YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video
I participated in the totally legit EthGlobal "Hack Money" hackathon (https://hackathon.money/) earlier this year and one of required submissions of that event was a video describing your work. I made one and uploaded it to Youtube. The hackathon went great and we won some prizes but that's not relevant to this story.
Yesterday evening I received an email from Youtube that they've removed my channel because "Spam, scams or commercially deceptive content are not allowed on YouTube.".
I thought this certainly must be an error so I used the attached appeal link and got a response within less than 15 minutes that they appeal has been rejected and that no further replies will be processed.
I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber and I can't login to even listen to my own music anymore. Amazing.
I would like to think that Google's AI systems are smarter than just videoTitle.contains("hack") && videoTitle.contains("money"), but apparently not.
If anybody has connections who can help get me unsuspended that would be highly appreciated. The google cache of my channel is still available here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gcYJ--...
395 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadThat is already telling.
This is obviously off-the-cuff, undetailed thinking here, but an approach like this might make sense in the future.
(Note: There are alternatives to YouTube that already use WebTorrent to make videos harder to delete, but their content is incredibly hard to sort through. Instead of improving on YouTube by making filters optional, they just didn’t implement filters at all. So most of the videos in search results are scams or political)
Dead comment that I can’t vouch for asks:
>Why do you need Blockchain for this?
I’m not sure if you need blockchain. I’d avoid it if possible because it’s expensive and slow. But you might not have a choice if you need a censorship resistant distributed log.
>Why can't you just cross post on Rumble with the exact same title and make an extension which replaces 404d videos with the equivalently titled Rumble video?
I’ve never heard of Rumble, but many have built YouTube alternatives only to run out of funding and end up on this list: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Deathwatch#Dead_as_a_...
Hell even my team has built a shitty YouTube alternative during a 1-day hackathon. The videos are downloaded peer-to-peer with webrtc and my site has better clustering/search than most *tubes; but of course the site is dead today and all the videos are inaccessible: https://github.com/NavinF/NodeVid.com
1: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/oracles/
Which is sad, because some of that stuff indeed has potential and should be used more (IPFS), but it cannot happen unless people take it seriously.
Now, I can't tell if what I'm saying is satire. But it does, at least, make sense, right? Because they're all terms you know and have familiarity with.
Don't dismiss something simply because you don't understand it. There's a ton of complexity in Web3. There's a ton of complexity in Web2; you just understand the complexity well enough to the point of it no longer being complex.
Maybe its satire. Or, maybe; Then they laugh at you. Its hard to say at this stage.
I love it :)))
Web3 is beyond the hill of magic vs technology for me currently, it's on the tolearn list. Is that actually the alternative to YouTube?
That said, there's other (centralized) video hosting solutions you can go to if you're less technically inclined. Vimeo is a popular choice.
It's the web3 part that's not on my radar yet, honestly I'm happy with YouTube as-is until someone figures out discoverability
this could be a place to start! makes it easy to upload content and host it on IPFS.
Service wise ofc happy to pay for anything that makes my life easier but they appear to be charging by the storage?
IPFS is a way to host and distribute files. It's not free. To have files distributed they need to be hosted somewhere. You can do this yourself by hosting an IPFS server at home or in the cloud. On IPFS this is called a "pin". Pinata host and serves your files to pin them on IPFS. That's why their list of services is that of a cloud provider.
From their pricing/plans page (https://www.pinata.cloud/pricing)
Fast Global CDN
100GB bandwidth included per month
Additional bandwidth at $0.05/gb
Unlimited storage at $0.15/gb
Here's a blog article that covers Pinata's primary use case - web3 hosting for NFTs https://medium.com/pinata/the-file-requirements-for-nfts-a20...
I can't tell if this is satire.
I can't help think that for a hackathon, it's a pretty good use case for something like this. The organizers can then take the files from wherever and post them to their YouTube channel for exposure and monetization if that's what they want.
I'd be furious if I ended up posting some video, mandatory on YouTube, for a fun week-end hackathon and ending up with my entire YouTube account suspended. So if I ever do end up organizing a hackathon or similar event, I'll keep in mind that it might be better to ask for the video files as just files and then handling the posting on my side so as to not expose participants to this risk.
If participants want to ensure their names are linked to the video bits used from their films, they can go through the all the blockhainy-web3-y trouble, if not they can just zip them.
Maybe I'm getting old. Scary world out there.
