack because you can't actually pay them for the thing you want to pay them for, so instead you have to pay for an unrelated product you don't necessarily need or want just to be able to reach a human.
- grishka 6y agoActually, 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.
- econcon 6y agoOnly channel I like on YouTube is applied sciences, hopefully it will never get deleted.
- finnthehuman 6y agoThat channel's probably fine, he works for Google.
- Animats 6y agoYou're promoting a political position which is against the financial interests of Google. Why should you expect them to give you a platform?
- hubbabubbarex 6y agoMy 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.
- WayToDoor 6y agoThe 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 6y agoTrue 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.
- dan-robertson 6y agoI think it’s also possible to get support by knowing the right people at google or by having a lot of followers on Twitter (including someone from google who can help)
- quellhorst 6y agoYou 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.
- kick 6y ago"Customers" are entirely irrelevant to this post.
- govHlthcareLol 6y agoEmails aren't safe. I have a large following, but if 0.1% of people mark you as Spam, you lose your abilities to send.
- gbear605 6y agoIt's wild really, I've been seeing emails from totally trusted sources - credit card bills, bank statements - and people that I have in my contact list go directly to my spam box.
- kmfrk 6y agoAnother 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!)
- Others 6y agoI 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.
- maceurt 6y agoIt 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 6y agoThis is why they don't have to care. They have an effective monopoly.
- malka 6y agoyoutube 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.
- vikramkr 6y agoTo do what? It has a sort of natural monopoly in that it has network effects. If you broke it up, you'd end up with two unprofitable businesses. There are no shortage of youtube competitors- its not like they're locking out competitors with anticompetitive practices. For livestreaming they dont even have a monopoly because of twitch
- 6y ago
- dehrmann 6y agoThe 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 6y agoIt's quite possible that it was a politically motivated complaint. We'd never know.
- Gibbon1 6y agoAbsolutely a politically motivated attack.
- pietrovismara 6y agoIt obviously is. People sitting down and calmly discussing private property can only be seen as threatening if you are a capitalist or a landlord. They are scared, given the current crisis. I would be scared too as a capitalist.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gentleman11 6y agoI 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 6y ago> 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".
- RandomBacon 6y agoYou're not wrong, but you are probably being downvoted because you're trying to be cute with your capitalization of the word "algorithms". Please don't do that.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoWell, "accidentally" also communicates that it was done automatically without human review and that human review ended up reversing the decision. I don't think splitting hairs with "well technically they intended for it to happen automatically so it couldn't have been accidental" adds to the discussion. Automatic processes absolutely make mistakes. This should be obvious after 10 seconds of thought, but here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoI 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.
- geitir 6y agoYou're talking about a company who recently stuck a big logo on the spacebar of their Android keyboard
- ship_it 6y agoWhat??? Source? (iPhone user here)
- onei 6y agoLooks like it got reverted as quietly as it was released, but here's a link with some info: https://9to5google.com/2020/04/10/gboard-google-logo-spacebar-android/ https://9to5google.com/2020/04/10/gboard-google-logo-spaceba...
- londons_explore 6y agoGoogles companywide policy is to prominently display the Google logo whenever Googles AI or aggregate data is being used. It's part of their efforts to make the public understand that collecting aggregate data can benefit the public. The keyboard uses googles AI to predict words using their language modelling, hence why it needs to display the google logo. With the "G" button removed from the top left, they decided to brand the spacebar instead.
- ffhhj 6y agoMeanwhile monetized animal abuse channels for children keep growing... because they make money: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4PpFUrfT2Pou7OwpVF0MUQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4PpFUrfT2Pou7OwpVF0MUQ Shameful!
- EdwardDiego 6y agoIn my country she would've been investigated by the animal cruelty people already.
- lonelappde 6y agoThe world isn't vegan, unfortunately.
- temp20160423 6y agoIs eating live seafood animal abuse? I also don't see how this channel is directed towards children. This type of food looks expensive and I don't think kids normally eat this stuff.
