The Linux Experiments YouTube channel has been terminated

https://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP/status/1434952628337795072

by mngnt • 5 years ago

459 386 5 years ago

rvz2• 5 years ago

Once again, using the private platform argument here: YouTube (owned by Google) reserves the right to terminate and de-platform anyone's account who has been in violation of YouTube's guidelines and terms of service.

You can criticise, protest, appeal, scream or throw a tantrum about it, etc but you should finally see that this can happen to anyone sitting on private platforms like YouTube.

YouTube will never change and it will only get worse.

gmemstr• 5 years ago

That's not the issue here. The issue here is letting automated systems having final say on such destructive actions as terminating an account entirely, with no concrete way to appeal. From what I am aware of, few channels wrongfully suspended get reinstated through support but rather through public outcry on the likes of Twitter.

AnIdiotOnTheNet5• 5 years ago

I don't think that's in disagreement with the parent. Whatever means YouTube uses to determine who to drop and who to keep is irrelevant because the point is that if you host content on someone else's servers you are giving them control.

AnIdiotOnTheNet5• 5 years ago

There is apparently a large contingent of people on this site holding the belief that if your private platform is large then the government should step in to force you to host things you don't want to host.

It's kinda funny, because it's effectively saying that they want to nationalize tech companies for being successful.

throwawaylinux• 5 years ago

No that's not true, there is a vast difference between regulation on business practices like this and nationalization.

Gollapalli2• 5 years ago

If you think about it, publicly traded companies are precisely that: nationalized. They exist as partly as government fiat, and partly of managerial control, but not as property. They are, by necessity, of somewhat unknowable, and almost always unaccountable ownership, ownership so diffuse it may be regarded as a generally representative subset of and equivalent to the general public. As such, can any public company be regarded as private? Or treated as private? Their ownership is public, and no individual, or small, knowable, and generally convenable group of people can say: these are our servers. On the contrary, a group of people equivalent to the general public, a subset of them in fact public or pseudo-public institutions (pension funds, university endowments), are the owners. As such, public institutions should very much be treated as public entities. After all, it is the general public which owns them.

krageon• 5 years ago

nationalize tech companies for being successful

It's not saying that at all (nationalising companies is a very specific action that doesn't have anything to do with what you described).

That said, I don't agree with your premise which appears to be that this is bad. Converting something that is basically a utility already (i.e. everyone uses it and everyone expects to be able to. It's almost unthinkable to have daily life without it) to a nationalised company would be a good thing.

addicted• 5 years ago

You are right.

The US has basically been a communist country since the 70s when it passed the ADA requiring businesses not only to serve the disabled but spend money to make sure disabled people can access their services.

There’s basically no difference between the US and the USSR ever since.

cbradford• 5 years ago

For over 100 years we have had laws and rules that prescribe that when a firm or industry reaches monopoly statue they must act as a common carrier and not discriminate. Been that way since telephones and railroads. People should understand history, this is not a new challenge and the solutions are already on the books.

https://blog.scorchedweb.com/technology/supreme-court-on-con...

selfhoster113• 5 years ago

Is nationalisation evil in itself? The private sector just doesn't have sufficient incentive to serve the public over their own interest. We've seen this time and time again.

ad404b8a372f2b9• 5 years ago

The government should step in to enforce data standards and data-transfer functionalities so that large tech companies do not have oversized monopoly like influence due to natural network effects.

sinyug• 5 years ago

There is apparently a large contingent of people on this site holding the belief that if your private platform is large then the government should step in to force you to host things you don't want to host.

I am part of that group. I am willing to accept a free-for-all till a company reaches a certain size as far as its user-or-customer base is concerned: something between the population of New Zealand and that of Australia. Beyond that it should be answerable to the people.

I also think supranational corporations should either be banned or very tightly regulated.

pessimizer4• 5 years ago

Do you think that the phone company should be allowed to ban women from using their lines?

_null_• 5 years ago

YouTube will never change and it will only get worse.

Private entities can be swayed by their customer's demands. Not saying that YT _will_ be swayed, just that this sort of creator outrage has a place in the market system, and "throwing a tantrum" over their bad behavior doesn't always have to be met with "private entities can do whatever they want!"

mrkstu• 5 years ago

That actually sounds like a good test for monopoly status- do you have to worry about what your customers want/desire or are you so entrenched that you don’t care?