I guess for a different comparison you could be a professional truck driver and still be completely unaware that we have cars that almost drive themselves with the right tech and conditions. It's just not something you normally come across in your line of work.
The cryptospace is wild, and web3 is a wild west, but some parts make sense, and they’re a bit awesome!
> Host it on what? Pair it with ETH? Like...the cryptocurrency? How does that work? How does that make money?
You host it in IPFS, which is basically just a bunch of running nodes that store files using a hashing system that results in these identifiers (CID) per file. This CID always reflects the same file, no matter if you store it or I store it or we both store parts of it.
Let’s say I upload my video file, and then send it to you on IPFS so now we both host it.
Then, I decide to NFT it. So I register a contract on the Ethereum blockchain (for which I have to pay in Ethereum, the currency) that points to this CID.
At this point, this particular video, its hash on the IPFS and the ETH blockchain entry under my wallet, give me a distributed right of ownership for those that choose to respect it.
As per how it makes money, I have no idea, it all feels like a giant scam to me. The money aspect is a more cryptobro oriented question than a technical one.
Similarly, an NFT doesn’t prevent everyone from accessing it so you can’t force people to pay for the cost of their access and it doesn’t protect your ownership — that’s done by copyright laws enforced by the government.
The only thing a blockchain is adding is the chance for people who sell blockchains to make money while distracting you from the real problems you’ll need to deal with either way.
IPFS has no blockchain, and the overhead of transferring files is incredibly low thanks to lib-p2p.
> Similarly, an NFT doesn’t prevent everyone from accessing it so you can’t force people to pay for the cost of their access and it doesn’t protect your ownership — that’s done by copyright laws enforced by the government.
By itself it does not, coupled with other mechanisms, it can. Access control to personal files is very much removed from where I expect government to exercise their own control.
Filecoin does, however, while you'll note was proposed as part of this. The problem with IPFS is the general one with P2P: there aren't enough people who are going to use their storage + network capacity to provide a CDN for strangers, especially with the personal legal risks to do so, and it's slower than a high-quality professionally-managed service like YouTube or Vimeo. That means that if you care about long-term availability, you need to pay for hosting and that likely will also require paying for bandwidth if the content becomes popular and/or you want to provide a competitive experience rather than simply pure archival.
> > Similarly, an NFT doesn’t prevent everyone from accessing it so you can’t force people to pay for the cost of their access and it doesn’t protect your ownership — that’s done by copyright laws enforced by the government.
> By itself it does not, coupled with other mechanisms, it can.
Yes, but that's like saying that if you buy a chainsaw and a loaf of bread you can make sandwiches. Either way you need to build and operate a system to store the video and provide authenticated access so the NFT is simply making that more expensive and adding additional failure modes.
> Access control to personal files is very much removed from where I expect government to exercise their own control.
This is like saying you don't expect the government to control access to your house. That's technically true but only if you define the problem so narrowly to omit the fact that the government provides the legal framework and enforcement which allows you to do so reasonably. For example, if you're trying to get paid for content someone will likely try to snag a copy and present it somewhere else with their ads; blockchains can't prevent that and will limit revenue only to the extent that the viewers care to validate an NFT. What does work is that you can send something like a DMCA request and get a prompt response from a hosting service because they know that the penalties for not doing so are enforced by the government rather than just your personal clout.
I'm not saying it's not a scam either.
But it's something where it's really not clear if it's a scam or not.
Because minting money is a pretty normal thing in finance, especially if you want to avoid deflation.
And for any normal currency deflation is one of, maybe the worst thing which can happen to it.
Which puts a strange view on crypto currencies as many of them are fundamental deflationary.
New they do have the benefit of (in general) not being bound to the economics of a country, and hence forth might be ok with being deflationary.
But even then if you create a crypto currency which is meant to be used as a currency inflation is still bad.
Hence why IMHO Bitcoin is a security which you happen to be able to use a currency, not a currency.
But that's not true for all crypto currencies, which likely lead to regulatory nightmares. Both for the regulators and even more so for anyone who wants to use crypto currencies as currencies, as the crypto security BitCoin is currently the face of crypto currencies.
It's such a mess, but has potential nevertheless.
But not necessary in the way it is advertised. (Like potential as securities, potential for some convenient/pragmatic things, potential for resolving certain trust/management issues, potential to undermine government regulations for both good and bad from both good and bad governments. Naturally not in the same currency. But if you are into crypto currencies for anarchistic or socialistic world view, to create a more fair world, you are probably in the wrong place).
