I knew Google's automated processes were pretty bad from earlier stories here, but today I got hit by it myself.<p>I participated in the totally legit EthGlobal "Hack Money" hackathon (<a href="https://hackathon.money/" rel="nofollow">https://hackathon.money/</a>) earlier this year and one of required submissions of that event was a video describing your work.
I made one and uploaded it to Youtube. The hackathon went great and we won some prizes but that's not relevant to this story.<p>Yesterday evening I received an email from Youtube that they've removed my channel because "Spam, scams or commercially deceptive content are not allowed on YouTube.".<p>I thought this certainly must be an error so I used the attached appeal link and got a response within less than 15 minutes that they appeal has been rejected and that no further replies will be processed.<p>I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing.<p>I would like to think that Google's AI systems are smarter than just videoTitle.contains("hack") && videoTitle.contains("money"), but apparently not.<p>If anybody has connections who can help get me unsuspended that would be highly appreciated. The google cache of my channel is still available here:
<a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gcYJ--i6UYgJ:https://www.youtube.com/c/MathijsVogelzang+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nl" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gcYJ--...</a>
Update: 3 hours after posting and being on the hacker news front page:<p>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."<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>How do we fix that, IDK, but probably at the government level.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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?)
> I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber<p>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.
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.
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 :/
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.<p>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.<p>People need to threat google, apple and facebook accounts as expendible.
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.
>totally legit EthGlobal "Hack Money" hackathon<p>> removed my channel because "Spam, scams or commercially deceptive content are not allowed on YouTube.".<p>checks out
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 <a href="https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/" rel="nofollow">https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...</a>
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?<p>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.
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?<p>I would imagine just a letter from a lawyer stating the facts of the incident would be enough to get real attention from google.<p>I mean, you pay for a service - they just canceled without further explanation. Shouldn't there be some rights left for normal people?<p>Otherwise yes, your story is a good (allmost daily by now) reminder, to reduce google wherever possible.
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.<p>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".
Okey at that point i ve got enough scared of that type of posts every two weeks, gmail is simply not viable solution.<p>I am moving my emails to a sane European provider with a real customer service.
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.<p>This might be a subtle anti-trust "cost" to consumers that is entirely overlooked in congress?
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.
For those inclinde to condemn, <i>or</i> exonerate, Google and other major service providers for such practices, I strongly suggest considering the actual scale of operations involved.<p>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.<p>More in this somewhat deeply-nested comment:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29463957" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29463957</a>
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Curious.
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.
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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529</a>
> <i>I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing.</i><p>It says right in the TOS that the music is licensed, not sold. It was never your music.<p>Pirate your music and film library instead. Giving these services money is a vote for their way of doing business.
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.
>I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing.<p>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?
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.<p>Only if you attract the interest of the djinn, will he grant you a review or three wishes.
Without class action lawsuits google (and other faangs) won't fix it's censor and appeal process. Maybe even on the European court.<p>That's it's doable you can see with GitHub, which does have proper support for it's huge userbase.
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.<p>It is only going to get worse and YouTube will NEVER change.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439417" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439417</a>
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!
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.
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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>HN isn't meant to replace actual Google support.