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YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

• kaustavha 5y ago
  I had my youtube suspended for the same thing for a different ethonline hackathon vid lol. plea didnt work either
• sailfast 5y ago
  Has anyone attempted to sue Google in small claims? For smaller annoyances like losing access to email and/or having a video removed this seems like it might be an option to increase the cost of improper take-downs? That said, not a lawyer and Google probably has a strong case around being a private platform with sole authority to remove content.
  • criddell 5y ago
    Yes, people have tried to sue Google in small claims court. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_213176 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...
  • fortran77 5y ago
    It's not such a bad idea -- even if you don't stand a chance legally, it would force Google to spend a few dollars in legal fees to respond, and you know a real human will look at your claim. Since "small claims" is usually for actual damages, start with the loss of the music account.
• Hakashiro 5y ago
  They don't allow scams yet every other pre-video ad I get is about an obvious pyramid scheme and the skippable ad itself lasts at least 30 minutes. Curious.
• sneak 5y ago
  > I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing. It says right in the TOS that the music is licensed, not sold. It was never your music. Pirate your music and film library instead. Giving these services money is a vote for their way of doing business.
• fsflover 5y ago
  Consider using PeerTube for your videos next time...
  • skinnyasianboi 5y ago
    ..or LBRY/Odysee
• pornel 5y ago
  Why are you using legacy centralized web 2.0 platforms ruled by fiat money? Put your video on IPFS, give it an ens.domain, mint an NFT for it. With an eth<>filecoin bridge it will fund its own censorship-resistance forever. That tech is great and has obsoleted web 2.0. Don't trust Google, self-govern!
  • marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I can't tell if this is satire.
    • isaacimagine 5y ago
      I think it is, but I can't tell if this is satire.
      • dathinab 5y ago
        Same for me, it feels like it's in a uncanny valley between clearly satiric and something some (not all/many) people (from the Web3.0 & DeFi) community might say.
        • dtech 5y ago
          Just another example of Poe's law
          • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
            Poe's law: take the absinthe, or the absinthe takes you!
        • JKCalhoun 5y ago
          You and several parent comments can't tell it's satire. That is already telling.
      • b0sk 5y ago
        Poe’s law
• sourcecodeplz 5y ago
  Because crypto is a scam…? Edit: just look at the latest 1.5 billion tether scam
  • dathinab 5y ago
    Which might not be a scam. I'm not saying it's not a scam either. But it's something where it's really not clear if it's a scam or not. Because minting money is a pretty normal thing in finance, especially if you want to avoid deflation. And for any normal currency deflation is one of, maybe the worst thing which can happen to it. Which puts a strange view on crypto currencies as many of them are fundamental deflationary. New they do have the benefit of (in general) not being bound to the economics of a country, and hence forth might be ok with being deflationary. But even then if you create a crypto currency which is meant to be used as a currency inflation is still bad. Hence why IMHO Bitcoin is a security which you happen to be able to use a currency, not a currency. But that's not true for all crypto currencies, which likely lead to regulatory nightmares. Both for the regulators and even more so for anyone who wants to use crypto currencies as currencies, as the crypto security BitCoin is currently the face of crypto currencies. It's such a mess, but has potential nevertheless. But not necessary in the way it is advertised. (Like potential as securities, potential for some convenient/pragmatic things, potential for resolving certain trust/management issues, potential to undermine government regulations for both good and bad from both good and bad governments. Naturally not in the same currency. But if you are into crypto currencies for anarchistic or socialistic world view, to create a more fair world, you are probably in the wrong place).
    • yunohn 5y ago
      > Because minting money is a pretty normal thing in finance, especially if you want to avoid deflation. Tether is “minting” USDT, a token pegged to 1 USD - out of thin air. That’s not the same thing as printing currency.
      • dathinab 5y ago
        Minting USDT currency to prevent deflation and keeping the currencies value around the value of 1 USD(1) is pretty much the same as printing USD to prevent deflation and keeping USD at the same value as some other currency/security, e.g. the Euro or Gold. The only difference is that most currencies place themself in relation to the USD, but anyway conceptually pretty much the same. Because in the end weather it's USDT, USD or even Gold their value is purely a construct of people (roughly) agreeing that it has that given value (in general in ratio to some other thing which has "value by agreement"). Gold might have some intrinsic value but it's fundamentally so much smaller then the gold price that it doesn't matter. (1): Assuming they did it for that reason, my argument was intentionally detached from Tether.
