YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account (opens in new tab)

It used to be much harder to knock someone you didn't like offline. You used to have to organize a DDOS attack. But now, all you have to do is organize a much easier mass-flagging attack. We need to update our threat models to account for how unreliable major platforms have become.

We can no longer rely on these companies. After big tech spent so much time investing in their own infrastructure, they are undermining themselves like this.

We need to just accept that a major liability of using a major platform like this is that your content may be removed and your account deleted, for unknown reasons.

Want to host your podcasts? Well don't rely solely on Apple Google or YouTube, they are not up for the job. Instead, you have to span it on multiple platforms and tell your audience where to find you if you get deleted.

Yeah, I think there are two broad relationships between a person and a company: personal and statistical.

At my corner grocery store, it's personal. I know all the staff, we say hello, we look out for one another. My doctor knows me as a person, and we talk as equals. You see the same thing between companies of similar scales. If my company is a significant customer of yours, we can talk as peers when we need to.

Google Youtube and Twitter, on the other hand, are mainly selling eyeballs to advertisers. Not only do they not care about any given individual, they couldn't if they wanted to. The ratio between users and workers is 10,000:1 or worse. At that scale they know they're going to screw over people; at best, at best, they make sure the errors aren't too biased in any one direction. And of course they will work hard to clean up PR problems, as those are expensive enough to justify actual attention.

I think the underlying issue is that Google is under a lot of pressure from the EU and other governing bodies to police its YouTube content, Google being Google is trying to do this with algorithms, unfortunately when the algorithm gets something wrong there is seldom much recourse beyond knowing someone on the inside or being able to raise a big enough stink on Twitter.

But this is nothing new, so I think you have to go into things planning for the day Google demonetizes your videos or suspends your account for no reason. Make sure you have backups in GCP, S3, or some other non-Google facility that your kid won’t unplug while playing. Learn how to serve video yourself and have that as a backup - when promoting your video link to a resource you control so you can direct people to backup sources when needed.

Thanks to Apple there are only two, more or less interchangeable, standards for playing video on modern browsers, the only difference is that one standard (HLS) is controlled by Apple and the only option on iOS, and the other standard (DASH) is controlled by Google and works on everything except iOS. Most CDNs have support for HLS which means they dynamically recode video, help to generate manifests that direct users to lowest latency locations, and help to enforce entitlements (though as far as I can tell without proprietary DRM extensions all that is good for is largely keeping honest people honest which you may not care about when making video blogs or other public consumption content)

It's kind of like having all your stuff stored on the computer of someone who randomly breaks all contact with people for no reason.

The cloud is just someone else's computer after all.

Happened to me a few years ago. Google account got terminated with no explanation. I used it for personal e-mail, watching videos on Youtube and to store personal files on Google Drive. I never posted anything anywhere public, including commenting on Youtube. Since then I've been self-hosting everything I can.

Twitter isn't arbitrary or unknown, though. You can easily predict with near certain accuracy who will get permanently banned for a controversial tweet and who won't.

YouTube is more hit or miss.

Maybe have multiple independent google IDs for activities you want to do? So if you do YouTube videos and android apps, don’t do them on the same google ID, so an accidental account suspension in one doesn’t affect the other.

I don't know what is do if I lost access to my Gmail account. I have tons of accounts on other services that only know me by that email address.

How do you backup Gmail?

plenty, on HN there is a chance you will know someone at Google or Twitter or can raise attention of someone who works there. if you have a legitimate case it seems people will try to help some out. but that is not the way to handle it en masse.

the big companies have decided that customer service is not for users (we aren't customers). once they start doing call centres it will just become a cost for ever more.

A lot of them, I have two Gmail accounts randomly locked and one Ads account randomly locked as well.

Agreed.

The co-timed arrival of the email about his GSuite account, and the removal of the YouTube (which GSuite support said was coincidental and unrelated) seems likely to be the product of a malicious activist working through the OP's accounts trying to cause trouble.

Ah yes, well known child porn trading sites. Except to the FBI.

I wonder if that would have been the result if the author didn't make so much noise about it....

I hope they they create an archive of their content to prevent being in a position they can loose it all again

No apologies?

You're talking about a company who recently stuck a big logo on the spacebar of their Android keyboard

Make sure you don't use "Log in with Google" anywhere or you're disconnected from all over.

It'd be really cool if OP could document exactly what happened, and how exactly it got fixed. Or if someone else could leak relevant information anonymously. But I appreciate that nobody involved would want to attract attention.

It obviously is. People sitting down and calmly discussing private property can only be seen as threatening if you are a capitalist or a landlord. They are scared, given the current crisis. I would be scared too as a capitalist.

Absolutely a politically motivated attack.

Interesting point. There's nothing much that's outright wrong with these claims, in fact many social scientists even of a fairly libertarian bent would basically agree with them. And these days basic income is increasingly being proposed from all sides of the political spectrum.

What's interesting is this generally doesn't happen with the federal government. You can always call someone, or go into an office somewhere, or find someone up the chain in municipal / local / state offices to get something solved. It may take a very long time, but it gets solved.

And that scales to at least 300 million users.

Google is apparently less competent then the federal government in that regard (granted Google can't print money, yet).

It would be cool if anybody else could make a real competitor to youtube then Google would have to actually cater more to content creators. However, sadly I think youtube is just too far ahead and google has way to many resources and time spent in the space for any competitor to even be able to make a dent into youtube's market.

