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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

#371

Post by shkkmo »

nybble41 wrote: post #341
shkkmo wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Wha…

> … this is a huge problem that we need to hold companies legally accountable for. Legally accountable for what ? They do not owe anyone free access to their service. If you're a paying subscriber then they do owe at least their choice of a refund or continued service until the end of the current subscription period—unless they can demonstrate that you were the one that broke the contract—but they are have no obligat…

> Legally accountable for what?

The legally accountable for providing a product that doesn't cause undue harm to the population.

> They do not owe anyone free access

I pay for services from Google, so does the entire customer base of the play store. The user in the published article was a paying YouTube music customer.

> but they are have no obligation to let you renew,

I would disagree. When companies are allowed to become large enough that they have a significant effect on the ability for alternatives to compete in the marketplace, they assume an obligation to provide access to that marketplace to everyone. I absolutely do not buy that large service providers have the right to deny service to someone simply because they don't like them.

Additionally, when you form a business relationship, even when that relationship consists of exchanging your product for their data, there is am entirely reasonable expectation that the relationship won't be severed without cause. This is an expectation that enables commerce and it is to the benefit of a nation to enable those expectations where possible.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#372

Post by nybble41 »

reginold wrote: post #362
nybble41 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can vouch for Forward Email ( https://forwardemail.net/ ). It's easy to set up if you have your own domain, you can continue using Google Mail if you like (for both receiving and sending), their message size limits are higher than Gmail's, you can set up multiple aliases and (optional) catch-all addresses, and they offer a free tier if cost is an issue. The big advantage of the reasonably-priced paid tier is privac…

Oh neat, glad to hear about this. Do they have any blogs/content about why to do this for people like the parent of this thread? While their FAQ seemed great to me, I'm someone already familiar with why this is important and generally how to do it. I could see it being overwhelming to someone just considering the idea. https://forwardemail.net/en/faq#table-of-contents

I don't believe Forward Email runs a blog, but this article[0] has a fairly good summary of how forwarding works and why one might want to set that up. The short version, in the context of this thread, is that it allows you to accept email on your own domain without running your own email servers. And if you ever want to change email providers in the future (or start running your own servers) you just need to edit some settings either in your DNS records or your Forward Email account; the email address everyone uses to contact you remains the same. Whereas if everyone knows you as username@gmail.com then you need to somehow get word out to your entire contact list—potentially without access to your old email account!—to let them know your new address.

Forward Email does a pretty good job with onboarding new users, in my opinion. Yes, some technical know-how is expected (you do need to know how to update DNS records for your domain, for example) but they give you step-by-step instructions both for setting up the MX and TXT records in DNS and for configuring your Google Mail account (or possible others, I didn't check) to allow sending email using your new address. I found it simpler to set up the forwarding itself than to go around to all my accounts and update the email addresses; that part is still a work in progress.

[0] https://medium.com/hackernoon/when-and-how-to-use-2019s-best...

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#373

Post by 015a »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #5
pornel wrote: post #3

Why are you using legacy centralized web 2.0 platforms ruled by fiat money? Put your video on IPFS, give it an ens.domain, mint an NFT for it. With an eth filecoin bridge it will fund its own censorship-resistance forever. That tech is great and has obsoleted web 2.0. Don't trust Google, self-govern!

I can't tell if this is satire.

Why are you using new web 3.0 platforms ruled by distributed money? Put your video on AWS S3, give it a domain name, and put CloudFront in front of it. With a horizontal load balancer and autoscaling, resource provisioning isn't an issue. That tech is great, and web 3.0 isn't necessary. Don't trust the distributed web, trust AWS!

Now, I can't tell if what I'm saying is satire. But it does, at least, make sense, right? Because they're all terms you know and have familiarity with.

Don't dismiss something simply because you don't understand it. There's a ton of complexity in Web3. There's a ton of complexity in Web2; you just understand the complexity well enough to the point of it no longer being complex.