Tether is “minting” USDT, a token pegged to 1 USD - out of thin air. That’s not the same thing as printing currency.
Because in the end weather it's USDT, USD or even Gold their value is purely a construct of people (roughly) agreeing that it has that given value (in general in ratio to some other thing which has "value by agreement"). Gold might have some intrinsic value but it's fundamentally so much smaller then the gold price that it doesn't matter.
(1): Assuming they did it for that reason, my argument was intentionally detached from Tether.
And is it really true that there are not enough engineers and product people reading stories like this and have a bit of that good old "Focus on the user and all else will follow" to make the system more humane?
Sweet summer child :) Google is not serving users, it is selling adtech to businesses.
I recently got bit by needing a google account to join Google Meet video calls. I found out that only paying GSuite accounts can create Meet invites that allow anonymous joins. Free Google accounts cannot do that.
I hope more people move their variety of content to Odysee, Rumble and other alt tech as that will help YouTube slowly lose their credible users.
Like in "HackerNews".
If you think Google's AI for Spam is pretty bad, then you haven't experienced Twitter's. I've had a Twitter account suspended because their AI does not understand context. I'm not allowed to use the account until I delete the content, which I won't.
In any case, now that you've seen first hand the power of Big Tech, consider the advice of @fsflover and @pornel below. Strive to own you own content. Keep in mind that in cases like this, even HN is Big Tech.
I would imagine just a letter from a lawyer stating the facts of the incident would be enough to get real attention from google.
I mean, you pay for a service - they just canceled without further explanation. Shouldn't there be some rights left for normal people?
Otherwise yes, your story is a good (allmost daily by now) reminder, to reduce google wherever possible.
I'm not DeFi fan (not by a long shot), but complaining about the practices of centralised services seems exactly in line with what a pro-DeFi person would do. There's no hypocrisy here.
So given that in reality, everything of consequence in the "Decentralized Finance" world still relies on centralized services (YouTube hosts your videos, a lot of cryptocurrency actually held in exchanges, not wallets, etc), charges of hypocrisy may not be entirely without merit.
Even if you get this resolved, its not a bad idea to create a new YouTube account, reupload videos you want to keep. And keep good OpSec to avoid them being "linked".
I guess when Youtube cancels your service they don't need to pay back any subscription fees for the month or whatever amount of the time you are paid up for?
It seems like best practice for any professional who needs to use Google anything would be to avoid Google to the greatest extent possible except in professional contexts, lest some inadvertent mistake (or something malicious like a hack) cripple your career.
Talking from my company's perspective, this is very real. It gets worse when out of the blue a customer rep from them want to schedule an interrogation about why to do you use their cloud services, which is because the absolutely vital part ML bit of your business is there. We are currently decentralizing and moving to a local cloud provider with real people subject to local laws, better for the environment.
I managed to login to the account but there is no way to ask what's up. I followed the procedures, even wrote them an e-mail that as a EU citizen, I'd want them to forget anything related to me and my phone number. No reply.
Still probably doesn't work, don't care all that much though. Wasn't a Twitter user before, wasn't one after.
"We need your phone number to post"
short time later
"We have leaked your phone number linked to your account to the entire planet"
Basically, at any given time I'm using a throwaway account. It's like Docker for Google accounts.
It's good because I could not care less about losing the account; another welcome side effect is that every few months I get a blank slate, that way I avoid becoming a prisoner of your own bubble e.g. in relation to Youtube suggestions.
PS when opening a new account Google will ask for SMS verification and recovery email address, I use those services that give you a throwaway email address and phone number - that way Google can't "follow me" across accounts.
Use single-purpose Google accounts for each professional need, so only one thing gets "banned" or logged out at a time.
Preferably for those accounts you should have email-forwarding to a different "human" account you can check even when logging in to the account is suspended.
Basically an unusual variation of defence in depth?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529
Started a support chat now, let's see if they can unlock my account.
---
Google reserves the right to:
* Disable an account for investigation. * Suspend a Google Account user from accessing a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system, if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated. * Terminate an account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.
---
So you can just be shut down completely for anything.
After privacy couldn't be trusted to big tech companies, now time for another EU law that restricts how companies can handle account terminations?
I always thought we had protections that when someone runs a public service (eg. a restaurant or a supermarket), they can't just turn people away they want for "any reason". But I was never confident this is true (and sure, it depends on the local laws).
