YouTube suspends a YouTuber's Patreon-exclusive account for self-impersonation

https://twitter.com/craig1black/status/1645649300167495681

by indrora • 3 years ago

199 109 3 years ago

sschueller• 3 years ago

I hate this practice of these companies to state "This decision is final", it's insulting and childish when everyone knows that people and especially automated systems make mistakes.

It makes it even worse wenn we all know that if a person has enough clout or gets enough attention it isn't final.

If you are going to say stuff like that, then you should keep your word and when you do make a mistake don't undo that mistake. Live with the bad press you are going to get for being the assholes you are.

ncallaway• 3 years ago

For me it’s more the “there’s not more we can do on our end” language. The fuck you can’t, you implemented the suspension. Don’t go talking like it’s an act of god that you have no control over.

If they’re not willing to change their mind, at least say so.

prox2• 3 years ago

“We reviewed this carefully” - we took like 3 seconds to look at a screen that doesn’t give insights.

raverbashing• 3 years ago

At this point I think chatGPT would have done a better job than Google's "reviewers" (if it's actually a biological reviewer they have doing that)

2Gkashmiri• 3 years ago

happened to me a few months ago on github. Apparently "sign in with" lets the dev do whatever they like with your account.

In reality, i simply signed in with github because why not and suddenly everything is gone. A single email from github about "engaging in illegal behaviour of star farming so my account is deleted".

I signed in to github, i just clicked a bunch of buttons simply out of form fatigue and in the background, the dev had used my account to star their repos.

the problem is, why not punish the dev and why me? if the workflow was sign in, why did it allow my account to be used for stars farming? secondly, why to blame me? did i willingly engage in stars farming when i clicked on "sign in with" ?

they said the same thing, "decision is final". I made a bunch of noise on HN and tomorrow everything was back in order for me.

Learning outcome: dont use sign in with. ever

xigency2• 3 years ago

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. I certainly appreciate this heads-up.

8organicbits• 3 years ago

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33917962

That's horrible, I'm so sorry that happened to you. But I think that's the wrong learning outcome. As a technology, OAuth uses scopes to grant permissions. You mentioned that you didn't read the permissions before granting access. An app that requests zero scopes is still safe, as it can't star repos for you, but the burden falls on you to read. This is inherent to the design of OAuth.

There is a problem with GitHub scopes being overly broad, and users can't audit what an app actually does with those permissions. GitHub and others should be policing apps that request unreasonable permissions.

febusravenga• 3 years ago

And yet today, on top of HN we've got next app that requested GitHub login with scary "acting on your bahalf" whatever that means.

There were some explanations, that they are sincere and they do only good thinks, but i retreated

sofixa• 3 years ago

did i willingly engage in stars farming when i clicked on "sign in with" ?

Yes? You clicked accept to give access to an application to do stuff on your behalf. It is 100% your fault you didn't read what the very clear prompt said to you.

That being said, the owner(s) of the application in question should be banned for their malicious practice of stars farming, and I don't see why you would be.

mrtksn• 3 years ago

They probably A/B tested it and find that it works, by works I mean people give up and stop bothering them.

nikanj3• 3 years ago

It's final unless you know someone who works inside the company, or manage to catch enough traction on some news site to catch the attention of someone who works there

hoseja• 3 years ago

It probably saves more money by shutting down scams than it loses even on bad PR, sadly.

aestetix• 3 years ago

My favorite part of the response he got is "there's not much more we can do on our end." Coming from the same company that did the suspension. Among things they could do:

* Have another team review the complaint

* Be more transparent as to the "offense"

* Have an appeals process other than direct messages

* Click the button to unsuspend the account, since they run the software

* Give him a phone number to call to talk with a real person

Remember, when using Big Tech products, you are not a customer, you are the data.

quaintdev2• 3 years ago

Big tech should not grow to the levels they grow if they can't handle simple cutomer complaints.

lb1lf• 3 years ago

The problem, cynically speaking, is that you're not the customer. Their revenue is ad-based, so you're the product.

iepathos• 3 years ago

I may agree if these were paying customers we were talking about, but keep in mind they aren't. Youtubers don't pay youtube anything. They use youtube's service to host their videos and capitalize on youtube's marketing and ad services to profit. Youtube should've handled this situation better, but they are providing services for free and are entitled to suspend that service as they see fit. The customer complaints they must actually handle well are from advertisers who actually pay them money.

yellow_lead• 3 years ago

Wow - his account has over 170k subscribers and he's still treated this way.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/craig1black

crote• 3 years ago

YouTube recently suspended one of the Linus Tech Tips channels - with 5 million subscribers. Their brand has over 20 million subscribers in total.

