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It's funny that everyone says "that's not the reason why it got banned". Yes. Well all know that. We all know that it was some mistake by some AI. Even the aut

It's funny that everyone says "that's not the reason why it got banned". Yes. Well all know that. We all know that it was some mistake by some AI. Even the author knows that. But we also know that the only way to get customer support from YouTube is to get some social media outrage. It's so common, Google should put on their website: "If you need customer support, please try to create some outrage on social media. We do not provide other channels of customer support."

zokier 5y ago
> Even the author knows that. Still the meat of the article is the insinuation that yt removed the video because of some nefarious motives. So either the author knows otherwise and the article is written in bad faith, or the author genuinely believes his theories. Neither option reflects well on the author.
- usrusr 5y ago
  If pretending to claim that it's done for other reasons than grotesquely failing AI is the workaround Google is basing their "good enough" on, then why wouldn't you play along?
- shkkmo 5y ago
  > So either the author knows otherwise and the article is written in bad faith, or the author genuinely believes his theories. That's a false dichotomy. I see no reason why Google earns any benefit of the doubt here. Letting Google off the hook by saying "it was just am AI mistake" when we don't actually know just gives Google more room to be draconian with no consequences. We really don't know why Google made this mistake and until Google provides a transparent and plausible explanation (hint, that won't happen even if this is decision is reversed), there is nothing wrong with assuming that Google is acting in bad faith. If Google wants the benefit of the doubt here, they need to earn it back.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  I disagree that it reflects poorly on the author to write an article in bad faith. There is literally 0 other ways to get Googles attention than to make as big a noise as possible. If people are forced to resort to absurd lies to get some customer support then that is a game Google has created for itself. An actual support chat would mean this article was never written.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Yeah Google not having any support channel or recourse for content providers and having Kafkaesque policies around this kind of thing is the first bit of bad faith going on here. If Google gives zero information on what the real problem was and people want to scream about how its a deliberate policy of suppression on Google's fault we should let them and not feel bad about amplifying it. Google can fix this all just by being more transparent and providing support.
- imglorp 5y ago
  Do you have a more plausible explanation than the algorithm is selecting for "harmful to parent corp revenue" but they won't admit it outright?
  - jerf 5y ago
    I have at least a possible one. I bet there's a reasonable chance if we saw the output of the auto-generated transcript (which I'm sure is generated even if it not presented) we'd all be able to scan through it and then say "Oh, oh yeah, I bet this mis-transcribed phrase is what did it". I don't favor the "protecting corporate interests" theory because of this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=install+nextcloud https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=install+nextclo... Doesn't exactly look heavily censored to me. The core problem remains what people have observed before, which is that Google, and the tech industry in general, seals people off from any support mechanism, other than "generate outrage on social media". Little by little, this becomes a bit more abusive every year.
    - imglorp 5y ago
      I'm down with mistranscription into something offensive, but then why would the appeal fail with the same condition? Could the appeal button be a placebo?
      - jerf 5y ago
        It wouldn't be the first time we've collectively thought the button was a placebo. We also don't know what "human review" constitutes. It may well constitute a human simply reading the incorrect transcription and agreeing that it violates policy, without any reference to the audio track. The details of how these tech companies are overdependent on AI are not publicly known, we merely observe the consequences that can only be explained with reference to it. So I can't tell you if there was never even a human involved in the appeal, or a bad human, or one who didn't care, or whatever. We can only infer the possibility space from the outcome, not nail down the exact details.
kytazo 5y ago
That's at best naive. I straight refuse to believe that the AI overlord would make such a blatant and impossible to fall for mistake as flagging this particular video being harmful and dangerous content. I believe they're imposing their tyrannical will partially until they're let lose for good when the time is right. They already made obvious how they like to treat our freedom of expression be it discussing political ideas, presenting medical information, researching intel about conspiracies, you name it.. I'd suggest you reconsider using the platform in general or proxy it via an invidious instance until you do.
- faeriechangling 5y ago
  That’s outrageous - social media should be informed!
GekkePrutser 5y ago
> It's so common, Google should put on their website: "If you need customer support, please try to create some outrage on social media. We do not provide other channels of customer support." Lol this is really funny. Sadly it's also true.
- walterbell 5y ago
  Please compete with other customers for outrage and we will support the winner.
  - RichardHeart 5y ago
