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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

#421

Post by jonwinstanley »

summm wrote: post #134
jonwinstanley wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would he work for free for Google in the first place?

The gamification was a factor but also the person really enjoyed having their photos viewed by a lot of people.

They’d go out and photograph places that had poor photos on maps to improve them.

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

#422

Post by Tozen »

ilamont wrote: post #97

How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action? No warning. No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy." No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative. N…

And that's how they like it, extreme "techno-authoritarianism". Making as hard as possible to appeal decisions or access higher management, and the facade of customer service is usually into ignoring or gaslighting customers to the point of sadism.

Ban or shadow-ban whenever

Raise prices whenever

Sell your private info to whomever

Violate your privacy however

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

#423

Post by Tozen »

Sad situation, and hindsight is always 20/20 with such. Probably would have been good to have also uploaded videos to other similar sites/alternatives like Dailymotion, DTube, etc... In addition to the free/cheap cloud storage options or buying external HDDs.

Google/YouTube will continue to ignore, abuse, and gaslight when they think there isn't any competition and can get away with it.

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

#424

Post by Siira »

vero2 wrote: post #349
kalleboo wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Tech Tips built and installed a custom ZFSonLinux server, which I'd also not suggest OP does. The difficulty in managing a NAS is completely different if you buy two off-the-shelf Synology boxes and log in and point-and-click turn on snapshot sync between the two and create an Amazon Glacier backup task.

Perhaps you need to look at average human trying to setup a router/DSL modem in a house hold. Then you may note that all your second sentence is a large task for any CEO. (No offence they are good in their field but anything more than dropbox or email or drive is a no go!)

CEOs are supposed to, like, delegate.

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

#425

Post by Siira »

ilamont wrote: post #97

How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action? No warning. No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy." No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative. N…

Your suggestion might increase the costs so much that we will simply not have such free services. It’s best to limit expert support to actual purchases (like ebooks, apps, etc.) and services that have explicit guarantees.

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

#426

Post by Tozen »

S_A_P wrote: post #237

YouTube deleted my account a few months ago. The reason was totally unfounded and I had no recourse. I’m pretty certain some AI flagged my account and instead of a sensible approach like 1) notify the user that something they did was flagged. 2) point to the instance where the supposed bad behavior happened and allow review/context by humans 3) see that my YouTube account was 12-13 years old and had only a handful of…

The arrogance and abusiveness of Google/YouTube is that they don't see any competition nor have fear of legal actions against them by "lowly" "nobody" users. More people have to choose alternatives to the point that Google/YouTube management will notice and be concerned about.

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

#427

Post by Tozen »

alienbeast wrote: post #240
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the issue is Google often takes down accounts with illegal content using the same process as here. Imagine the very real scenario that Google found CSAM on an account: They aren't going to let you access it or download it again for any amount of money. And that's the problem here: With no humans in the process, YouTube treats ordinary users and predators exactly the same way, because ultimately, algorithms are stu…

Solution: A button that says "Click here to pay $5 for a human to review your situation."

Good idea. Not sure why YouTube/Google doesn't do it. As you would think there is good money in it and better user relations. Possibly they like the authoritarian algorithm approach, and feel they are making enough money, so don't need to bother with alternatives or "lowly user" issues.

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

#428

Post by Tozen »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #202
stjohnswarts wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think that google is smart enough to give content a score based on popularity and sheer amount of content (and existence time) and allocate those to humans to review and handle.

perhaps someone having setup the automated system should think, hmm, false positives are rare, but they happen on single items, meaning that people who have lots of items increase their chance of having a single false positive in their collection and thus we will have situations that will seem unfair and idiotic to people outside Google if we remove access to collections of data for a positive hit for violating conte…

Very good points. The longer the person has been using YouTube and the more data accumulated, clearly the math shows the more likely they are to get hit with false positives.

The flip side of this, is where YouTube/Google is finding excuses to conduct "purges" of data and older accounts. They know what they're doing is wrong, but it has plausible deniability to it.

So easy to pull, "Don't blame us, blame the algorithm." As if it isn't people programming and supervising it, and there isn't loads of user complaints as to what's going on.

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

#429

Post by makeitdouble »

ghusbands wrote: post #370
makeitdouble wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GDPR rules would be cleared with Google effectively deleting all the data, which could be their laziest solution to a legal request…

Deleting data in response to a GDPR request is explicitly illegal under the GDPR.

I stand corrected

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

#430

Post by ehnto »

p1esk wrote: post #400
ehnto wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, if you feel like you have a handle on your personal situation and are comfortable with the level of risk then by all means don't be worried. When I say catastrophic, I don't necessarily mean catastrophic to your entire life with no way forward. I just mean your digital life will be pretty toast and you'll have to start again on a lot of platforms that don't make the email changeover easy. That's not goin…

Well, if I lose access to gmail the first thing I do will be switching all important online services to a new email. I’m curious though, which online services would be really bad to lose access to (for you personally)?

How are you going to log in to anything using Google SSO? It's not the email address that logs you in, it's the authentication handshake from your google account. Anything using 2FA, or one time passcodes to your email address for new devices?

One example is when I lost access to an email account tied to a Digital Ocean account. It had been hosting a project VM and I never had a need to log in to it until the project shut down. I try and log in and although the credentials are right, it needs me to verify a one time code from my email address to prove I am not a bot. Couldn't do that. I never gained access back, DO required me to give them a full suite of proof of ID before I could even get them to disconnect my credit card, and even to this day it periodically restarts charges against my card and I have to contact them. Each time they escalate to engineering and engineering says they "Fixed the issue". Now times that experience by potentially dozens of accounts.

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