• Terry_Roll 5y ago
  https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
• numlock86 5y ago
  The problem is that this does not happen often enough to be of any relevance so they simply and literally don't care, even if you are a paying customer. It's a valid reason not to use any Google services anymore, though. That won't harm Google nor will they change anything (the "no relevance" argument) but at least you get to sleep well at nights knowing you'll still have access to your "life" the next morning.
  • nuker 5y ago
    > It's a valid reason not to use any Google services anymore, though. I recently got bit by needing a google account to join Google Meet video calls. I found out that only paying GSuite accounts can create Meet invites that allow anonymous joins. Free Google accounts cannot do that.
  • thijser 5y ago
    Isn't it just incredibly sad that one of the top 5 companies in our industry has this way of operating? And is it really true that there are not enough engineers and product people reading stories like this and have a bit of that good old "Focus on the user and all else will follow" to make the system more humane?
    • plebianRube 5y ago
      I'm sure they exist, they are just too busy playing the 'stay out of the bottom 10% of automatic layoffs' game.
      • vajrabum 5y ago
        Supposedly, unlike Amazon or others, Google uses stack ranking for promotions and doesn't fire people based on the stack rank.
    • nuker 5y ago
      > good old "Focus on the user Sweet summer child :) Google is not serving users, it is selling adtech to businesses.
• busymom0 5y ago
  I remember a few months ago (or maybe a year ago) there was some change to their terms of service which no longer allowed whitehat content. Many people pointed out the obvious flaw in their rule changes but what can we do really? I hope more people move their variety of content to Odysee, Rumble and other alt tech as that will help YouTube slowly lose their credible users.
  • necovek 5y ago
    While the term "hacking" is used in both black- and white-hat contexts, it's also used to mean simply... programming/making computers do what we want them to :) Like in "HackerNews".
• tombh 5y ago
  Meanwhile the actual problem on the platform is hijacked accounts used to show those "live" streams of Buterin or Hoskinson claiming to double your crypto. So the problem isn't the account holders, nothing is solved by banning the original holders of the accounts :/
  • cube00 5y ago
    Turning off "ad personalization" is an eye opener. I was shocked Google allows such fraudulent advertising. Worst once I've seen so far is wide footage of Elon at a conference over dubbed with a voice telling me about this great share trading software he's invented that can double my money.
• obiwan14 5y ago
  > I knew Google's automated processes were pretty bad... If you think Google's AI for Spam is pretty bad, then you haven't experienced Twitter's. I've had a Twitter account suspended because their AI does not understand context. I'm not allowed to use the account until I delete the content, which I won't. In any case, now that you've seen first hand the power of Big Tech, consider the advice of @fsflover and @pornel below. Strive to own you own content. Keep in mind that in cases like this, even HN is Big Tech.
• streamofdigits 5y ago
  There is only room for one emperor without cloths
  • devoutsalsa 5y ago
    Naked co-emperors sounds like a very modern take authoritarianism and body positivity.
• hutzlibu 5y ago
  Personally I surely would not want to go that route, but maybe suing(or the threat of it) helps, if you know a trustworthy lawyer? I would imagine just a letter from a lawyer stating the facts of the incident would be enough to get real attention from google. I mean, you pay for a service - they just canceled without further explanation. Shouldn't there be some rights left for normal people? Otherwise yes, your story is a good (allmost daily by now) reminder, to reduce google wherever possible.
  • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    small claims court, obviously, require them to send someone somewhere to appear.
    • willis936 5y ago
      If the defendant doesn't show up that doesn't stop the hearing. A google lawyer likely costs more than the damages.
      • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        right so they get their money back for their youtube subscription.
      • nradov 5y ago
        Large companies typically send paralegals to small claims courts. In those courts the defense counsel doesn't need to be a member of the bar.
  • caf 5y ago
    A month's YouTube Music sub would be well within the jurisdiction of small claims, that'd cost them at least some lawyer time to respond!
  • necovek 5y ago
    Perhaps you need to mention suing/lawyer in your original response to avoid your plea being automatically rejected.