WhyNotHugo3• 5 years ago

Not sure why this guy is getting downvoted.

I wish he were wrong, because he's saying sucks, but he's just telling the hard truth the way it is.

YouTube won't change, yet we continue using it as if it didn't have the track record it does.

pessimizer4• 5 years ago

the private platform argument

No part of what you said is an argument.

Do private platforms have unlimited latitude? If not, what are the underlying philosophies underlying current limitations, and can those be seen to imply that other limitations should be made? Should private platforms have unlimited latitude?

Those are discussions that could be had. "Private things are allowed to do whatever they want" is not only a thought-terminating cliché that avoids all ethical or tactical judgement, but a simple falsehood.

rvz2• 5 years ago

Do private platforms have unlimited latitude?

Who is arguing that? No need to create a straw-man argument.

"Private things are allowed to do whatever they want"

Who are you quoting here?

So YouTube (owned by Google) doesn't reserve the right to terminate and de-platform anyone's account who has been in violation of YouTube's guidelines and terms of service?

I already said the offended users can appeal, didn't I? I'm just saying that not only this can happen to anyone, but YouTube (Google Inc.) will not change and we'll see more of this regardless if it is automated or not.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

I'm out of the loop- what rules were broken?

grey_earthling• 5 years ago

I hope cases like this lead more people to understand that proprietors of private services do have so much control (even if they often wield it soberly), and persuade them to consider decentralised or protocol-based open alternatives.

As ever, Tony Benn's five questions are instructive: “what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you?”

=> https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1998-11-16/debates/db3...

maccolgan• 5 years ago

Private platforms can indeed do whatever they want, but I think there's a discussion to be had about whether what they are doing is right or wrong...

mcjiggerlog• 5 years ago

The Linux Experiment is probably my favourite linux-focussed YouTube channel. Nick has been doing absolutely fantastic work and his channel being permanently deleted would be an absolute travesty and a clear mistake. He is producing high quality, thoughtful, inoffensive content. Here's to hoping the channel is rightly reinstated ASAP, along with an apology and explanation from Google.

Also, if you don't know the channel and want to check out his videos, you can still watch them on Odysee - https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment.

drcongo3• 5 years ago

What is Odysee? I'm intrigued because at first glance it seems to be better than YouTube in almost every way possible. Page loads are quick, if you turn off AutoPlay it actually stays off, the controls are actually usable on an iPad etc.

fragileone• 5 years ago

It's a peer-to-peer video client, with part of it's data being directly shared (similarly to torrents) and part via a blockchain. This makes it highly resistant to censorship and thus is where many people are moving their channels to.

kxrm• 5 years ago

Except oddly dark mode requires an account. That's a strange requirement when they can pull this from the browser preference.

Mockapapella• 5 years ago

Holy crap, you weren't kidding about the pages loading quickly. I wish every web page loaded that fast.

busymom0• 5 years ago

Out of all the alt-tech, Odysee has been my favourite. Their UI is quite nice and they also have a wide variety of content.

enriquto2• 5 years ago

Here's to hoping the channel is rightly reinstated ASAP

I for one am not looking forward to this. Youtube is no longer an acceptable platform for distributing your videos. If a person who makes good videos is forced out of youtube, that can only be a good thing. Hopefully their videos will help make another service more popular.

Youtube terms of service are public and unacceptable. People who get burned by them had it coming.

Uehreka• 5 years ago

If there was a clear alternative that’d be one thing, but there isn’t, and I suspect this creator is one of those high-quality-but-small-audience channels where they don’t have enough pull to bootstrap an alternative themselves. So it seems kind of naive to say “that can only be a good thing”.

amelius• 5 years ago

YouTube should be forced to allow "Watch this video on $COMPETING_SERVICE" links.

mattl• 5 years ago

YouTube is fairly ubiquitous in terms of support on hardware players. Any alternative would need to be similar. Vimeo perhaps?

phkahler• 5 years ago

> you can still watch them on Odysee

Never heard of them, but that page looks great! Bookmarked.

dan1234• 5 years ago

It's the video/consumer frontend to LBRY, a decentralised/p2p/blockchain based publishing platform.

