Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube
Let me explain the content of all 5 videos on my 11 year + old channel.
1) a video of a squirrel that carried half a loaf of French bread along a fence and jumped into a tree. He dropped the bread during the jump but somehow managed to one hand/paw catch the bread and save it.
2) a friend of mine who was unable to ride a spring horse on a playground.
3)my son reacting to a scene from the movie hot rod(cool beans) this was a private video.
4) music video of my own music. No samples or other copyrighted material contained. 5) another music video also with no copyrighted material.
I submitted a request to the YouTube forum but I suspect that is a black hole where support requests go to die.
I’m not really all that upset and I have all the videos that are on the channel locally but the 1 strike you are banned seems awfully extreme. The fact that I wasn’t told that something was flagged or given any sort of heads up is really what bothers me. How can I get YouTubes attention?
169 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadGot another email later the same day from YouTube: "We're pleased to let you know that we've recently reviewed your YouTube account and, after taking another look, we can confirm that it is not in violation of our Terms of Service. We have lifted the suspension of your account, and it is once again active and operational."
Must have been an error or glitch, I did not take any action. Maybe the same for you.
Maybe bots are trying to muddy the waters of legitimate take down requests by flooding support with fake ones.
Incompetence hat:
Maybe YouTube’s abuse detection is broken.
How can you tell them apart? ;) Jokes aside, I'd like to add another hat, which is "ambivalence hat", which says: This person's pain is not all that important. The (very mild) harm it does to YT's reputation can be safely ignored. Ambivalence hat synergizes with "ignorance hat" which is the one that says, "Gosh, I'd like to help but I just don't know what to do."
(A person wearing both ambivalent AND ignorant hats is a good approximation of the population at any given time about any given topic, btw.)
Youtube doesn't care about false positives, not even a little bit. If some random Joe with five videos gets run over - the cost is really zero. Not having any support ensured the random Joe won't waste anybody's time and money on something the company doesn't care about. The money comes in from million-subscriber channels carrying ads. The rest can shut up and watch the ads - or just shut up. Youtube is not for Joes with five videos - they are tolerated, but that's all, nothing is optimized for them.
It's kinda like Linux tech support: ask "How do I do X?" and get told to RTFM. But say "Linux sucks because I can't do X" and nerds will fall all over themselves to help you.
I've had this discussion with Googlers here before and this is apparently what they actually believe.
* They're content with algorithmic approaches to spam prevention and other moderation that results in numerous false positives and don't see the problem with that.
* They think their support channels are more than adequate.
* They think their bans result solely in bad actors being harmed and don't realize that shady businesses that actually do spam have endless fake companies at their disposal to keep on trucking.
I would still be sad if they blocked my account. I'm actively trying to get better at making videos and there are some very nice memories on there (which I have saved locally, of course, but still).
Googlers are smart people, how can they believe in something this plain wrong?
The System constructed by Googlers is so smart, the Googlers themselves are subject to a form of papal infallibility.
they are smart enough to know that "improved customer service" will never get them that promotion
I suspect the rationale is something like "Well, you don't pay for your YouTube account (or don't pay that much) so you shouldn't expect good support or moderation."
They are probably highly skilled in the things they are selected for skill in. “Smart”, even when it is really high general IQ, doesn't translate to universal proficiency without dedicating time and effort to particular domains.
> how can they believe in something this plain wrong?
Strong selective pressure: people who don't have beliefs that fit with the current Google context and bureaucracy are less likely to be selected by, or select to work for, Google and, even if they are, are more likely to be selected out, or voluntarily depart.
See the destruction of the Ethical AI unit over issues very closely related to the conflict over blind faith in algorithmic approaches.
I wasn't even able to get my one of my best friends' access to their account restored when they had all the correct info and the automated account recovery form was breaking with absolutely useless error messages.
But competing with YT is nearly impossible. Maybe YTubers should start talking about some sort of association.
Like some sort of union of workers with similar interests?
That's the problem and why moderation is so difficult. It's incredibly difficult to scale.
Anything that allows people to appeal negative actions will be abused by bad actors. Spend some time on the League of Legends or World of Warcraft forums or subreddits and you'll see people claiming to have been suspended or banned for no reason, until eventually a moderator or CS rep will come in and say "Actually you were banned because you spammed racial slurs in the game and told a teammate to kill themselves."