Google just doesn't care about you - regardless of your size.

junon• 3 years ago

This was different, admittedly. Their account got session jacked and taken over by a crypto scamming farm. Google was in the right to shut down the account until it could get resolved.

The fact people can get session jacked by Google, though, is still wild. Linus explained that their access control granularity is woefully underdeveloped, especially for such a large company.

eis4• 3 years ago

That's just insane. Imagine Mastercard or Visa shutting down card payments for Amazon.com randomly without anyone with half a sense doing a proper review. No circuit breaker in place to stop automated takedowns of huge accounts.

Google and especially Youtube seem to be run in a reckless, careless and incompetent way in this regard. Similar to Youtube seemingly being uninterested in solving the huge comment scam problem. I don't buy that the company that successfully filters out billions of spam messages in Gmail can't detect these really obvious spam/scam comments on Youtube. It's just baffling.

eiiot• 3 years ago

While it does seem a bit odd that all 3 of his channels have almost identical names[0], YouTube/Google's lack of response to its own creators & users is still a disgrace.

Good reminder to back up all of your Google data[1], just in case they determine you've violated some random policy and terminate your account without any warning.

[0] https://twitter.com/craig1black/status/1645655035517476865

[1] https://takeout.google.com/

indrora• 3 years ago

They're named in the style of the Apple, apple ][, and Apple ///.

Adrian specializes in mostly Classic mac and apple hardware

haunter• 3 years ago

The lowercase typing and “other q’s” makes it look like so unprofessional.

defanor• 3 years ago

If this was a comic strip (or some other kind of parody/satire), I imagine it would have been explained by Google noticing that "the decision is final" is not great to write in public, wondering how to improve it, and deciding on this informal-looking style, instead of fixing the wording itself and/or actually fixing the issue.

hmate92• 3 years ago

Allow people to pay say $50 in order to get someone to actually review all the facts about the case and refund the user the money if they were right.

prox2• 3 years ago

I feel this one should be enshrined in law.

Broken_Hippo• 3 years ago

So, no poor people get this. I mean, it is the cost of nearly 7 hours work if you only make minimum wage. It doesn't really matter if the money will be refunded - it can't be used on food while the company holds the money for weeks.

Honestly, they should be required to simply have a case worker look at everything if the person has exhausted other options. Those other options should be easily found on the company's website (or facebook page, etc). And the case worker should actually have the power to decide either way, free from coercion and without quotas leaning either direction.

patates• 3 years ago

I like the idea, while thinking the next steps in case that goes wrong gives me a pause. What do you do if that person you get for 50$ seems incompetent? Exponentially increasing fees to get a review?

Remembering again, perfection is the enemy of good, what we have here is more than good enough for most of the cases perhaps.

whatshisface• 3 years ago

Here's a little sci-fi short fiction...

In 2041, Google begins offering a service where you can pay $28 ($50 in USD2041) for a human to review your claim. Since it costs them $8 to do this, they will allow you to appeal their decision as many times as you want.

In 2042, a data analyst discovers that routing claims to a specific subset of reviewers maximizes this revenue stream and updates the business logic accordingly.

searchableguy• 3 years ago

This is a business model for many hardware vendors who sell support and insurance with gross profit margin of more than 50% so I don't think it might improve the situation all that much in the long run.

heavyset_go2• 3 years ago

They will pay someone on the other side of the planet 5 cents to spend 30 seconds applying a checklist of strict conditions against your case that if not met means you're SOL.

hmate92• 3 years ago

If that’s the case then it will very quickly be known that spending this money is useless.

This is supposed to be a win win for both the platform and the user and not a source of revenue.

Of course if google decides to try and squeeze a couple of extra bucks of profit from this then it is useless.

SturgeonsLaw3• 3 years ago

So if the company denies your claim they also keep the $50? Sounds like the incentives are pointing away from a just outcome.

buzer• 3 years ago

There kind of is this with many companies these days. It's called arbitration. Someone did it with PayPal a while ago for example (ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462658). In many cases it's free, but in some (especially b2b) there might be terms that say each needs to pay their own fees or that winner needs to pay loser's fees.

andrewstuart2• 3 years ago

Not just "a YouTuber" - it's the guy from Adrian's Digital Basement - a classic retro channel and mainstay of geeks everywhere.