I hope it can achieve a critical mass because it does look interesting, but I don't hear many people talking about it - even in tech circles.

https://lbry.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBRY

lucasyvas• 5 years ago

Does anyone have more context? This is one of my favourite Linux channels... what the fuck.

This drive-by algorithm BS is ridiculous.

fouc2• 5 years ago

Seems like odysee doesn't have captioning. Looks amazing but no captioning is a deal killer.

_nalply• 5 years ago

It seems that Odysee forgot the captions. As a Deaf programmer I need captioning.

Or are they hidden away somewhere in the settings?

EDIT: I mailed to hello@lbry.com and asked them about this.

asddubs2• 5 years ago

Feels to me like less and less youtube videos have the auto-caption option as well these days.

WhyNotHugo3• 5 years ago

YouTube has been changing in weird ways in the last year or so.

The amount of propaganda on the platform is ridiculous, though very frequently disguised as "news" or "educational". As someone who's been around quite a bit, I can also imagine that it doesn't look like propaganda to average Americans (I'd be glad to be wrong on this).

A great deal of content is just plain sophistry too. Inspecting comments, it seems that most viewers don't pick up on this.

At the same time, finding reviews or alike for products or services is near impossible -- the platform is filled with generic reviews which are indistinguishable form ads.

omgitsabird• 5 years ago

This seems rather vague. Can you give examples of propaganda?

sbarre• 5 years ago

Oh come on... spend 10 minutes on YouTube and you'll find tons of it.

There have been countless articles and posts written about this problem over the last several years.

I would challenge _you_ to go educate yourself on this rather than ask others to bring this widely available and widely accepted information to you.

sprafa4• 5 years ago

The current “ivermectin is a dangerous horse dewormer” debacle has been the biggest example of a moment where I’m not sure whether everyone is lying at this point. YouTube censored a few videos with actual experts and doctors who were discussing ivm.

Yes we had issues with HCQ in the beginning, but ivm is being actually studied right now by Oxford Uni/NHS in their big covid trials in the UK… it’s amazing what a hit job the media is doing on it.

jostmey• 5 years ago

It is rather vague, but I have the same impression. So N=2

heh9001• 5 years ago

Anything you see on the front page of youtube, i.e. you didn't specifically search for it, is most likely being promoted by some ad agency or think tank somewhere down the line. Meaning it's propaganda to some extent. The exceptions to this rule are, of course, independent creators that the algorithm latches onto, but the algorithm only promotes videos that people are gonna click on and generate revenue for Youtube. That is, in a way, controlled propaganda too.

bilbo0s• 5 years ago

I can also imagine that it doesn't look like propaganda to average Americans

It looks like propaganda to us too.

We're not quite as dumb as the rest of the world thinks. That said, I suppose everyone's a bit dumber than they think they are, so take my statement with a grain of salt.

devwastaken2• 5 years ago

Watch one "conservative news" video and it will do a complete 180. Ads for "rations", "preparing for the end of the world", "how to be self sustainable", tons of PragerU propaganda, and some of the most low quality l BS you'll ever see from political ads.

YouTube delivers content based on what you've watched.

wing-_-nuts• 5 years ago

Yeah I watched some 'forgotten weapons' and 'demolition ranch' videos, and it was wild how quickly my feed changed from science and history stuff to conservative talking points. I spent a rather long time marking videos as 'do not recommend this channel, I dislike this video' etc, before things returned to normal.

rjbwork2• 5 years ago

I watch a lot of lefty "news" and infotainment. I still get ads for the conservative propaganda, survival rations, prepping, etc. I think it's because I also watch a lot of firearms hobby content.

Kinda silly, but it does make me chuckle that people like Ben Shapiro, PragerU, and 4Patriots are subsidizing my lefty youtube subscriptions.

zenron2• 5 years ago

Calling PragerU propaganda is like calling an Western history book written by a religious person contraband. What exact points do you take umbrage with or is this just a signal to your political preference?

sjmulder• 5 years ago

Late night show Zondag met Lubach put this to the test: https://youtu.be/FLoR2Spftwg (English CC available. Skip to 11:48 if you just want to see this bit.)

They created a fresh account using a fresh browser, clicked the top result for “PCR test reliable”, then some recommended videos. Just three clicks in they get to 9/11 and qanon conspiracy videos. By then their home feed too is full of that stuff.