    Well said.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  > Lol this is really funny. Personally I see nothing funny in it. It's been a sad reality for many years. Every time I see a comment here under one of these posts "Hi I'm Eric from Google, I'll try to check it with our X department", it's a sad reminder that you have a chance of solving your problem only if you manage to make enough fuss about it in public.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  One day, internet outrage will not be enough and prospective customers who need support will have to show up with a marching band outside of the Google HQ.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
zouhair 5y ago
YouTube creators are the product YouTube sells to its customers. They have well oiled channel for customers. Who the hell talk to their product?
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Even when I was sending them a cheque every month the support was garbage.
- blihp 5y ago
  In Google's eyes ads are the product YouTube sells to advertisers. Creators just produce the content that keeps viewers around between ads. Google does not see creators or those watching the content as customers.
- techdragon 5y ago
  People who sell pets? Seriously got me pondering now… boutique plant sellers perhaps… damn this is a short list …
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  Creators/channels are not the products, they are the manufacturers of the products.
krapp 5y ago
Hacker News shouldn't be used as an customer support outrage sink. This just results in heated but uninteresting threads half filled with a pitchfork-wielding mob reacting to clickbait and half filled with people talking them down. Why does everyone who gets banned, demonetized or downvoted on any other social media platform have to come here to complain about it? Do that on Twitter! There should be a rule against using Hacker News for customer support. Also using Hacker News to talk about sites being up or down.
- minton 5y ago
  I appreciate the occasional reminder that I can’t rely on having access to these services and need to keep local copies of important data.
rinze 5y ago
> It's so common, Google should put on their website: "If you need customer support, please try to create some outrage on social media. We do not provide other channels of customer support." Not only Google, though. I closed my Twitter account a few years back and one of the few arguments in favour to leaving it open was that I had a sizeable number of followers (+6k) and I could leverage that if I needed to complain to some company for one reason or another. Social media is the world's support service, provided you carry enough eyeballs. Edit: grammar.
- AviationAtom 5y ago
  I find that in many cases you don't even need to have many followers. It's weird how the social media team tends to wield so much power. I think it's because companies see the ability for social media posts to go viral.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    It's also quite literally an advertisement against the company. Similarly to how you can make people believe something if you just constantly bombard them with the message, a company can get a pretty bad image if people regularly see "my account was closed w/o recourse". And if people realize how volatile their accounts really are, Google (and Facebook etc) will have a massive problem.
    - AviationAtom 5y ago
      I think that's what's behind a big movement to "de-Googlefy". Losing all your email, Drive files, etc., merely because you logging in from a share IP, which someone broke the TOS from, would be a pretty crappy deal. It makes you begin to really value data custody.
- oonerspism 5y ago
  On the flip side, here. That is, those (company complaint incidents) are some of the few occasions I regret having never cultivated a social media world. When I'm on the hard end of some business/corporate injustice, and realise exactly how expendable and voluntary most of my so-called consumer's or citizen's rights are. As a lone voice desperately holding his bowl out to a corporate giant, like a modern day Oliver Twist - and no army of social media friends behind me...
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Brazil the movie in 2022: AI mistake administration, no customer support, hackers and inside connections doing the role of the unlicensed plumber.
sofixa 5y ago
> We do not provide other channels of customer support For the n-th time, they do and it's called Google One.
- techdragon 5y ago
  That’s not a customer support channel… that’s a paid service for getting bigger disk quotas and other trinkets and perks… basic customer support should not be a fucking perk.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Customer support for a free service ? You get what you pay for.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    Why hasn't a competitor arisen who uses customer support as a competitive advantage? Could it be because it is competitively disadvantageous to pay humans to support millions of non-paying "customers"?
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      We're not really talking about non-paying customers here. We're talking about YouTubers posting ad-sponsored videos, ie revenue sources for Google.
ballenf 5y ago
The YT ban here was certainly indiscriminate, but the presence of special immunity tokens to certain creators makes the bans by nature not indiscriminate. And while he may not have been targeted because of his "anti-Google" content, it's plausible that an immunity token would be harder for him to get because of it. It's unfortunately a pattern we see outside digital, in particular with law enforcement. It's a force that undermines society in a very destructive and pernicious way. People need to feel that there is some fundamental fairness in society or they will stop contributing and start destroying. It's really too bad that these large tech companies haven't maintained their early prioritization of fairness. It's the root cause of frustration with their search engine as well.