- foobaw 6y agoif you eating live seafood is considered abuse, then should all fishing channels should be banned as well?
- ashtonkem 6y agoI honestly kind of hate most of Google’s products. While they are incredibly reliable, they often have inconsistent and poor UX, and are liable to either cancel or change the entire UI on a whim.
- kspacewalk2 6y agoNot to mention that they spawn and kill off features and products with equal ease and frequency.
- dralley 6y agoRedesigned Gmail is ludicrously slow and glitchy in so many ways that old-Gmail was not. According to about:performance, not only is it consistently the most demanding tab in terms of CPU (usually by a wide margin), but it also uses nearly double the memory of Youtube, which is itself also much more bloated than it used to be. Google is supposed to hire the best and brightest engineers around, yet apparently they require 60-120 megabytes of RAM just to show a couple of lines of text on the screen. It's absolutely pathetic.
- amiga-workbench 6y agoThat's just what the modern web is like now, chickenshit minimalism, oodles of whitespace, vapid hero banners, plenty of grey Helvetica ultralight on white and a pile of bloat.
- mrob 6y agoPlain HTML version is still available and very fast.
- exikyut 6y agoAnd wraps sent emails at 72 characters, which looks incredibly unprofessional. And doesn't autosave drafts.
- ashtonkem 6y agoI stopped using the gmail interface years ago; it’s now only an imap/smtp server pair for me. The constant changes and moving features just made it markedly inferior to even Mail.app in the long run.
- sneak 6y agoI lost a 12 year old Twitter account (with nearly 10k followers) last month as well. No communication whatsoever from Twitter, even after I opened a ticket about it. I'm beginning to think that publishing anywhere except my own site is foolish.
- spullara 6y agoDid you change your birthday such that you were < 13 when you opened it? That is common thing that happens.
- ShakataGaNai 6y agoThat's why you always put down your birthday as January 1, 1901 (or whatever earliest date they allow).
- _nalply 6y agoThen you've violated the terms of service and when they find out they have an excuse to kick you.
- smartseoul77 6y agosmartseoul77@gmail.com
- superasn 6y agoI have all my photos including many precious pics like my daughter's first birthday, etc backed up only with Google photos (as GPhotos often cleans up my phones it removes the original too). Post like these are a true wake up call. I definitely need to setup something like syncthing to backup at least one more to good old usb 1tb drive. I guess you should too if you're in the same boat.
- therealdrag0 6y agoTIL syncthing. Looks neat. I recently switched to backblaze since I only share a subset of my photos, so I put those on gphotos separately.
- katbyte 6y agoThat’s why I pay for gsuite - at least I have some recourse to seek out support (also unlimited gdrive is pretty great)
- mceachen 6y agoMake sure you get a Google Takeout, but realize that much of the image metadata is deleted (and sometimes outright changed) from the originals. My takeout failed with an write until I requested an archive that was only photos, and only a year-subset of my library (which required me to make a manual album). I also tried the open source "timeliner" project, (which does incremental backups very conveniently), but due to Google's API, all GPS tags are stripped from what the images that it can pull down. If SyncThing doesn't work for you, you can also try Resilio Sync. If you need software to manage all your photos and videos, you might want to try PhotoStructure! (I'm the author, details in my profile).
- dannyw 6y agoIt’s why I pay for Apple iCloud AND GSuite.... sign.
- benhurmarcel 6y agoIs there a method for automatic backup of Google Photos? Something that a script could do, without manually using Google Takeout. Also, is there another service to backup photos that doesn't modify the data? I was thinking of using Nextcloud. But the prices for Google One are quite attractive.
- mirimir 6y agoFor what it's worth, I believe that "recklessly" is more accurate than "accidentally". In the motor vehicle context, for example, people acting more or less prudently, and in good faith, occasionally have accidents. But when people aren't acting prudently, we call them reckless.