OneEyedRobot2• 5 years ago

The amount of propaganda on the platform is ridiculous, though very frequently disguised as "news" or "educational".

I certainly don't see that on the youtube channels I frequent, but admit that the 'news' is typically op-ed disguised as news.

An alternative theory is that they (youtube) pushes 'news' since it pays well and is quite popular. 'News' tends to come from official channels over time with a kind of network effect. Those channels are all Pravda. The fact that it's propaganda is not necessarily a youtube choice but a major news organization choice.

nickysielicki• 5 years ago

The way that they've changed search to only link to checkmarked channels is infuriating. When Kabul was falling I wanted to see older videos of the embassy, from when it was opened, to see the buildings and how extravagant they were. I couldn't find any, though, because no matter what I searched I got videos from news channels released within the past 24 hours about evacuating the embassy. The war on "misinformation" needs to stop.

underseacables• 5 years ago

The fault is on YouTube’s reliance on automated systems, making permanent decisions, without human intervention. However, in my humble opinion, people are naturally lazy. The humans who might be charged with reviewing automated decisions are no different. Especially if there is a cultural or language divide.

cube00• 5 years ago

:s/YouTube/Google

reasonabl_human• 5 years ago

Usually I have to type :%s, and a trailing /g, you can omit those?

asah3• 5 years ago

no - see above comment re illegal sweepstakes

ashtonkem4• 5 years ago

Preventing illegal sweepstakes, even if accidentally illegal ones, seems like a good rule for YT to enforce. That being said, banning accounts without a process to solve the issue until there’s enough public furor for a moderator to notice is a bad system. If someone repeatedly breaks the rules, fine permaban them. But having a fake appeal process is pretty annoying, and makes me not want to do business with Google in general.

qwerty4561272• 5 years ago

As it often happens, again I discover a cool resource from the news about its termination.

Is there by any chance a mirror of its content anywhere to download?

If I were a YouTuber I would maintain an archive of my old videos available on ThePirateBay.

izacus• 5 years ago

The problem is that ThePirateBay will not pay you per view. YouTubers stay on YT because it pays out a slice of ad revenue and not because it's just a convenient distribution site. Making those videos costs an insane amount of time and money - which means that most YTers can't afford to do it for free.

Any kind of YT competition needs to figure out on how to keep the revenue streams intact.

qwerty4561272• 5 years ago

That's why I wrote "an archive of my OLD videos". They probably don't generate much revenue already.

Also, ThePirateBay does not compete with YouTube even in the cases of the same content being available on both the platforms. Most of the people want to watch the videos on-line, go to YouTube naturally and won't bother using torrents. Sophisticated people who want an off-line copy just use youtube-dl anyway. The actual YouTube audience will only go to ThePirateBay when they really can't access the videos on YouTube.

aembleton• 5 years ago

You can watch the channel at https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment:e

christophilus2• 5 years ago

Wow. It's hard for me to imagine how he crossed any line worthy of deletion. He's one of the best Linux voices on YouTube, and seems like an incredibly nice guy.

His content can be seen on Odysee[0].

Chris Titus Tech has a video covering this[1].

Honestly, I try to watch everything on Odysee these days, anyway, just to try to continue de-Googling my life.

[0] https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment:e

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHeZXkZT_jk

asah3• 5 years ago

no - see above comment re illegal sweepstakes

jvdheuvel3• 5 years ago

Chris Titus Tech has also an Odysee channel, https://odysee.com/@christitustech:5

gambler• 5 years ago

Any large communication platform has a choice: either accept some form of content neutrality or become a petty and chaotic tyrant constantly reeling from one public backlash after the other. YouTube made its choice. Now, random videos and channels get demonetized, content gets deleted for no reason and people covering basic news speak in code to avoid the wrath of the idiot AI. In the background Google publishes batshit crazy research papers that call automated propaganda "AI fairness" and relies on a horde of underpaid serfs bordering mental breakdown to make final decisions on content moderation. Welcome to the predicable future of your bad decisions.

