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Ask HN: YouTube channels removed or disabled for no reason

6 points by emilfihlman ↗ HN
YouTube is continuing its spree of disabling and removing channels for no reason. One of them was by Jeff Quitney, a person restoring public domain videos, mostly science, technology and military from what I watched.

From his Patreon page

>My previous YouTube channel was shut down on March 20, 2019 for no reason, with no warning, and no explanation. YouTube will not answer my inquiries. There were no copyright strikes against my account. I had posted over 5050 videos at YouTube...

How did I stumble upon this? I tried watching videos from my "watch later" playlist but alas they don't even show the name of the channel nor the name of the video removed, hidden or disabled, forcing me to go on a treasure hunt trying to find what the link was about (remember to periodically use the takeout download of your data...).

If there are YouTube people among us, do you have insight into this? Seems like a problem that should be solvable...

For the rest, what violations have you witnessed and would like to share about?

7 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 23.0 ms ] thread
cannedslime
I have seen harmless mashup music videos like "Saint pepsi - enjoy yourself" been removed. I think it is because the video featured the McDonalds moon guy character, which has been coopted by the far right.
emilfihlman
That's one possibility for videos of political nature where a brand doesn't want to be associated with something.

Hardly explains why public domain educational videos and channels are booted, though :/

krapp
It could just as well be the name of the group or the samples having triggered something in the algorithm.

Although if that's the case then I guess that's the end of vaporwave on Youtube.

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Just1234
I found this because I am inquiring about why Jeff's videos and my playlist dubbed "electro-old" containing 75 videos have all been deleted. They are erasing history,the older videos showed the simplicity, ingenuity, philosophy, and progression to modern technology. The math made sense and was easy to follow and a home experimenter could replicate the technology. Removing these videos are leaving us with modern garbage with theoretical constants and mathematician loops of deceptions. The old videos showed and explained easy to understand concepts of physics and modern videos lack the insight to provide understandable concepts and they muddy it with garbage. They are taking it out of the hands of the people and the majority of the people needed to stop the destruction already say "I don't understand and so I don't care as long as it works when I flip a switch or start the engine" I'm so disappointed. We are losing vast amounts of knowledge and understanding. The older videos also showed what failures looked like and modern can't admit and therefore don't account for failure but each failure is a bucket of knowledge of how physics and technology works. It's lost, all gone now, a society of morons controlled by deceptive power hungry rich that will suck everything from us and leave us deaf, dumb, blind and dead.
krapp
To be fair, videos being disabled or removed for reasons Youtube refuses to divulge is not the same as videos being disabled or removed for no reason.
emilfihlman
Sure, what I'm implying is that the reason is not legitimate.