Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to “spam and deceptive policies”
bsky.app
bsky.app
Could a competitor cause the algorithm to think that, somehow, perhaps by engaging a service that reports the videos, in bulk, repeatedly from a seemingly diverse set of user accounts?
YouTube have 114 million active channels. A small error rate of 0.001% would kill 1000 channels.
Without any context about the owner of the channel, the reader has no way to know how unfair the shutdown is.
I understand from the HN thread that the dev is well known and that the shutdown seems unfair - but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation.
Best of luck to the channel's owner - let's hope the appeal ends up in front of a human being.
Now, let's all go back on youtube, to watch suggested videos about fake news interspersed with ads for crypto scam.
Thank FSM for ad blockers and nebula.
I'm not really sure what makes raging about this so hard for you. Current YouTube practice is equivalent to locking up a citizen for "thievery" and "reasons" without providing any evidence of such at any point.
And sure, few hundreds years ago this course of action would fly. But today we advanced a bit and demand that our justice is a bit more just. I don't see why we should demand less of the corporations. Or do we just accept their role as a pocket of feudalism in modern society? Accepting undemocratic small planned economies of corporations is one thing, accepting customers to be their serfs is another.
It’s not like they are paintings loaned to an art gallery, where the gallery might have some obligations to preserve, return, etc.
From what I understand there’s no liability even if the board of directors decide to shut down Youthbe tomorrow and permanently delete every uploaded video.
Says who and why should citizens of democratic countries listen to them? YouTube is a staple. If you reach this size, there are gonna be some rules. At least there should be.
> From what I understand there’s no liability even if the board of directors decide to shut down Youthbe tomorrow and permanently delete every uploaded video.
They are welcomed to do that. But deciding to refuse service on arbitrary grounds to one client is something they shouldn't be allowed to do. Otherwise why not ban people because they are Jewish or gay or just at random to sow fear? When you offer your services to the public then you shouldn't be allowed to refuse service to any member of the public without a very good and specific reason.
The prior comment wasn’t posted randomly in some arbitrary location.
It was in response to a specific comment in a specific location.
Namely:
> but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation
No, it's not even that remotely, and to equate the two shows massive ignorance.
This is like a book publisher of its own accord (without the government forcing them to) deciding that they do not want to publish your book anymore. Unless you have an explicit and enforceable contract with them that says otherwise then they're well within their rights to stop publishing your book.
If you don't like it then don't use their platform, and if you're using YouTube to host things for your business then it would be a really good idea to have a backup host in place that you can direct users to.
There's no book publisher as big as YouTube/Google but that doesn't break the analogy, and there are plenty of other places you can host video online.
> There's no book publisher as big as YouTube/Google
There's nothing as big as YouTube/Google and that's why analogy breaks.
Your analogy with publishers works only if there's relevant competition and there's none. YouTube is analogue to state publisher and others are underground small printers who's main occupation is printing opposition leaflets. There's no competition between YouTube and those entities.
Like you, I used to believe this. Recent events have me re-examining my assumptions.
Clarification needed indeed: i did not meant "hard to share" because I don't feel empathy for the creator ; I meant "hard" in the sense that:
* I did not know beforehand anything about the creator,
* Neither the post, nor, surprisingly, the HN thread, gave much context about what the creator where accused of
* But the thread was full of outrage ; that I was, unfortunately, not entirely comfortable sharing.
But again, moot point - I completely agree that youtube automated moderation is a living advertisement for human moderation.
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:
"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." [0]
[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/sinevibes.bsky.social/post/3lhbep5p...
Have channels with playlists and channels with 1 movie each. Add one of the playlists to the description (that playlist may not contain that movie)
The movies one by one vanish from the playlists and are uploaded again on new channels.
The playlist channels seem to last for a really long time.
Every AI decision becomes a way to shirk responsibility, even more than just automated ones (because then its "your" rule).
Welcome to the brave new world of AI-decision laundering.
Great thought from op.
Horrible implications.
This gives google a lot of “oops, the system did it” leeway.
Sadly the original source was lost in a flood and IBM archives do not have a copy: https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1798170111058264280
Edit: here's a better link https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
Or is that tweet about the parent post?
On topic: I think our whole current Ad-economy is cancerous-- the decoupling of incentives between platforms and consumers/customers is IMO a bad trend for all of us long term (both sides), and having public attention/sentiment basically permanently on sale is yet another can of worms. I really hope we can learn to deal with this before it ruins our society. On the other hand, there are so many possibilities opening up, and generally just things improving without anyone much noticing, I'll still take unaccountable, capricious corporate overlords any day of the week in exchange. I would not want to live in any other time in the past if I had to make an honest choice.
Maybe the "customer support via HN/twitter" model can save the day here at least for this (as ugly as that whole concept is).
We simply cannot trust huge platforms to care about the small to medium developers, people who are essentially powerless against a behemoth like Google or Apple. You get your app taken down, your account locked and the only recourse left would be spending six to seven figures in lawyers while risking losing the case altogether.
