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YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

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Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#41
post #22

500000000th person discovers google is not creating youtube for you, but for them to make cash. Crazy story. Really shocking and definitely not one of the most standard complaints in existence. Anyways, there's absolutely no such thing as "I can't stop paying for this". Just do a chargeback on your card. It's not a real problem.

You probably do agree that this should not be normal. And not the expected way to get your money back? There is no blocklist option at my bank, so I'd have to do that every month in perpetuity?

Simply because I cannot login and cancel my account?

side note, these are things I feel should be: 1. Illegal: "noreply@" addresses. My inbox is not a dumping ground and email is two way, not one way. 2. Required: phone numbers on you website, easily found, that are picked up by humans.

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#42
post #22

500000000th person discovers google is not creating youtube for you, but for them to make cash. Crazy story. Really shocking and definitely not one of the most standard complaints in existence. Anyways, there's absolutely no such thing as "I can't stop paying for this". Just do a chargeback on your card. It's not a real problem.

> discovers google is not creating youtube for you, but for them to make cash

This isn't the cop-out you think it is. Plenty of profit-making businesses have great customer service. Google's crap service is entirely on itself.

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#43
post #26
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had similar experience. My best guess is that the account never went through the various age verification flows (since it was that old, it predated all that) and ended up being marked for deletion- I suspect that they had a bug (legal or in code) that prevented warning emails to get out. I got lucky to detect it early, since they disabled AI a few weeks before account deletion.

My gmail account still has the "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail." mail in it from June 2004. The account itself is over 21 years old. I wonder if I'll get forced to age verify myself any time?

As the owner of a GMail account which is also of legal adult age (and a Reddit account which will be 18 this year), I am morbidly curious what will happen once these mandatory "age verification" start to be enforced.

It should be trivial for Google and Reddit to grandfather-in accounts which are more than 18 years old (arguably less, who created their account when they were, e.g. 5 years old?). However, I'm betting they will come up with all sorts of rationalisations as to why this is not possible, anything from the bullshit ("not technically feasible" my ass) or the self-contradictory ("an account may have changed owner"... so in violation of the ToS? And what's to stop an account from changing ownership after age verification?).

I admit I am prematurely riling myself up with indignation for something which may never happen. Maybe I am wrong and Google, Reddit, etc. take the common sense approach, but I have no hope in it.

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#44
post #25

Easy fix, wait for the next billing, contact the bank explaining what happened, and block that and future debits. At least in Australia, this shouldn't be a problem.

Same for uk. Can cancel direct debits from the bank website. Things like this would probably not be via direct debit though

Yeah. Recurring card purchases are hard to stop. They can keep going even after the card has been cancelled or expired. The direct debit guarantee is so nice in comparison.

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#45
Did you or did you not publish AI "music" on YouTube? This half AI written rant looks like an angry Rathbun bot. It needs a summary.

YouTube is clamping down on AI content because they know people hate it and leave YouTube.

There is no money in generative AI. Google needs to advertise to humans and not to Rathbun.

That is why Disney cancelled the Sora deal.

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#46

Easy fix, wait for the next billing, contact the bank explaining what happened, and block that and future debits. At least in Australia, this shouldn't be a problem.

> Easy fix, wait for the next billing, contact the bank explaining what happened, and block that and future debits

You'd also want to mail a letter to Google documenting that you're cancelling your subscription. Cancelling a payment method alone doesn't void a contract.

I doubt Google would do this. But there are plenty of trashy litigation-finance shops that buy up these abandoned contracts for pennies on the dollar and then try to collect. Even if you never give them any money, it would trash your credit for a while.

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#47
post #11

it's besides the point of the post but > That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it. I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated mus…

> flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. This is questionable. Did generated code decrease the price of software products?

Generated code isn't a product but a generated song is. And it definitely reduced the value.

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#48

Easy fix, wait for the next billing, contact the bank explaining what happened, and block that and future debits. At least in Australia, this shouldn't be a problem.

By comparison, Goldman, the bank operating Apple Card in the U.S., has previously refused to perform that block future debits process for me; they simply didn’t have the capability. I ended up closing my account with them to stop the charges, which worked perfectly. I envy Australia’s apparent regulation to compel merchants to do so.

As an additional data point, in the UK I can just login to my banking app and remove the authorisation for a particular vendor (or, for people who don't use online banking, I could phone up to do the same thing).

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#49
post #11

it's besides the point of the post but > That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it. I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated mus…

> flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. This is questionable. Did generated code decrease the price of software products?

Price, no. Value - probably.

Re: YouTube locked my accounts and I can't cancel my subscription

#50
post #22

500000000th person discovers google is not creating youtube for you, but for them to make cash. Crazy story. Really shocking and definitely not one of the most standard complaints in existence. Anyways, there's absolutely no such thing as "I can't stop paying for this". Just do a chargeback on your card. It's not a real problem.

So how is this supposed to convince me to give YouTube money directly or indirectly by buying a subscription and disabling my ad blocker? Stories like this reinforce my decision to never give YouTube a single cent.
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