Eg. imagine there being the only supermarket in your area where the security person (or the branch manager, whoever) doesn't like you (it could be for a mundane reason, maybe you made the computer nerds club and they didn't :), and never lets you in. Obviously, supermarkets rarely exist right next to each other, so existence of one usually precludes another one existing nearby (sometimes even due to urban planning/zoning), but this would be equivalent to terminating someone's account "for any reason".
Would that be legal anywhere?
With public servants, it is usually clear: they've got to give you a reason for any action they are taking, a reason supported by law (except when endangered, but those are special, edge cases).
I, as a freelancer, refuse to work with certain "difficult" clients at my sole discretion for example.
A bunch of professions require special licensing to be able to deal with the public (supermarkets included, but even one-man professions like public notaries in some countries), and while there is no similar legislation for internet "places", we can easily establish de-facto public services (which most social networks are).
So, if you've got an open shop (retail space), can you forbid someone from entering for "any reason"? Eg. "I dislike your hairstyle" is a reason.
There are, of course, edge cases. For example, a shopping mall is a private space but not in and of itself a retailer. IIRC, they are held to a higher standard than retailers and must have a real reason to deny entry. And then there are the cases of using one reason to deny service when really you want to deny service to a protected class. Those are common lawsuit material.
If that's the case, we probably need to re-think through those policies if we think that they should not apply equally to "virtual" spaces (like Google/Youtube accounts).
An example from 2019:
> As he explained, this didn't just kick people out of chat. It affected entire Google accounts -- people lost videos, channel memberships or access to important services they needed, all because they spammed several emotes in one line.[1]
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019-11-10-youtube-reinstates-banne...
Only if you attract the interest of the djinn, will he grant you a review or three wishes.
For each one of these threads that reach high in the HN index, there are like 10's or 100's more cases - why is one person more special than another?
Really, we should just do a weekly 'big tech banned my account pls help' and pressure changes to be made, such as legislation, to ensure proper support is given in these cases.
HN isn't meant to replace actual Google support.
>appeal has been rejected and that no further replies will be processed
until there is a weely thread, your suggestion is equivalent of closing it as duplicate, resolved, while the linked ticket closed stale due to people giving up on getting support.
The problem is that there is no serious appeals process, and no third party oversight of moderation decisions. This is true for all the big platforms.
How do we fix that, IDK, but probably at the government level.
If they had had a message "this is a problem with your account, fix it or else within 3 days we suspend you", that wouldn't have been nice but not completely impossible like the current solution.
How is it not possible for Google to implement that? I understand they also have some very bad cases of spam to deal with, but if I take my account as an example, the 'bad' video was uploaded 4 months ago and has 133 views in total, how can the system not determine there's no harm in leaving it up for another 3 days (in which it probably will get 0 views)?
So sad that the big tech companies can't manage to change from the inside but need to be forced by regulation to do good for their customers.
Edit: Google's profit margins aren't my problem. If they want to be such a big, all-encompassing force in the "digital lives" of individuals they need to be held to account with fair policies for dealing with Customers. If that creates an untenable business for them they can either innovate in a manner that results in a fair deal for users and lower expense to themselves or they can suck it up and take the hit on their margin.
I don't use Google's various services beyond search, personally, but it's clear that some regulation is needed. Non-technical individuals don't understand the ramifications of relying so heavily on a platform that can be pulled out from under them with no notice and no recourse. Heck, even technical people don't seem to grasp it.
In all, I pay Google north of $1,000 every year.
Whether Google likes it or not, I AM their customer.
I don't think anyone here is arguing with that - it's a pretty widely accepted fact that Youtube has a hegemony (see: near-monopoly) in the space.
If you want a paid video provider many exist.
If we're assuming that "youtube as a permanent monopoly" is inevitable then, sure, fair enough, but I think if you're making that assumption it's worth making it explicitly.
Some way that for a user to have faith in the appeals process and purchase peace of mind. Just knowing that a backstop is there would help a great deal.
Historically, such systems are legislated against and are often made illegal.
Example: Suppose you are a cashier working in retail. If at the end of your shift your drawer is short for whatever reason, you cannot make up the difference out-of-pocket. Your managager would be commiting a crime by accepting your money.
There is no fixing that without massive corporate reorganization, which won't be voluntary, and thus will take 10x the time with worse results. At this point this is just the Google way to do things, and making smaller fry follow this rules will probably only end up making Google bigger.
The one real way out there might be is making one-click self hosting viable again.
It's not the users' problem per se (unless they get aggressively pushed out but then they go to alternatives so that company still doesn't make profit out of them).