Though it should be noted it's not the Adrian's Digital Basement channel that has been booted.

eis4• 3 years ago

This happens way too frequently nowerdays. A friend of mine had his Youtube account banned. He never even uploaded a single video nor post any comments. How could it even possibly have created a reason to be banned? Of course support requests went into the void and he just gave up. Luckily his gmail was not affected.

A company I was involved with had a business account with Wise (Transferwise). One day out of the blue they froze our account and said only withdrawals from now on. The "reason" they provided was Violation of Acceptable Use Policy. They wouldn't even say which clause or give any details whatsoever. When asked for review we got an reply that after extensive review they can't reinstate the account, the decision is final. During the whole process it was painfully clear that they didn't read our messages or even try to understand the situation. After a few weeks and many emails with supporting evidence that we really can't see how we broke any of the terms the account was reinstated - a surprise to us. It seems like eventuall someone actually did take a look at the issue. But we never heard why it was frozen in the first place or what made them reinstate it. We probably just got really lucky. During that time we couldn't do payroll. We couldn't collect customer payments. It could have killed us did we not quickly scramble to get an alternative setup.

The common theme is that a company makes ill-advised banning decisions that have a big impact on a single user and then appeals are not treated seriously. This can have devastating effects. Usually this happens after the company who is running the platform grows to a certain size where they don't need to care about a low percentage of users anymore and rather save on support staff costs. And to add insult to injury they lie in your face about having conducted "extensive" reviews and having "carefully" decided all the while it being clear that they spent no energy or time on the matter. What's the solution here? Some mandatory third party appeal service which you can call upon? Many victims of wrongful banning would be glad to carry the costs of a review by a real human to get their accounts back.

sumedh• 3 years ago

How could it even possibly have created a reason to be banned?

Maybe he posted comments using that account which broke the terms?

eis4• 3 years ago

I explicitly mentioned he did not post any comments.

He never even uploaded a single video nor post any comments.

He wasn't really using it in that way. It was a pure video watching account.

WhackyIdeas• 3 years ago

TransferWise done this to our business account too. Couldn’t explain how we broke their terms (because we never) but we never bothered to fight them, we simply let customers transfer from International countries with our proper business account - which unfortunately just caused customers to pay more fees as a result.

throwaway20373• 3 years ago

The more that I read about the "international wire transfer" business, the more I think it is untenable at the current prices. The amount of "bad people" trying to launder money with your low priced wire transfers is incredible. Plus, the regulatory pressure only increases (year by year), which means you need to hire humans who can think to do AML/KYC. To be clear, good AML/KYC needs people who can think to evaluate "red flags". You cannot hire a bunch of paper pushers at minimum wage and think this will cover you against the regulator -- it will not. I don't see how it can continue. Soon these businesses will all be expensive or bankrupt, and we are back to the megabanks with mega fees, but more effective AML/KYC. It's tough.

susanwceo• 3 years ago

dammit this just happend to me too. my fifth ASMR live octopus mukbang react channel was unfairly terminated for impersonation, but luckily my live lobster crush mukbang, baby spiders ASMR zit popping prank react and disney elsa spiderman yoga morning routine main channels are still doing quite well

andrewstuart2• 3 years ago

All businesses must mitigate against big tech companies cutting them off.

If that big cloud hosting company decides they don't like your company anymore, and you've put all your eggs in that one basket - that's your fault.

There's ample evidence now that big tech companies are elephants that don't even notice the ants they're stepping on as they lumber around.

Built your entire company on AWS, or Google or Azure? You're a fool if you haven't built it to survive a cloud chucking you out.

Most unfortunately, there's no alternative platform for YouTubers. Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube - not Apple, not Netflix, not Amazon, not Microsoft - until there's an alternative platform, YouTubers just have to hope they don't stray in the way of the elephants foot.

xigency2• 3 years ago

Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube

Up until recent history, it was a money losing business. I’m sure that’s turned around now but mainly through heavily injecting ads. It would be difficult to disrupt them because of the network effects of all the content, viewers, and creators. And it would be hard to compete on price (whether subscription cost or amount of ads) without having the kind of infrastructure Google has.

It might be done in the future, but it will be anything but easy.

omeysalvi• 3 years ago

Exactly, it is the same philosophy with which VCs will pour billions of dollars into a business to prioritize growth over everything. When all competition is eliminated, there is no one left to challenge you and you get all the benefits of a monopoly.

smcl• 3 years ago

mainly through heavily injecting ads

HNers are more likely to use an ad blocker so they may not quite appreciate how severe this has become. I recently switched my casual/kitchen computer from an old MacBook Air (where I’d browse with Firefox and uBlock Origin) to an iPad (where I use the YouTube app) so I got to experience the difference first hand. The amount of adverts is horrendous - two sometimes-skippable ads every three minutes. I guess they want me to go for YouTube premium, but I have simply been put off from using YT altogether.