RegnisGnaw3• 5 years ago

The choice of "content neutrality" is pretty much keyword also for:

1. constantly reeling from one public backlash after the other

2. advertising dropping you due to controversial content

3. government coming after you for controversial content

If I were a business, I'd go content moderation all the way. Less blow black and more steady income.

tedivm2• 5 years ago

Most of these platforms start off trying to be content neutral and end up adding more moderation as a result of how badly it ends up hurting them. There's only so many times advertisers are willing to have their brand shown next to child pornography (ie, reddit's former /r/jailbait) or hate speech.

If complete neutrality was an answer these companies would be doing that, since it's the cheapest option.

BoxOfRain• 5 years ago

If we must live in a cyberpunk dystopia, I wish we could at least get sci-fi style "holographic" displays as a consolation prize.

shadowgovt• 5 years ago

In this case, looks like someone hacked authorization to the channel and deleted it. This is probably not "channel taken down for violating policy," but instead "channel deleted by 'owner.'"

The wording in the email from Google suggests they don't yet have enough info to trust the inquisiting email comes from the channel owner (source: my own experience proving email account A and email account B were the same person).

caeril• 5 years ago

either accept some form of content neutrality or become a petty and chaotic tyrant constantly reeling from one public backlash after the other

No, there is a middle ground that Google, with its army of engineers, could implement in a weekend:

1. You stop trying to assume you know what advertisers want their ads to be displayed on.

2. You implement a basic, fixed (but can be expanded) ACL-type system based on categories such as "hacking content", "politically sketchy content", "sexual content", etc.

3. YOU LET THE GOD DAMN ADVERTISERS DECIDE FOR THEIR OWN GOD DAMNED SELVES WHAT KIND OF CONTENT THEY'RE OK WITH ADVERTISING ON.

4. You end up spending LESS on content moderator salaries, and end up with FEWER unhappy advertisers because THEY can align their principles with the content. Hak5/Sparkfun would be fine advertising on Linux Experiments. I'm sure MyPillow would be happy to advertise on a Q Conspiracy channel. The demand for this feature is unquestionably there.

5. You stop playing God and pretending that the concept of global "community standards" means anything at all in a world with 7 billion people and hundreds of thousands of disparate interests-based communities, each with their own disparate community standards.

RegnisGnaw3• 5 years ago

Your plan fails, lets say they implement what you do. Let say that company X advertises but only on the safe subjets. Then my immediate attack will be:

"Company X advertises on a website showing jailbait sexual content" or "Company X advertising on a site promoting Q Conspiracy".

You are going to fight an uphill battle explaining to people the naunces of the system, which is a losing battle.

MisterTea• 5 years ago

2. You implement a basic, fixed (but can be expanded) ACL-type system based on categories such as "hacking content", "politically sketchy content", "sexual content", etc.

Who or what ensures that the Q conspiracy channel is properly categorized as "politically sketchy content" and not "hacking content"?

The reality is no amount of computer code will fix a human problem.

mschuster912• 5 years ago

2. You implement a basic, fixed (but can be expanded) ACL-type system based on categories such as "hacking content", "politically sketchy content", "sexual content", etc.

The problem: for some of these, the definitions, the legality status and the liabilities (especially around "politically sketchy" stuff) may differ wildly between jurisdictions. And you will always have trolls mis-labeling their content on purpose, or content that is to be classified as "gambling" in the US but not in Germany... the list of issues is endless.

3. YOU LET THE GOD DAMN ADVERTISERS DECIDE FOR THEIR OWN GOD DAMNED SELVES WHAT KIND OF CONTENT THEY'RE OK WITH ADVERTISING ON.

And then they will still have headlines "Youtube allowing Nazis, antivaxxers, incels and other threats to the general public". Not to mention the legal issues (e.g. Nazi content is banned in Germany/Austria, LGBT content in Russia, a whole boatload of stuff illegal in India with jail threats for local staff)...

5. You stop playing God and pretending that the concept of global "community standards" means anything at all in a world with 7 billion people and hundreds of thousands of disparate interests-based communities, each with their own disparate community standards.

You will always need some sort of "global minimum standards" that ideally is at least somewhat of a common ground in Western-allied nations. And that means: no Nazis/white supremacists, no Qanon, no antivaxxers, no incels, no adult content/gore, no drugs (tobacco/alcohol/illegalized drugs), no gambling, no glorification of violence.

