I keep hearing stories about similar issues. Suddenly someone is terminated from a Google service for unknown reasons, without any possibility of reversing such decisions.
This appears to be true of Twitter and others as well.
From my vantage point, it appears to be quite arbitrary. And quite concerning in a number of cases, given the centralization of email, docs, etc.
I do make backups of google content every so often.
I guess the irony of making a copy of a cloud set of services data locally, as you may not be able to trust that these services will be there over longer intervals, is either ironic ... or problematic.
It speaks directly to the concept of risk of extended supply chains ... is the risk to your data, and ability to interact with services worth maintaining a presence on the systems?
This behavior on their and related tech giants generally makes me question how much we should rely on them for important things (like permanent email addresses) over time. This has been making me uneasy for a while, and seeing more stories like this is not quelling my discomfort.
It used to be much harder to knock someone you didn't like offline. You used to have to organize a DDOS attack. But now, all you have to do is organize a much easier mass-flagging attack. We need to update our threat models to account for how unreliable major platforms have become.
We can no longer rely on these companies. After big tech spent so much time investing in their own infrastructure, they are undermining themselves like this.
We need to just accept that a major liability of using a major platform like this is that your content may be removed and your account deleted, for unknown reasons.
Want to host your podcasts? Well don't rely solely on Apple Google or YouTube, they are not up for the job. Instead, you have to span it on multiple platforms and tell your audience where to find you if you get deleted.
This concept of de-platforming is becoming more and more prevailant.
The big techs cannot differentiate between legitimate de-platforming vs a Denial of Service de-platforming. I think while the big techs have a legitimate concern for de-platforming things that are deemed hate speech, this same power can be utilized by individuals to target a de-platforming for people whose opinions they don't like.
I think big techs should consider a public-court like system - where in order to deplatform, a jury of peers should be used to make judgements.
> The big techs cannot differentiate between legitimate de-platforming
I can try to give some guidelines, I'd love to see improvements (and also like to know if anyone points out I'm wrong :-)
Legitimate de-platforming is
a) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on a request from law enforcement followed by a review by the platforms staff to verify that the request is genuine and that the reasons stated are valid.
The account should still not be deleted for a certain number of days, and if requested by the user or organization, relevant details should be made available to them to take fight it in court against the relevant law enforcement agency.
b) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on an written policy, known by the users of the platform in advance and verified by a second team. Upon request an explanation of why the account was deplatformed should be made available.
> b) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on an written policy, known by the users of the platform in advance and verified by a second team. Upon request an explanation of why the account was deplatformed should be made available.
That alone would be great. They should have to justify exactly why they removed someone. And by making it explicit, they open a pathway for legal action.
But more importantly, these platforms need to be declared public utilities and forced to be transparent. This is not controversial and is usually welcomed by the public when it happens. Most public utilities that we enjoy today started out as being completely private.
The fire dept would let your house burn down if you were late with your bills. The telegraph company would ban you from their private network if you were a journalist that criticized them. The electric companies would make you agree to onerous terms to get electricity. And currently we have this mess with private medical insurance companies and tech platforms.
Edit: added quotes. Added part about not wanting any social network nationalized.
> But more importantly, these platforms need to be declared public utilities and forced to be transparent. This is not controversial and is usually welcomed by the public when it happens.
Even just a real threat that it might happen might, if it became visible enough, drive some introspection and push them in right direction.
> It is time for us to nationalize Facebook.
Assuming you are from US (but mostly valid anyway): Not sure if I'd want your president, now or in 6 years, to have more say over the biggest social media networks than they already have.
Note that even accepting your previous paragraphs, this doesn't follow. Most public utilities are already not nationalized afaik; I'm not american, but none of my electricity, gas, water, phone or internet are provided by government-owned or -operated companies, and I'd be surprised if it was much different over there. They're regulated, but not nationalized.
I was at Joyent when we deplatformed some group. The vast majority of the company was for this action, based upon what they interpreted as "their values." Their values were not shared in whole across the entire company. Some of us believed that speech, no matter how repugnant it is, should not be constricted.
This is the nature of the 1st amendment in the US. The government cannot restrain speech.
A private company was another matter. They can do whatever they want, within the boundaries of law. 1st amendment doesn't apply in this case.
The concern I had was that this would become "easier", and more frequent.
It has. This was the nature of my concern, that the slope would be more slippery.
Justifications for banning are getting "easier". Groups celebrate this deplatforming as "victories."
No one seems to worry much about the long term consequences of this. Well, Cloudfare did for a while, but then it stopped.
Right now, its hard for me to tell if bans are for ToS violations, or political wrongthink. I am troubled by this. ToS violations are generally fine, as long as the ToS aren't onerous. Most aren't. Wrongthink violations ... think of when the political winds shift, and when current rightthink becomes wrongthink.
Niemöller's poem[1] becomes an apt metaphor in this case.
Government can and does restain speach. It issues gag orders, classifies information, places and enforces injunctions, and facilitates private bounds on speech through patent, trademark, and copyright law, trade secrets, and recognition and enforcement of nondisclosure and nondisparagement contracts. Even forms of observation may be limited under espionage or treason laws. Limits are placed on incitement, inflammatory speech, pornography, indecency, and "fighting words".
Freedom of speech, as with other legal and civil rights, is an ideal, not an absolute. It has evolved tremendously within the US, arriving at a form we'd recognise currently only in the 1950s and 60s, about 60 years ago. The famous "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre" objection was raised in a case (Schenck) in free speech was found not to apply to anti-draft advocates during WWI, barely over a century ago.
And the US Supreme Court's "marketplace of ideas" standard is similarly quite problematic, owing far more to free-market fundamentalist advocacy than some doctrine of prevailing truth.