zokier 5y ago

> Even the author knows that. Still the meat of the article is the insinuation that yt removed the video because of some nefarious motives. So either the author knows otherwise and the article is written in bad faith, or the author genuinely believes his theories. Neither option reflects well on the author.

usrusr 5y ago
If pretending to claim that it's done for other reasons than grotesquely failing AI is the workaround Google is basing their "good enough" on, then why wouldn't you play along?
shkkmo 5y ago
> So either the author knows otherwise and the article is written in bad faith, or the author genuinely believes his theories. That's a false dichotomy. I see no reason why Google earns any benefit of the doubt here. Letting Google off the hook by saying "it was just am AI mistake" when we don't actually know just gives Google more room to be draconian with no consequences. We really don't know why Google made this mistake and until Google provides a transparent and plausible explanation (hint, that won't happen even if this is decision is reversed), there is nothing wrong with assuming that Google is acting in bad faith. If Google wants the benefit of the doubt here, they need to earn it back.
thatguy0900 5y ago
I disagree that it reflects poorly on the author to write an article in bad faith. There is literally 0 other ways to get Googles attention than to make as big a noise as possible. If people are forced to resort to absurd lies to get some customer support then that is a game Google has created for itself. An actual support chat would mean this article was never written.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Yeah Google not having any support channel or recourse for content providers and having Kafkaesque policies around this kind of thing is the first bit of bad faith going on here. If Google gives zero information on what the real problem was and people want to scream about how its a deliberate policy of suppression on Google's fault we should let them and not feel bad about amplifying it. Google can fix this all just by being more transparent and providing support.
imglorp 5y ago
Do you have a more plausible explanation than the algorithm is selecting for "harmful to parent corp revenue" but they won't admit it outright?
- jerf 5y ago
  I have at least a possible one. I bet there's a reasonable chance if we saw the output of the auto-generated transcript (which I'm sure is generated even if it not presented) we'd all be able to scan through it and then say "Oh, oh yeah, I bet this mis-transcribed phrase is what did it". I don't favor the "protecting corporate interests" theory because of this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=install+nextcloud https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=install+nextclo... Doesn't exactly look heavily censored to me. The core problem remains what people have observed before, which is that Google, and the tech industry in general, seals people off from any support mechanism, other than "generate outrage on social media". Little by little, this becomes a bit more abusive every year.
  - imglorp 5y ago
    I'm down with mistranscription into something offensive, but then why would the appeal fail with the same condition? Could the appeal button be a placebo?
    - jerf 5y ago
      It wouldn't be the first time we've collectively thought the button was a placebo. We also don't know what "human review" constitutes. It may well constitute a human simply reading the incorrect transcription and agreeing that it violates policy, without any reference to the audio track. The details of how these tech companies are overdependent on AI are not publicly known, we merely observe the consequences that can only be explained with reference to it. So I can't tell you if there was never even a human involved in the appeal, or a bad human, or one who didn't care, or whatever. We can only infer the possibility space from the outcome, not nail down the exact details.

kytazo 5y ago

That's at best naive. I straight refuse to believe that the AI overlord would make such a blatant and impossible to fall for mistake as flagging this particular video being harmful and dangerous content. I believe they're imposing their tyrannical will partially until they're let lose for good when the time is right. They already made obvious how they like to treat our freedom of expression be it discussing political ideas, presenting medical information, researching intel about conspiracies, you name it.. I'd suggest you reconsider using the platform in general or proxy it via an invidious instance until you do.

faeriechangling 5y ago
That’s outrageous - social media should be informed!

