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Comment by AzzieElbab | Hacker News Reader

An algorithm just deleted entire channel without a warning?

Wouldn't suprise me. A woodworking channel I watch had all of its videos deleted with no warning. The channel owner said that customer support told him it's against their policy to say why videos are deleted.

They probably don't even know why, or it's just too much effort to find out. The Algorithm Has Spoken. YouTube makes enough money anyway so why bother doing right by people?

At YouTube's scale it's almost impossible to not mess up these kind of things some of the time, that's okay. The unforgiving part is that they just don't care.

Yeah but these aren't being auto-deleted with logs or reason. They are almost certainly sitting in a table somewhere marked as deleted by algo. So they do know why, they just don't care.

Someone knows why. It's likely that the YT support rep doesn't know why, and it's likely not information you want to share with low paid outsourced staff.

Reminds me of a chapter in the book, "Weapons of Math Destruction"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction

Oh the "algorithm". Default excuse so that nobody is responsible. Someone is responsible.

Happens all the time on YouTube.

Is there a good video backup tool that archives a channel for later viewing?

Yes, youtube-dl (also handles many, many other sites)

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

# Download all playlists of YouTube channel/user keeping each playlist in separate directory:

$ youtube-dl -o '%(uploader)s/%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLinuxFoundation/playlists

Why does an AI have that power?

Because it helps against abuse, allows youtube to claim "We are doing something about X" and is pretty dang cheap.

And the cost of getting it wrong is pretty low for youtube.

Trial by robot, welcome to 2020

There is nothing wrong with the AI having that power as such IMO, as long as humans have the ability to override it. The problems are mostly in that last part IMO.

Well in this particular case the YouTube humans surely have the ability but won't do anything about it. It feels pretty much the same, if you're at the receiving end of the stick.

I'm not so sure the regular Google support people have all that much power to change things; based on the various story I hear, I suspect they have very little power.

Situations like this are precisely why I'm against people who want to "automate everything" --- sooner or later a complex system is going to do something wrong, possibly with severe consequences, and you're going to have a very hard time figuring out what happened and how to fix it.

Because somewhere north of 500 hours of content is uploaded to YT every minute. Scanning and moderating that with people would be very expensive so they turned it mostly over to algorithms to have a hope of keeping some control over the nature of YouTube to keep it advertiser friendly. Then when a channel has accrued enough strikes to warrant removal you as YouTube potentially have hundreds of hours of video to consider if you're trying to manually review removals.

I can understand the inspection and analysis, but why automate the decision making over something that terminates potential revenue, and hampers goodwill?

Except for the larger channels any individual channel doesn't bring in much revenue and the larger channels get some contact with a rep where they can get actual support. Though even that can be spotty from the stories some channels tell; like the time one of CGPGrey's secondary channels was banned... for impersonating CGPGrey.

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