Turns out it was always more a bit of pro-free-market-fundamentalism propaganda than a pro-truth notion.
See Jill Gordon, “John Stuart Mill and the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’"
What big tech is doing so clearly violates the principles of free speech that I can't see an argument for it. It goes well beyond people expressing unpopular opinions, to the point of interfering with markets and elections.
Twitter has been interfering in elections by selectively deplatforming candidates that they don't like. It is so obvious that the biggest threat to the integrity of American elections is big tech. I can't believe that there are some that think that Russia buying a few thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads is a bigger threat than Google.
Simple and fair. The above idea is what happens when you stick a reasonable, smart person without an agenda into a room and ask them to simply solve a problem without politics.
There already are laws, regulations and courts that rule on the exceptions to free speech. This should never be in the hands of a private company to decide.
These 'platforms' perpetually dance around issues and present a different face dependent on who they talk to on what issue.
We also need to update our definition of freedom of speech. It's commonly repeated on the Internet that freedom of speech doesn't cover private platforms. That's true because in 1791, when the First Amendment was written, only the government could impact individual freedom of speech. But now large companies can do it very effectively because they own the platforms everyone is using. Sure, you can still express yourself by shouting on the street or self-publishing a book, but that isn't a at all in the spirit of the Constitution. In practice, individuals can be silenced.
The principle of common carriers, over which all (lawful) conduct is permitted, including postal, telegraph, and telephone services, as well as equal-time and community-access broadcast services, offer alternate models.
I'm finding the "private platform, no free-speech rights" argument increasingly thin on platforms aggreggating hundreds of millions or billions of eyes and ears, and increasingly inextricably bound to social, commercial, and governmental institutions and activities. At the same time, the wild west alternative has also proved untenable, with strong civil-rights groups including EFF and ACLU increasingly acknowledging and accommodating this reality.
That’s exactly the spirit of the constitution. Back then few people could afford a printing press, so your ability to reach the masses could easily be frustrated by the refusal of private entities that did.
But the founding fathers never thought it necessary to regulate printing presses to ensure the access of minority opinions. The First Amendment was explicitly written to prevent that kind of social intervention.
I think they’d tell you, set up your own server and your own service, it’s not hard.
The principle of "spread across multiple platforms" is fundamentally inconsistent with a "safest holdout".
You need to hedge your bets.
You need to realise that free services can be discontinued, paid contracts can be terminated, content or accounts can be flagged, copyright or patent claims may be asserted (more the former than the latter, generally, but expect patent claims on more capable systems), domains may be hijacked or squatted, and self-hosted systems may be DDoSed, require ongoing maintenance, moderation (if user / third-party content is permitted), etc.
POSSE -- Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere -- is probable the most robust option overall.
Yes, what I've been saying is that we're moving back to where we were 20 years ago. We're moving back to a hosting model where you can not completely rely on any hosting company to get the job done.
Big tech companies changed things a lot, and developed very sophisticated infrastructure that we could not compete with.
Nobody could compete with YouTube for awhile. But now, YouTube has made itself so unreliable, that people are forced to find new video hosting services, and people will put up with slower speeds for more reliability.
> We're moving back to a hosting model where you can not completely rely on any hosting company to get the job done.
That's become my mantra about anonymization: that you can't trust any one system/provider, so it's prudent to distribute trust. Basically, what Chaum said, so many years ago.
But that's harder with hosting. Sure, if you lease a ___domain, you can easily point to different IPs. But then, what happens if you lose the ___domain?
And for people who don't lease domains, how will your followers find your other sites? Once the one they were hitting is gone, I mean. Some will bookmark all of them, for sure. But not most, I bet. Search services would help, but I suspect that'd be iffy.
This is exactly how I've been treating GitHub lately; in addition to my own SSH-enabled server, I have both GitHub and Bitbucket configured as remotes (strongly considering adding sr.ht to the mix), and every push pushes to all remotes simultaneously (well, technically sequentially, I guess).
>We need to just accept that a major liability of using a major platform like this is that your content may be removed and your account deleted, for unknown reasons.
No we don't. You make it sound like it's a law of nature how these companies behave. It's not.
Yeah, I think there are two broad relationships between a person and a company: personal and statistical.
At my corner grocery store, it's personal. I know all the staff, we say hello, we look out for one another. My doctor knows me as a person, and we talk as equals. You see the same thing between companies of similar scales. If my company is a significant customer of yours, we can talk as peers when we need to.
Google Youtube and Twitter, on the other hand, are mainly selling eyeballs to advertisers. Not only do they not care about any given individual, they couldn't if they wanted to. The ratio between users and workers is 10,000:1 or worse. At that scale they know they're going to screw over people; at best, at best, they make sure the errors aren't too biased in any one direction. And of course they will work hard to clean up PR problems, as those are expensive enough to justify actual attention.
I think the underlying issue is that Google is under a lot of pressure from the EU and other governing bodies to police its YouTube content, Google being Google is trying to do this with algorithms, unfortunately when the algorithm gets something wrong there is seldom much recourse beyond knowing someone on the inside or being able to raise a big enough stink on Twitter.
But this is nothing new, so I think you have to go into things planning for the day Google demonetizes your videos or suspends your account for no reason. Make sure you have backups in GCP, S3, or some other non-Google facility that your kid won’t unplug while playing. Learn how to serve video yourself and have that as a backup - when promoting your video link to a resource you control so you can direct people to backup sources when needed.
