Ask HN: How to Contact YouTube?

That's the thing! If you read the post I NEVER received ANY warnings... Legit just banned for three strikes over night with NO emails about any of the copyright strikes. No way to appeal or contact youtube about what videos had strikes or on what channel. All I have is speculation based on the termination emails I received.

I need to make this clear now. NONE of the videos were MONETIZED... None of the channels reached watch-time criteria to be monetized because youtube doesn't count shorts. ALL clips where EDITED into shorts and given proper attribution back to the streamers with links in the description and video etc. Some of the streamers even commented and I was able to pin/promo their streams in the comments as well!

MY MAIN CHANNEL. That is ALL purely my content was INCLUDED in the ban. I made the shorts channel in the youtube channel switcher section and they didn't have emails associted. Somehow I could still get emails to my gabnworba@gmail.com account through random page emails like: league-of-legen-63423@pages.plusgoogle.com (they route to my main I guess?)

I'm sorry that I'm not a very good writer and didn't detail all this in my medium post but I was definitely NOT just ripping content as my own and getting paid for it. I only had revenue from my MAIN channel which was terminated with the rest.

I've revised my post to cover the copyright strike situation as you state here. If I understand correctly, you don't actually know if you received the three strikes overnight, right? I imagine it's possible the notices were somehow sent to an email you didn't realize was connected, and if that's the case, the notices might have actually spanned more than one day and you just didn't realize until the final one came.

I agree that you have a right to obtain the notices. Hopefully they provide them to you. But, either way, I'm pretty sure you won't be and shouldn't be getting your account back.

I think even if it turns out they did send you all three strikes at the same instant, they would still be completely in the right here due to the channel apparently being so dedicated to bad faith content pinching and infringement. It probably could've theoretically racked up dozens of strikes.

And it doesn't matter if you gave attribution. You only didn't monetize them because your account wasn't (yet) able to - you surely would have if you had the option. You said it yourself:

>With no way for me to really monetize them, I stopped running the scripts (which would be around the beginning of this month).

Giving attribution is better than not giving attribution, but it's still not close to sufficient. There are lots of channels that make tons of stolen profit off of creators (mostly TikToks and Twitch streams; fancy that...) through ads, sponsorship deals, affiliate links, etc. You very probably would've ended up like all those other exploitative, parasitic content-stealing channels after enough time if you could have and if YouTube didn't shut it down.

Some/many probably use bots like you tried to. They often include attribution. They never include consent from the creators they steal from, and they give the creators they steal from 0% of the profits they make from those creators' stolen content.

The creators often don't even know it's happening. "It's free promotion!" is not a good excuse; if you actually wanted to be a legitimate promoter, you would have done it legitimately, by contacting people and offering such services and working out a content uploading and revenue sharing agreement with each individual ahead of time.

I never received any emails about strikes no even though I would get notification emails about comments etc to gabnworba@gmail.com through those randomly generated page emails? I'm not sure how youtube works when you don't make the channels with an email.

I would just like to put on record it was never my intention to steal from other content creators. The initial idea came as a service I could provide to streamers. I pivoted as one of my streamer friends became popular through a popular clip channel. I figured Instead of trying to charge my friends for a service if I could get one clip channel big enough I could just reproduce that success for all our own clips...

I mean like the first rule of tech is don't be a dick right???

I just feel like it's very unfair of you to assume I'd eventually go down a specific route before it played out.

Also losing my entire livelihood for a programming project hurts enough even without your words.

>I would just like to put on record it was never my intention to steal from other content creators.

I believe you. But that's still what you ended up doing.

>The initial idea came as a service I could provide to streamers.

Then why didn't you make it a service you could provide to streamers, instead of skipping the service and agreement part and just uploading the content first without their knowledge? A little like offering a security service by showing up outside a store with a gun and taking some money off of each customer in exchange for the protection you're graciously providing to the store owner (who has no idea this is going on). Not saying what you did is at all like a protection racket; just trying to illustrate that the difference between a service and a racket is full, up-front consent and explicit agreements.

>I pivoted as one of my streamer friends became popular through a popular clip channel. I figured Instead of trying to charge my friends for a service if I could get one clip channel big enough I could just reproduce that success for all our own clips...

Why not provide this service for your friends for free and offer it to everyone else for a fee, then? (I get the actual reason; I'm just saying it's wrong. Unfortunately, many [not all] "growth hacks" are unethical.) I understand your intention here, but it seems like you may have been placing your friends above strangers to the point of not fully thinking about how the strangers were affected.

>Also losing my entire livelihood for a programming project hurts enough even without your words.

The project could've generated clips and you could've reached out to creators and showed them how the bot worked, with examples, and worked out an arrangement with anyone who was interested. It would've been the same programming project, except it would be ethical, legal, and perhaps directly profitable.

I'm not trying to roast you here at all. You don't seem like a malicious person. You're forthright about what you did. I just think this is a lesson you should take to heart and something you should move on from. If I were you I'd probably be trying to scrub all evidence of this, honestly, instead of trying to make a big deal of it. I know it stings a lot right now, but, trust me, I think you'll be very thankful for this in the future, even if it doesn't seem like it at the moment. Cut your losses.