• pepemon 5y ago
  So you're pushing for DeFi and all things decentralized, but whining that the centralized service has enforced its power upon your content about decentralization there? Nice.
  • johnday 5y ago
    What do you mean but whining? I'm not DeFi fan (not by a long shot), but complaining about the practices of centralised services seems exactly in line with what a pro-DeFi person would do. There's no hypocrisy here.
    • microtherion 5y ago
      It seems to me that an actual advocate of decentralized services would have nothing to complain about, because there would be no way to censor them (cf "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"). So given that in reality, everything of consequence in the "Decentralized Finance" world still relies on centralized services (YouTube hosts your videos, a lot of cryptocurrency actually held in exchanges, not wallets, etc), charges of hypocrisy may not be entirely without merit.
    • sodality2 5y ago
      I assume the hypocrisy is that OP is still using these services
      • johnday 5y ago
        The OP states that it was a requirement of attending something they went to.
• polymatter 5y ago
  Unlucky. It might not even be keyword matching, AI systems in use a far dumber than that. AI systems are mostly trained random noise and it can be impossible to know what set them off. Even if you get this resolved, its not a bad idea to create a new YouTube account, reupload videos you want to keep. And keep good OpSec to avoid them being "linked".
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing. I guess when Youtube cancels your service they don't need to pay back any subscription fees for the month or whatever amount of the time you are paid up for?
• throwaway82931 5y ago
  It's terrifying that the punishments are so draconian (because one false move and you lose access to the entire Google account, and possibly become persona non-grata and lose the ability to create another one even in a company context), it's hard to understand what the rules are, the appeals process generally won't help, and even being a paying customer won't save you. It seems like best practice for any professional who needs to use Google anything would be to avoid Google to the greatest extent possible except in professional contexts, lest some inadvertent mistake (or something malicious like a hack) cripple your career.
  • cube00 5y ago
    I wouldn't mind if the appeals process was legitimate but it's clearly not. 15 minutes to say "nope, appeal denied" how much background research could that person (assuming there was a person) have done?
    • Ygg2 5y ago
      Appeals process is somewhere between Kafka's Process and 1984.
  • petters 5y ago
    As far as I understood, the entire Google account was not suspended. Was that the case?
    • throwaway82931 5y ago
      The user cannot log into their Google account. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29458794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29458794
      • thijser 5y ago
        Sorry if I was unclear, only Youtube is blocked for me now, gmail & rest of the account is fortunately still working.
  • 5y ago
• fodmap 5y ago
  It amazes me that HN, and Twitter, is the only customer service for a multi-billion dollars company like Google.
  • imglorp 5y ago
    The customers are well taken care of. The users are not the customer, they are the product.
    • fodmap 5y ago
      thijser is a user and a customer, as you can see when they say 'I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing.'
    • classified 5y ago
      Google defrauds them just as much as they scam everyone else. The only interest Google is working for is their own.
  • classified 5y ago
    Twitter should invoice Google et al. for providing those helpdesk services.
  • cube00 5y ago
    You forgot Tim's email address[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529
    • fodmap 5y ago
      No, I didn't. We're talking about Google here, not about all the companies of the whole world with the same, or similar behavior.
  • sofixa 5y ago
    That's not true, Google has "Google One", where you pay for stuff like Google Drive, and get access to support via chat and phone.
• totetsu 5y ago
  Could one lose access to manage domains registered with Google domains because of some other service like this?
  • thijser 5y ago
    When I try to visit Youtube now I get redirected to https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=youtube https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40039?p=youtube which says: --- Google reserves the right to: * Disable an account for investigation. * Suspend a Google Account user from accessing a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system, if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated. * Terminate an account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. --- So you can just be shut down completely for anything. After privacy couldn't be trusted to big tech companies, now time for another EU law that restricts how companies can handle account terminations?
    • necovek 5y ago
      How do these things work in the physical world? I always thought we had protections that when someone runs a public service (eg. a restaurant or a supermarket), they can't just turn people away they want for "any reason". But I was never confident this is true (and sure, it depends on the local laws). Eg. imagine there being the only supermarket in your area where the security person (or the branch manager, whoever) doesn't like you (it could be for a mundane reason, maybe you made the computer nerds club and they didn't :), and never lets you in. Obviously, supermarkets rarely exist right next to each other, so existence of one usually precludes another one existing nearby (sometimes even due to urban planning/zoning), but this would be equivalent to terminating someone's account "for any reason". Would that be legal anywhere? With public servants, it is usually clear: they've got to give you a reason for any action they are taking, a reason supported by law (except when endangered, but those are special, edge cases).
