Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to “spam and deceptive policies”

That's shocking, sinevibes is a legit developer in the music/audio space. They made the FX for dreadbox's Typhon synth and several popular FX plugins for Korg logue synths. I'm subscribed to their newsletter and have never received spam. All their youtube channel had were demos of their products, as far as I recall. Like "here's how the dry synth sounds, here's how it sounds with reverb", can't even imagine how an algorithm thought it runs afoul of a spam or scam policy. Probably a mistake, hope it's fixed.

Might be moot, but the shutdown email mentions &quot;spam, scam or deceptive practices&quot;, not just &quot;reasons&quot;.<p>Without any context about the owner of the channel, the reader has no way to know how unfair the shutdown is.<p>I understand from the HN thread that the dev is well known and that the shutdown seems unfair - but it&#x27;s always hard to share the outrage in this situation.<p>Best of luck to the channel&#x27;s owner - let&#x27;s hope the appeal ends up in front of a human being.<p>Now, let&#x27;s all go back on youtube, to watch suggested videos about fake news interspersed with ads for crypto scam.

My channel suffered the same fate. I had a few original songs on it and a few original videos on it. Never got a warning or copyright strike or any sort of notice. Just boom shut down.

The title on HN needs to be updated. Right now it says &quot;YouTube shut down 15 years old audio developer&#x27;s channel for &quot;reasons&quot;&quot;<p>It can be read as saying the age of the person is 15 years old. But the developer said they had the channel for 15 years, not that they are 15 years old:<p>&quot;How they are willing to insanely shut down a 15-year-old channel with not a single issue on record, without any warning or question, is beyond crazy.&quot; [0]<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;sinevibes.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lhbep5pxq22b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;sinevibes.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lhbep5p...</a>

This happens all the time in Google Play, how do you protect against random take downs? You have several copies of your dev account or channel. That&#x27;s it, you become a spammer to defend against the bot that &quot;protects&quot; us from spammers.

a computer can never be held accountable — therefore a computer must never make a management decision

Same happened to an app that I published on Play Store, I don&#x27;t even care that much, I only feel bad for the people that bought the premium version of it. Overall the takeway is that your product is never safe and you shouldn&#x27;t only rely on these big platforms for marketing&#x2F;distribution.

For those that rely on social media, this is probably the biggest upside to there being social media platforms... not all of them will take you down at once.<p>Other than that, this is probably because the content owner has a product called &quot;Switch&quot;, and they are not as big and mighty as Nintendo. Makes me think that if you are creating a brand or product name, better use a made-up word

My 13 year old son&#x27;s Youtube account (not just channel) was banned without explanation or recourse. Multiple appeals resulted only in generic &quot;stay in the corner and reflect on what you&#x27;ve done&quot; replies but no indication of what he did wrong.<p>Even if he did upload something questionable, or his account was hacked or whatever the case may be, why ban his paid Youtube Premium account and not just the channel? Why not share the so-called questionable content with the parent so I can help him avoid another strike in future?<p>Even if opening another Gmail account is trivial, the hassle of setting up Google Family, Youtube Premium, Fortnite, Steam and every other account linked to his Gmail address is a massive pain.<p>Not sure where I&#x27;m going with this other than Google doesn&#x27;t seem to care about paying customers.

Could it be related to them selling a product called Switch? Although unrelated, could match some overzealous Nintendo filter. Who are on a quest against anything emulation recently.

The platforms are opaque in their Kafkaesque bureaucratic nonsense.<p>But equally consistent is the narratives of the deplatformed are presented from one side, 100% victim, 0% responsible.<p>I know it’s hard when facing a faceless, robotic, powerful enemy - but going full one-side is just playing into the powerless-game framework of the platforms. Step up, own the full spectrum of your choices - and whatever the outcome, it’s more of a learning experience and you’re more empowered - rather than just “right”.<p>Also engage Black Swan techniques for dealing with abstruse bureaucracies.