- RichardHeart 6y agoYouTube is also banning all cryptocurrency channels, strike by strike. For no reason. It's disgusting. I know, because I have such a channel with a strike. 2 more and it's permanent delete. Can't appeal, as the livestream was deleted before it was in progress. No response to appeals for over a month and a half. (You get 1 warning before the strikes start, I was able to appeal only that.)
- hpcjoe 6y agoI keep hearing stories about similar issues. Suddenly someone is terminated from a Google service for unknown reasons, without any possibility of reversing such decisions. This appears to be true of Twitter and others as well. From my vantage point, it appears to be quite arbitrary. And quite concerning in a number of cases, given the centralization of email, docs, etc. I do make backups of google content every so often. I guess the irony of making a copy of a cloud set of services data locally, as you may not be able to trust that these services will be there over longer intervals, is either ironic ... or problematic. It speaks directly to the concept of risk of extended supply chains ... is the risk to your data, and ability to interact with services worth maintaining a presence on the systems? This behavior on their and related tech giants generally makes me question how much we should rely on them for important things (like permanent email addresses) over time. This has been making me uneasy for a while, and seeing more stories like this is not quelling my discomfort.
- andai 6y agoIt's kind of like having all your stuff stored on the computer of someone who randomly breaks all contact with people for no reason. The cloud is just someone else's computer after all.
- wpietri 6y agoYeah, I think there are two broad relationships between a person and a company: personal and statistical. At my corner grocery store, it's personal. I know all the staff, we say hello, we look out for one another. My doctor knows me as a person, and we talk as equals. You see the same thing between companies of similar scales. If my company is a significant customer of yours, we can talk as peers when we need to. Google Youtube and Twitter, on the other hand, are mainly selling eyeballs to advertisers. Not only do they not care about any given individual, they couldn't if they wanted to. The ratio between users and workers is 10,000:1 or worse. At that scale they know they're going to screw over people; at best, at best, they make sure the errors aren't too biased in any one direction. And of course they will work hard to clean up PR problems, as those are expensive enough to justify actual attention.
- zxcvbn4038 6y ago
- gdulli 6y agoI'm glad it was resolved, but what am I supposed to do when Google wrongfully suspends my account and my submission here doesn't make it to the front page?
- caseysoftware 6y agoMake sure you don't use "Log in with Google" anywhere or you're disconnected from all over.
- mirimir 6y agoIt'd be really cool if OP could document exactly what happened, and how exactly it got fixed. Or if someone else could leak relevant information anonymously. But I appreciate that nobody involved would want to attract attention.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoHow many Google accounts are arbitrarily nuked, and host content that is not famous enough to make the front page of HN, or Reddit, or some other noisy social media site?
- celticninja 6y agoplenty, on HN there is a chance you will know someone at Google or Twitter or can raise attention of someone who works there. if you have a legitimate case it seems people will try to help some out. but that is not the way to handle it en masse. the big companies have decided that customer service is not for users (we aren't customers). once they start doing call centres it will just become a cost for ever more.
- chx 6y ago> once they start doing call centres it will just become a cost for ever more. then charge for it? Even support that only deals with account terminations would be worth $5, $10 a month to quite a few of us, I would think. You have a busy YouTube channel, ten bucks a month is not that much to ensure it doesn't go up flames accidentally.
- chii 6y agohow come the revenue google makes in advertising on those videos can't be used to cover the cost of such support? It should not cost money for a user to correct the mistake of a service provider. If the telephone company shutdown my number, i have the telecommunications onbudsman to call and get the problem fixed. Granted, youtube isn't as essential as a phone, a similar body should exist to ensure that online service providers are treating customers fairly.
- dylan604 6y ago> how come the revenue google makes in advertising on those videos can't be used to cover the cost of such support? The first rule of making money is to not spend money.
- iandanforth 6y agoI would support legislation that mandated they have phone support, were required to publish their content guidelines and decision making manual, disclose who did the review, and provide for a neutral* third party to arbitrate disputes. *yeah yeah I know "neutral"
- fortran77 6y agoIt's interesting reading about what Karl Wikderquist's writings are about to get some insight into who orgranized the "report brigade" to get him banned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Widerquist#Empirical_and_anthropological_criticism_of_contemporary_political_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Widerquist#Empirical_and_...
