Automated email out of the blue: "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."

Thanks hacker news for voting this up and clearly triggering something within the GooglePlex. Still a big -1 for Google/YouTube that their normal processes are completely broken.

The key insight that made it possible? That responding to front-paged Hacker News complaints doesn't have to scale. This allows them to shaft users in the vast majority of cases which never become high profile.

The spammers have full time jobs figuring out Google's algorithm and how to manipulate it. Regular content creators don't, so they tend to get clobbered by the algorithm.

As Google continues to tighten the algorithm to fight spam, eventually the only users who will be able to post are the spammers.

It feels like Google has it backwards…they’re siloing the fraud detection and banning across different products. If they switched that and did fraud detection across product boundaries and more targeted bans, we’d see far fewer of these AI-run-amok pleas to publicly shame them into getting a human to look into an obvious mistake.

But last I checked, they were the #5 largest company in the world.

You'd think that an issue that's obvious to literally everyone who uses the platform would also be obvious to even a handful of manual reviewers, and they could take the fight to the spammers a little more aggressively. Just a smidge. Like, one full-time reviewer, since it appears on my feed with devastating regularity, I'd even apply for the job myself, if it meant I could keep that scourge out of my own recommendations.

I'm left to conclude that maybe the #5 largest company in the world can't afford one full-time reviewer?

Unknown sender, body full of red flag keywords, and an attached .htm file with an obfuscated javascript redirect to the scam domain.

I was honestly impressed they had achieved this. Evolutionary pressure for virii and scams is a real thing, I guess.

One might argue, and I think there's a strong case to do so, that if you can't do a thing viably at scale, then perhaps you should not do it.

At the same time, an acknowledgement of the scope of the problem by those criticising practices ... would be a breath of fresh air.

(I'm a long-standing critic of most of the information monopolists, and have to the greatest extent possible avoided getting sucked into their respective maws.)

Shallow dismissals really don't advance conversation or understanding. Please do better.

The intractability of the overall problem is a topic of interest, sure. But this thread is pointing out how poor Google’s current implementation/attempt to solve that problem seems to be. The parent comment adds to the dialog by pointing out that while innocent content is getting removed, truly harmful content still exists and is rampant. Is it piling on? Maybe. But Google is earning the criticism.

This doesn’t imply that the solution is simple, but highlights how broken things are. Google is not the only place people can post user generated content, but they have a growing reputation for handling these issues more poorly than most, which isn’t just dismissible because it’s a hard problem to solve.

My goal is to try to inject some awareness or concept of scale and accuracy being demanded. You've had the opportunity to do so, you've neglected that option, instead doubling down on the emotive argument. The data happen to be readily available online for anyone bothering to look.

The problem with both the original comment and your reply here is the denominator is ignored:

- How many accounts exist?

- How many are removed?

- How many of those removals are appealed?

I happened to look up the numbers for Facebook a few days ago when similar complaints were lodged against them. And again: I believe in large part that the power and influence of these platforms requires an extraordinary level of care.

That said, Facebook blocked 99.8% of fake accounts preemptively before they were flagged by user, in 2021Q3. For a total of 1.8 billion accounts removed. Whatever experience ordinary users of the system had of fake accounts was after that removal of 1.8 billion accounts, nearly 8 billion per year.

https://transparency.fb.com/data/community-standards-enforce...

I'm looking up Google's own transparency report based on your comment. The YouTube Community Standards report is here:

https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-policy/removal...

The headline number is that in 2021Q3, YouTube removed 2.4 million channels. That's an annualised rate of nearly 20 million, and the quarterly removal rate roughly doubled from the 2020Q4 & 2021Q1 rate begining in 2021Q2. The cadence is 55,000 channels per day, or about 2,300 per hour.

For comparison, manual reviewers at maximum capacity can moderation about 700--800 items in a day, leaving roughly 30 seconds per item, based on the New York Times comment moderation desk.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv...

I've discussed content moderation in terms to total personal media capacity a few years ago here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/53qbx3/estimat...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/informa...

Note that we're taking both FB and YT accounts at face value, that the removals were legitimate. Facebook offers information on appeals, Google (so far as I can tell) does not. But at a first approximation the removals seem to be mostly valid.

