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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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't scale. Scale is just how they made a lot of money. If you make a dollar a billion times you made a billion dollars. The problem is that good customer support costs more than $1. It costs more than what they make from the average user, so the average user can't have it. That would still be true if they had 100 times less users. It's a result of the service being free, not the service being large.

The vast majority of Google users will never need customer support, and those who do probably will mostly have easy problems. There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this. The channel in question has 100K+ subscribers and 17M+ views. That's probably a sizable amount of profit for Google from ads. It it really so unfathomable that google could tun…

> There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this.

Your treating the instant case as the common one, but it's not. And you don't know that until after you've done an investigation, which means you don't know it when deciding whether to allocate resources to an investigation.

It's trivial to game subscribers and views. If having more gets you something then all the actual garbage channels will have plenty and you're back to square one.

Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#232
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to convince a company to provide good service when they can make more money by not doing so.

I'm not sure about that. It's pretty common knowledge that YouTube isn't the endgame for a lot of content creators. If instead, YouTube supported their users more (especially the larger ones) they would have potential to be in the loop for other services like livestreaming, merch, and donations instead of having creators resort to using services like Twitch, Squarespace, and Patreon.

The revenue of Twitch [0], Squarespace [1] and Patreon [2] combined pales in comparison to that of YouTube [3].

The revenue potential in the advertising space cannot be underestimated. Merch has high fixed costs and does not scale dynamically. Live-streaming is inaccessible for both streamers and viewers (in comparison to YouTube videos). Donation fees aren’t a secure revenue source. Either the donators or the creators could turn off donations at any time. But ads are guaranteed. There’s so much to the ad space that isn’t publicly known; Google’s operating on a whole‘nother level.

It’s also a lot more complicated to start ten $300 million projects than to optimize one $3 billion project. The people steering the ship (CEO, CFO, CTO, ...) only have so much time and brain power. They could delegate projects to others, but that requires hiring the right people and that’s really hard. If you have 4 layers of accounting management, and the probability of a bad hire is 25%, the chance of each layer being managed well is only 32%. Whereas if you have only one or a few big projects, you can have less layers, so the probability of success increases all round.

(You might say that Google should do all these projects so can diversify. But why should they take the risk? There are thousands of startups out there testing the waters. They can just acquire those when they show promise. If those startups fail, Google loses nothing.)

(The claims in this comment are educated guesses from reading a lot of articles. I definitely haven’t run a $300 million project!)

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/01/08/report-ama... [1] https://www.drift.com/blog/squarespace-billion-dollar-growth... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elisabethbrier/2019/07/16/next-... [3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#233
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Yes, Google has never been good at customer service. They believe that providing feedback tooling is the better approach. I think Google has succeeded _despite_ this not because of it

Google was always great at _customer_ service, but their only customers are in advertisement, paid subscription SaaS and cloud departments. When you use any other services you are not customer, but a product and no one owe you anything.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#234
post #59

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…

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…

(Disclaimer: I work on YouTube, but all the opinions are strictly my own).

We tried to convey the message [1] that due to corona virus fewer and fewer human reviewers will be available.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-...

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#235
post #100
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 n…

Personally I had very much opposite experience with Google Ads support. For the person who buy ads it's exceptional and with available phone support even if you only buy ads for $100. They can literally explain how every single thing work on their system, giving advice on how to improve campaigns or fix something.

It's very much opposite when it's come to AdSense, but again they don't really care when some webmaster lose his source of income since there will be other webmasters to replace him.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#236

This is extortion. Did Google disclose to you the identity of the party who sent the takedown notice. If not, a lawyer might be able to help here. You have a good case against the other party for extortion, and a weak case against Google for assisting them. There's a strong legal incentive here for Google to disclose the name of the other party, if they are being difficult about doing so. DMCA notices can't be anonym…

Is a circumvention of technology claim part of the DMCA?

Yes. 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A).

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#237

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…

Google support in general (and YouTube specifically) is one of the most incompetent, entitled, and utterly useless systems that exist. Your feeling of YT doing their best doesn't match the reality of how incapable, slow and unhelpful they are. There are many stories of YouTube channels being taken down, receiving strikes for false copyright claims, or just demonetized based on the whims of some virtue signaling employee.

Automating thins is fine, and even getting things wrong is okay. YouTube is nothing without the content that's on it, so it goes without saying that any money-making channel deserves expedited support, especially in cases like this one.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#238
post #219
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Oh please, I've worked on the anti-fraud/abuse system of a large hosting/internet provider in Europe. It was a flexible "if then scoring escalation/ticketing rules". I'm not saying my knowledge applies to all customer support cases, but what happened here would never have happened with our system. Just very simple tricks go a loooong way dealing with malicious people: how old is the account of the "reporter" ? is the…

I too use osTicket for my support escalation needs...

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#239
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to convince a company to provide good service when they can make more money by not doing so.

I'm not sure about that. It's pretty common knowledge that YouTube isn't the endgame for a lot of content creators. If instead, YouTube supported their users more (especially the larger ones) they would have potential to be in the loop for other services like livestreaming, merch, and donations instead of having creators resort to using services like Twitch, Squarespace, and Patreon.

The overlap between Twitch-able content and Youtube-able content is rather small, and the Twitch audience is much smaller (and different) than Youtube's audience.

Patreon and Squarespace are not competitors to Youtube, they're in completely different races.

There is no real competition to Youtube when it comes to UX (specially loading speeds and availability of different resolutions) just due to the sheer number of CDNs and server infrastructure that Youtube has. Youtubers can complain and complain (sometimes rightfully), but 99% of them are not willing to abandon the platform, because that's equivalent to abandoning their online career altogether.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#240
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, if you want to monetize your Youtube, Twitch, or other videos, the partner agreements on those platforms explicitly forbid uploading the same content to other video sites within certain time periods or posting videos on one platform to send users to your preferred platform. In particular, I know that you have to wait at least 24 hours after a Twitch stream to upload the VOD to Youtube, you can't co-str…

They could post a free teaser in YouTube with a link to their main platform.

Against YT tos, Linustechtips got channel blocked for it once.
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