Now imagine how many people put copyrighted music in their YouTube and afterwards appeal the inevitable copyright strikes on their video because they think it somehow falls under fair use or think putting "No copyright infringement intended" in the description absolves themselves of any wrong-doing.
There would at least be a path forward for the little guy.
The platform being so dominant is the root cause - if the person above has the ability to move away, google will change (for the betterment of the OP).
> Google One is a membership that gives you more storage to use across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. Plus, you can redeem exclusive benefits, back up data from your phone, and get support for everything Google from our team of experts.
That's more than a lot of platforms give. The trend lately is to give no information about why other than pointing at a list of rules and picking one, so as not to "let bad actors game the system". Sure, then let's just get rid of the right to know which crimes the government may accuse you of committing, and just say "we determined you broke the law, you go to jail for X years, no we won't tell you what you did, if we did then criminals could find loopholes!" while happily jailing innocents.
I honestly started to do a chargeback on the promo charge, but I guarantee you I'd lose access to all google services because of a tos violation if I did that. Lesson learned. Never do business with a monopoly provider, you have no recourse.
Having them claim that I'm violating their promotion because they can't deliver the service promised by their coverage map is infuriating.
fi used to be cheaper for me because I would use $20 line + $10 data. Now mint is undercutting them on both price and giving more data.
Then there’s channels that do everything from outright stealing content to adding a voiceover to get around copyright, playing the real video in a frame surrounded with other content and on and on.
I don’t think I have a particular knack for it but I see way too many of these channels every single time I open YouTube. They’re all perfectly fine.
AND that’s what is extremely annoying. If the rules are applied by a bit but in a consistent way and mercilessly, people will either not break the rules by being aware or they’ll switch to something else where their stuff is not banned.
A plumber that wants to promote their business and it's reliability should not be required to make funny scripted videos using the "OhNo song" just to get views.
A doctor that pops pimples should not be required to make funny or gross scripted videos using the "OhNo song" just to get views.
A musician that want's to promote their music as well should not be required to make funny scripted videos using the "OhNo song" just to get views, especially because that song is probably not their own, and it has nothing to do with their music.
None of those "creators" should be required to pay to promote/boost their originally produced content either (especially when they're primarily promoting "OhNo by Creeper", but somehow that's become a widely accepted thing as well... It's all dumb, and pretty much a modern-day pyramid scheme.
If you spend most of your time working on designing thumbnails and writing scripts, finding daily trending hash tags, and in shooting and editing videos according to success advice, you're simply not working on improving your "bread and butter". As trends become coveted goals, the overall quality of content declines as well, and it burdens attention spans of viewers overall (just look at how many videos now over-use jump cuts, overly excited and sensationalized dialogue, and zoom effects)... :\
This is what also encourages content theft as an easy route to getting views and likes that ultimately do nothing good for most people... It's popularity without profit for anyone but the platform.
People get frustrated only after years of trying to climb the mountain and finding out there is nothing at the top, the platform loses it's foothold, and then is replaced by something new... Rinse and repeat... Friendster, Myspace, Mp3.Com, Napster, etc... :\",
Out of curiousity, is there any actual process that is kicked off when someone posts into the support forum or the subreddit?
Or are there just some employees who happen to browse those boards in their free/20% time - and if they feel particularly moved by some post, they can try to rally up enough internal support to do something about it?
Because with all due respect, that's not support, that's charity.
You're right that it can't be solved with code, but can't it be solved by leveraging power as a scarce resource? Hiring is incredibly expensive so at some point they have to give. And if they don't, well, at least you're not contributing to the problem.
And Google is a company with primarily software engineers…
The challenge is to moderate a popular service where any user can upload content that many actors will try to abuse.
Even putting aside that YouTube is partly supported by ads, there is no known solution as far as I know, short of turning YouTube into an old fashioned TV channel with only a few vetted content creators allowed to upload.
As for the human powered appeal process, how to design it so that it is not spammed/abused as easily as the upload?
It's easy to explain everything away because of evil corporation, but those are also actual technical issues.
> * They're content with algorithmic approaches to spam prevention and other moderation that results in numerous false positives and don't see the problem with that.