GekkePrutser 5y ago

walterbell 5y ago
Please compete with other customers for outrage and we will support the winner.
- RichardHeart 5y ago
  Well said.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
> Lol this is really funny. Personally I see nothing funny in it. It's been a sad reality for many years. Every time I see a comment here under one of these posts "Hi I'm Eric from Google, I'll try to check it with our X department", it's a sad reminder that you have a chance of solving your problem only if you manage to make enough fuss about it in public.
maccolgan 5y ago
One day, internet outrage will not be enough and prospective customers who need support will have to show up with a marching band outside of the Google HQ.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

zouhair 5y ago

YouTube creators are the product YouTube sells to its customers. They have well oiled channel for customers. Who the hell talk to their product?

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Even when I was sending them a cheque every month the support was garbage.
blihp 5y ago
In Google's eyes ads are the product YouTube sells to advertisers. Creators just produce the content that keeps viewers around between ads. Google does not see creators or those watching the content as customers.
techdragon 5y ago
People who sell pets? Seriously got me pondering now… boutique plant sellers perhaps… damn this is a short list …
xboxnolifes 5y ago
Creators/channels are not the products, they are the manufacturers of the products.

krapp 5y ago

Hacker News shouldn't be used as an customer support outrage sink. This just results in heated but uninteresting threads half filled with a pitchfork-wielding mob reacting to clickbait and half filled with people talking them down. Why does everyone who gets banned, demonetized or downvoted on any other social media platform have to come here to complain about it? Do that on Twitter! There should be a rule against using Hacker News for customer support. Also using Hacker News to talk about sites being up or down.

minton 5y ago
I appreciate the occasional reminder that I can’t rely on having access to these services and need to keep local copies of important data.

rinze 5y ago

> It's so common, Google should put on their website: "If you need customer support, please try to create some outrage on social media. We do not provide other channels of customer support." Not only Google, though. I closed my Twitter account a few years back and one of the few arguments in favour to leaving it open was that I had a sizeable number of followers (+6k) and I could leverage that if I needed to complain to some company for one reason or another. Social media is the world's support service, provided you carry enough eyeballs. Edit: grammar.

AviationAtom 5y ago
I find that in many cases you don't even need to have many followers. It's weird how the social media team tends to wield so much power. I think it's because companies see the ability for social media posts to go viral.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  It's also quite literally an advertisement against the company. Similarly to how you can make people believe something if you just constantly bombard them with the message, a company can get a pretty bad image if people regularly see "my account was closed w/o recourse". And if people realize how volatile their accounts really are, Google (and Facebook etc) will have a massive problem.
  - AviationAtom 5y ago
    I think that's what's behind a big movement to "de-Googlefy". Losing all your email, Drive files, etc., merely because you logging in from a share IP, which someone broke the TOS from, would be a pretty crappy deal. It makes you begin to really value data custody.
oonerspism 5y ago
On the flip side, here. That is, those (company complaint incidents) are some of the few occasions I regret having never cultivated a social media world. When I'm on the hard end of some business/corporate injustice, and realise exactly how expendable and voluntary most of my so-called consumer's or citizen's rights are. As a lone voice desperately holding his bowl out to a corporate giant, like a modern day Oliver Twist - and no army of social media friends behind me...

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Brazil the movie in 2022: AI mistake administration, no customer support, hackers and inside connections doing the role of the unlicensed plumber.

sofixa 5y ago

> We do not provide other channels of customer support For the n-th time, they do and it's called Google One.

techdragon 5y ago
That’s not a customer support channel… that’s a paid service for getting bigger disk quotas and other trinkets and perks… basic customer support should not be a fucking perk.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Customer support for a free service ? You get what you pay for.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  Why hasn't a competitor arisen who uses customer support as a competitive advantage? Could it be because it is competitively disadvantageous to pay humans to support millions of non-paying "customers"?
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    We're not really talking about non-paying customers here. We're talking about YouTubers posting ad-sponsored videos, ie revenue sources for Google.

ballenf 5y ago

The YT ban here was certainly indiscriminate, but the presence of special immunity tokens to certain creators makes the bans by nature not indiscriminate. And while he may not have been targeted because of his "anti-Google" content, it's plausible that an immunity token would be harder for him to get because of it. It's unfortunately a pattern we see outside digital, in particular with law enforcement. It's a force that undermines society in a very destructive and pernicious way. People need to feel that there is some fundamental fairness in society or they will stop contributing and start destroying. It's really too bad that these large tech companies haven't maintained their early prioritization of fairness. It's the root cause of frustration with their search engine as well.