I’m not speaking on behalf of Google and I’m only speculating, but I think what you’re proposing could increase the per-user cost of service 10x or even 100+x, and could easily invalidate their entire revenue model and put them out of business

If a customer makes 1 phone call to support every few months because their Wifi is down and they think it’s Google’s problem, they would probably be losing a huge amount of money on that customer (relative to per-customer revenue)

Amazon only does this so well because they have so much revenue per transaction, and those transactions already necessitate a paying relationship directly with the customer, so it’s trivial to distribute the cost of support across all transactions as a minor and unarticulated fee

They have Google One subscription which gives you direct support. It's hard to scale free support to billions of users.

Yeah they can get away with it because for 99.9% of people their services work fine and they don't need support. But it is pretty annoying when gmail starts randomly losing emails and all you can do is join a thread on their support forum with 100 other people saying "yeah this happens to me too, it's definitely a bug in their software and it's easily reproducible." with no response from Google.

https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6187016

Well, don't trust "Cloud Services" unless you're paying them $10k+ a month.

Actually, when it comes to getting any kind of support from Google, connections are of paramount importance. I've seen countless stories of people having problems with their Google Play developer accounts, for example being terminated for no reason and hitting the wall trying to appeal the way they suggest. Yet, if you know anyone from Google's developer relations, you'll usually have all your issues figured out in no time by emailing them. They're really nice guys.

Of course it shouldn't be like this, but that's the way it's been for as long as I've been an Android developer.

One of the sad hacks for businesses nowadays is finding a way to throw them money to achieve some grounds for complaining on account of being a customer.

With YouTube, you probably want to pay some money for ads so they'll look at you differently. I remember working with a client for a YouTube channel they had bought ad placements for, and it blew my mind that I could actually call a human at YouTube who would also pick up the phone immediately.

The two-tiered system of free services is so goddamn awful.

> Which is why I would never trust Google for any business functions.

Which is why I'd never trust Google for anything.

Did you change your birthday such that you were < 13 when you opened it? That is common thing that happens.

True story I had a major issue where a new Google cloud service was restarting instances that were relatively expensive and billing me for them about 4 years ago. it was doing so completely automatically and I would log back in and see that these instances have been restarted. Couldn't get anyone to help me until I went on the Google BigQuery subreddit and bitched directly to their chief evangelist. They finally fixed it after that. Lesson learned. That company doesn't know how to hire people who don't constantly want to do interesting things. it turns out that running a business and supporting customers isn't always super fun and gratifying.

And can we admit that while their tech is still top-notch their software libraries in the open source realm are not? Compared to pytorch tensorflow is a piece of s*. It's so so bad now.

They didn't do well in the front end space either. React blows angular 2 away. Remember dart? Neither do I. Sure do miss inbox.

I think it’s also possible to get support by knowing the right people at google or by having a lot of followers on Twitter (including someone from google who can help)

>>>What you can do

Support Other Video hosting platforms

Advise Creators to upload to multiple Platforms

When Sharing links, if the content it on another platform share that instead of YT

YT stays on top because people refuse to move off it

Correct, it would have to be someone going rogue. YouTube does not take action based on content creators publicly making statements.

Policy will change if a newspaper article is written about it though, ironically.

Redesigned Gmail is ludicrously slow and glitchy in so many ways that old-Gmail was not. According to about:performance, not only is it consistently the most demanding tab in terms of CPU (usually by a wide margin), but it also uses nearly double the memory of Youtube, which is itself also much more bloated than it used to be.

Google is supposed to hire the best and brightest engineers around, yet apparently they require 60-120 megabytes of RAM just to show a couple of lines of text on the screen. It's absolutely pathetic.

Something that stands out as representing the bad UI as a whole is this ridiculous menu under the upload button on YouTube. A vague, textless icon that you're supposed to guess means upload which is completely pointless when the two sub-items could have just been put into all that wasted space to the left of it.

Current state of affairs: https://i.imgur.com/rJi6LHR.png

Mockup in 30 seconds in mspaint of the obvious improvement: https://i.imgur.com/nfrgYQF.png

My company recently switched us to G Suite, and personally I quite like most of the products.

However, helping colleagues with the transition made very apparent that Google tools have many UI inconsistencies. They seem small but actually made the tools quite confusing to many colleagues.

The main issue was the overuse of the "3 dots" icons for a menu. Gmail in particular puts it in several locations for different menus, but in general it's all over G Suite. And there were also many small inconsistencies between products; for example the Gmail settings need to be saved at the bottom, while the Calendar settings autosave. Or in Gmail the settings for "display density" and "configure inbox" are outside of the rest of the settings.

Not to mention that they spawn and kill off features and products with equal ease and frequency.

Make sure you get a Google Takeout, but realize that much of the image metadata is deleted (and sometimes outright changed) from the originals.

My takeout failed with an write until I requested an archive that was only photos, and only a year-subset of my library (which required me to make a manual album).

I also tried the open source "timeliner" project, (which does incremental backups very conveniently), but due to Google's API, all GPS tags are stripped from what the images that it can pull down.

If SyncThing doesn't work for you, you can also try Resilio Sync.

If you need software to manage all your photos and videos, you might want to try PhotoStructure! (I'm the author, details in my profile).

Don't rely on a single drive. If your data is important for you, invest in a two-bay NAS and put two hard drives in a RAID1. Hard drives can and do break.

That’s why I pay for gsuite - at least I have some recourse to seek out support (also unlimited gdrive is pretty great)

TIL syncthing. Looks neat. I recently switched to backblaze since I only share a subset of my photos, so I put those on gphotos separately.

Emails aren't safe. I have a large following, but if 0.1% of people mark you as Spam, you lose your abilities to send.

"Customers" are entirely irrelevant to this post.

You're not wrong, but you are probably being downvoted because you're trying to be cute with your capitalization of the word "algorithms". Please don't do that.

That channel's probably fine, he works for Google.