It's disgusting.
You can sue them in San Mateo county and have the case adjudicated in a court which does not allow lawyers for either side and which has the power to compel a Google or a Facebook to reverse an erroneous moderation decision.
https://www.engadget.com/how-small-claims-court-became-metas...
And then you get Meta failing to show up, but asking for a set-aside afterwards because... they failed to show up.
It's aggressive customer contempt. This is someone's livelihood, possibly their entire livelihood, and these bobbleheads treat it like a joke.
Google otoh is more like, bot/automated system takes things down and unless you happen to catch the eyes of someone in the particular department of Google you're SHOL because they don't want to give away "security secrets".
Point in case, the Terraria dev losing his Google account while making a Stadia port that couldn't get his account back despite having internal Google contacts (maybe he eventually got it back but not before the damage was done).
Other than that, this is probably because the content owner has a product called "Switch", 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
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?
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.
Not sure where I'm going with this other than Google doesn't seem to care about paying customers.
But equally consistent is the narratives of the deplatformed are presented from one side, 100% victim, 0% responsible.
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”.
Also engage Black Swan techniques for dealing with abstruse bureaucracies.
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'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.
Even if I was missing something, I saw nothing TOS-violating or even within the same universe as that. Is this the new normal?
IMO, good content creators need to go back to self-hosting as their primary location, preferably on a decent host that won't just shut them down though if they make sure they have full control of the domain name at least and a good local/backup copy of everything, getting up and running elsewhere if that host goes tits-up is relatively easy. Then upload to youtube/others as secondary channels, so you can take advantage of the infamous algorithms for exposure, the interaction features¹, and to save bandwidth²³.
Also make sure your identity everywhere is, well, identifiable - so if youtune/InsertIdentityHere goes down someone searching for InsertIdentityHere can easily find the instances hosted on other sharing sites or your central one.
More work of course, but not massively so especially if it is (or is intended to be) a money making channel rather than purely a hobby project, and worth it long-term if take-downs happen.
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[1] I would not want to manage public comments and such on a self-hosted instance, fighting spam, hate, and other such issues can become a full-time job.
[2] Essentially using them as CDNs.
[3] You might have to give low quality versions of videos to most public requests to your main site⁴, sending users to yt/other for HD+, perhaps serving ad-free high quality videos direct to those who support you via payment (via Patreon or similar).
[4] And make sure you have appropriate throughput limits⁵ in place so “going viral” doesn't result in a massive bandwidth overage bill.
[5] This could be site-wide, though you could implement finer grained controls, perhaps if a particular item becomes temporarily “too popular” start serving a _really_ low quality version and more obvious links to TY/Vimeo/… until things die down.
- The AI bot costing billions in development, compute and energy who just banned your account based on a false positive
Once you’re locked out, you’re fucked. Meta doesn’t give a shit about its users, that’s the only way this business model can work.
Now for me, I try to use Meta products as little as possible. But my partner gets a significant amount of business leads from Instagram, it’s quite lucrative for her, so she took quite a hit when she lost that account and had to start over.
Happened to one of my relatives recently. Their (at least 10 years old) Facebook account has been linked by some hacker (I don't know how) with some unknown Instagram account, which then misbehaved, and the FB account was suspended as a result. A message says that the decision can be appealed from the unknown Instagram account to which we never had access and is not anymore linked. Reddit is full of people that had the exact same issue. Drives me crazy the fact that there's absolutely no way to talk to any human to solve this.
Heh. Not really. Meta poured tens of billions in the last few years in their VR effort, with almost no results to show. With that money, they could have literally given a few minutes of human customer support to each and every of their users.
https://bsky.app/profile/sinevibes.bsky.social/post/3lhc6l3c...
Can people sue, and seek punitive damages large enough to be punitive to a trillion-dollar company?
If they can, should they be able to? If I run a website I think I should be allowed to decide what content is on there, and taking space in my DB is not a human right. I should be able to just rm -rf / without asking permission. I would be an asshole, but I'm paying the bills and I decide what my site is. I shouldn't even need a TOS that states that I can, I shouldn't have to keep promises I've never made.
The problem here is using YouTube and Google products that are known for these kinds of shutdowns, with no way to get in touch with a human. They are known to censor and remove access to truths they disagree with, and those truths are subject to change.
Instead of trying to change companies we don't support, we should help companies we do support get the traction they need. Educate people and de-google.
Sinevibes makes audio plugins and other stuff for makes synthesizers, so I am not sure what it is about...
Meanwhile, Youtube does not lack of crypto scam channels with millions of subscribers...
Just leave for another platform, especially if you're making content people would actively seek out. Who even watches Youtube at this point?
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?
Let's try both!
Imagine you sold a product for general popularion, and wanted to publish a tutorial video somewhere online... except for self-hosting it, youtube is the only viable option, sadly.