A huge problem is that a small fraction of a very large number ... is still a large number. A 1% misclassification rate of 20 million channels is 200,000 channels/year. A 99.99% accurate classification is still 2,000 channels year. For Facebook, with 5 billion removals/year, a 99.99% accurate rate is 500,000 erroniously banned profiles.

And the risk profiles are asymmetric. For the platform. 99.99% success is ... well, pretty good. But for each individual who's erroneously classified, the consequences range from a major annoyance to catastrophic.

And lest you think I'm making the case that this is "good enough" or "acceptable losses", I'm not. I think it would be fairly straightforward to make a strong argument for the heavy regulation or break-up of these services strictly on this basis. They have too much control and influence, both at the macro and micro scales, and even near-perfect operations, management, and policies are not nearly good enough.

You might also want to think about your own actions, and those of formal and informal institutions in which you believe and/or rely, and consider what their own failure rates in judgement and adjudication are. How many false arrests, or evictions, or debt collections, or sentencings, or executions are you willing to live with, transacted in the name of society?

> My goal is to try to inject some awareness or concept of scale and accuracy being demanded. You've had the opportunity to do so, you've neglected that option, instead doubling down on the emotive argument.

You're doing so by highjacking a thread that is unrelated to your end goal. I've neglected nothing, because the point I was trying to make is unrelated. You seem to believe that all exploration of the problem (someone loses access to their account due to bad algorithms taking enforcement actions) must be looked at through the lens of how hard the problem is to solve, or the discussion isn't worth having.

It's fine to raise awareness about the implications of scale and accuracy, and that's an interesting topic to examine, but you've gone a few steps too far and seem to believe that one must look at the user impact through this lens, or they shouldn't look at all.

Treat the problem of moderation as a black box for a moment:

1) Content goes in, moderated content comes out with some error rate

2) Based on the moderation result, some action is taken against the content and potentially the user

3) Due to the inherent error rate, incorrect actions will be taken against some content/users

And assume for a moment that the error rate cannot be improved; it's still possible to have a meaningful conversation about #2 and #3 without delving into the seeming impossibility of changing the error rate in #1.

There are myriad angles to explore ranging from: how to best run a manual review program, to how to improve enforcement actions so they have less impact on legitimate users, to improving the appeals process to ensure it doesn't take a HN front page article to get something done.

Someone could choose not to even attempt improving the error rate, or discover that there are diminishing returns to lowering the error rate at some point. These are tangentially related, but still technically orthogonal to improving the enforcement/appeals process.

Of course it's still completely valid to examine #1 directly! There's plenty to explore: reducing false positive rates in algorithms, optimizing the manual review process, etc. But it's silly to cast aspersions on the basis that someone chose to focus on the customer facing problem without acknowledging how hard it is to fix that problem.

It's just as reasonable to talk about how dangerous "self driving" vehicles are today. Of course it's a monumentally difficult problem to solve. But we still need to have meaningful outcome-focused conversations about these cars despite those complexities.

> You might also want to think about your own actions, and those of formal and informal institutions in which you believe and/or rely

I do often think about such things, but today's discussion is about a common issue plaguing the YouTube content ecosystem. There are appropriate places and threads to discuss those topics.

I'm mostly aligned with what you're saying, and do understand how difficult these problems are to solve. I take issue with the idea that folks are somehow involved in some kind of dereliction of duty or low value discussion for not injecting sympathy/awe at how difficult the problem is to solve.

Among other issues, if you want to solve a problem, it helps to accurately describe it. And the problem description here is not accurate, either directly or by its implied senses.

The far more likely case is that 1) false-negative errors are relatively rare and that 2) false-positive errors are large in an absolute sense, because the true positive case is staggeringly huge, resulting in "small fraction of a very large number ... is still a large number."

The reason to consider these facts is simply that they're integral to the problem at hand and an accurate statement of what that problem is.

________________________________________________________________

In your three-item flow suggestions, what happens as the inputs of appropriate and inappropriate content are varied relative to one another? What happens as assessment costs are scaled? How do you account for identity (and more specifically, identity attribution), which I'd argue is actually central to this case. What is the role of reputation? How would you account for a changed reputational assessment, either because of a baseline change in the individual (betrayal and changes of allegiance are utterly fascinating in fiction and history for precisely this meaning), or because of transfer or misappropriation of identity tokens (similarly)?

