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YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

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Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#71
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need legislation. Google is too powerful.

Legislation to protect e-mail mailboxes as the same way we do with official postal (snail-)mail services in most countries needs to be handled very carefully, because otherwise we'll end up protecting spammers - the very opposite of the people we want to protect. I see this story as Google's equivalent of when Valve would ban people from Steam for crude comments they made on the Steam forums, which I understand meant…

Well, fairly simple to solve; mail services should be able to restrict sending mail (possibly only to family contact, limit of 25 contacts or so) until the matter is handled, ie temporarily if it's not blatant abuse of the service (ie spam). Otherwise, receiving mail should be a right once you have a mail address at a larger provider.

Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#72
post #21

I wish lawmakers instead of spending time on misguided cookie banner laws, spent more time on things like this. Behavior like this is completely unacceptable, it is equivalent to store owner throwing you out because he thought your hair are red. People whose accounts are being suspended without warning, without explanation, and without a way to appeal, like in this case, should be able to sue the company for a large…

> Behavior like this is completely unacceptable

This comment gives a lot more context:

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp...

IMHO, it seems a lot more reasonable.

Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#73
post #2

oh wow! there must be more backstory to this. finding it hard to believe that whole google accounts got suspended for spamming a youtube video chat!

Sometimes there is not much back story. Google has banned entire accounts for far less; not using Google wallet, apps similar to each other, using donation links. You lose everything, drive, Gmail, domain accounts, AdWords, chrome login.. wait until they make Google search only to registered users

Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#74
post #72
post #21

I wish lawmakers instead of spending time on misguided cookie banner laws, spent more time on things like this. Behavior like this is completely unacceptable, it is equivalent to store owner throwing you out because he thought your hair are red. People whose accounts are being suspended without warning, without explanation, and without a way to appeal, like in this case, should be able to sue the company for a large…

> Behavior like this is completely unacceptable This comment gives a lot more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp... IMHO, it seems a lot more reasonable.

No, it's not reasonable.

>The emote spam in question was not "minor", the accounts affected averaged well over 100 messages each, within a short timeframe.

This is a crazy bad take. 100 messages in a few minutes is totally normal for live-streams. Just hold the ctrl-V button and... oops, your G-Mail is locked.

That. Is. Crazy. I worked at Twitch and the idea of disabling someones Amazon account for spamming emotes (even temporarily) is completely insane.

Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#75
post #48

There are too many people here advocating to host your own email in your own domain. Please be warned that it has its own risks: By hosting your main email on a custom domain(not a provider) you open a new attack vector for identity theft. There was an article on HN just a couple weeks ago about someone getting hacked by exactly this attack form. IIRC it was godaddy having stupid verification process. Someone can hij…

Also, you randomly won't be able to send mails, as google will randomly mark them as spam (for no reason, with no explanation and with no chance to appeal) So you'll never know if any mail you send to a gmail user (which is pretty much everybody) will ever actually reach an inbox https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg08806.html https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-October/10381...

This. I recently found that even though several emails from my custom domain accounts had gotten through to gmail users - some of them did not get to the main box instead ended up in promotions.. and some of them did not get delivered at all.

These cases were to the same person, from the same computer and account - some would go through and some would not, some could be found in spam box, others just vanished -

then I started calculating the time I spent writing some emails that I never got a reply to - like hours of writing - and I though I was just ghosted for a competitor - turns out it's likely they never saw the work I sent.

I have witnessed this with 3 different receivers the past year.

The last back and forth I just resorted to using my personal gmail account to communicate with new business associate as the receiving was so erratic. At first they wondered why google was putting stuff in spam folder that did not belong there - then it just turned to non-stop frustration and delayed thumbs up on work orders.

the algo should know if you sent one email and they opened and read and replied - and you sent another, it should not matter if you put in the second email, 'your desire to do Z with your web site is understood, and can be done, but you may run into a bad SEO issue that could affect where your site displays in search results, so instead we reccomend not doing X and instead doing Y.."

something like that - so many times is seems that the anti-spam seo hating google teams trump and destroy all the things, regardless of false positives - and no transparency which hurts people - but saves the secret sauce of the anti-spam team I guess.