      • dannyw 5y ago
        It is completely legal for businesses to deny service as long as it's not a protected class. I, as a freelancer, refuse to work with certain "difficult" clients at my sole discretion for example.
• OneTimePetes 5y ago
  Welcome to google support. We value our customer so much, we let our developers handle your worries. All we require in return, is you bring us news, interesting things, hacker news. Only if you attract the interest of the djinn, will he grant you a review or three wishes.
• aboringusername 5y ago
  I know this isn't going to be a popular suggestion but can we please ban these type of threads from HN? I'm not sure if that's a 'done' thing around here, but they are multiplying in number and really, HN isn't a suitable venue for Google support. For each one of these threads that reach high in the HN index, there are like 10's or 100's more cases - why is one person more special than another? Really, we should just do a weekly 'big tech banned my account pls help' and pressure changes to be made, such as legislation, to ensure proper support is given in these cases. HN isn't meant to replace actual Google support.
  • tokai 5y ago
    Flag and hide stuff you don't like.
  • plebianRube 5y ago
    No, HN is not a venue for Google support, but when official support says: >appeal has been rejected and that no further replies will be processed until there is a weely thread, your suggestion is equivalent of closing it as duplicate, resolved, while the linked ticket closed stale due to people giving up on getting support.
• bambax 5y ago
  The problem is not the content of the video, crypto or not. The problem is not that YT moderates aggressively (it doesn't do enough IMHO) or even how it moderates. The problem is that there is no serious appeals process, and no third party oversight of moderation decisions. This is true for all the big platforms. How do we fix that, IDK, but probably at the government level.
  • rodolphoarruda 5y ago
    We may fix this by decentralizing the original source of the content and making the social end, the account used to post/share that content, ephemerous. How can we still build reputation in this model? Making sure the original source is visible and accessible. It all boils down to reputation management, which needs to be re-engineered.
  • thijser 5y ago
    I totally agree. If they had had a message "this is a problem with your account, fix it or else within 3 days we suspend you", that wouldn't have been nice but not completely impossible like the current solution. How is it not possible for Google to implement that? I understand they also have some very bad cases of spam to deal with, but if I take my account as an example, the 'bad' video was uploaded 4 months ago and has 133 views in total, how can the system not determine there's no harm in leaving it up for another 3 days (in which it probably will get 0 views)? So sad that the big tech companies can't manage to change from the inside but need to be forced by regulation to do good for their customers.
  • giansegato 5y ago
    It could be remunerated. Like: pay 100$ to have a human look at your case. You can appeal (and pay) up to 3 times. This would partially solve the scalability problem + provide partial disincentives for scammers and spammers. I would happily pay 100$ to recover my lost Google account. Of course this would in turn create the bad incentive of having Google not create good models. Ideally the law would require to cap prices somehow. Hard problem for sure.
    • 5y ago
• jay7600 5y ago
  Why do you use YouTube? The <video> html tag was invented 10+ years ago and works flawlessly with mp4.
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    You don't exactly need HTML to serve a video file.
  • andybak 5y ago
    Because YouTube provides a lot more than a video hosting service? Discoverability being the main one. Finding an audience isn't trivial.
  • BoxOfRain 5y ago
    I think persuading people to self-host is probably a lost cause, you're essentially asking people to pay to put their videos somewhere that nobody's going to see them. If we want to replace YouTube with something less obnoxious (a worthy goal IMO) we have to solve the problem of actually getting an audience for the people putting out the videos to begin with.
    • LinuxBender 5y ago
      Perhaps a balanced approach would be to have a Youtube channel that 100% complies with their algorithms Im half kidding, nobody really know what this is and then your own CDN distributed videos. Mention towards the end of your videos where to find more detailed content and avoid words like uncensored, raw uncut as I am sure the YTBots will see that as evasion. I see some of the more popular youtubers doing this and it appears to be working for them. They still get monetization, audience and ad-revenue leaving their uncensored discussions elsewhere so that YTBots need not concern themselves.