Thanks to Apple there are only two, more or less interchangeable, standards for playing video on modern browsers, the only difference is that one standard (HLS) is controlled by Apple and the only option on iOS, and the other standard (DASH) is controlled by Google and works on everything except iOS. Most CDNs have support for HLS which means they dynamically recode video, help to generate manifests that direct users to lowest latency locations, and help to enforce entitlements (though as far as I can tell without proprietary DRM extensions all that is good for is largely keeping honest people honest which you may not care about when making video blogs or other public consumption content)
It's not just pressure from the EU, a lot of it is also coming from the USG [0], that's why Google, and pretty much any other major US-based social media, have outsourced a lot of content moderation to small armies of shadow-moderators in the Philippines [1]
GCP being a cloud service, it’s not susceptible to the same risks as YouTube. There’s no way for someone unscrupulous to “report your account” and the algorithms to be worried about are not scanning content. Instead, watchdog security systems may determine that your account had been compromised by bitcoin miners or something and lock things up until you get on the phone.
Happened to me a few years ago. Google account got terminated with no explanation. I used it for personal e-mail, watching videos on Youtube and to store personal files on Google Drive. I never posted anything anywhere public, including commenting on Youtube. Since then I've been self-hosting everything I can.
Twitter isn't arbitrary or unknown, though. You can easily predict with near certain accuracy who will get permanently banned for a controversial tweet and who won't.
Maybe have multiple independent google IDs for activities you want to do? So if you do YouTube videos and android apps, don’t do them on the same google ID, so an accidental account suspension in one doesn’t affect the other.
That seems to be for one-in-a-while use case only.
The parent poster mentioned that they backs up their google data. So I am assuming some kind of regular backup. I find that hard to do with gmail. And as I understand it will soon be impossible due to their updated API/authentication?
How many Google accounts are arbitrarily nuked, and host content that is not famous enough to make the front page of HN, or Reddit, or some other noisy social media site?
plenty, on HN there is a chance you will know someone at Google or Twitter or can raise attention of someone who works there. if you have a legitimate case it seems people will try to help some out. but that is not the way to handle it en masse.
the big companies have decided that customer service is not for users (we aren't customers). once they start doing call centres it will just become a cost for ever more.
> once they start doing call centres it will just become a cost for ever more.
then charge for it? Even support that only deals with account terminations would be worth $5, $10 a month to quite a few of us, I would think. You have a busy YouTube channel, ten bucks a month is not that much to ensure it doesn't go up flames accidentally.
I'm paying $12/mo for YouTube Premium because I consider it an exceptionally valuable service, but they only offer automated support. Google can afford to give high quality customer support, as we've seen with Project Fi, they just don't care about their users.
I think I'd phrase this a little differently. It's out that they don't care, it's that they practically deify software.
Their hyper-obsession of algorithmic trivia in hiring, I think, leads to a natural conclusion that there's an algorithm for every problem. And, indeed, every product they launch is extremely heavy on technical complexity with little reliance or consideration for customer value.
This is purely opinion with no real data, but it's what I've observed for about a decade now.
how come the revenue google makes in advertising on those videos can't be used to cover the cost of such support?
It should not cost money for a user to correct the mistake of a service provider. If the telephone company shutdown my number, i have the telecommunications onbudsman to call and get the problem fixed. Granted, youtube isn't as essential as a phone, a similar body should exist to ensure that online service providers are treating customers fairly.
Actually, it's the users/consumers who are paying for it all, with their privacy and by buying products from companies with vast advertisement budgets.
Isn't taking this as an absolutist view kind of myopic? Sure, people don't pay anything to watch and each person's eyeballs aren't worth that much. But pretty much the entire value of the service is locked up in the crowd of these people, led by the minority who actually create things. Annoy enough of the creators (or lose the trust of those who see what happens to their peers) and they'll start to leave, taking your advert-viewing crowd with them. The network effect makes this really difficult and slow to begin with, but we're already seeing attempts by people like Wendover Productions with things like Nebula and CuriosityStream. I'm curious to see how this plays out over the next few years (and if it's similar to anything that's happened historically?).
i wish them success, but i doubt they will see the sort of revenue possible with youtube. These premium subscription services are more like netflix, where they need to provide value proposition to the payer. They don't scale tbh, as the majority of the internet is non-paying. I suppose with a large enough backlog, it can start to look attractive for viewers to pay to subscribe.
But then you have to see that every company wants their subscription. If you wanted to have access to each service, you'd end up paying 100's of dollars per month. So more likely to happen is that people see a specific series they want, and pay for just that month.
Youtube's business model is much more broad and does not depend on quality content, but on the existence of a large audience. I think creators go to where the audience is, not the other way around.
So a protection racket, only not by a third party but by the vendor?
Nice YouTube account you have there, it would be a shame if we accidentally destroyed it...
I'm more in favour of a) splitting out parts of Google until it becomes managable b) new regulations that protect persons and companies in extremely one sided relationships (man vs Google). We are already starting to get there with GDPR and I'm seriously hoping that we'll see it enforced more in near future.
Youtube was net negative for a long time, it is a model which is very hard to get profitable. If they were forced to spend more likely they would just shut down the service or force you to pay fees.
I would guess that someone nefarious got access to the Google account associated with that youtube account...
If you can log into an account, it's pretty easy to get an account permabanned.
Just paste some links to well known child porn trading sites into the description, and the account gets banned within about half an hour. Someone at my school modified a chrome extension to do that and half the schools youtube accts got banned forever!
The co-timed arrival of the email about his GSuite account, and the removal of the YouTube (which GSuite support said was coincidental and unrelated) seems likely to be the product of a malicious activist working through the OP's accounts trying to cause trouble.
Looks like youtube account has been restored. Update from the medium article:
>> UPDATE: We’re back as of 8:39pm EDT April 11, 2020!
I received the following email from YouTube:
Hi there,
After a review of your account, we have confirmed that your YouTube account is not in violation of our Terms of Service. As such, we have unsuspended your account. This means your account is once again active and operational.