Elementary psychology -- one that's studied at 9th grade where I live -- could have told them that it's super hard giving people something for free and then taking it away. People don't react well to that and never have.
They only have themselves to blame.
> Nobody has been "conditioned" to think anything. … > Elementary psychology -- one that's studied at 9th grade where I live -- could have told them that it's super hard giving people something for free and then taking it away. People don't react well to that and never have.
That was in fact my point: since the mid-to-late 90s, Internet users have become accustomed to thinking that they pay for internet connectivity but that most of the content they view will be free either because it's been subsidized by investors or advertisers. There are exceptions but they generally tend to be either connected to the physical world or a handful of areas like commercial movies or gaming where the major rightsholders were largely successful at preventing people from getting used to free content.
That puts you in exactly the dynamic I described: very few people think that YouTube-level content is something they pay for but their expectations are set by the kind of resources that billions of ad profits can support.
I'm not sure what the best way to go about it is, but I know that advertiser and corporate pressure being the only thing that matters is not working (see: dislike count removal). I would not be surprised that if YouTube continues to be unable to regulate itself we'll see governments stepping in and regulating it for them.
Unfortunately that all seems to be proprietary money making territory right now.
The other is harder: some ISPs outright blocked or throttled P2P protocols entirely (much to the annoyance of, say, Linux users torrenting ISOs) and most others will have some mechanism to respond to copyright claims. The latter is really hard for a YouTube competitor if it allows anyone to upload content — if the network attempts to auto-mirror content, you are potentially at risk if someone uploads something illegal; if it doesn't, only the most popular public content will be well-replicated.
1.) The discovery associated with YouTube and
2.) In addition to being convenient, you don't need to pay to host on YouTube. It would be pretty trivial for people to host their own content--much of which is never going to pay anything to speak of in ads. But then they'd have to pay for the hosting.
I'm pretty tech savvy and have heard of none of these. Not a single one.
Oddly unmentioned are Vimeo and Dailymotion, which have been around much longer and probably have larger user bases and network effects.
However, as to your larger point - you're right, most people don't know about these.
I would argue that those who want to escape Google's grasp should be willing to encourage person-to-person sharing as an alternative to the recommendation algorithm. Sure, 99.99% of the population isn't browsing PeerTube, but I bet you that most of them would be willing to watch a video hosted there if it was suggested to them by their friends.
This might be a good idea in general. Think of how much better ecosystems we would have if people relied on their friends to make personalized recommendations to content on any platform, as opposed to engagement-optimizing automated algorithms that exclusively recommend content on a single platform.
If you’re not a YouTube partner? You’re collateral damage that is baked into the design and considered acceptable by YouTube. Your value as an independent content creator is very low to them. The effort required to moderate independent creators is significantly higher than it is to moderate managed partners on a per-view basis. It’s a lot of work for small dollar amounts.
This is a pretty common situation we’ve seen play out over the last century. When a new media paradigm is established, there’s a land rush. But once the initial land rush is over, the industry regulates itself and consolidates for efficiency. The new media landscape eventually becomes the very thing they displaced. Ever wonder why YouTube has as many ads as broadcast TV these days?
I saw lots of stories here about Google, but I don't remember see one about how Microsoft blocks user account. Did I miss?
Anyway. Couple years ago, I received several email notifications from Microsoft about someone tried to reset my account password. I got a little bit concerned and eventually sent a feedback to Microsoft asking what I need to do. Surprise! I got a answering call from Microsoft by a real human!
Because of all the bad stories about Google blocks user accounts, I moved all my stuff to Microsoft products and my own NAS.
Paid email has many great providers like fastmail..
Microsoft doesn't offer a video platform so it doesn't really apply.
Sue them in small claims court for the value of your music library.
I produce content for YouTube full-time.
Just a few days ago a well-performing video ended up age-restricted. It was an edge case, and could have gone either way. I appealed, and included the best argument I could put together.
A few hours later I received this:
We have reviewed your appeal for the following content:
[the video title]
After taking another look, we can confirm that your content does not violate our Community Guidelines.
Thanks for your patience while we reviewed this appeal. Our goal is to make sure content doesn't violate our Community Guidelines so that YouTube can be a safe place for all - and sometimes we make mistakes trying to get it right. We're sorry for any frustration our mistake caused you, and we appreciate you letting us know.
~~~
I appeal YouTube's decisions all the time. Sometimes appeals go my way, other times they don't, but that doesn't mean there is no serious appeals process. As far as I know, almost every adverse decision can be appealed.
