YouTube Shadow Banned Us WTF Happened?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh_260Z1jzw

by minotaursage • 5 years ago

93 55 5 years ago

youtube.com

forgotmypw172• 5 years ago

Sounds like a combination of good heuristic security and not being able to scale customer support...

If I were them, I,d be investing in the latter.

teddyh• 5 years ago

But YouTube has absolutely no incentive to do that.

chakerb• 5 years ago

Money? Doesn't hiding videos leads to less views which leads to less revenue for Youtube?

szszrk2• 5 years ago

Youtube Rather whole Google in most of their products.

forgotmypw172• 5 years ago

If I were working for YouTube I would be horrified at this video. This creator has gone from loving and synergizing with YouTube to looking for another platform. In fact, they already are on another platform, and just gave it a huge shoutout.

Although they say there is no alternative to YouTube for them today, it makes it obvious that there is an opportunity.

Seems like a pretty large incentive for anyone forward-thinking and not over-confident.

ahrs• 5 years ago

They should invest in a mechanism to allow you to train the heuristics in advance. If the heuristic knows that location A is a location you normally login from and location B is not but you could tell it in advance "I'm going to travel to location B on date X for duration Y" it would have the extra necessary information to know that this activity is normal and not suspicious.

wildpeaks2• 5 years ago

It's unlikely to change because it costs them less to automate (even if it's far from perfect) and manually deal with errors that happen to people with enough reach to cause bad PR than to have staff.

Maken• 5 years ago

It has been clear for a long time that big tech companies do not care about customer support. It's something that just cannot be done without having personnel propositional to your userbase.

theknocker• 5 years ago

Why? They’re a completely entrenched monopoly whom the government lets pretend to be some kind of intelligence agency.

wildpeaks2• 5 years ago

I wonder if Netflix will ever move in this space: they already have a backend and audience, and could vet creators before accepting them on the platform, just another kind of Original Content except it costs less to produce.

rasz• 5 years ago

It seems the reverse is true with YT winning some of the Netflix type of content creators https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7sDT8jZ76VLV1u__krUutA/vid...

jasode• 5 years ago

I wonder if Netflix will ever move in this space: [...], and could vet creators before accepting them on the platform

But vetting creators doesn't address the fundamental issue causing the creator's temporary shutdown: security heuristics used to flag unauthorized/compromised access is very hard

Similar examples I've personally experienced across other domains:

- Citi credit-card blocks my card when I was on vacation in Canada and tried to buy shoes from the store.

- Chase Bank locks all my online accounts from any logins when I try to transfer $20 to a friend's bank account. The only way to unlock it was to drive to a physical branch and present 2 forms of ID. Even after the bank employee unlocked the account, the effect wasn't immediate and was still locked for several hours. I then retried the exact same $20 bank transfer and it worked.

- Rackspace hosted email service locks out my coworker's email account (that's on my paid plan) because of suspicious activity. It turns out her laptop had a hidden virus that compromised her email account and was sending out spam.

Other than the Rackspace example, the false-positives are inevitable because no heuristic to detect unusual behavior is perfect. Netflix would also have the same false-positives and lock/shutdown creators channels which triggers similar headlines: "Netflix shutdown my channel..."

To point back to your idea, I was already vetted by my bank with physical forms of ID when I there to sign papers and open the account -- and yet they still locked me out years later for suspicious activity. You see how vetting doesn't really solve this Youtuber's problem?

thraway123412• 5 years ago

- Gmail locks out my account because of suspicious activity, which was sending two messages to test my own email server after an update & config change (both messages bounced back because of a typo).

I also stopped commenting on Youtube altogether because their algorithms tend to block so many comments.

ghaff4• 5 years ago

You pretty much have to have multiple credit cards these days because "random" fraud declines and card cancelations happen on a pretty regular basis. I've never had trouble getting a new card issued or a lock lifted, but I also often haven't been traveling at the time.

I have gone through a couple of identity verification gymnastics over the past year for various things. While not absolutely necessary, gaining a degree of confidence that someone is who they say they are is certainly more difficult over the phone than in person.

esperent• 5 years ago

Citi credit-card blocks my card when I was on vacation in Canada and tried to buy shoes from the store.

With my Irish bank, I have to tell them when I plan to use the card abroad otherwise they'll block it. It takes about 30 second through an online form. Since I've had cards skimmed multiple times while traveling I think this is a reasonable precaution, however, they didn't make it very obvious and the first time I found out about it was in Bali airport trying to withdraw money to pay for my visa.

tobyhinloopen3• 5 years ago

I hate what YouTube has become, but the creators are still there by choice so the viewers are as well.

FloatPlane is too expensive (I don’t want to pay per channel). Vessel was great but it’s gone.