If you forgot your password, please visit this link to reset it:
<snip>
Sincerely,
The YouTube Team
It would not have. For each of these articles you see, there are hundreds of others who lose access to their account for no reason and never get it back.
I liked how Google's pro-forma email didn't fill in the blank as to why they flagged the account ... but they still sent that message. Surely that's a pretty easy failure to capture, I'm surprised Google can't spot such failures.
Googles companywide policy is to prominently display the Google logo whenever Googles AI or aggregate data is being used. It's part of their efforts to make the public understand that collecting aggregate data can benefit the public.
The keyboard uses googles AI to predict words using their language modelling, hence why it needs to display the google logo. With the "G" button removed from the top left, they decided to brand the spacebar instead.
Another fun thing that can happen with YouTube channels is getting them banned because you used titles and thumbnails that were too similar. This can get flagged as spam, which also increases the likelihood of just getting reviewed algorithmically.
Basically no appeal process unless you can explore some unofficial means of appeal like this one.
How's that for motivation to work on your thumbnails not and naming things "Show X #1..n".
Yes, this specific issue might be automated more because of coronavirus, but the general issue is not a novel one.
--
The only silver lining is that this doesn' take down your entire Google account like some YouTube bans do. (Woo!)
I'm glad it was resolved, but what am I supposed to do when Google wrongfully suspends my account and my submission here doesn't make it to the front page?
It'd be really cool if OP could document exactly what happened, and how exactly it got fixed. Or if someone else could leak relevant information anonymously. But I appreciate that nobody involved would want to attract attention.
Yes, I know that "Google" won't. But there have been leaks about many issues. And this is arguably a huge, if poorly reported, issue. Perhaps not relative to the total user population, but huge in absolute terms.
It obviously is. People sitting down and calmly discussing private property can only be seen as threatening if you are a capitalist or a landlord. They are scared, given the current crisis. I would be scared too as a capitalist.
I met Alex once in some online chats during startup school a couple of years back where he was working on a universal basic income system. Very smart and interesting guy. Very disappointed that somebody like him has to deal with this, it’s probably a major blow to his project
It's interesting reading about what Karl Wikderquist's writings are about to get some insight into who orgranized the "report brigade" to get him banned:
Interesting point. There's nothing much that's outright wrong with these claims, in fact many social scientists even of a fairly libertarian bent would basically agree with them. And these days basic income is increasingly being proposed from all sides of the political spectrum.
I love Google's products, and I put up with the fact that they harvest my data. But to have such terrible support for their services is absolutely ludicrous. I've seen too many stories of people losing their content, email addresses, services they rely on, or livelihoods. All because Google is too cheap to provide a reasonable way for customers to talk to a person about their problem.
I understand this is expensive and hard, but to be a company worth 100s of billions, and still neglect this is unacceptable. I think that there is a social responsibility that comes with running such a large and important web service, a responsibility that Google is neglecting.
What's interesting is this generally doesn't happen with the federal government. You can always call someone, or go into an office somewhere, or find someone up the chain in municipal / local / state offices to get something solved. It may take a very long time, but it gets solved.
And that scales to at least 300 million users.
Google is apparently less competent then the federal government in that regard (granted Google can't print money, yet).
>Google is apparently less competent then the federal government in that regard (granted Google can't print money, yet).
Even if they could, they would randomly discontinue the money 3 years down the line.
But I think comparing Google and the government in this sense isn't quite appropriate. Google is trying to make a profit. They try to keep their costs low. Automating customer support is one of these things, even if this customer support is poor. I'm just not sure this will work out in the long run. People know Google has bad customer service and I'm sure this has limited them in some way. I'm also sure that it's going to limit them more on the future. Would you want to jump on board this new Google service if there's a good chance that the service might get discontinued or you might have trouble with your account and no way to get help? I think Amazon is a much better company to compare to. Amazon has somehow made it work. Their customer service is great and this means that people won't worry as much about trusting things to Amazon.
The federal government has 330 million users and tax revenues of about $ 3.5 trillion, while YouTube has 2 billion active users and only $ 15 billion in revenue.
So $ 7.5 per user for YouTube, but $ 10600 per user for the US federal government.
Edit: If you only look at the number of channels, which is only 31 million, you are at $ 483 per channel for YouTube.
But how long would it take for a human to look into an issue and apply human logic instead of the algorithm. 10 minutes? Also, what percentage of users actually need or request support? Everyone pays in, but very few use the service.
It would be cool if anybody else could make a real competitor to youtube then Google would have to actually cater more to content creators. However, sadly I think youtube is just too far ahead and google has way to many resources and time spent in the space for any competitor to even be able to make a dent into youtube's market.
I don't think Google is too far ahead. You don't have to compete with all of YouTube.
I think LTT has the right idea with FloatPlane. If you can siphon off premium users that are willing to pay for premium channels you're getting the most valuable part of the system anyway (premium content and paying users).
IMHO anyone starting or running a video content business should be viewing YouTube as a great way to externalize costs while starting up and as a way to generate some revenue off users that aren't willing to pay once you're established. The goal from day 1 should be to build a following and then to move all your premium users to another platform.
> valuable part of the system anyway (premium content and paying users).
doubt. The most valuable part of the system is the large audience. Youtube's advertising dollars is vastly bigger than any of the premium content from other places. Unless the new premium platform is also powered by advertising and tracking, and selling of demographic data about the audience for targeted ad campaigns. There's very little that can currently compete with short-form video content for the masses.
Microsoft tried to siphon off the gamers with Mixer. Paid significant amounts of talent, built a reasonably good technical platform, leveraged Xbox, and gamers and game livestreaming are definitely one of the most profitable parts of YouTube for Google.