What's your napkin-maths for a manual-review process? What budget(s) are you going to consider? What alternatives to exhaustive review might present themselves?

Oh, incidentally, in looking at both the FB and YT numbers, one point that stands out to me is that "wisdom of the crowd" utterly fails to rank against automated (and presumably AI-based) content and activity detection. One point absolutely common between FB and YT is that they are not relying on user-based flagging to make assessments, they're very ahead of this. (I suspect that user flags are used to help establish ground-truth, though even that is problematic.)

I tossed out some numbers based on hypothetical false-positive rates. I'd be interested in knowing what such rates you'd be comfortable with.

I also strongly suspect that pursing that line of inquiry is in fact a red herring, though I suggest it Because Reasons. I've a suggested approach in mind, but would be interested to see if you find yourself going there as well.

In the case of self-driving vehicles, one factor which we don't have to consider is the validity of the vehicle itself. That vehicle exists in its environment, and its physical manifestation is a robust assertion of that existence. A chief problem with online profiles is determining which are actual steel-and-rubber, erm, flesh-and-blood humans, and which are mere digital simulacra or sock-puppets. Which is to suggest that online content-moderation has an identity crisis, so to speak.

Self-driving cars would have numerous other issues, but that isn't one of them.

You can't personally control the lens through which people look at problems or discuss ideas. Someone approaching a problem differently than you is not automatically a signal that they are wrong, but that they think differently than you do.

I may have communicated that poorly through the examples I offered, but bottom line: you and I are having conversations about entirely different things.

That sword cuts both ways.

I'm not trying to control. I am trying to shine a light on the issue in an area that seems to be pervasively underilluminated.

You're the one who's lashed out several times now against that. If that's not an attempt at control, I don't know what it is.

If you find yourself in a conversation you're not having, one option is to leave.

Another is to see if that conversation might be one that you would benefit from.

That said, someone's hijacked this thread from a direct discussion of the phenonomenon originally at hand to several levels of meta, and in a markedly uninteresting and unilluminating direction.

Indeed it does. And as I very openly stated, there's a time and place to discuss what you've raised as well! Even on this very post.

> I'm not trying to control.

Numerous times, you admonished me and the other poster for not bringing value to the conversation because it didn't include points that you personally find most important. You effectively communicated "If you don't include what I personally deem to be most relevant and illuminating, you should check yourself".

If that's not trying to control, I don't know what is.

> If you find yourself in a conversation you're not having, one option is to leave.

Another comment that cuts both ways. I should remind you that you joined the conversation you weren't having, only to tell someone else how they should change what they were discussing.

> in a markedly uninteresting and unilluminating direction

Perhaps to you. Again, you seem to only consider the conversation relative to your own point of view, and that continues even in this conclusion.

I do intend to leave this thread, because it’s devolved into something that doesn’t really align with the spirit of HN.

Again, a very peculiar and one-sided definition of "control" here.

I don't think this discussion deserves any further attention from me.

Cheers.

They take over the channel, change a bunch of settings, etc... then start spewing out the usual Space-X live stream crypto-mining pyramid-scam. Sometimes if you look at the channel hosting the live-stream, you can sometimes still see clues to the old channel you were subscribed. You have to audit through the videos and playlists, old comments, etc...

If I see it again I 'll check if the channel has been hijacked or anything else I can find. I 'd rather not see it again though :p

I just couldn’t find the real live, but these fake lives had tens of thousands of viewers.

YouTube sucks.

Big tech is ruining democracies simply by having so much power yet not having a proper method of flagging targeted misinformation.

If there are any googlers on here who could grant a little mercy and guide me on how to try and talk to someone to resolve this, I'd be eternally grateful.

My Amazon Affiliate account got suspended for "impersonating a popular Android application", turns out I'm the developer and publisher of this application. Now all my applications are now automatically suspended of the Amazon program.

Nice!

[0] https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=yout...

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.

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

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.

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 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.

> 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 pretty tech savvy and have heard of none of these. Not a single one.