Spot on. False positives are part of the game when you're trying to improve on $1.3MM revenue/employee.
> * They think their support channels are more than adequate.
Anybody at any internal discussion would probably disagree with this, instead saying something along the lines of "there may be deficiencies with our support process but we can always improve them later on."
> * They think their bans result solely in bad actors being harmed and don't realize that shady businesses that actually do spam have endless fake companies at their disposal to keep on trucking.
Nobody thinks that the bans solely result in bad actors being harmed and the fact that there are endless fake companies is what necessitates these robot walls that don't have human connections. False positives will happen and a goal is minimizing them... however goal #1 is growing the product (which indirectly requires keeping false positives from getting too high) and goal #2 is preventing company liability (which directly requires that false negatives stay really low). When you have strong pressure to keep false negatives low and less pressure to keep false positives low, then you end up with a bias toward positive results.
OK, well, that's why we end up here. Is this helpful to OP? Probably not. Sorry, OP!
Algorithmic moderation will always have false positives. The question is how you deal with them: Do you have an appeals process that involves human review or do you just say "sucks to be you" and let the false positive be the user's problem?
In a similar way, car accidents will always happen. However the car industry decided (not completely on their own) to invest in safety so that when accidents do happen, they are less deadly.
> Anybody at any internal discussion would probably disagree with this, instead saying something along the lines of "there may be deficiencies with our support process but we can always improve them later on."
The mythical time of "later on". When exactly would that be?
And yes, you can always improve anything. This is a vaguely pleasant-sounding non-statement.
Why was the false positive generated? Why was the user unable to use the process in place to appeal? And then improve the root process cause.
This is what seems to be broken at Google and Facebook, and is the fundamental difference between a black hole support model (make problems invisible to us, because they never get to us) and one that works at scale. You're always going to have false positives, but I don't think anyone feels like the mega-corps actually have a process in place to monitor and improve the process for dealing with them.
Google employees (including YouTube employees) only do what gets them promoted. This is all Larry & Sergei's fault. Only governments can make them behave as responsible members of society. So here's what you can do:
1. Report bad business practices to the FTC [0] or the European Commission department for Justice and Consumers [1]
2. Report the problem to your elected representatives [2].
3. Use the company's products less or migrate to a better-behaved product. I've done this with Facebook, Instagram, Google Maps (Apple Maps is good enough now), Google Search (DuckDuckGo is good enough), and Facebook Messenger (iMessage is good enough).
[0] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/justice-and-consumers_...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
If we pressured companies like Google to hire people to do customer support and to review flagged videos manually, it would create more jobs and make using the internet a better experience. But for now, they can just choose not to, and save a buck.
youtube "Hero" is a dumpster fire. Someone mass banned my google dev account for one app that I had for around 8 years as "impersonating or trying to impersonate" whatever that means.
I applied for review and got an automated review that even all related accounts will be banned and they went ahead and banned a related play dev account.
Weird thing is that I have a google cloud account with $120k yearly spend and my startup on it. Time to hedge my bets and move off google cloud.
https://www.byteside.com/2021/02/terraria-dev-to-google-doin...
Aren't you afraid to get your startup down by some automated BS hell?
besides as a solo boostrapped company, I hardly have any time for tech work.
I wouldn't trust Google with anything valuable... their customer support is non existent and the company seems to be "full of themselves" in dealing with their errors and things that are their fault.
For all shit that Amazon gets, my experience with AWS has been generally positive: Their technical support is really good (you get a HUMAN who guides you through screen share to achieve what you want) and it has been quite dependable in the more 10+ years that I have used them commercially.
Today's Google feels like Microsoft in the 90s or early 2000: "You don't like us, tough luck, fuck you and you still have to use us".
There is a wave of people copying other people's music, claiming as their own and then sending claims to the original video.
Maybe since your channel is small, Youtube decided to just ban. I've seen it happened with people who tried to pirate music more than once.
I don't post any music at all on Youtube. It all goes trough a third-party service that posts on my behalf and on streaming services.
But I agree that is a very dangerous name in the time of algorithm controlled moderation.
I mean here there’s the obvious question of why not make a new account and move on? Considering the description of the account that would be much less effort than has been invested here.
And less drama.
