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YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

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Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#301
post #269

Update: 3 hours after posting and being on the hacker news front page: 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…

It’s funny how Google’s automated system will flag a small video like yours but I see tons of crypto scams on SpaceX imposter live feeds with thousands of viewers

Indeed. And what's worse they all appear to have the Space X channel name. They look legit the first time you see them unless you treat youtube the same way you do when reading an email, ie looking for phish. And what's worse is that those channels are recommended by the youtube algorithm!!!

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#302
post #41

The problem is not the content of the video, crypto or not. The problem is not that YT moderates aggressively (it doesn't do enough IMHO) or even how it moderates. 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.

People talk about creating an appeals process like it's something Google could just snap their fingers and do, like the commenter in this thread who suggested they should just "hire 100000 moderators". The problem is, scaling a human system like this is extremely difficult and human appeals are notoriously weak against social engineering attacks. It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling billions of users and reliably producing the correct outcome is even possible at any kind of plausible cost.

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?

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#303
post #156
post #65

> I am a paid Youtube Music subscriber 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…

None of Google's shared plans work cross-country - YouTube, Google Play, Stadia, Google One. All of them error, sometimes cryptically ( e.g. "Can't access payment methods"). It should be clearer what the issue is, with clear, concise error messages, but IMHO it's not a bug per se . Different country legislations, copyright, tax codes, prices, etc. etc. make that a complex matter and i see how they wouldn't want to de…

Sorry if that was not clear, my wife and I live on the same address in the same country. Her billing address is same as mine. I checked the net and Google product forums for possible solutions, checked the billing address, Play store settings, nothing helped.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An Internet standard for video delivery and ISP edge caching might be a nice way out... Unfortunately that all seems to be proprietary money making territory right now.

Can we have something like 'municipal fiber' for content? With help of IPFS perhaps?

There are two reasons why P2P has been generally less successful than a lot of us hoped around the turn of the century: the first is largely technical, namely the small number of people with plenty of uplink bandwidth, and something like municipal fiber would actually help a lot there. When people have 1,000/25 connections they have less capacity to share in general and with things like video chat and gaming being common, the amount of idle capacity consistently available is relatively limited.

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.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#305
How much of the underlying issue reduces to incentive structures? Any large entity (Google being one) has plenty of monetary incentive to reduce the number of customer service professionals. Any algorithm that minimizes human interactions is profitable unless it actually costs the company its customers. Thus, since it's almost impossible for Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple to lose a significant proportion of customers, it is almost inevitable that they'll avoid letting anyone speak to a human being when a dispute arises.

This might be a subtle anti-trust "cost" to consumers that is entirely overlooked in congress?

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#306

Presumably, many Googlers who are directly involved in designing and implementing content moderation are active readers of Hacker News, as is evidenced by the fact that having a story hit the front page is an effective way to solve problems like these. 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 mode…

> 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. 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 spe…

Yup. Here’s a good video for what goes on behind the scenes at Amazon’s gaming org for example.

https://youtu.be/aggk93Nazuk

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

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#307

Presumably, many Googlers who are directly involved in designing and implementing content moderation are active readers of Hacker News, as is evidenced by the fact that having a story hit the front page is an effective way to solve problems like these. 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 mode…

> 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. 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 spe…

It's probably not a singular insane executive who just hates good user experiences, either. It's probably a web of incentives that emerge to produce this poor experience:

- 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.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#308
post #269

Update: 3 hours after posting and being on the hacker news front page: 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…

It’s funny how Google’s automated system will flag a small video like yours but I see tons of crypto scams on SpaceX imposter live feeds with thousands of viewers

If u buy ads from them, you are a honorable and valuable customer, regardless if your ad say "send X btc to this address and we will send you back 2X".

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#309
post #269

Update: 3 hours after posting and being on the hacker news front page: 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…

It’s funny how Google’s automated system will flag a small video like yours but I see tons of crypto scams on SpaceX imposter live feeds with thousands of viewers

On the last Apple Keynote I wanted to watch the live on YouTube so I looked for it on YouTube directly and the only results I got were older Apple events and crypto scam lives (on channels named stuff like « AppleEvent », stuff like that).

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

YouTube sucks.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#310
post #302
post #41

The problem is not the content of the video, crypto or not. The problem is not that YT moderates aggressively (it doesn't do enough IMHO) or even how it moderates. 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.

People talk about creating an appeals process like it's something Google could just snap their fingers and do, like the commenter in this thread who suggested they should just "hire 100000 moderators". The problem is, scaling a human system like this is extremely difficult and human appeals are notoriously weak against social engineering attacks. It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling bi…

>It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling billions of users and reliably producing the correct outcome is even possible at any kind of plausible cost.

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.

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