  • howdydoo 5y ago
    rsync was invented 25 years ago, why would anyone use Dropbox?
• dncornholio 5y ago
  This is why I have like to have many google accounts. One for personal mail, one for my own youtube channel, another for my 2nd channel with random uploads, another for gmail for the first youtube account and another account for gmail for the other youtube account, plus 2 more gmail accounts for spam or when I need to signup with an email for another expendable service, I use one of these. I don't do anything on my personal Google account, just mail. Also I use a Google account only for one product at a time. People need to threat google, apple and facebook accounts as expendible.
  • cube00 5y ago
    This isn't foolproof. Account bans can fan out and ban known shadow accounts you also operate as well, perhaps if you have different mobile phone numbers on each that might give you a bit more of a fighting chance.
    • dncornholio 5y ago
      It's not foolproof, that's why I consider all those accounts expendable. I don't use them for anything important and I keep them spread. No phone numbers linked to any of the accounts. I'm sure Google can see a link between them, but I'm not too worried about that.
      • dredmorbius 5y ago
        AFAIU, all current Google property account registration workflows now require a phone number.
      • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
        > No phone numbers linked to any of the accounts. ...on your devices.
      • querez 5y ago
        > No phone numbers linked to any of the accounts. Whenever I tried to create a Google account, it would ask me for a phone number sooner or later. Is that just me, or is there a way to circumvent that?
• archsurface 5y ago
  An example of how HN has turned from a hacker site into a user site.
• 101008 5y ago
  I know losing a YouTube channel is horrible, especially after you dedicated so much time, effort and money - and for some people it may be a source of income as well. It is totally unfair. But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me. Not only email access (and thus, access to every service I use because I have my Google account linked to it), but also Google Photos, with memories from the past 15 years with loved ones (even photos of my mom who passed away). And I am sure a lot of other services that I cannot remember now (by the way, imagine you are hired by a company that uses Google Cloud, you couldn't technically work for them?)
  • bambax 5y ago
    Do not use the cloud as a storage system. Use it as a distribution system only and keep multiple copies of precious data with you, on media that you control. I use Smugmug but if they go out of business today I couldn't care less, not only do I keep copies, I also keep the structure of the galleries and could recreate them elsewhere with little trouble.
    • dspillett 5y ago
      > Do not use the cloud as a storage system. Use it as a distribution system only and keep multiple copies of precious data with you, on media that you control. Also unless you are paying for it Google are not storing the full un-recompressed copies of the photo files from your device, so if you rely on them for backup what you restore when your primary copy is lost/damaged is not the full quality you originally had. I do have my stuff go up to Google but only for easy access. For backup, I rsync (currently via termux) to home and from there the data is copied elsewhere as part of my offsite/offine backups with everything else I can't reobtain easily if lost/corrupt.
  • cube00 5y ago
    You have the power TODAY to change that. Do it before you lose access. Start with a Google Takeout and get your email out into your own domain as a starting point. Search "self hosting" for more details, even if you have no interest in running your own servers it gives you lots of good ideas to regain more control over your own data.
• karlkloss 5y ago
  That's rich, comming from the biggest spammer and scammer there is.
• dandare 5y ago
  > I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber The saying goes that if you don't paid for it then you are the product. So I subscribed to YouTube Music family plan, thinking I won't be the product. But my wife's account will always return an error saying that she is in a different country or something. I tried to reach the support for help but never got any reply. In the end I cancelled the subscription. Google is simply too big to care about individual users.
  • resonious 5y ago
    I've been thinking the same thing lately. When YouTube released "YouTube Red" and later YouTube Premium, there was kind of a glimmer of hope. Like finally, we can just pay and not "be the product" anymore! But then stuff like this happens. You get just as little support as when you were ad food. Definitely makes one want to try and find non-big-tech solutions to things.
    • LegitShady 5y ago
      it turns out they'll happily accept money from the product.
  • you-liquidated 5y ago
    > The saying goes that if you don't paid for it then you are the product. So true. This is why I switched from free Linux to paid Mac, and why I've started replacing open-source apps with commercial ones.
    • reginold 5y ago
      I don't think this saying applies to the situation you are in. Perhaps more apt is "you get what you pay for". For myself, I've switched to paying for Linux and open source software. I believe open source needs to be sustainable for consumers and expecting devs to work for free is insane.