~~~
About your last comment, the existence of a problem doesn't mean that government stepping in would be better.
You raised high enough to be full-time on Youtube, you have a full history of interactions with their moderators, a track record of videos that performed well, and get to be handle by real humans.
That doesn’t mean it’s the same experience for the vast majority of creators, especially those who upload a video once in a while and have no reputation in the system.
On any Google service I think both sides exist, and the difference is usually pretty stark, like night and day.
PS: on the gov. part, the issue is that Google is economically big enough that there is no counterpart to make them do what they don’t want to. People are turning to govs. because there is basically no other recourse in many situations.
Now their unrelated YouTube Music account is locked
The Rumble SPAC deal is interesting because it seems they may be the first company to have the capital to compete with Youtube. I have a strong feeling that once an actual competitor emerges, Youtube will tamp down on their censorship. They censor all day long now because they know creators don't have another option. Once that other option arises, the only thing that censorship will do for Youtube is loosing customers.
This is incredibly naive. All that would happen is both services would use similar automated systems for moderation - it is cheaper for them. They would have no incentive to provide good support.
We need regulations that require access to human judgement for digital services. When millions of people use a service, even a 1% error rate in moderation / account disabling has a real impact on a lot of peoples lives.
Yes there is, see [0] - also posted by me in another reply in this thread, where I mention that my own YouTube account was suspended identically to OP earlier this year, but was restored 3-4 hours after filling out the form. The decision may or may not have been AI-driven, but I'm pretty sure there was a human in the loop behind the solution.
Don't mistake me for a Google fanboy - I had my primary Gmail account locked last week for daring to use a VPN, so I'm currently looking at de-Googling myself a bit. But to be fair, I was able to fix both issues within a few hours.
[0] https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=yout...
yikes I check my gmail behind a VPN semi regularly. Now I'm worried.
Since I wasn't trying to evade geoblocking, I now use a VPN that's set to my own city AND I shut down the applications on the headless machine. But that still leaves my phone sucking in mails on a non-VPN connection, and that's not so easy to fix, because I'm damned if I'll switch it off every time I need a VPN, or trouble myself to use a VPN on that too.
So, yeah, in general I'm worried too. Personally I think we'll look back on VPN use in five years the way that early 20thC cocaine addicts fondly remember when you could just buy the stuff over the counter without a scrip in pharmacies. Sorry to see China setting the pace on this one.
Think about how much a court case in the US costs - orders of magnitude more than a company could possibly afford to spend on moderation. Does everybody really think it's possible to design a process that's orders of magnitude cheaper without also being orders of magnitude less accurate?
I would hope that the reason that scaling is hard is because violators would spam the system. If there really are so many legitimate users losing access, then this is a huge problem that we need to hold companies legally accountable for.
What we need is a system that disincentives large companies from having too many false positives while disncentiving bad actors from using the appeals process.
> Think about how much a court case in the US costs - orders of magnitude more than a company could possibly afford to spend on moderation.
You shouldn't need a full court case, it seems like a small claims court type approach would be sufficient.
One answer is a solution is used in many places already is to allow the judge to assign court costs to one party or the depending on the facts of the case.
> Does everybody really think it's possible to design a process that's orders of magnitude cheaper without also being orders of magnitude less accurate?
I absolutely think it is feasible to build a system that doesn't cost too much vs. the level of supplementary accuracy it would provide. I also don't see how we have a choice. In this era where we own nothing and everything is a service, we absolutely need to be able to have accountability for the companies that provide those services. We can't just allow them to cut the services off at their whim with no legal recourse.
Legally accountable for what? They do not owe anyone free access to their service. If you're a paying subscriber then they do owe at least their choice of a refund or continued service until the end of the current subscription period—unless they can demonstrate that you were the one that broke the contract—but they are have no obligation to let you renew, any more than you are obligated to continue subscribing.
Google doesn't have a monopoly on much beyond their own brand and reputation. All the services they offer, including video hosting, can be found elsewhere. If you want to build your income stream on their brand ("Oh, but no one will be able to find me if I host my videos on PeerTube!") you do it on their terms.
The legally accountable for providing a product that doesn't cause undue harm to the population.
> They do not owe anyone free access
I pay for services from Google, so does the entire customer base of the play store. The user in the published article was a paying YouTube music customer.
> but they are have no obligation to let you renew,
I would disagree. When companies are allowed to become large enough that they have a significant effect on the ability for alternatives to compete in the marketplace, they assume an obligation to provide access to that marketplace to everyone. I absolutely do not buy that large service providers have the right to deny service to someone simply because they don't like them.
