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.
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.
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.
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.
These 'platforms' perpetually dance around issues and present a different face dependent on who they talk to on what issue.
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.
There's a middle way.
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.
OK, so what's the safest holdout?
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.
________________________________
Notes:
1. A Japanese word, often translated as "unask the question". https://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=583
No we don't. You make it sound like it's a law of nature how these companies behave. It's not.
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.
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)
[0] https://www.npr.org/2018/09/05/644607908/facebook-twitter-he...
[1] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/327887/pbs-th...
The cloud is just someone else's computer after all.
YouTube is more hit or miss.
Express "wrongthink" and you will get banned.
That should terrify everyone. As you don't know what rightthink and wrongthink are. They can, and do, change with time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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
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.
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.
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The only silver lining is that this doesn' take down your entire Google account like some YouTube bans do. (Woo!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Widerquist#Empirical_and_...
I wish we had a good alternative
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
It didn't succeed.
If you're a large established video provider it works, but most people aren't film studios.
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.
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.
"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.
One thing that they have is an automatic system to copy over your YouTube catalog and upload it to lbry.
That, or BitChute needs to finally release a mobile app.
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 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.
TicTok, Instagram, Twitch, Dailymotion, FB Video, Vimeo, Netflix etc all are counterexamples.
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
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
Or perhaps we should shut up and be content they offer the service at all, no matter the impact to a “minority” of lives?
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?
> 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.
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).
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.
But it's absolutely no way to run a business. Pass.
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.
Which is why I'd never trust Google for anything.
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.
Google would be better off getting ahead of this.
I'm beginning to think that publishing anywhere except my own site is foolish.
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.
Decentralize all the things.
Support Other Video hosting platforms
Advise Creators to upload to multiple Platforms
When Sharing links, if the content it on another platform share that instead of YT
YT stays on top because people refuse to move off it
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.
Bitchute is absolutely full of racists, conspiracy theories, and just awful people in general. I wouldn't touch it with a 2m stick.
Policy will change if a newspaper article is written about it though, ironically.
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.
Current state of affairs: https://i.imgur.com/rJi6LHR.png
Mockup in 30 seconds in mspaint of the obvious improvement: https://i.imgur.com/nfrgYQF.png
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.
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.
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).
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.
It's really best to back up the originals that are on your phone. SyncThing and Resilio will do that automatically to your NAS.
I run it nightly from my home server. It has a few limitations (due to limitations of the Google Photos API) but overall it does what you want.
> account gets reactivated after a complaint to customer support
So it wasn't permanent.
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.
Google don't accidentally terminate accounts or remove/block videos.
They intentionally left that job to AlGoRiThMs instead of using actual people capable of reason/thought. That's no "accident".
This should be obvious after 10 seconds of thought, but here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
*yeah yeah I know "neutral"