- zozbot234 6y agoInteresting point. There's nothing much that's outright wrong with these claims, in fact many social scientists even of a fairly libertarian bent would basically agree with them. And these days basic income is increasingly being proposed from all sides of the political spectrum.
- fortran77 6y agoI can certainly see a brigade of youthful libertarians hitting the "report" button en masse.
- lightwin 6y agoLooks like youtube account has been restored. Update from the medium article: >> UPDATE: We’re back as of 8:39pm EDT April 11, 2020! I received the following email from YouTube: Hi there, After a review of your account, we have confirmed that your YouTube account is not in violation of our Terms of Service. As such, we have unsuspended your account. This means your account is once again active and operational. If you forgot your password, please visit this link to reset it: <snip> Sincerely, The YouTube Team
- grecy 6y agoI wonder if that would have been the result if the author didn't make so much noise about it....
- chii 6y agoor how prevailent the problem is, and is just not heard because most people don't have a voice on the internet large enough to garner attention.
- slau 6y agoI think you mean “prevalent”. “To prevail” has a different meaning.
- notRobot 6y agoIt would not have. For each of these articles you see, there are hundreds of others who lose access to their account for no reason and never get it back.
- ekianjo 6y agoNo apologies?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- codegladiator 6y ago
- flywithdolp 6y agoToo many problems from Youtube in the last year with banning/deleting accounts. I wish we had a good alternative
- jimnotgym 6y agoSelf-regulation has failed. YouTube, and others, failures to employ proper content moderation is hitting both consumers and creators. This market is broken
- pietrovismara 6y agoThe fact alone that they are banning "content" (it was just a harmless title and a pic) about private property in this period is not a coincidence. There was no way to link that title "Boston Basic Income #98: Karl Widerquist on Private Property" to any violation of the law. I think they are just scared that in this period, talking about private property will bring people to uprise/unite to stop paying rents. YouTube is still part of the capitalist system and will do its part to protect it. And nobody is talking about this kind of censorship.
- coleifer 6y agoIt really sucks you can't run your own webserver and host your own videos.
- jasonvorhe 6y ago> company x permanently terminated my account > account gets reactivated after a complaint to customer support So it wasn't permanent.
- guggle 6y agoHappened to me years ago with Flickr... all my pictures lost, including family. This is how you learn the hard way that the cloud is just someone else's computer.
- badassiel 6y agoSome people are saying self-hosting content is the way to go. People interested pursuing that way can look into "IPFS". There's lot of tools to make the "hosting" part easy (static websites are easy on bare IPFS it self) Some keywords to search for are DTube, Temporal, Textile. I'm already on way to self-host my data, hope you can get on bandwagon as well.
- sunstone 6y agoYahoo, with malice aforethought, deleted my email account of 20 years.
- valuearb 6y agoI’m so conflicted because YouTube is absolutely in the wrong here, but Universal Basic Income is such a silly idea.
- dchyrdvh 6y agoOne day Google locked one of my gmail accounts and demanded a verified phone number in exchange for access. Luckily, that email wasn't that important. However this taught me a lesson: next time Google is going to lock my important gmail and demand an ID, W2, routing number, full address and medical records in exchange for access and then I'll have a hard choice. That day I finally put effort into setting up my own email domain.
- Mindwipe 6y agoIt's only a matter of time until the EU regulates something about this sort of arbitrary account termination with no recourse to a (manned) customer service center, probably with an escalation to a regulator. If the UK's Online Harms regulator ever actually happens (and god help us all if it ever does) I'd expect them to do an investigation fairly rapidly. Google would be better off getting ahead of this.
- qu4ku 6y agoTwitter has suspended my account two+ weeks ago without a reason and didn't even notify me about that by e-mail. They don't respond to my appeals either. Decentralize all the things.