      • you-liquidated 5y ago
• majkinetor 5y ago
  Its becoming obvious that people shouldn't keep their stuff online on places they have 0 control. Even google's data liberation can't be used to take your data once account is blocked - if they allowed me to just use this one service after the blockade for a limited amount of time, I wouldn't have any problems. So it seeems that NextCloud and PeerTube should be must in this day and age... Mail seems most problematic but helpfully, you could easily keep local copy in mail clients.
  • classified 5y ago
    It has been obvious for quite some time now. There still seem to be a lot of folks who need to learn the hard way that a megalomaniac overlord isn't a trustworthy steward of anything whatsoever.
• tyingq 5y ago
  I'd file a small claims suit for the remaining prorated amount of your YouTube Music payment. Just so an actual human Google rep has to show up for you to vent at.
• rurban 5y ago
  Without class action lawsuits google (and other faangs) won't fix it's censor and appeal process. Maybe even on the European court. That's it's doable you can see with GitHub, which does have proper support for it's huge userbase.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• bob332 5y ago
  Lol good crypto is cancer
• banterCZ 5y ago
  Sorry to hear that, but you are not the first nor the last one. See Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/ https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
• deadalus 5y ago
  Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
• dgan 5y ago
  Okey at that point i ve got enough scared of that type of posts every two weeks, gmail is simply not viable solution. I am moving my emails to a sane European provider with a real customer service.
• nla 5y ago
  YouTube has the biggest clown car in executive management.
• IiydAbITMvJkqKf 5y ago
  Seems like the system is working then.
• rvz 5y ago
  I said it before and I will say it again. [0] YouTube does not care about you or small creators and are moderating content like the big media companies who are now on the platform. It is only going to get worse and YouTube will NEVER change. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439417
• rasz 5y ago
  >totally legit EthGlobal "Hack Money" hackathon > removed my channel because "Spam, scams or commercially deceptive content are not allowed on YouTube.". checks out
  • qwertox 5y ago
    On Saturday 27 there was a live stream at the top of my recommended Videos. It was a live stream from "SpaceX", where Elon Musk was presenting a talk "Elon Musk Live | Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission | Launch SpaceX Follow DART Mission". It wasn't SpaceX's channel, even though at a glance it would look like it, and the live presentation was just some old talk being played back. The giveaway was the doubling of the coins sent to a specific address, BTC and ETH https://etherscan.io/address/0x5d923a343b99885de0245f3d6bba54db3e2a36b6 https://etherscan.io/address/0x5d923a343b99885de0245f3d6bba5... https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1CD1XwABDCpvSYDKwxP3HctH873ZejxXfz https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1CD1XwABDCpvSYDKwxP3H... YouTube really needs to be careful about what it allows its platform to stream, so having a "EthGlobal 'Hack Money' hackathon" on the platform doesn't sound like a good idea.
• PHGamer 5y ago
  You could always use Odysee or Bitchute .
• superkuh 5y ago
  Okay. So post the video somewhere else? Maybe host it on your own server.
• tomohawk 5y ago
  "my account" - That's the first problem right there. It's google's account and you are donating content to them.
• thijser 5y ago
  Update: 3 hours after posting and being on the hacker news front page: Automated email out of the blue: "We’re pleased to let you know that we’ve recently reviewed your YouTube account, and after taking another look, we can confirm that it is not in violation of our Terms of Service. We have lifted the suspension of your account, and it is once again active and operational." Thanks hacker news for voting this up and clearly triggering something within the GooglePlex. Still a big -1 for Google/YouTube that their normal processes are completely broken.
  • badkitty99 5y ago
    Viral social network justice
  • Farow 5y ago
    Ah, the classic. In order for your issue to be resolved you have to make the news. Really sad how this applies to many/most online services.
    • rubatuga 5y ago
      I guess Kafka forgot to acknowledge the power of complaining on Hacker News.
      • throwaway82931 5y ago
        Google is Kafka at scale. All of the other characters in The Trial besides Josef K have been optimized away and replaced with silicon. The key insight that made it possible? That responding to front-paged Hacker News complaints doesn't have to scale. This allows them to shaft users in the vast majority of cases which never become high profile.