Maybe its satire. Or, maybe; Then they laugh at you. Its hard to say at this stage.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#374

Post by aznicht »

gwerbret wrote: post #283

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…

I wonder what do you expect to hear? I don't have anything to do with youtube or its moderation approaches. But I had some experience with automatic content moderation. Imaging a system contains of tens (hundreds) of signal sources. Signal might be as complex as ML model resolution or as simple as static list of stopwords. And everything in between. With sufficiently large rate of new content to moderate (and I guess YT has a lot), you don't deal with specific moderation decisions. For you they are just points in your metrics. So you can't treat all blocks as probably false-positive, you react only to drastic change in trends. In such system the only way to solve single false-positive - human intervention. So you have some operators who process appeals. But human operators are not cheap, so first you try to increase their productivity - for example by preprocessing data for them. So they (for example) don't need to watch the video, they get transcript, probably part of it, that triggered the signal. So it might be possible that these 15 minutes were enough for human operator to make a decision based on some substring of transcript, which without context was enough for them to mark author as fraud. Or you can go even further - you can skip operator if content got enough bad signals.

My point here is that the problem is not entirely technical. You can't make ideal model without false-positive. You just try to optimise it by using discovered cases like this as input to bake better one. So the only thing to blame here - not enough human operators. Thats why you probably don't get any answers here from google engineers. The root cause either not technical, or too technical to comment it outside.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#375

Post by ivegotnoaccount »

wayoutthere wrote: post #323
ivegotnoaccount wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, do you actually get as many ads on YouTube as on TV ? With the former, I am used to 2 10-seconds to 1-minutes ads every 10-15 minutes and that are usually skippable (~16% in the worst case). On TV, at least in France, there are at least as many ads, but they can't be skipped.

Yes it’s gotten pretty egregious. I generally get 30 seconds of non-skippable ads every 5 mins or so. I haven’t watched broadcast TV in probably 10 years so maybe I’m not remembering how bad it is, but I have a hard time watching YouTube with how frequent (and poorly targeted) the ads are.

Wow, if it gets to this level, I can understand. If you don't mind, what country do you live in ? I am kinda curious of if it is related to location.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#376

Post by nybble41 »

shkkmo wrote: post #371
nybble41 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … this is a huge problem that we need to hold companies legally accountable for. Legally accountable for what ? They do not owe anyone free access to their service. If you're a paying subscriber then they do owe at least their choice of a refund or continued service until the end of the current subscription period—unless they can demonstrate that you were the one that broke the contract—but they are have no obligat…

> Legally accountable for what? The legally accountable for providing a product that doesn't cause undue harm to the population. > They do not owe anyone free access I pay for services from Google, so does the entire customer base of the play store. The user in the published article was a paying YouTube music customer. > but they are have no obligation to let you renew, I would disagree. When companies are allowed to…

> When companies are allowed to become large enough that they have a significant effect on the ability for alternatives to compete in the marketplace, they assume an obligation to provide access to that marketplace to everyone.

I would disagree. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results." There is no obligation to keep doing things the same way they've "always" been done. Every interaction is decided on a case-by-case basis. One does not forfeit freedom of (dis)association through mere inertia; one retains the right to make exceptions or to change one's mind.

> Additionally, when you form a business relationship, even when that relationship consists of exchanging your product for their data, there is am entirely reasonable expectation that the relationship won't be severed without cause.

I might be willing to buy that, to a point. The usual rule is that the expectations need to have a reasonable basis in the contract and any liability is limited to the direct impact of having those reasonable expectations disappointed. However, even paid services routinely disappear on short notice, for various reasons. Assuming that a paid service will be maintained well after the current subscription term elapses is not reasonable. Neither is assuming long-term access to a free service.

> … it is to the benefit of a nation to enable those expectations where possible.