Additionally, when you form a business relationship, even when that relationship consists of exchanging your product for their data, there is am entirely reasonable expectation that the relationship won't be severed without cause. This is an expectation that enables commerce and it is to the benefit of a nation to enable those expectations where possible.
I would disagree. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." There is no obligation to keep doing things the same way they've "always" been done. Every interaction is decided on a case-by-case basis. One does not forfeit freedom of (dis)association through mere inertia; one retains the right to make exceptions or to change one's mind.
> Additionally, when you form a business relationship, even when that relationship consists of exchanging your product for their data, there is am entirely reasonable expectation that the relationship won't be severed without cause.
I might be willing to buy that, to a point. The usual rule is that the expectations need to have a reasonable basis in the contract and any liability is limited to the direct impact of having those reasonable expectations disappointed. However, even paid services routinely disappear on short notice, for various reasons. Assuming that a paid service will be maintained well after the current subscription term elapses is not reasonable. Neither is assuming long-term access to a free service.
> … it is to the benefit of a nation to enable those expectations where possible.
Then "the nation" can very well lead the way by offering its own services (on a voluntary, non-tax-supported basis, naturally) and not by, in effect, nationalizing a private service by imposing its own terms.
We are not talking about a person, we are talking about a corporation. While there is certainly a value to freedom of disassociation for large corporations, I see no reason that freedom is not bounded by the right to have access to services that are available to the general public. We don't allow service to be terminated to people of a protected class, we don't allow service to be terminated explicitly to interference with your ability to compete.
> nationalizing a private service by imposing its own terms.
Regulating a business is not the same thing as nationalizing it. Trying to conflate such terms is not debating in good faith. Please try to think outside of your black and white partisan rhetoric and participate in a real discussion.
There is value, to Google, in those expectations being possible. Those expectations encourage people to do business with Google and trust Google with their data. Similar to the value of a stable currency or an incorrupt judicial system, these are expectations that enable the flow of commerce to the benefit of all. Creating a government run AppStore or YouTube fails to accomplish those goals and does nothing to enable commerce.
There is value in free enterprise and not restricting people's ability to find new ways to solve problems. That does not mean that large corporations have the right to treat people disposably. If we don't let ourselves get trapped in ideologically rigid thought we can find a way to balance these needs and rights in a fair way.
I would also note that these large companies don't actually want to terminate service to the users who would win on appeal. It is just that these companies don't want to pay to process appeals for spammers and fraudsters. Creating a system of fair and properly incentivized account adjudication could improve things for everyone.
I don't do anything on my personal Google account, just mail. Also I use a Google account only for one product at a time.
People need to threat google, apple and facebook accounts as expendible.
...on your devices.
Whenever I tried to create a Google account, it would ask me for a phone number sooner or later. Is that just me, or is there a way to circumvent that?
But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me. Not only email access (and thus, access to every service I use because I have my Google account linked to it), but also Google Photos, with memories from the past 15 years with loved ones (even photos of my mom who passed away). And I am sure a lot of other services that I cannot remember now (by the way, imagine you are hired by a company that uses Google Cloud, you couldn't technically work for them?)
My (Linux-based) process also involves ratarmount, bindfs, and fuse-overlayfs. These tools are not strictly necessary but they do reduce the amount of temporary space required, since there is no need to unpack the .tgz files. Access to the resulting filesystem image is through either squashfuse or for better performance (but requiring root) a native loopback mount.
[0] http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquashFS
It's hard to know what's best in terms of risk management here. The likelihood that you will be hit is small but the consequences are potentially devastating.
[1] But my nightmare in here is that you lose access to your whole Google account and that would devastate me.
I've not had any issues with email not reaching people - and I'm not sure that other mailservers would put gmail any higher, especially as they are used for a lot of spam
[1] https://mailinabox.email/
While their FAQ seemed great to me, I'm someone already familiar with why this is important and generally how to do it. I could see it being overwhelming to someone just considering the idea. https://forwardemail.net/en/faq#table-of-contents
Forward Email does a pretty good job with onboarding new users, in my opinion. Yes, some technical know-how is expected (you do need to know how to update DNS records for your domain, for example) but they give you step-by-step instructions both for setting up the MX and TXT records in DNS and for configuring your Google Mail account (or possible others, I didn't check) to allow sending email using your new address. I found it simpler to set up the forwarding itself than to go around to all my accounts and update the email addresses; that part is still a work in progress.