Macha• 5 years ago

YOU LET THE GOD DAMN ADVERTISERS DECIDE FOR THEIR OWN GOD DAMNED SELVES WHAT KIND OF CONTENT THEY'RE OK WITH ADVERTISING

Have you talked with advertisers? They're really twitchy about this stuff, they even have vendors for brand safety they'll want to include in their ads or have you integrate with if you're a platform like YouTube to rule out ads on anything that could show their brand in a bad light.

I don't use YouTube, but I thought this was what the demonetisation was - the creators were getting a trickle of revenue, but most of it was gone, sounds to me like the impacts of it being considered not "brand safe" and most advertises enable such controls reflexively.

ridaj• 5 years ago

You stop playing God and pretending that the concept of global "community standards" means anything at all in a world with 7 billion people and hundreds of thousands of disparate interests-based communities, each with their own disparate community standards.

I think you're confusing the Internet with YouTube. The Internet has no global content standard, but this is not the world that YouTube lives in. It lives in the world of ad-supported services which has been repeatedly very clear about its minimum expectations regarding community standards. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=adpocalypse

otterley• 5 years ago

How do you know this could be done in a weekend, let alone a year, in a way that will make YouTube’s stakeholders happier than they are today? You seem to know an awful lot about this.

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” —H. L. Mencken

hashkb• 5 years ago

Don't forget the police playing copyrighted music while they abuse you to stop you from filming them. When the police are ahead of the tech, you know the People are f'd.

noasaservice• 5 years ago

And at least when they're playing a popular song with easy to obtain MP3s, you can use gnuradio to cancel that out of the audiotrack.

Yeah, they're being shitty piggies, but we have tech we can use too.

titzer• 5 years ago

It's Kafka-esque, really. Google has always thought it is smarter than everyone else and that has led, inexorably, to it establishing itself as the final arbiter of truth. Except Google is a dysfunctional, distracted, neurotic, schizophrenic entity, like all organizations, with an ever-changing set of in-fighting fiefdoms and warring executives.

Worse, growthism forced its "Organize the world's information" mission into "Swallow and monetize the world's information" with an added helping of "know exactly what every person wants, even if they don't know they want it yet."

acomar• 5 years ago

growthism

any day now, the moral, upstanding, self-restrained capitalists will buck the profit motive and save us from the unsavory sorts who rule our world today.

only_as_i_fall• 5 years ago

I feel we pretty badly need to revisit laws surrounding social media platforms in the US. I'm not sure what the silver bullet is here, but the way platforms have almost limitless latitude to filter and shape discourse on their platform and also virtually zero liability for that same discourse seems like an obvious problem.

Unfortunately the average senator is over 60 and the companies that own these platforms have deep pockets.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

asah3• 5 years ago

no - see above comment re illegal sweepstakes

ggrrhh_ta• 5 years ago

Most people do not give a second thought to employees having a minimum set of rights and obligations even if they work for a private company.

I think it is not difficult to consider any contributor in a (virtual) Commons to be subject not only to obligations but also to a set of rights.

globular-toast• 5 years ago

Can someone add some context to this? I have never heard of this channel and a link to a screenshot of a generic message from Google tells me nothing.

hapless• 5 years ago

It appears to have been banned when the author offered an illegal sweepstakes.

Contests and sweepstakes are carefully regulated in America, with slightly different regimes in all 50 states. You should not run one unless you have gotten legal help with it!

EastToWest• 5 years ago

Source? The creator's twitter doesn't mention that at all.

dom111• 5 years ago

It's implied here: https://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP/status/1435107199785832449

but no more detail than that I can see...

juniperplant• 5 years ago

There was a giveaway of a Tuxedo laptop[1]. Whoever wanted to participate had to comment on the video announcing the giveaway, which apparently goes against YouTube's TOS (as far as I can tell comments count affects YouTube's algorithm).

[1] https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment:e/win-the-tuxedo-aura...

mabbo• 5 years ago

Let's presume you're right and this is why the channel was legitimately deleted.

Was there a warning? Was there some communication with the owner saying "Hey, what you're doing violates or Ts&Cs"? It seems like if there was, the owner would be tweeting that he disagrees with the deletion rather that completely not understanding why it happened.

Putting more humans in the loop would be more expensive, but it would help end these puzzling situations where creators don't know why they've been told to stop creating.

comeonseriously• 5 years ago

Algorithms don't warn. Nor do they communicate. They just delete.

rscoots2• 5 years ago

That's still begs the question though, why not simply hide or abridge that video. Or add a disclaimer?