Then "the nation" can very well lead the way by offering its own services (on a voluntary, non-tax-supported basis, naturally) and not by, in effect, nationalizing a private service by imposing its own terms.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#377

Post by jandrese »

myself248 wrote: post #346
jandrese wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense in a weird way. The spammers have full time jobs figuring out Google's algorithm and how to manipulate it. Regular content creators don't, so they tend to get clobbered by the algorithm. As Google continues to tighten the algorithm to fight spam, eventually the only users who will be able to post are the spammers.

If Google were a solo schlub in their basement writing code because they didn't have time to do manual review, that would be understandable, even excusable. But last I checked, they were the #5 largest company in the world. You'd think that an issue that's obvious to literally everyone who uses the platform would also be obvious to even a handful of manual reviewers, and they could take the fight to the spammers a li…

More likely they outsource the review job to a contractor who operates out of whichever country currently has the most lax labor laws. The contractor hires only the cheapest labor they can find and sets a quota like reviewing at least 360 complaints every hour for their 12 hour shift. Also, if the workers allow an actual bad faith objection to go through they get penalized.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#378

Post by haswell »

dredmorbius wrote: post #370
haswell wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, there's some great information in this comment. Thanks for taking the time to elaborate. However, we're on very different wavelengths and having conversations about two very different things. > My goal is to try to inject some awareness or concept of scale and accuracy being demanded. You've had the opportunity to do so, you've neglected that option, instead doubling down on the emotive argument. You're doing…

"Hijacking a thread" is a strong claim to be made against a discussion which begins with a shallow criticism based on an entirely unsubstantiated claim that both false-positive and false-negative claims are both highly prevalent. (Specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29461038 ) Among other issues, if you want to solve a problem, it helps to accurately describe it. And the problem description here is not…

You seem to have missed the point entirely. Let me summarize this a different way.

You can't personally control the lens through which people look at problems or discuss ideas. Someone approaching a problem differently than you is not automatically a signal that they are wrong, but that they think differently than you do.

I may have communicated that poorly through the examples I offered, but bottom line: you and I are having conversations about entirely different things.

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#379

Post by Iolaum »

parasense wrote: post #338
Iolaum wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!!!

Actually, what happens is a channel you were subscribed to, or one which you have consumed enough content from to influence the YT algorithm.... has been compromised, taken over, the password was discovered by crypto miners. They take over the channel, change a bunch of settings, etc... then start spewing out the usual Space-X live stream crypto-mining pyramid-scam. Sometimes if you look at the channel hosting the li…

In the two cases I noticed when I investigated the channel looked like it had no uploads other than what I was watching. And there was no visible subscriber count, which I interpreted as likely almost no subscriber. I think YT algorithm tends to push live streamed content.

If I see it again I 'll check if the channel has been hijacked or anything else I can find. I 'd rather not see it again though :p

Re: YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video

#380

Post by dredmorbius »

haswell wrote: post #378
dredmorbius wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hijacking a thread" is a strong claim to be made against a discussion which begins with a shallow criticism based on an entirely unsubstantiated claim that both false-positive and false-negative claims are both highly prevalent. (Specifically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29461038 ) Among other issues, if you want to solve a problem, it helps to accurately describe it. And the problem description here is not…

You seem to have missed the point entirely. Let me summarize this a different way. You can't personally control the lens through which people look at problems or discuss ideas. Someone approaching a problem differently than you is not automatically a signal that they are wrong, but that they think differently than you do. I may have communicated that poorly through the examples I offered, but bottom line: you and I a…

You can't personally control the lens...

That sword cuts both ways.

I'm not trying to control. I am trying to shine a light on the issue in an area that seems to be pervasively underilluminated.

You're the one who's lashed out several times now against that. If that's not an attempt at control, I don't know what it is.

If you find yourself in a conversation you're not having, one option is to leave.

Another is to see if that conversation might be one that you would benefit from.

That said, someone's hijacked this thread from a direct discussion of the phenonomenon originally at hand to several levels of meta, and in a markedly uninteresting and unilluminating direction.

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