[0] https://medium.com/hackernoon/when-and-how-to-use-2019s-best...
I feel free now.
There's so much nuance and it's easy to let things lapse, or make a small mistake and silently get all your mail rejected, lose/corrupt a bunch of data, etc.
If I can set up a custom domain, you can definitely do so.
I'm a freelance and my livelihood also depends on cold emailiing people. It's just a false belief that we need Google to handle important aspects of our life. No, we don't
https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/
I use Smugmug but if they go out of business today I couldn't care less, not only do I keep copies, I also keep the structure of the galleries and could recreate them elsewhere with little trouble.
Also unless you are paying for it Google are not storing the full un-recompressed copies of the photo files from your device, so if you rely on them for backup what you restore when your primary copy is lost/damaged is not the full quality you originally had.
I do have my stuff go up to Google but only for easy access. For backup, I rsync (currently via termux) to home and from there the data is copied elsewhere as part of my offsite/offine backups with everything else I can't reobtain easily if lost/corrupt.
I don't use Gmail, but do have a YouTube account. If that account is suspended this minute, I wouldn't even bother. I still have my videos and can recreate them somewhere else.
On a related note, let's see if HN will let this comment post, since this would be my 2nd in an hour.
TOS-violation suspensions are likely to involve all of your accounts at once.
The simple solution is to stop doing business with Google.
They'll also hand all of your shit over to the CIA without a warrant even if you aren't doing anything wrong, so there's that, too.
So I would only really need to switch
1) my mail provider to something else, which is easier today now that I rely on "messengers" more than mail, so not many people that I need to inform. Just subscriptions and account details that I can update one at a time.
2) cloud storage to something else, and there are oceans of alternatives there, many very capable.
I'm using nextcloud as a google photos replacement. It's not quite as smooth as google photos but it works well enough and I control my data. The official app handles auto-upload of my photos. Yaga is a nice android client for viewing the photos on my degoogled phone. The web app works well for that too and there are even sharing features, so I can share an album or photo with friends, family, or whoever. Nextcloud has suitable replacements for notes, drive, docs, contact backup/sync, and more. It's a little bit of effort to set up but totally worth it to control my data and get privacy.
Fastmail is a great paid replacement for gmail. It has calander, notes, and file storage features too.
There are so many cloud storage options, really no excuse to use google drive.
There are other turnkey google photo replacements as well these days, amazon and flickr come to mind. Google has nice apps but it's just not worth being their product, especially since they nerfed the free storage.
I also referred to https://www.gmass.co/blog/smtp-server-linux/
I also looked at OwnCloud, but ended up just syncing from my phone to local Mac and doing backups off that regularly.
You could also rsync to other devices. A raspberry Pi with a SSD at home would work fine. If you have a VPN set up on your own network (eg. an ASUS router), you could use it to host photos/backups/music. If you home IP address is dynamic, use a free DDNS provider so you can always connect to your home site.
Just make sure you get a copy of those photos sooner than later!!
The saying goes that if you don't paid for it then you are the product. So I subscribed to YouTube Music family plan, thinking I won't be the product. But my wife's account will always return an error saying that she is in a different country or something. I tried to reach the support for help but never got any reply. In the end I cancelled the subscription. Google is simply too big to care about individual users.
But then stuff like this happens. You get just as little support as when you were ad food.
Definitely makes one want to try and find non-big-tech solutions to things.
So true. This is why I switched from free Linux to paid Mac, and why I've started replacing open-source apps with commercial ones.
For myself, I've switched to paying for Linux and open source software. I believe open source needs to be sustainable for consumers and expecting devs to work for free is insane.
I pay for my TV. It still spies on me.
And so on...
You are always the product, paying customer or not.
You are always the product in "free" services like FB, YouTube. It is a fundamental part of that model.
There are plenty of shitty companies in both buckets (and seemingly more as time goes by) but let's not pretend there's never a difference.
When it comes to open source and other community-based projects, it's true that you shouldn't expect much in the way of personalized service or attention to your particular needs or issues if you're not paying for it. Fortunately, just making a copy of some software (even really good software) doesn't cost much at all, so it's not unreasonable that you're getting that much for free. Improving the software requires an investment from someone, though, one way or another.
https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...
it's really hard not to be the product.
1 https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7431675?hl=en&c...
Speaking of not being able to use Google services, if my wife plays any music on our Google Nest at home, I cannot stream music in my car because "My Account is being used in another location". Seriously?