It didn't succeed.
If you're a large established video provider it works, but most people aren't film studios.
YouTube is one of the reasons I will probably always dislike Google for.
They bought an existing service, made few improvements to it, made it worse in some ways, continue to ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially limited on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the native Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.)
Worst of all, because they are So Big, people are preemptively disheartened from even imagining a competitor.
Before the acquisition Youtube were getting their ass kicked about all the copyright violation on the site, they were losing money, they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators, they only supported low-resolution video, and only in an Adobe Flash player.
All of which changed after the acquisition.
I would agree, of course, that there's plenty wrong with Youtube these days, and the pace of innovation has dropped a lot.
>they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators
This is the one point that makes YouTube so difficult to shake. The money is attractive to creators and YouTube offers the most money with the largest audience. YouTube themselves actually gets 45% of the revenue, while the creator gets 55%.
vimeo has a $55/month cost for 5T of videos. Most youtube channels that are businesses make way more than $55 per month, and youtube keeps way more than $55 of their ad revenue.
I dont think the major reason creators choose youtube because it's "cheap" - it aint. It's the only game in town where there's sufficient advertiser demand to pay out money. And youtube knows this, and thus, can charge the 45% split. The "free" aspect is also keeping out new competitors - the business moat is huge. There's a reason why microsoft or amazon isn't getting in the game.
Advertiser demand may be part of it, but there's also discoverability.
Turning up around YouTube must be extremely valuable. If your content is only on Vimeo, your odds of being chosen by the mighty YouTube algorithm are 0%.
> microsoft or amazon isn't getting in the game
You're right really, and it's not really the same thing, but they do both offer free file-storage services capable of streaming video to the browser.
> They bought an existing service, made very few improvements to it
Huh? AFAIK the Youtube Google bought wasn't profitable and it had much fewer viewers and content creators. It even lacked transcode options! Other than the basic functionality it provided (you could upload clips for free, you could watch other people's clips for free) it isn't comparable to today's Youtube.
Given the many years all of that took, I don't think it's reasonable to compare what exists now with what it was when it was bought.
It's perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that it would have been as good or better feature wise.
Also, saying it didn't have a big userbase? Compared to what? It was easily as much of a giant relative to the competition then, as currently youtube is to its competition.
Youtube had a lot of users but dailymotion, myspace and google video had a fairshare of marketshare. Now youtube is so much bigger than facebook, dailymotion, vimeo in terms of videos.
Google has introduced many great features that would not be possible without google or google ai. Muting songs but not background sounds is a cool new feature. Identifying and categorizing videos and presenting similiar videos is better than anywhere else.
For years youtube couldn't make money. Without google figuring this piece out a site like this would still be too expensive.
> They bought an existing service, made few improvements to it, made it worse in some ways, continue to ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially limited on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the native Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.)
"Staying in business" was an improvement that literally would not have happened without Google (or at least Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft). The site was literally doing bankrupt, and down in flames. It needed Google to sustain the losses, and someone with that much of a warchest and legal power to muscle into collective agreements with enough music collecting societies to survive.
Is the business even profitable? They claim youtube made $5 billion in revenue ads last 3 months but they don’t provide net numbers. Their typical text ad weights approx 250 kb in size (including all JS junk) and ther profit margin is “only” 23%. I doubt pushing 4k content for 15 minutes and serving one 15 cents ad puts them in green.
Use Youtube without an adblocker, they have a lot more than just simple text ads. Also, bandwidth is essentially free for Google beyond capital costs due to the fact they are peered with practically every ISP on earth (traceroute Google.com).
If it was "free" then everyone could do it. The fact that very few people have the capability to provide the connectivity Google provides points to the contrary.
The people behind PornHub need to make a "PeopleHub" site for hosting non-pornographic content. Use the same business model, which seems to work well for the "Pro-Am" content creators on PH.
That, or BitChute needs to finally release a mobile app.
BitChute is a cesspit of genuinely hateful and extremist content. That alone keeps away a majority of creators and viewers. It's like a silo school for kids who've been expelled from all the other schools in the area. Only in this case the bad kids are advocating genocide and racewar.
> Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think antitrust laws should be applied.
If it's true that it isn't profitable how would anti-trust laws make it better? If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more Youtube. That doesn't seem like a better outcome than what we have today.
So it must be profitable to even begin to consider anti-trust regulation. Personally I think it is profitable although it likely has a very long time to recuperate investments (since it's mostly infrastructure like fiber, peering, caching accelerators, etc).
I think the argument is that YouTube is keeping the "price" artificially low which makes competition untenable. If at some point YouTube "raises their prices" (starts paying out less/takes significant extra money from creators) then you could argue that they were engaging in predatory pricing. I don't think it's true, but if you squint right you might get that impression.
If Google is subsidizing everyone else’s consumption of video, pricing it below market, that’s a good thing. Someone giving you free money or a discount you b didn’t even need to ask for is a good thing. Dumping out selling below cost harms no one but the seller.
> If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more YouTube
You have to look back at Microsoft's Antitrust case around Internet Explorer, the were bundling the software into the operating system for free to kill any competition.
It maybe a loss leader but it plays into an overall corporate strategy.
Splitting YouTube off would not trigger it to go bankrupt, market forces would come into play, they'd have to seek revenue and others players would come into the market to offer a competitive offering.
To do what? It has a sort of natural monopoly in that it has network effects. If you broke it up, you'd end up with two unprofitable businesses. There are no shortage of youtube competitors- its not like they're locking out competitors with anticompetitive practices. For livestreaming they dont even have a monopoly because of twitch
How are you going to enforce antitrust upon something that costs 0 to consume and pays some people who post upon it?