This is a tough place to be in when so many use gmail.

Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#76

The real issue here is that (reportedly) the people who spammed got their GMail accounts shut down. That's outrageous. That's your real-life, not just your online-life. Your GMail account isn't even related at all to your YouTube identity. Remember: if you aren't _at least_ paying for your e-mail service you don't own your own mailbox. When was the last time you made a backup of your GMail account? What contingency p…

I remember a story (maybe from here?) a couple years back where someone had their gmail account blocked - and they lost google services - and they needed access to docs and other things to work with his team.. and after trying for days to get it brought back, he was essentially laid off from work as he could not participate in any of the tools that were being used by the rest of the company.

I had a time a while back when my youtube account got blocked - and then I found that googleplus had put a block on the account and it auto-blocked the youtube videos - and they said all the videos were find for youtube and no problem there - but they would not go over the heads of the googleplus team, so we were screwed.

we should have posted on many more sites your advice about "you don't own your own mailbox. When was the last time you made a backup of your GMail account? What contingency plan do you have in-place if Google ever accidentally, unintentionally, or in this case, intentionally, shuts it down?"

like how this site has recently added info about big G's censorship: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490272

most people don't know about these issues - they just assume gmail will be there, and google's search shows truth.

Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#77
post #72
post #21

I wish lawmakers instead of spending time on misguided cookie banner laws, spent more time on things like this. Behavior like this is completely unacceptable, it is equivalent to store owner throwing you out because he thought your hair are red. People whose accounts are being suspended without warning, without explanation, and without a way to appeal, like in this case, should be able to sue the company for a large…

> Behavior like this is completely unacceptable This comment gives a lot more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp... IMHO, it seems a lot more reasonable.

I love how their final point is "there's just too much content for us to manage".

Google, you're being paid by advertisers for that content. You hold people's entire livelyhoods in the palms of your hands. No individual's ability to access their email should depend on the number of emoticons they're putting into a chat channel.

Step up and put a bit more of your billions of profit every year into making sure you're not destroying lives by empowering poor automation.

Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#78
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not rely on a third party (especially a platform with so inconsistent behavior and unclear rules) when talking about an irreplaceable asset.

Yeah, switching to a better email provider is on my to do list, but it’s a big project that I’ll get around to “someday”. Easier to fly under Google’s radar.

I'm sure some of those commenters in the video stream believed the same thing.

Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#79
post #72
post #21

I wish lawmakers instead of spending time on misguided cookie banner laws, spent more time on things like this. Behavior like this is completely unacceptable, it is equivalent to store owner throwing you out because he thought your hair are red. People whose accounts are being suspended without warning, without explanation, and without a way to appeal, like in this case, should be able to sue the company for a large…

> Behavior like this is completely unacceptable This comment gives a lot more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp... IMHO, it seems a lot more reasonable.

I do understand how difficult it is to deal with spam, and how important it is. I also see that the issue have arised from error/negligence and not from malice. But blocking the whole google account including the email, that can contain very important or urgent information, is completely unacceptable.

A small site like HN can block someone by mistake then apologize and say "Yeah, we definitely fucked up there", but google pushes gmail to make it essential for everything: login to phone, login to chrome, built in password manager in chrome, oauth login to third party sites. So it must handle things much more carefully.

Re: YouTube suspends Google accounts of Markiplier's viewers for minor emote spam

#80
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Behavior like this is completely unacceptable This comment gives a lot more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp... IMHO, it seems a lot more reasonable.

I love how their final point is "there's just too much content for us to manage". Google, you're being paid by advertisers for that content. You hold people's entire livelyhoods in the palms of your hands. No individual's ability to access their email should depend on the number of emoticons they're putting into a chat channel. Step up and put a bit more of your billions of profit every year into making sure you're n…

Exactly, and even if they do not want to spend billions to manage all the content, they should spend at least a few millions and implement per site blocking + warnings, so that a small error in youtube spam filter results in a small issue of youtube account not being able to post comments.

This is just a common sense, because with their current approach of nuking everything and then sending explanations to the blocked email account they are eventually going to upset either enough people or someone wrong, and that will cost them way more.

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