I don't even find it inconvenient that I can't long-press and "search Yandex for this image" on my phone, the quality is sufficiently better enough that it's worth it to {go navigating through Recent/whatever|copy/paste the URL}
> This video (link below) has been marked as having a song when there is absolutely no fragment of the song in the video.
> The video was used for Forever Young by Youth Group. But this is the original footage, from Australian TV, from 1976. Waaay before even the original Forever Young, by Alphaville in 1984.
>I went to record a complaint but you have to be the owner, so I threw it in the too hard basket.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nod5q7OHAF4
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26910465
Now I just don't share on Reddit anymore and mostly use private links because of that experience.
Someone else used the same track in their original work. They also have copyright.
Your work is similar to their work.
If they were first they have a plausible copyright claim against you.
Unless the license was copyleft. Which is a motivation for copyleft.
The license to a drum track only protects from claims from the rightsholder of the drum track.
Using samples for percussion doesn’t mean sampling other commercial tracks, nor does it mean you’re using loops.
> Your work is similar to their work. > > If they were first they have a plausible copyright claim against you. > > Unless the license was copyleft. Which is a motivation for copyleft. > > The license to a drum track only protects from claims from the rightsholder of the drum track.
This is 100% incorrect. There is nothing here that matches reality of copyright.
The owner of the original recording that was sample owns the copyright but can license to others without losing it.
If you have a legitimate license and the licenser is the legitimate copyright owner, you are in the clear.
One person using it doesn’t make them the owner.
The copyleft advice is also completely wrong. Copyleft in the context of music is untested in courts and wouldn’t make a iota of difference here.
Basically when it is easy and simple and sounds good right out of the box, someone else has beat you to using it in a song, and you are in violation of their copyright.
The license to the loop/track/etc. doesn’t mean your work isn’t protected by copyright. And it doesn’t mean your work doesn’t infringe on other work using the same content under the same license.
No, it’s not. Not in a million years is a violation. This is not how copyright and licensing works. Youtube doing what it does is 100% wrong in every aspect, technical and practical.
> The license to the loop/track/etc. doesn’t mean your work isn’t protected by copyright. And it doesn’t mean your work doesn’t infringe on other work using the same content under the same license.
You’re 100% wrong. If you use something licensed to you, then you are not violating anything, and just because someone beat you, doesn’t mean they get exclusive rights to the sound. This is 100% pure bullshit.
ContentID is not synonymous with copyright. And ContentID is severely broken.
Just like your reply below that seems to ve flagged, your new post is also 100% wrong.
You don't have to follow the stupid and time-wasting script they promote for being a creator.... It's a phony script. There are several other ways to skin the cat of promotion in getting people to listen.
However, until professional YouTubers start leaving and cause Google's ad revenue to dip by 2-3%, we won't see any action. Most of us with a handful of random videos deleting our content from YouTube won't change anything. And even if the top 50 YouTubers quit en masse, there's still the queue of bright hopefuls more than willing to fill those spots.
The platforms have a responsibility to create better economies of scale so that each community can be more effectively managed and integrated.
One single "front page" or "For you page" (or even a handful of them) is a terribly short sighted idea from a terribly greedy mind... And it's probably the main reason why most content uploaded never finds an audience on most modern platforms.
Reddit had that right at first, but they began to let moderators control each subreddit like it's own single front page, which then also introduced the usual corruption and pay-for-play into the mix.
YT (and many other platforms) end up needing to make sure that their sponsored artists always trend first no matter what, and consequently that also means they need to take steps to hold other (non-affiliated) artists down once they begin to trend and gain support through organic means.
It's kind of like the friend that invites you over to play a video game, but when they only have one game controller... They really just want you to watch them play games...
The best thing to do in that situation is to ignore them and create your own footprint elsewhere until they get bored of putting on a terribly inconsiderate and selfish party.
I don't need my whole Google account being locked for some dumb strike/claim/whatever for some stuff I don't care about.
This would seemingly be the most straightforward reason. The system flagged a copyright film clip. Though this doesn't explain why you didn't get a notice about just that video.
But honestly, why spend time worrying about this? It sounds like you barely used your account, so just get a new one.