  • mcast 5y ago
    It’s funny how Google’s automated system will flag a small video like yours but I see tons of crypto scams on SpaceX imposter live feeds with thousands of viewers
• lmilcin 5y ago
  What I really hate about this situation is Google profiting from HN users by using us as unpaid human complaint department.
• unixhero 5y ago
  Back up your Google Drive and Email folks! You may one day lose access to your data out of the blue.
• bunkydoo 5y ago
  Yeah the censorship is cancer. Way over the top. There was a point when it wasn’t anywhere near as bad but 2020 really pushed all these tech companies over the brink
• gwerbret 5y ago
  Presumably, many Googlers who are directly involved in designing and implementing content moderation are active readers of Hacker News, as is evidenced by the fact that having a story hit the front page is an effective way to solve problems like these. But what I never see is any of those Googlers taking the time to explain why they feel these seemingly-broken approaches are the only ways to solve the problem of moderation at scale. To me, it seems insulting to one's intelligence to receive an automated message that your channel's been banned, be given the option to appeal, and to receive an equally automated message rnd() minutes later that your appeal has been denied. But what do I know? I've never been tasked with solving such an engineering problem. I know FAANGers here may feel put upon by what appears to be a hostile environment against their companies, but that's at least in part because you've never said exactly which technical and practical challenges lead to this state of affairs. If it's not against your company's NDAs, I challenge you all to try; whether the community agrees with you or not, I think we would all learn something useful from a productive discussion about the problem.
  • wombatpm 5y ago
    I understand the need for automation, and can imagine that the spammers, grifters and crooks would overwhelm any manual review system. I'm suprised that Google has not implemented pay for support. If the issue is really important, can I just pay $50 and speak to a real person? Just because manual processes don't scale, doesn't meam they shouldn't exist.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > But what I never see is any of those Googlers taking the time to explain why they feel these seemingly-broken approaches are the only ways to solve the problem of moderation at scale. They are not broken approaches. They are optimizing for net income. Higher net income for the company means higher compensation for individuals at the company, since they are being paid with equity. Spending more money on labor means less net income for the company means lower compensation for individuals.
  • throw10920 5y ago
    > But what I never see is any of those Googlers taking the time to explain why they feel these seemingly-broken approaches are the only ways to solve the problem of moderation at scale. From my experience with a very large bureaucracy, I believe the answer to this is "the worker bees don't believe this; the requirement to implement automated moderation [in this way] is imposed by managers and/or executives" - and speaking up can get you retaliated against.
• rickreynoldssf 5y ago
  A lot of YouTube's "customer service" people are poorly trained contractors in India, may of which don't even understand English well. I've gone back and forth with them sometimes being asked for things that I clearly provided in previous emails and one time I got a reply with instructions that included a bunch of You Tube internal network only links (that were in India which is how I know where they are), then when I replied to that without providing anything they asked for (because I can't get to the links) was told I wasn't being cooperative. So its not always AI being dumb.
• submeta 5y ago
  Yesterday we read about Apple suspending an account[1]. Today this. These companies can do as they please, and the consumer has no way to defend. This is not acceptable. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529
• evancoop 5y ago
  How much of the underlying issue reduces to incentive structures? Any large entity (Google being one) has plenty of monetary incentive to reduce the number of customer service professionals. Any algorithm that minimizes human interactions is profitable unless it actually costs the company its customers. Thus, since it's almost impossible for Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple to lose a significant proportion of customers, it is almost inevitable that they'll avoid letting anyone speak to a human being when a dispute arises. This might be a subtle anti-trust "cost" to consumers that is entirely overlooked in congress?
• hartator 5y ago
  What are assuming it’s not your other video “Tulips and water” the issue? :)
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  For those inclinde to condemn, or exonerate, Google and other major service providers for such practices, I strongly suggest considering the actual scale of operations involved. YouTube bans nearly 5 million channels per charter, 20 million per year. For Facebook it's closer to 2 billion/quarter or 8 billion per year. Even at a daily or hourly rate, the numbers are staggering. More in this somewhat deeply-nested comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29463957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29463957
• Fnoord 5y ago
  If you consider DeFi as scam (and I do, as they're always MLM pyramid schemes), then a hackathon distributing prizes with DeFi is a platform for scam. That doesn't mean a video about it should or shouldn't be allowed, but it isn't a far stretch from thereon.