I&#x27;m a fellow audio dev and I have a hard time understanding who they even made MAD, they look very innocuous. Only thing I can see is they have one Bluesky post celebrating Independence day for Ukraine. That&#x27;s it.<p>This is either a test shot, or some private grudge, and an obvious SWATting using YouTube automated systems. Someone tip off Google? This is beyond egregious. I started digging through their social media posts expecting they&#x27;d be some kind of noisy advocate, but nada. They seem totally innocuous and most of what they have to say, even in replies, is about their synth design work.<p>Even if I was missing something, I saw nothing TOS-violating or even within the same universe as that. Is this the new normal?

Why hire and pay actual humans to moderate and review false takedowns when you can have the free labor of other community platforms (like twitter, hn, reddit) organically raise only the high impact support tickets for you? It is literally jira, but free, IQ 1000

Mistake? Haha, we don&#x27;t make mistakes. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s</a>

Same happened to oluv, one of the few honest audio review guys. His channel got attacked by scammers, his content stolen and hit with fraudulent IP claims. Youtube has become a cesspool.

If you are choosing to use Google products, you are choosing to solidify their monopolist position and they will thank you by randomly killing your account. Don’t use Google products.

At some point Youtube is going to cull the long-tail to save money. It will be an Alexandria burning sort of moment.

Don&#x27;t worry, you can appeal at the GMAFIA robot. Who will instantly deny you.

The irony in taking down a channel for spam and deceptice practices, when most YouTube advertisements are <i>exactly</i> that, yet are nearly impossible to get pulled

Update: their account has been restored<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;sinevibes.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lhc6l3caps2l" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;sinevibes.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lhc6l3c...</a>

Is there a chance the account was taken over by spammers and shutdown before OP ever got a chance to review things? Even if so, I suppose Google should suspend the account.

I am sure this will end up all well in the end for the channel. I also get it why you can&#x27;t have anything but automated filtering as a first pass on the volume youtube deals, it&#x27;s absolutely understandable. This, however, might be a learning on youtube&#x27;s end to include &quot;if filter returns that this channel is literally hitler, but channel is also &gt;xy years old or &gt;subs or &gt;views take it at least for a human consideration before inconvenience&quot;. Ultimately it won&#x27;t render anything new to youtube as a platform, they&#x27;ll still have to deal with automated and then human appeal process, but at least it will gain some confidence to content creators that the broom isn&#x27;t all that thick.

Note that the channel was 15 years old, not the person running it.

This keeps happening, and it can end someone&#x27;s company, and livelihoods.<p>Can people sue, and seek punitive damages large enough to be punitive to a trillion-dollar company?

Tech titans have too much arbitrary power.

Live by the platform, die by the platform

Likely was mass reported? fake copyright strikes? account hacked? it is a possible explanation.<p>Sinevibes makes audio plugins and other stuff for makes synthesizers, so I am not sure what it is about...<p>Meanwhile, Youtube does not lack of crypto scam channels with millions of subscribers...

Hope your story bubbles up enough to get real support from Google.

Sometimes I wish it would all just burn down so we could have a do over. The currently players in the market aren&#x27;t good stewards.

Always run and advertise your own website. There is no protection against deletion from social media for whatever reason they are going to come up with.

&quot;These days it feels like the only way you get resolution to this automated bullshit is to post on some social media platform or other.&quot;<p>Just leave for another platform, especially if you&#x27;re making content people would actively seek out. Who even watches Youtube at this point?

When Poland was in the Soviet bloc (post-WWII until 1989), there was the &quot;Main Office for the Control of Press, Publications, and Performances.&quot; Every censor working there was known by their full name, and you could even negotiate with them on certain issues when publishing a book, movie, etc. This was classic censorship but based on some old-fashioned rules.<p>Now, Big Tech can censor your work while providing only a vague explanation, with no clear feedback channel to protest or request more information. How would you call that?

YouTube is still a big platform, but I notice that they&#x27;ve lost their monopoly on hosting and distributing long-form video as of ~a few years ago. IMO the way to look at it now is that all the major social media platforms are video platforms. X, insta, TikTok, etc. all allow posting long videos directly to the platform.