The private video did not show the movie and showed my son getting excited and trying to imitate the cool beans bit. It was barely audible in a few seconds of the 20 second video and my son was talking over it so I doubt automated solution would likely not fingerprint it. It’s also about 10 years old and has always been private.
Honestly, you're wasting way too much mental energy on this. Youtube is a blackbox. Effectively, it bans and otherwise penalizes accounts arbitrarily with absolutely no recourse. You either use their services understanding this, or don't. It's pretty straightforward.
I don't know if that's a thing with YouTube and private videos, but when I got a copyright strike on my YouTube account because of a private video I never got explicitly notified about it.
I just have random stuff on my channel, similar to what OP describes and largely use YouTube for watching content. The video in question was a private video of me doing a quick demo of some project where a radio was faintly playing in the background (I didn't even notice that at first - only after finding the original video file and cranking up the volume did I realize that the mic picked up some recognizable music in the background).
I would have never noticed that I had a copyright strike if I wasn't bored and randomly clicking through the YouTube UI one day.
Email: legal@support.youtube.com
Fax: +1 650 872 8513
Address:
Ditch YouTube.
Could be 1.5s of silence in your video repeatedly flagged automatically and cleared manually, or had been script reported by 65535-node botnet that claims to be real individual non-group of people in a remote Eastern Europe village.
Every major social networks has this class of problems, worsening each minute as time goes on, and while your online fame can be exploited to exempt yourself from it, it will probably need a legislative action to control.
I would happily move to using a competitor instead except that between the price point (free or better) and the mass audience, there are no effective competitors.
What can we do about this?
The best way I've found to spur YouTube into action though is to @ their account on Twitter... It works for now.
I'd strongly recommend taking steps to remove yourself from the platform, voting with your feet. You're cetainly not strongly wedded, as major YouTube creators are, many of whom have been taking steps to establish themselves more independently of that one platform and its advertising revenue, through direct donations (generally through Patreon, which I'd put fair money on one of the monopolists buying out at some point, possibly to shut down). What I'd strongly suggest is trialing peer-to-peer video-sharing technologies such as PeerTube.
Note that the independent route may also be subject to copyright claims (will your Internet provider cut you off?), harassment, and/or cracking attempts. YouTube does actually protect you a gainst a fair amount of that. You'll also want to find out what CDN options are available for that video that makes you Internet Famous for a day.
I'd strongly urge you to file complaints with your political representatives and consumer-protection agencies. This would include local (city/county), state, and national representatives, as well as your state's attorney (usually, there may be another consumer protection agency), and national communications and trade agencies (in the US: FCC and FTC). This step combined with seeking out and promoting alternatives is our best way out of the present monopoly hell.
I'd specifically request:
- Appeals processes for account bans.
- Full reports on why invalid bans were imposed.
There's a long list of other reforms people who've spent more time than me on this have come up with. Look up Cory Doctorow, Tim Wu, Tristan Harris, the EFF, and others who are advocating for reforms.
I am sure it is I considered. There was that one shooting at the YouTube, campus caused by precisely this.
People should remember that someone showed up at Youtube HQ with a gun a few years ago[0].
[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_headquarters_shooting)
https://joinpeertube.org/
It's instances usually have low quotas though~
A user who wants to publish a video could do that in the form of special links which contain a hash of the video (maybe magnet links do that?).
They could do that on their own website for example. Or in multiple places. Their website, their GitHub pages, their Twitter etc.
The viewer (say Joe) who wants to see such a video would click the special link and have a software that searches it on a decentralized network of nodes.
Some other viewer (say Paul) who recently viewed the video and still has it in his cache could deliver the video to Joe.
In return, Joe could automatically get some crypto currency. Say worth $0.01 or so.
Content aggregators could crawl all these sites and create an experience similar to YouTube. Or maybe this could also be implemented in a decentralized fashion.
Sure, the hundred or thousand most popular videos will load relatively quickly, but some video I saw 10 years ago that is relevant to a conversation I am having would either take a very long time to load, or not load at all. And now you, the human, as a content producer, need to game the algorithm to be viral with every video.
Don't get me wrong I think YouTube and Google drop the ball constantly, but you can't decentralize content distribution and have the selection you do now. It'd be like going back to the 70s with broadcast television.
We could really use a decentralized YouTube. Our collective culture just should not be living behind YouTube's walls.