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Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

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Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#52
post #15

Lots of commenters rushing to chastise the user for not taking pro-active steps to preserve content, since your Google account (or any cloud account once a provider decides you've violated their Terms of Service) may go "poof". Wouldn't it be nice if the platforms themselves helped out with this, instead of luring their users into a false sense of security?

YouTube isn't a cloud storage service, let alone one a paid one. I'm not really sure what you'd expect them to do. If they lost access to their free Google drive I'd be more sympathetic.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#53
post #15

Lots of commenters rushing to chastise the user for not taking pro-active steps to preserve content, since your Google account (or any cloud account once a provider decides you've violated their Terms of Service) may go "poof". Wouldn't it be nice if the platforms themselves helped out with this, instead of luring their users into a false sense of security?

Both of those things are true simultaneously. YouTube and other Google products are advised against for long term storage because Google's acting this way is entirely unacceptable. Until the latter can be fixed, the only real hedge a person has is to simply not rely entirely on Google for anything. That's just the reality of it.

Blame never rests on the user, either way. Google will always have far more power than the user.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#54
post #16
post #2

> youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company I don't mean to be an asshole, but nobody guarantees you that your videos will stay up perpetually on YouTube. Especially if you've got hundreds of private or unlisted videos, it doesn't particularly surprise me that YouTube would pull them down, even if only for petty reasons. If you've been following the state of their website over the past…

> "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs. Except that is exactly how cloud companies market themselves. That is exactly what cloud companies have been telling consumers for a decade+. Right up to the point of commercials showing someone lose a device and saying “no worries, it’s all in the cloud!”, etc. We’ve been told for years that our data is safer in the cloud than it is on our own devices. That the c…

Youtube isn't "the cloud". It's an entertainment provider like TV, it's not really something you mistake for backup of your stuff.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#55

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can…

This is similar to leaving your personal property contents in a storage locker / unit / container that you don't own.

Except it being digital, and given the storage isn't / never was being paid for, you're going to get that much less sympathy from the judicial system - entirely appropriately.

No, there's no legislative solution to something like this. The content owner has no standing and it's difficult to find an argument in favor of why they should.

Use services of companies you can trust, and or host your own content. If the content is important, pay for its hosting, because that's the rational thing to do, buy the service level to match the value of your content. That's the correct solution to this problem. You can't trust YouTube in that sort of use case and we don't need a giant new federal agency to make YouTube host videos long-term against their will, it's absurd. Hosting those videos on Hetzner or DigitalOcean or similar would be inexpensive for a small business (or use a paid video hosting service, I'm sure there are several of those around).

The content owner likely wanted to use YouTube because it's free. That turned out as one might expect.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#56
Mea Culpa I'm in the industry. I knew we should have had backups. She is brilliant but not technical and while the backups would have been expensive and difficult due to size, I should have built multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated.

To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is a paid service (I guess is youtube part of that?) now.

I just assumed if there was a problem we could youtube-dl everything, it didn't occur to me that control of the account would be suspended arbitrarily with no recourse for literally no reason. Despite reading about similar things here for years.

I guess I just thought those were lightning strikes, and I was focusing my time outside of work on the new SPA rollout we were working on for the company. I understand excuses like armpits are something we all have and they all smell, so I'll just say I fucked up and own it.

I appreciate all the advice and I understand why you are all saying what you are saying.

This was spur of the moment post (I didn't think it through) and I hadn't updated my contact information on my profile. I've done so now.

Thanks.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#57

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can…

>At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry.

FDA, youtube edition: alphabet is the only company approved to host videos for public consumption, because they're the only one that has an approved copyright/hate speech filter (regulated for safety, efficacy, ADA compliance, and to be non-discriminatory). All other sites are prohibited from operating unless they spend $5B to get their systems approved.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#58

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can…

What could possibly go wrong with the government policing content stored by a private company?

It’s a little late now. But the answer was for her to backup her videos on $60 USB hard drive and pay a service like Backblaze.

Comparing an agency that is there to make sure people don’t die from bad food and drugs to wanting a government agency to regulate third party content storage that can easily be backed up is nonsensical.

Re: Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

#60

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can…

A friend of mine had a similar problem in Google maps.

He’d spent years adding photos and reviews and his photo views were in the millions, then Google flagged him as doing something that violated their terms.

Within a week his whole account had been taken down and there’s no way to speak to a human about what happened.

Never even received confirmation of which post was in violation and what the issue was.

How did we get to a situation where the people that spend the most time using the platforms end up losing the most and having no way of getting support.

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