How can deleting the entire channel without warning possibly be the ethical move here?

spurgu3• 5 years ago

It's not. The consensus (here at least) seems quite clear.

Teknoman117• 5 years ago

That doesn't make much sense though, given that many of the tech YouTubers (LinusTechTips, JayzTwoCents, to name a few) have done hardware giveaways fairly regularly. "We're giving away RTX 3080s and 3090s to verifiable gamers" is the recent trend. LTT is in Vancouver, but JayzTwoCents is in Southern California somewhere, and therefore, the United States.

KeepFlying• 5 years ago

Except those channels probably have the means to run it legally and with the right caveats, legalese, tax documentation, etc.

Sweepstakes and giveaways aren't banned, they just have some overhead and legal requirements around them.

wheybags• 5 years ago

LTT weren't giving them away though. First come first served, and you only got the opportunity to buy them at MSRP, instead of scalper markups. They werent given away for free.

sschueller• 5 years ago

If this is true there are several very large youtubers that are running illegal sweepstakes. Jake and Logan Paul for example.

raydev2• 5 years ago

How do you know those sweepstakes are illegal? Have you verified that the Paul brothers either have bad legal teams or no legal teams?

heavyset_go• 5 years ago

If you suspect this, report them to the FTC.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 5 years ago

The error message claims that an account has not existed or has been deleted long ago, not "you violated our ToS and are permabanned no appeals kthxbye". Assuming this recovery attempt was started within whatever Google considers that short time, it implies something else is happening.

One possible guess would be the account getting hacked, somehow moved to a different address, then deleted. (I have no idea how primary e-mail addresses work for Google/Gmail accounts, except that what used to be a standalone YouTube account got merged into a Google account which once I created a gmail address for it suddenly had a different primary e-mail address, so there are ways for stuff like this to change and "brand accounts" complicate it further on YouTube).

e40• 5 years ago

This is what happened to Jim Browning (YT channel about scammers... very entertaining). He was tricked into it.

https://youtu.be/YIWV5fSaUB8

tmaly• 5 years ago

I was doing this YouTube survey last night. This was one of the points I raised in the survey. That a channel with 10 years of videos can be deleted without notice.

fastssd• 5 years ago

Chris Titus has covered this topic excellently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHeZXkZT_jk

jbj• 5 years ago

I hope he can get it back, it is a great resource for well researched news in my oppinion. I just tried out /e/ recently after learning about it on his channel

petepete• 5 years ago

I love his channel. Definitely one of the better Linux-focussed channels around and far less cringe than Baby WoGuE.

zenron2• 5 years ago

The Linux Experiment is one of the best Linux channels on Youtube for beginners as well as just a feel good vide technology channel for everyone.

Its a must have channel next to Destination Linux Network suite of channels.

Hope it gets reversed.

sneak• 5 years ago

Donating free content to censorship platforms is a way to continue having this sort of nonsense happen forever.

croes• 5 years ago

Maybe governments should forbid and fine YouTube and if they ask why just answer that they violated laws and that no appeal is possible.

egberts1• 5 years ago

I just sauntered over to Apple App store to take a look-see at Odysee app and its privacy “level”.

No thanks.

nabakin2• 5 years ago

Channel has been reinstated!

https://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP/status/1435311971973406726

I want to know what happened for Google to make such a serious mistake.

fouc2• 5 years ago

That twitter link didn't work for me.

Can confirm it's back: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheLinuxExperiment

Seems glitchy though, I can't sort by "most popular", it suddenly says "this channel has no videos". Hopefully that's just an old cached result that will clear up at some point.

nabakin2• 5 years ago

Looks like he couldn't login so he deleted the tweet. Here's the new twitter thread: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1435317727158177796

skinkestek• 5 years ago

I want to know what happened for Google to make such a serious mistake.

Remember, this is Google. They do everything automatically including messing up big time.

Needing a human in the loop to mess up big time wouldn't scale, at least not web scale.