I think that ideally the legal problems that lead to stuff like content-id being necessary should be resolved so that you could theoretically have competitors but why should the thing that is a huge moneysink be forcibly removed from the company that sustains it?
I am definitely in the top 1% of people that hate Google but I fear that anyone besides Google would be pruning videos from Youtube at an amazing clip.
As a monopolopy punishment, they should make any video that is available on YouTube and other platforms (Vimeo, etc) redirect to the other platform. Now, all of these other sites get an influx of users. We'll see who built the better infrastructure. sorry, my alarm clock is ringing, better wake up from the dreaming.
I’m not speaking on behalf of Google and I’m only speculating, but I think what you’re proposing could increase the per-user cost of service 10x or even 100+x, and could easily invalidate their entire revenue model and put them out of business
If a customer makes 1 phone call to support every few months because their Wifi is down and they think it’s Google’s problem, they would probably be losing a huge amount of money on that customer (relative to per-customer revenue)
Amazon only does this so well because they have so much revenue per transaction, and those transactions already necessitate a paying relationship directly with the customer, so it’s trivial to distribute the cost of support across all transactions as a minor and unarticulated fee
Again not speaking for Google and only speculating without any inside information on the details of this subject, but:
If Google didn’t exist because only customer-paid business models were permitted for the services they provide, you would be cutting the vast majority of humanity off from essential communications and information services, and they would only be available to the wealthiest people in the wealthiest nations
People in the Philippines for example have the same access to Google that you have (assuming they’ve paid to load enough data onto their phone that week, which some of them can’t afford, or they have access to wifi, which most of them don’t), and I think that isn’t just amazing but is one of the greatest boons to humanity that we’ve ever seen
That would never have happened if Google was required to provide human customer support to every user, and if that changed today Google would very likely have no choice but to scale their entire business back to only being accessible to the top n% wealthiest people (or go out of business)
There are a few billion people in less-wealthy nations who wouldn’t even be capable of paying Google, not only because of poverty but also for simple lack of the required financial infrastructure that you and I take for granted
This is what I try to point out every time someone tries to say that ad-based revenue models should be made illegal because of various reasons. It is ignoring how useful and accessible ad-supported web products are to pretty much anyone that isn't living in a first world country having easy access to credit cards.
As someone that has grown up in a second world country, barely having any money to pay for food in college, nobody I knew had even a debit card not to mention a credit card, I was very much grateful to have access to Google Search for "free" and the quality of the results it returned and I continued to be grateful and enjoy the products later developed (Mail, Maps, etc).
The people who can’t pay tend to be pretty low-value to google anyway when it comes to advertising. If they had to, they would quickly find a way to charge a very little amount to those people if advertising had to go away (e.g. agreement to charge cell carrier).
It’s not Google vs paid service, it’s Google vs another free service. They already exist, it’s just that Google has monopoly due to network effects, despite providing inferior product.
An example in Australia is consumer protection law. This saved me recently. My AppleCare has expired. I had raised a support case with Apple before that about a flickering screen. I live in bali where we have no Apple stores and authorised service centres take 5-6 weeks to do screen replacement. But after opening the case I call support to discuss this open issue and going to Australia to get it fixed. The supper guy said sorry your AppleCare expired and doesn’t matter that you already opened a case before it expired. But I went to australia and Apple Genius Bar and the guy said well your still covered under consumer law.
What do you do if you can't access your Google One subscription because they've terminated your Google account for posting an emoji in a YouTube live stream, for example?
Words and symbols sometimes have multiple meanings. Just because it looks like a fruit to you doesn't mean that's the message that was intended to be communicated by the author.
I don't support any kind of censorship, but if you can understand why a company might censor sexual harassment, threats of violence, or any other kind of message, it's pretty easy to understand that language/emojis/etc can be re-imagined to convey those types of messages.
Yes but its not that billions of users have this kind of problem or at least of this magnitude. But do they care? Probably not... they are an basically an advertising platform with chaotic products that suddently are cut off and so on...
I just went through password recovery for my 10 year old sons gmail account.
They ask a few security questions then ask for the recovery email address. It sends a login code to the recovery address. I input that code back on gmail site and it says “sorry we could not recover your account”.
Why send the code to the recovery email address if it’s not going to work?
Yeah they can get away with it because for 99.9% of people their services work fine and they don't need support. But it is pretty annoying when gmail starts randomly losing emails and all you can do is join a thread on their support forum with 100 other people saying "yeah this happens to me too, it's definitely a bug in their software and it's easily reproducible." with no response from Google.
> I do have backup archives of many of the videos and they will be back online again as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I was not diligent enough in keeping backups — especially early on. I am missing the following 21 videos ...
Another reminder, yet again, not to trust "Cloud Services" and always to have a copy of data you care about.
I hope the problem gets resolved and the channel is restored, I hope we get to hear what happens.
You could pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and will still be disposable. Amazon knocks out sellers worth millions of dollars even if their customer service is amazingly good and attentive not the bullshit you hear from Google.
Nah. With Google, the attitude of ad-supported extends to B2B. You can pay them a megabuck a year, and still get steamrolled by their AI having a random bug.
Do you have an example of paying customer giving Google >=$1m a year and still get steamrolled by AI without being able to get in touch with a human and correct the issue?
I had a very similar one in my career. It's a little bit more complex than that, though -- the value of us as a customer was >>$1 mil per year (Google had several dedicated engineers for the partnership), but it wasn't a flat-on paying customer relationship.
The failure happened in a different part of Google than the one managing the relationship. The people who wanted the partnership to succeed were in Google's cloud hosting business. The failure was in Youtube. It wasn't anything like a bad flag; just a straight-up bug (which caused us to move our videos to S3, and scramble to put together our own video player).
