81–90 of 101 posts
Just absurd, the damage of having my entire google account being banned is seriously non-trivial and would easily cost thousands of Dollars worth of time and energy to deal with. I remember having the fear of what's happening here when Google originally purchased YouTube but after years of non-issue I forgot about the possibility. For me, this is the last straw with Google, the risk of being banned for such an arbitr…
The real issue here is that (reportedly) the people who spammed got their GMail accounts shut down. That's outrageous. That's your real-life, not just your online-life. Your GMail account isn't even related at all to your YouTube identity. Remember: if you aren't _at least_ paying for your e-mail service you don't own your own mailbox. When was the last time you made a backup of your GMail account? What contingency p…
I am with you but I think protocols and apps that are designed to allow users to own and host content on primarily their own device would be great.
For mail, what if email was always delivered to device for free and you pay a service provider to mirror it so that while your account is active,they provide backup,spam filtering and content search on their servers?
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> without explanation Common misconception. Let’s assume something as bad as a criminal in prison. Well, they still need their emails. Perhaps not in prison but at least for their recovery. Or to access their bank account. Their retirement funds. Their social security. It’s a misconception that there could be a good reason to entirely revoke any account. Youtube is different. It’s a broadcasting tool.
There can be some special cases when suspending account is justified, e.g. criminal not in prison using the account for criminal activity, someone creating new account and sending spam from it or collecting phishing data. So we do not want to completely prevent companies from banning users who abuse the service and cause financial damage to the company, we want companies to not mistreat the normal users who happened…
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More importantly, pay for your own email DOMAIN. And keep backups of your email. Then, even if your account gets shut down, you can get up and running elsewhere quickly.
Be careful: By hosting your main email on a custom domain(not a provider) you open a new attack vector for identity theft. Someone can hijack your godaddy/namecheap/gandi account and point the MX DNS records of the domain to their own server and receive all your "Forgot your password? here is the link to reset!" emails This a very bad advice unless you actually know what are the risks.
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Be careful: By hosting your main email on a custom domain(not a provider) you open a new attack vector for identity theft. Someone can hijack your godaddy/namecheap/gandi account and point the MX DNS records of the domain to their own server and receive all your "Forgot your password? here is the link to reset!" emails This a very bad advice unless you actually know what are the risks.
Is there a good way to protect against this aside from good password hygiene at your domain registrar? I use namecheap if that is relevant--maybe there's a better/more secure registrar to move to. But I guess, equivalently, someone can just equivalently hijack your email account directly if you use a service like Gmail or Yahoo.
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> Behavior like this is completely unacceptable This comment gives a lot more context: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/dtr6gi/youtube_susp... IMHO, it seems a lot more reasonable.
No, it's not reasonable. >The emote spam in question was not "minor", the accounts affected averaged well over 100 messages each, within a short timeframe. This is a crazy bad take. 100 messages in a few minutes is totally normal for live-streams. Just hold the ctrl-V button and... oops, your G-Mail is locked. That. Is. Crazy. I worked at Twitch and the idea of disabling someones Amazon account for spamming emotes (e…
This boils down to trust. We need to trust that our email provider won’t turn off. We need to trust that our ISP won’t shut off our internet. We need to trust that our cell provider won’t shut off our service. We need to trust that our power company won’t shut off our power. There is simply far too much on the line here to not have protections. The use contract of email providers needs to regulated.
Note that trust != reliability. Trust is an extension of faith beyond available information. Reliability is a statistical measure. You can achieve higher reliability with low trust through surveillance, enforcement, punishment, and/or a limited-options environment. But that's not engendering trust (and may actually be a reasonably good summary of why tech tends to break down trust -- I'm still thinking this through).
Keep in mind that trust is a two- or multi-way street. In our mediated relationships, there's trust between user and provider, provider and user, and third parties. Any or all may be or contain untrustworthy elements. And the channels of information are limited making decisions on who or what to trust challenging.
It's complicated. Though I think Google can and should do better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6746731 [1]
But no.
Just from my own experience, I've been locked out of my Google account[2], my real Google account[3], and of course, when the company, as it on very rare an infrequent occasions does, cancels services, found myself (and a few million others) scrambling to salvage content and communities.[4]
Others have had slightly worse authentication/access situations.[5]
To be fair: the problem is a complicated one, and Google sees a lot of abuse. Or, as in Mariplier's community's experience: activity which looks a lot like spam, at a multi-billion-user scale, which can make assessment difficult.
(Though as has been pointed out: if scale of operations makes reasonable levels of service provisioning prohibitive, perhaps you shouldn't be operating at that scale?)
Google do manage to cull a lot of spam, abuse, and other crud. In my some-time career of trying to get hard numbers regarding aspects of Google+ membership and activity, I found:
- G+ communities were being created and deleted at a prodigious clip of thousands per day. Even in the final months of the site, several hundred thousand new communities were added.
- A strong predictor for whether or not a G+ profile would be deleted was if it had ever posted public content. By a factor of about 10 over profiles with no visible content. Presumably, many of these were spam or other abusive profiles.
- The very most active profiles across a small sampling of recent Communities posts were spammers, and by the time I'd gone back to verify the top few, most or all their content was removed.
When you're operating at large scale, it's difficult to make discerning, accurate, fair, or consistent decisions. That's understandable.
But you should be aware of this and design systems to recover gracefully from errors. Which includes not discomfitting, annoying, or distressing users excessively. Someting Google have repeatedly failed at.
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Notes:
1. The day that item ran, the top three items on HN were either directly or indirectly about my experience or frustrations with the then-new Google+ - YouTube accounts merger. https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&f...
2. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2w618r/how_to_...
3. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3mo7l6/that_go...
4. https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Goals
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-e...
How does this even get coded? Bug in some rules engine for detecting spam?
Which effectively means Google's own engineers don't understand what is happening or why.
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I love how their final point is "there's just too much content for us to manage". Google, you're being paid by advertisers for that content. You hold people's entire livelyhoods in the palms of your hands. No individual's ability to access their email should depend on the number of emoticons they're putting into a chat channel. Step up and put a bit more of your billions of profit every year into making sure you're n…
Exactly, and even if they do not want to spend billions to manage all the content, they should spend at least a few millions and implement per site blocking + warnings, so that a small error in youtube spam filter results in a small issue of youtube account not being able to post comments. This is just a common sense, because with their current approach of nuking everything and then sending explanations to the blocke…
A billion dollars has a lot of employment power. And Google makes around $8-9 billion in profits.
