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I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

gamefromscratch.com

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Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#91
post #70
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this. Which makes sense from the SV software engineer perspective, but really is unfathomable to the normal user who then has to live in fear if some malicious teenager decides to ruin their channel. I…

> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them. I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise g…

There has to be something between the best customer service and things like letting shitty "AI" ban accounts without any human intervention.

How hard can it be to augment crowd sourcing and "AI" with some actual humans? If the "AI" is so crappy that it can't figure out an established, popular account is worthy of human support, what problems can it actually solve?

I also wonder why we can't just pay $X to get a human, but I know the answer. Tech companies would just take the money as extra profit and still provide the shittiest quality support possible.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#92
post #70
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this. Which makes sense from the SV software engineer perspective, but really is unfathomable to the normal user who then has to live in fear if some malicious teenager decides to ruin their channel. I…

> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them. I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise g…

We should question the assumption that we need services to be at Google's scale. Especially when it comes to pushing user-generated content to all those costumers.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#93
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it is changing after Joe Rogan is moving to Spotify. He has a point.

Weirdly enough, Spotify's goal is to scoop up all the money that's currently going directly to podcasters by making the advertising market more efficient. They want to enjoy the type of monopoly that Facebook/Google/Amazon currently have online, except in the podcast space.

Oh well, podcasts had a good run.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#95

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem. I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1] It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge…

In my view, if platforms like YouTube/Twitter/Facebook are going to exercise editorial control over the content they host, they should be held fully responsible for all of the content that isn't taken down.

If these organizations don't want to be responsible for the content on their platforms, then they shouldn't censor content unless ordered to by a judge.

They want it both ways - full editorial control, but no responsibility.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#96

It seems like the extortionists can keep sending claims until they stumble across a YouTube moderator who guesses wrong and clicks the "this claim was legit" button. Even if 90% of the moderators would get it right eventually your video is going to be down for good. Even humans make mistakes sometimes, so human-in-the-loop isn't a perfect solution. The thing that really doesn't make sense to me is that when a moderat…

If Google created systems to defend against a single actor spamming their reporting system, it would be an admission that they're aware that they aren't capable of identifying and filtering that out automatically.

"We don't pay for fraud traffic, we don't bill our advertisers for fraud traffic, and youtube analytics represent real users not bots" is pretty much Google's whole business model.

They can survive being caught being mistaken, but it's much worse for them to be caught lying.

So they have to pretend to believe that reporting spam represents large numbers of real humans filing mistaken or dishonest reports that they have to manually review.

This doesn't have anything to do with the media cartels though -- they have access to ContentID and can take down YT videos without filing reports or involving Google employees at all. Media companies wouldn't care if YT removed the report feature entirely.

If you're looking for a corporation to blame for this it's the advertisers, they don't want to see their ads next to brand-unsafe videos. YT has outsourced the hard work of actually watching and classifying videos for appropriateness to the report system. They assume that once they take down anything that catches a lot of reports, whatever is left will be anodyne enough to be brand-safe.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#97
post #3

I keep reading these horror stories about YouTube. It must really suck, as there are alternatives, but they just don't have the audience YouTube has. I guess there just isn't much we can do about this apart from hosting elsewhere when necessary?

https://lbry.tv/ - they also recently launched paid videos, so you can get paid if you make premium content.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#98

Hi so this is illegal. Call the FBI. Extortion and coercion are felonies in all 50 states.

"Hello, FBI? This random guy on the Internet is extorting me."

FBI: 'Go away and come back when you have a name and address, and can prove the guy is under our jurisdiction.'

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#99

This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem. I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1] It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge…

This is a money problem. Google don't want to spend money on human curation. The cost of that is that legitimate channels lose income.

I feel bad for authors that use the platform because they must to reach a sizeable audience, yet the platform does not care about them because they are not Vevo.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#100
post #70
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are really doing their best. If other Google's support forums are any indicator of their effort, they are mostly trying to automate the whole process as much as possible which then causes errors like this. Which makes sense from the SV software engineer perspective, but really is unfathomable to the normal user who then has to live in fear if some malicious teenager decides to ruin their channel. I…

> Instead of actually trying to create the best customer service I've worked in high volume customer services. It's not easy for the agents doing the work or the companies operating them. I've worked in multiple call centers dealing with calls and tickets. I've worked in companies in which I dealt with mobile phone bill queries and hardware issues right up to Cisco networking problems and then eventually enterprise g…

They might have 1 billion free users, but they definitely don't have 1 billion partners or 1 billion paying customers.

Google's customer service is horrible even for organizations that pay them +$10k/month or make them +$10k/month for ad sales, and that is a far smaller number.

You would think they could at least scale customer support properly for that much smaller number, but they don't because culturally they do not want to. Even people who have used google cloud services say the support is bad compared to AWS. Google stands out as a corp that is really bad at customer service.

While apple, amazon, AWS & many other companies provide customer support that mostly works for customers who provide maybe $40/month max in revenue. They don't even let you self pay for your own support at google in most cases.

I bet youtubers who live on their work on youtube would gladly pay $100 to deal with one off incidents like these that might happen once a year if it meant they had proper thought applied to their issues for example.

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