I’m fine with paying for videos, but there’s just no platform like Netflix for random creators

Hamcha• 5 years ago

I think floatplane by itself never wants to compete with Youtube, they know they can't scale that much and just want to provide creators with a second option for supporters. If LTT were to disappear from Youtube I bet they'd still find some way to provide a free way to access their videos, even if on another provider.

wayoutthere• 5 years ago

I worked with a large media company a few years ago on a product like this; long story short YouTube pays the big content creators to stay on YT. Getting a critical mass of content that’s not also available on YouTube is a problem, because you need content to draw an audience and creators don’t want to do a bunch of extra work for no exposure — YouTube is only one revenue stream for the top stars, but it gets them the publicity to monetize their image in other ways on other platforms. So there’s an opportunity cost to using another platform.

tobyhinloopen3• 5 years ago

I get the problem, I just wish there was a solution

krageon• 5 years ago

by choice

If you have two choices, namely no money and some money and you must have money to eat then you don't have two choices. There is no choice, because the other platforms are far too small to compete. What should arguably happen more is uploading to more than one location, but searching for youtube alternatives is almost impossible (at least if you want one that actually has some potential. There is a ton of trash).

dfxm122• 5 years ago

If the issue is money, there are many ways to make money besides relying on YouTube.

soco• 5 years ago

Maybe Vimeo or Dailymotion will pick up some users this way, like Signal and Telegram picked lately some Whatsapp traffic...

tobyhinloopen3• 5 years ago

You can cross upload your content, right? Just upload it to all platforms. Sure noone will watch from there but if enough people start doing it, viewers will follow. At some point it must be worth it to set an example for your colleague creators.

It just needs a start

thesuitonym2• 5 years ago

Is there a reason that Vimeo wouldn't work? Aside from the lack of regular users, which could be fixed over time.

sct202• 5 years ago

Monetization on Vimeo basically requires you to already have a following of some sort to sell subscriptions or pay per view videos. So I've seen some people use Youtube as a funnel to get viewership and send them into other services like Patreon/Vimeo/etc.

k3liutZu• 5 years ago

Is there a reason that Vimeo wouldn't work?

Do they have apps for all smartphones and TV's?

I just search the iOS App Store, and the 2 Vimeo apps that are at the top seem to be for creators, not consumers.

I watch most Youtube on the TV, if there's no Vimeo app, I wouldn't be able to consume the content.

virgil_disgr4ce2• 5 years ago

This is a good question. I have a suspicion that the big difference is actually many tiny UX differences: Vimeo isn't nearly as aggressive with getting you to watch more videos (i.e. automatically playing a video next) with an aggressive recommendation algo; it also doesn't seem to encourage engagement as much. Vimeo's brand (at least afaict) is more on the business/commercial end, a 'prestige' brand (at least to some extent?) with fairly different demographics.

dagw• 5 years ago

Discovery and search. Looking through my YouTube subscription, well over half of the people there are people I discovered via YouTube, either by searching for a video about a thing or by having it recommended to me. YouTube has the best tools for building an audience, and that is what a competitor has to replicate, not the video hosting functionality.

fsflover• 5 years ago

What about PeerTube? Random creators often include their own advertisements into the videos anyway.

creativeembassy• 5 years ago

I've been using Nebula more frequently. Only one monthly payment for the whole platform, zero ads. A lot of my favorite YouTube content creators have been uploading their videos there too. And not just uploading the same videos, but higher-quality ones. For example, they're more free to use copyrighted material fairly when doing content criticism, knowing that they're not going to get automatically flagged/demonetized even when they're within their rights.

(If someone from Nebula reads this: My only complaint is a lack of a Roku app, which is where I consume most of my content in the living room any more. Please make this happen!)

benhurmarcel• 5 years ago

It's not available for any video creator though, only a few selected by Nebula.

xiphias22• 5 years ago

I'm on the opposite side, I love what Youtube has become, and Youtube Premium is givinge lots of value.

Sure, I'm not happy about authors optimizing for some alforithms, like increasing playtime, allowing thumbnails that have nothing to do with content, and heavy moderation of important words (like COVID), but I live with it.

ziml77• 5 years ago

I have the same feelings about YouTube. There's great content on there and is absolutely worth paying for Premium. That helps support the creators you watch too because a Premium view is worth more than an ad-supported view.

Of course it really is the content that is making it worth my money here. There is no platform loyalty. If another platform amassed a significant number of quality creators, I would certainly switch over.

tablespoon• 5 years ago

but the creators are still there by choice so the viewers are as well.

Not really. Network effects keep them all there whether they like it or not. The creators need their work viewed, and that happens where there are both creators and viewers, which is Youtube.

Thaxll• 5 years ago

Not blaming OP but if you have a channel with 750k viewewrs there is absolutely no reasons to not turn on mfa.

onewhonknocks• 5 years ago

I believe that they already had MFA turned on.

kokx• 5 years ago

Watch the video. They state that they had MFA turned on before, and that they renewed their password and MFA within five minutes after the supposed security breach.

Strom• 5 years ago

Seems like the issue was caused by logging into their Google account from a new geographical region. I've had my personal Google account locked a few times because of this, it's pretty annoying. Especially because I already have 2FA enabled.

rvz• 5 years ago

YouTube i.e. Google is a private company. They can shadow ban, kick or permanently ban and do whatever they want. Reason or no reason.

underseacables• 5 years ago

When a YouTube employee censors a channel erroneously, is there ever any repercussions for that employee? It seems like the content moderators are very knee-jerk, without much consequence.

bmn__• 5 years ago

That does not accurately model the world we live in. Responsibility is diffused to people across organisational boundaries, and victims are even conditioned to blame "the algorithm".

YouTube Shadow Banned Us WTF Happened?

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