Yes, we could get in contact with a human. No, the problem couldn't be fixed. Yes, Google did ultimately lose >>$1 million/year in revenue in part as a result of this and other failures (to AWS).
Which is why I would never trust Google for any business functions.
These things happen all the time with Google. The model is based on your value being your ad revenue. If the cost of support outweighs your future ad revenue, which it always does, you're ignored. Everything is automated, and no matter what bad decision the machine makes, you can't appeal.
Unfortunately, that attitude translates to GSuite for Business, Google Compute Engine, etc. A non-paying customer gets better support from Microsoft (which is built around B2B) than a business customer does from Google.
Google gives better technology than Microsoft, but at the end of the day, the risk just isn't worth it: If Google's AI messes up, you're out of business.
(And Amazon has better support and technology than Google).
Actually, when it comes to getting any kind of support from Google, connections are of paramount importance. I've seen countless stories of people having problems with their Google Play developer accounts, for example being terminated for no reason and hitting the wall trying to appeal the way they suggest. Yet, if you know anyone from Google's developer relations, you'll usually have all your issues figured out in no time by emailing them. They're really nice guys.
Of course it shouldn't be like this, but that's the way it's been for as long as I've been an Android developer.
One of the sad hacks for businesses nowadays is finding a way to throw them money to achieve some grounds for complaining on account of being a customer.
With YouTube, you probably want to pay some money for ads so they'll look at you differently. I remember working with a client for a YouTube channel they had bought ad placements for, and it blew my mind that I could actually call a human at YouTube who would also pick up the phone immediately.
The two-tiered system of free services is so goddamn awful.
It's a sad hack because you can't actually pay them for the thing you want to pay them for, so instead you have to pay for an unrelated product you don't necessarily need or want just to be able to reach a human.
One day Google locked one of my gmail accounts and demanded a verified phone number in exchange for access. Luckily, that email wasn't that important. However this taught me a lesson: next time Google is going to lock my important gmail and demand an ID, W2, routing number, full address and medical records in exchange for access and then I'll have a hard choice. That day I finally put effort into setting up my own email ___domain.
It's only a matter of time until the EU regulates something about this sort of arbitrary account termination with no recourse to a (manned) customer service center, probably with an escalation to a regulator.
If the UK's Online Harms regulator ever actually happens (and god help us all if it ever does) I'd expect them to do an investigation fairly rapidly.
I lost a 12 year old Twitter account (with nearly 10k followers) last month as well. No communication whatsoever from Twitter, even after I opened a ticket about it.
I'm beginning to think that publishing anywhere except my own site is foolish.
The fact that the only support you get from Google is if your HN post is upvoted enough to go to the frontpage should be something that would be a red flag to any business. Guess Google don't care, support cost money, and you can't add ads in there.
True story I had a major issue where a new Google cloud service was restarting instances that were relatively expensive and billing me for them about 4 years ago. it was doing so completely automatically and I would log back in and see that these instances have been restarted. Couldn't get anyone to help me until I went on the Google BigQuery subreddit and bitched directly to their chief evangelist. They finally fixed it after that. Lesson learned. That company doesn't know how to hire people who don't constantly want to do interesting things. it turns out that running a business and supporting customers isn't always super fun and gratifying.
And can we admit that while their tech is still top-notch their software libraries in the open source realm are not? Compared to pytorch tensorflow is a piece of s*. It's so so bad now.
They didn't do well in the front end space either. React blows angular 2 away. Remember dart? Neither do I. Sure do miss inbox.
I think it’s also possible to get support by knowing the right people at google or by having a lot of followers on Twitter (including someone from google who can help)
Twitter has suspended my account two+ weeks ago without a reason and didn't even notify me about that by e-mail. They don't respond to my appeals either.
Some people are saying self-hosting content is the way to go. People interested pursuing that way can look into "IPFS".
There's lot of tools to make the "hosting" part easy (static websites are easy on bare IPFS it self)
Some keywords to search for are DTube, Temporal, Textile.
I'm already on way to self-host my data, hope you can get on bandwagon as well.
You can have it automatically pull content from your YouTube channel to your BitChute channel. Make sure to let your viewers know about it in advance, so when Google pulls the rug out from under you, for no reason, they know where to find your content.
Not necessarily. The platform might just have political biases of its own. But that's also why it can be good to have more variety: it means biases are a lot more likely to cancel out over time.
The problem with Alternative Platforms is they are often first used by people that have been banned by main stream platforms
It is sad we have come to the point that people "will not touch" a platform because there are others on their which they disagree with, or even find offensive.
It is easy to defend the speech of people you agree with, it take someone of strong ethical convictions to understand that in order to actually have free speech, the speech we find offensive must also be permitted.
Much of the original content on YT, that made YT popular would be banned under the terms YT operates under today. If you apply these conditions to potential replacements for YT then no replacements are possible
This is a great idea I can get behind. We need to decentralize away from the major tech platforms in general. Is there an index of all such alternative platforms? I know there’s https://curiositystream.com and am wondering how I discover others like it.
Happened to me years ago with Flickr... all my pictures lost, including family. This is how you learn the hard way that the cloud is just someone else's computer.
The problem isn't so much that this happened. Account terminations are usually manual processes, so from time to time, a human's going to do the wrong thing. The real problem is that there's no recourse, and you get trapped in a customer (or non-customer, so Youtubers don't even pay?) service maze.
Self-regulation has failed. YouTube, and others, failures to employ proper content moderation is hitting both consumers and creators. This market is broken
I honestly kind of hate most of Google’s products. While they are incredibly reliable, they often have inconsistent and poor UX, and are liable to either cancel or change the entire UI on a whim.