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.

Oddly unmentioned are Vimeo and Dailymotion, which have been around much longer and probably have larger user bases and network effects.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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?

But what I never see is any of those Googlers taking the time to explain why they feel these seemingly-broken approaches are the only ways to solve the problem of moderation at scale. To me, it seems insulting to one's intelligence to receive an automated message that your channel's been banned, be given the option to appeal, and to receive an equally automated message rnd() minutes later that your appeal has been denied. But what do I know? I've never been tasked with solving such an engineering problem.

I know FAANGers here may feel put upon by what appears to be a hostile environment against their companies, but that's at least in part because you've never said exactly which technical and practical challenges lead to this state of affairs. If it's not against your company's NDAs, I challenge you all to try; whether the community agrees with you or not, I think we would all learn something useful from a productive discussion about the problem.

From my experience with a very large bureaucracy, I believe the answer to this is "the worker bees don't believe this; the requirement to implement automated moderation [in this way] is imposed by managers and/or executives" - and speaking up can get you retaliated against.

- CEO has a goal of getting support ticket resolution times to X

- Some exec is tasked with flagging content, and allowing very little unapproved content through (creates lawsuits)

- Some exec has a budget of Y for resolving support issues

- Some other execc else wants to get a higher level technical win on their resume

Then in total you get someone who builds an automatic flagging system. This creates support tickets. You need to drive them down, but you only have Y budget to do so (so you can't hire an army of high-quality reps). You hire a smaller amount of reps on a budget. They do a bad job from being undergunned; someone builds an internal product that will magically help them resolve issues faster but it basically just helps them resolve issues really fast by identifying the obviously innocent and denying appeal on most cases. At the end of the day an understaffed team closes a huge # of tickets without prejudice. But at no point did anyone say "F those users."

This is actually worse than some tone deaf exec who hates users, because you can't solve it by replacing someone bad.

https://youtu.be/aggk93Nazuk

I can verify this is true since I used to work there.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-ga...

They are not broken approaches. They are optimizing for net income. Higher net income for the company means higher compensation for individuals at the company, since they are being paid with equity. Spending more money on labor means less net income for the company means lower compensation for individuals.

- They are extremely self-assured of their competence and the effectiveness/completeness of anything they design.

- Google has nearly two-decade-culture of drive-by product development. People work on something, it becomes a product, the laser pointer of Shiny dances nearby, and they're off to work on something else and the product matures at a glacial rate, if at all.

They also don't care. Money printing machine go brrrrrrrrrr to the tune of $10BN/year.

Can be awful for users, but hey, the company lives on.

My point here is that the problem is not entirely technical. You can't make ideal model without false-positive. You just try to optimise it by using discovered cases like this as input to bake better one. So the only thing to blame here - not enough human operators. Thats why you probably don't get any answers here from google engineers. The root cause either not technical, or too technical to comment it outside.

Hiring individual people to address your issues is going to be hard to scale in a way that allows a free service to be rolled out to billions.

I don't work at Google, do work at another company that I have no doubt has the same issue, but not discussing in the context of that company either.

This ^ is nontrivial (maybe impossible) to determine without consulting an attorney.

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?)

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...

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.

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/

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.

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

I feel free now.

https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/

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.

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.

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

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 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!!

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.

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.

https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

it's really hard not to be the product.

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.

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?

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.

Started a support chat now, let's see if they can unlock my account.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29446529

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?

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 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.

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?

...on your devices.

> removed my channel because "Spam, scams or commercially deceptive content are not allowed on YouTube.".

checks out

It was a live stream from "SpaceX", where Elon Musk was presenting a talk "Elon Musk Live | Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission | Launch SpaceX Follow DART Mission".

It wasn't SpaceX's channel, even though at a glance it would look like it, and the live presentation was just some old talk being played back.

The giveaway was the doubling of the coins sent to a specific address, BTC and ETH

https://etherscan.io/address/0x5d923a343b99885de0245f3d6bba5...

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1CD1XwABDCpvSYDKwxP3H...

YouTube really needs to be careful about what it allows its platform to stream, so having a "EthGlobal 'Hack Money' hackathon" on the platform doesn't sound like a good idea.

---

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.