_-david-_• 5 years ago

Google frequently make mistakes like this. Sometimes channels are not so lucky when it comes to the reinstatement though.

anigbrowl3• 5 years ago

I'm sympathetic but not a video creator, but I wonder why don't people band together and sue, or alternatively pressure their state attorneys-general to bring a civil enforcement action? Yes, yes, arbitration clauses, but there's a doctrine in law called 'unconscionable contract' and a demonstrable pattern of unilateral kafkaesque behavior by YT is a good start for any attorney.

As I have pointed out over and over market solutions don't work when there are huge power/capital differentials involved. Hoping some plucky little underdog product/service will lead to an exodus isn't going to happen.

Back in the day, Google ate Yahoo's lunch (along with Altavista, Lycos and everyone else) because Google had a genuine search engine (in the form of a graph database) whereas the incumbents were operating directories, and the classification/curation couldn't keep up with the volume of information being crawled. For those who were not around at the time, it's hard to communicate how different the products were. Incumbents let you search but also offered a huge number of categories, like a library catalog. Google looked like a joke website the first time you visited due to the lack of any categorical or navigational options, just this over-confident search field...except that it worked. It was like sorcery.

The reason I mention this is because in economics there's a concept of elasticity of demand, of how attached you are to a thing you already use or consume. Generally, you want to stick with what works. This is especially true where network effects come into play. Competitors that offer X + some incremental improvement usually fail; their best outcome is that X buys them and incorporates the incremental improvement (which is sometimes the competitors' ultimate goal). To lure people away from a successful product the additional benefit to the buyer has to be more like 100% than 10% or 20%, and that rarely happens. If you look at Youtube's contenders, they fall into specialized categories such as art stuff like Vimeo (extra access control, higher video quality/ delivery options), Twitch (emphasis on livestreaming and social, especially for gamers), Rumble (for Freeze Peach aficionados), Pornhub and the whole adult entertainment ecosystem, or high-end commercial content streaming.

So if you dream of beating YouTube in the market, you need to either occupy a niche they don't want to be in (most of which have already been occupied) or offer something that's radically different for the consumer. Being distributed/ FOSS/ blockchain/ whatever isn't it because only nerds care about that stuff. Nerds don't rule the marketplace, even when they build the marketplace: 95% of people do not care how something works or that it serves a higher purpose. It needs to offer a wholly different user experience, and really, it's kinda hard to see how you're gonna radically rethink TV.

You have a better chance to do something amazing in virtual reality or internet navigation in general, and provide a native offering in which Youtube is diminished to the minor status of a channel owner, ie your UI/brand is The Thing and YouTube is just a minor service provider icon below the content.

So the alternative is to address the situation legally. Monopoly complaints won't work, because the nice capitalists at the University of Chicago have institutionalized the idea that monopolies are fine as long as the public is happy, and the huge # of consumers using YouTube vastly outweighs the small # of creators who are pissed off with it, so good luck with your public interest argument. However, there might be some mileage in attacking the contract terms or alleging that YouTube has implicitly defamed creators by suspending them without explanation. Or you could go in a different direction and argue that YouTube is a sort of public utility, though then you need to decide whether you really want online video to be regulated by FCC.

Litigation would be expensive and stressful and would need to be a collective rather than individual undertaking, and a selective one at that - folks like Linux Experiment are sympathetic plaintiffs, folks like Logan Paul are not (you may think this shouldn't matter, but tough luck, it does). Chances are that such a case would almost certainly fail, but the object would be to make discovery and the trial excruciatingly embarrassing for youtube, which would mean refusing to settle and (probably) looking for specific performance like YT submitting to supervision of some kind in the form of a consent decree, rather than mere compensation. If you just ask them for money you'll (maybe) eventually get some but nothing will change, because asking for money is essentially the same as saying whoever has the most money gets to be king of the market and Alphabet has plenty of coins to toss in the direction of the peasants.

The potential upside here is not winning in court (a vanishingly unlikely possibility) or getting a big check to shut up and go away (nice and what your lawyers want, but basically selling out your principles), but either a change in the law from Congress (ha ha good luck) or a shift in the public's thinking about how contracts should work, the distribution of obligations, and how much market power is acceptable.

Shorel• 5 years ago

Google is EVIL.

hamburgerwah• 5 years ago

Another "google's customer support is only available via online mob outrage" situation. Just pathetic, who isn't embarrassed to work for Google at this point?

The Linux Experiments YouTube channel has been terminated

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