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I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

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Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#291

Post by wayoutthere »

RandomTisk wrote: post #205
wayoutthere wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a big fan of looking at annual reports to understand a company. Google is not subtle about where its priorities lie. There is a section in their 10-K titled “How we make money” and the two sub-bullets are “Performance advertising” and “Brand advertising”. The rest is a footnote. Their revenue breakdown tells a similar story. Google as a whole had revenues of $161B in 2019, and $134B of that was direct revenue fro…

Does this mean that Google is basically using all their services like Stadia or Fiber to keep people's minds aware of their presence, essentially using these services as their own advertisement outreach while hoping they also return a profit on their own advertisement?

They're using those services to "grab eyeballs" and collect data for advertising. You don't need a ton of users to get enough data about a market via sampling. Stadia is pretty new but I don't see it sticking around for the long haul. Amazon (Twitch) and Microsoft are in a much better position in that market.

Fiber has been effectively cancelled; Google has been shopping it around to various telecoms since 2017 but because it's an overlay network and it's not very large, nobody wants the headache of trying to integrate it. Fiber was always an attempt to push broadband providers to update their networks to better support YouTube; Google was never going to throw down the $100B that it would have taken to be competitive. It was never designed for long-term viability because it didn't need to be to serve its purpose.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#292

Post by close04 »

SXX wrote: post #235
novok wrote: 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…

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…

There are multiple perspectives here: the customer, the support engineer, the senior management, and more.

"Absolute certainty" aside, OP basically just said they saw the mountain from the base (only has the view of the volume of tickets pending in their queue) and most of it is in a cloud, they can't even see the top, it looked big, hard to drill, impossible to shave down to ground level. The "absolute certainty" confirms the point of view.

Senior management see it from above (see the big picture) and see total volume of work, a mathematical division based on resources, the value of each work area, which are core or not, where to focus more resources, and which parts to cut down because they set the end goal.

The customer sees the paid promise of a flat terrain. No mountain, no resources.

Now I don't expect the support engineer to know or care about more than what comes in their queue. That's their only job. But I do know management almost always sees support areas, especially for the "low value/impact" segments, as the best candidates for some savings when you have shareholders to please. Successful management will strike a balance between saving more money from cutting costs than they are losing by losing customers and image. Anything else is considered shortsightedness: they either leave money on the table, or they choke the business for short term gain.

In this particular case YouTube could solve the issues but they have deemed this not worth it. The amount needed to fix this is higher than the return so it can't be justified. Fixing one offs and high visibility cases is cheaper than eliminating the issue entirely.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#293

Post by bemmu »

slightwinder wrote: post #278
movedx wrote: 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…

> Google has approx' one BILLION customers. > What is your suggestion here? Which means they also have one billion potential workers. They could tap into the power of crowd-intelligence. It's probably somewhat easy to forge some processes to oursource certain support-problems which need low human interaction. Something they do with Recaptcha already and IIRC at Google Maps. They could sell Youtube Premium to some tho…

Would be amusing if they integrated it into Recaptcha. "To proceed logging in, please select all the inappropriate images"

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#294

Post by dhimes »

jandrese wrote: post #13

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…

Agree. This will have to be fixed at the legislative level.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#295

Post by 7leafer »

tekkk wrote: post #59
gkoberger wrote: post #12

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…

Here is how YouTube is dong their best about this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=spiderman+elsa

And this, by far, is not the worst case of what's proliferating there.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#296

Post by throwanem »

bencollier49 wrote: post #218
throwanem wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh well, podcasts had a good run.

Switch to Napster. I did, for this reason, and I'm very happy I did.

How does that help prevent podcasts going Spotify-exclusive and ceasing to be podcasts?

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#297

Post by close04 »

yuliyp wrote: post #201
Dylan16807 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'scale' is often used as a cop-out. If you double your customer count, and double your revenue, then you can double your customer support resources. O(n) does not become impractical just because the number gets really big. If they can't deal with something, the fundamental design is wrong, and would fail even if they downsized a thousandfold.

These things are not linear. As your scale grows, the amount of attention from bad actors you receive goes up (from what could basically be 0 for something small). Coordination also becomes more difficult, as does managing the fleet of customer services resources. If you have 1 person doing support, they can deal with the weird cases themselves. If you have 2 people, they need to share information between themselves.…

A lot of things get exponentially more complicated as the company or customer base scales up. You'll notice that the ones that benefit the company and the bottom line somehow manage to keep up. I take this as a sign that any such challenge can be successfully tackled providing you have a genuine interest in that. Things are as they are not because they are technically unsolvable but because this is the degree of interest each one posed for the company.

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#298

Post by [deleted] »

gkoberger wrote: post #12

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…

[deleted]

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#299

Post by Lev1a »

antpls wrote: post #226
causality0 wrote: post #84

Google has an absolute fetish for making the ratio of profit to employees as large as possible. They will do it at any cost. There is no Google service without horrific customer support. Youtube, Google Fiber, Google Fi, doesn't matter. They refuse to accept that having 2x as many customers requires 2x as many support personnel.

Aren't YouTube's customers the advertisers paying to have their ads displayed? YouTubers are not customers. At best, I believe they are "partners" (like with Twitch)

They are the people making the content ad companies can plaster their drivel on.

Essentially YT is a middleman between billboard manufacturers (content creators) and advertisers (drivel manufacturers).

Re: I was blackmailed – any YouTuber could be next

#300

Post by Applejinx »

colechristensen wrote: post #111
tekkk wrote: 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…

If you're living in fear go find a paid platform where you are the customer instead of the product. If you aren't making enough money on YouTube to be able to afford paying someone to host your content and provide better, paid customer service, then you have to consider that the risk of being on a mostly automated, poorly supported platform is the only thing keeping you from losing money, or in other words, is the so…

There's a problem in that: what if you're up against VC-backed silicon valley unicorns whose business case is to overgrow and obliterate anything else in their sector?

In other words, if you can't afford to buy cars and hire drivers and comply with all regulations then don't compete with Uber. The missing part is, Uber intentionally cuts these things out of its business model so you can't… I guess it would be, drive for Uber until you can afford a real taxi medallion.

Likewise, I think being a YouTuber you will NEVER be able to earn enough money that you can jump ship to a competing video service with better conditions, because no such service (?) exists at the scale and audience of YouTube, because YouTube runs at a substantial loss in order to completely own the market for non-trivial uses.

That's valuable. How valuable? Stock market valuable: as in, people with money THINK it is valuable, and I don't think the reality has been well tested yet. We're still in the world where dominating and monopolizing is seen as super valuable, because of some immense perceived payback that you apparently get to do.

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