Redesigned Gmail is ludicrously slow and glitchy in so many ways that old-Gmail was not. According to about:performance, not only is it consistently the most demanding tab in terms of CPU (usually by a wide margin), but it also uses nearly double the memory of Youtube, which is itself also much more bloated than it used to be.
Google is supposed to hire the best and brightest engineers around, yet apparently they require 60-120 megabytes of RAM just to show a couple of lines of text on the screen. It's absolutely pathetic.
That's just what the modern web is like now, chickenshit minimalism, oodles of whitespace, vapid hero banners, plenty of grey Helvetica ultralight on white and a pile of bloat.
I stopped using the gmail interface years ago; it’s now only an imap/smtp server pair for me. The constant changes and moving features just made it markedly inferior to even Mail.app in the long run.
Something that stands out as representing the bad UI as a whole is this ridiculous menu under the upload button on YouTube. A vague, textless icon that you're supposed to guess means upload which is completely pointless when the two sub-items could have just been put into all that wasted space to the left of it.
My company recently switched us to G Suite, and personally I quite like most of the products.
However, helping colleagues with the transition made very apparent that Google tools have many UI inconsistencies. They seem small but actually made the tools quite confusing to many colleagues.
The main issue was the overuse of the "3 dots" icons for a menu. Gmail in particular puts it in several locations for different menus, but in general it's all over G Suite. And there were also many small inconsistencies between products; for example the Gmail settings need to be saved at the bottom, while the Calendar settings autosave. Or in Gmail the settings for "display density" and "configure inbox" are outside of the rest of the settings.
I have all my photos including many precious pics like my daughter's first birthday, etc backed up only with Google photos (as GPhotos often cleans up my phones it removes the original too).
Post like these are a true wake up call. I definitely need to setup something like syncthing to backup at least one more to good old usb 1tb drive. I guess you should too if you're in the same boat.
Make sure you get a Google Takeout, but realize that much of the image metadata is deleted (and sometimes outright changed) from the originals.
My takeout failed with an write until I requested an archive that was only photos, and only a year-subset of my library (which required me to make a manual album).
I also tried the open source "timeliner" project, (which does incremental backups very conveniently), but due to Google's API, all GPS tags are stripped from what the images that it can pull down.
If SyncThing doesn't work for you, you can also try Resilio Sync.
If you need software to manage all your photos and videos, you might want to try PhotoStructure! (I'm the author, details in my profile).
Is there a method for automatic backup of Google Photos? Something that a script could do, without manually using Google Takeout.
Also, is there another service to backup photos that doesn't modify the data? I was thinking of using Nextcloud. But the prices for Google One are quite attractive.
https://github.com/mholt/timeliner is the script I referenced, and it does incremental backups. It is limited by what Google's API exposes, though, so what you get back is not what you uploaded: it's got many tags stripped, including GPS.
It's really best to back up the originals that are on your phone. SyncThing and Resilio will do that automatically to your NAS.
Don't rely on a single drive. If your data is important for you, invest in a two-bay NAS and put two hard drives in a RAID1. Hard drives can and do break.
As trasz points out, RAID is not a backup. Nothing stops e.g. a filesystem bug or a crypto-locking malware from destroying everything on a RAID array. & that's before we get into the fragility of hardware RAID controllers giving up the ghost for no reason and then you not being able to import the drives into something else.
For what it's worth, I believe that "recklessly" is more accurate than "accidentally". In the motor vehicle context, for example, people acting more or less prudently, and in good faith, occasionally have accidents. But when people aren't acting prudently, we call them reckless.
It's wild really, I've been seeing emails from totally trusted sources - credit card bills, bank statements - and people that I have in my contact list go directly to my spam box.
The fact alone that they are banning "content" (it was just a harmless title and a pic) about private property in this period is not a coincidence.
There was no way to link that title "Boston Basic Income #98: Karl Widerquist on Private Property" to any violation of the law.
I think they are just scared that in this period, talking about private property will bring people to uprise/unite to stop paying rents. YouTube is still part of the capitalist system and will do its part to protect it. And nobody is talking about this kind of censorship.
Is eating live seafood animal abuse? I also don't see how this channel is directed towards children. This type of food looks expensive and I don't think kids normally eat this stuff.
You're not wrong, but you are probably being downvoted because you're trying to be cute with your capitalization of the word "algorithms". Please don't do that.
Well, "accidentally" also communicates that it was done automatically without human review and that human review ended up reversing the decision. I don't think splitting hairs with "well technically they intended for it to happen automatically so it couldn't have been accidental" adds to the discussion. Automatic processes absolutely make mistakes.
I would support legislation that mandated they have phone support, were required to publish their content guidelines and decision making manual, disclose who did the review, and provide for a neutral* third party to arbitrate disputes.
YouTube is also banning all cryptocurrency channels, strike by strike. For no reason. It's disgusting. I know, because I have such a channel with a strike. 2 more and it's permanent delete. Can't appeal, as the livestream was deleted before it was in progress. No response to appeals for over a month and a half. (You get 1 warning before the strikes start, I was able to appeal only that.)
This appears to be true of Twitter and others as well.
From my vantage point, it appears to be quite arbitrary. And quite concerning in a number of cases, given the centralization of email, docs, etc.
I do make backups of google content every so often.
I guess the irony of making a copy of a cloud set of services data locally, as you may not be able to trust that these services will be there over longer intervals, is either ironic ... or problematic.
It speaks directly to the concept of risk of extended supply chains ... is the risk to your data, and ability to interact with services worth maintaining a presence on the systems?
This behavior on their and related tech giants generally makes me question how much we should rely on them for important things (like permanent email addresses) over time. This has been making me uneasy for a while, and seeing more stories like this is not quelling my discomfort.