So that’s now Twitter and YouTube who have lost me as a user just through sabotaging their own product :-)

kuschku• 3 years ago

Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube

Nebula and Floatplane did, though both are relatively small.

Onlyfans and Patreon have so far been relatively active as well.

What all these three have in common is that they're for paid subscribers only, the only way this business can be sustainable.

michaelt• 3 years ago

Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube - not Apple, not Netflix, not Amazon, not Microsoft

Plenty of companies have tried to take on youtube in one way or another - Vimeo was a very similar product before they pivoted; some youtube creators also post to Floatplane, Utreon, Nebula, Odysee etc; and many social media sites that used to be awash in youtube links now have their own video hosting.

But youtube seems very durable.

nixgeek4• 3 years ago

Another fun “this decision is final” happened for me with Amazon recently.

We ordered two pairs of Beats. One was ordered by me, the other by my spouse. We’d discussed the purchase but we weren’t clear on who was actually going to order. Received both via Prime.

I setup a return. We return the item which was received on her Order ID against my return.

Amazon tells us we’ve returned a fraudulent item because the Serial # do not match. Multiple emails (5+) back and forth with Customer Service to explain fall on deaf ears. We give them both Order IDs. We ask for ANY option to solve this mess. We’re told repeatedly that this is their policy, their decision is final, go away.

Amazon won’t even send us the headphones back so we can send the correct ones — those have been destroyed.

“To protect our employees and customers, we have disposed the incorrect item that we received as per our policy.”

In a nutshell Amazon stole $250 from us, and is apparently creating tons of e-waste by destroying brand new, unused and perfectly good returns like ours.

justinclift• 3 years ago

Is there something like a "small claims" court you could turn to?

nixgeek4• 3 years ago

Possibly? We’re in Washington State, but honestly unless it’s literally point-click-done and without a need to drive and appear in a courthouse, it’s just not worth it for $250 (to me).

I expect this has been considered when creating policy at the largest companies — what’s the ease of obtaining recourse for unhappy customers?

What’s additionally interesting is I thought Amazon CS had a degree of goodwill factored into policies based on LTV or some other calculation. We saw zero goodwill here despite having spent >$100k on Amazon.com in the last 5 years.

Both this and the YouTube example seem like bad business; you’re disincentivizing your most ardent users from continuing to tolerate your services. They hadn’t looked at shopping on Walmart or B&H with every purchase previously and now will. They hadn’t considered Twitch or other places to serve video and now will.

chris_wot• 3 years ago

You need a country with strong consumer protection laws, such as Australia. In NSW, I’d go straight to the Department of Fair Trading, and they’d fix the issue.

dan_wood• 3 years ago

You don’t even need to go that far in most cases just mentioning it would get you on the right track.

buildbot• 3 years ago

Meanwhile, they’ll happily ship you an GPU that is actually someones old return…then also refuse to refund you. Criminal.

nixgeek4• 3 years ago

Ha; I’d forgotten my experience with LIFX bulbs and Amazon Warehouse Deals back in 2017 when we originally moved to USA, this exact situation happened across 50+ bulbs.

They’d sold a LIFX to Customer A who bought a $0.69 BR30 from Home Depot, substituted into the LIFX packaging and then returned to Amazon, who refunded them, and listed the item on Warehouse Deals.

On that one Amazon CS was also somewhat useless but they did at least refund us.

When it eventually came to a senior leaders attention, Amazon got it sorted out properly. They ended up auditing all their stock in Warehouse Deals for this type of item and discovered widespread fraud. Sounds like they fixed smart bulbs but haven’t fixed GPUs though!

silisili• 3 years ago

I feel for you, but just banish Amazon everything from your life, and convince others to do the same. We lived fine without Amazon before they existed, and we'll live fine without them once they're gone.

I'm on the verge of getting banned as they've warned me I'm returning too much, and have had enough negative interactions with their support that I'm in a similar boat.

It's been somewhat freeing giving them up. There's plenty of D2C out there we've been neglecting due to AMZs marketplace...

2-718-281-8283• 3 years ago

haven't ordered at amazon for many years. and I order a lot online. so, I confirm it is possible without any problem ... provided some IT-literacy. and that's usually why people fail at it. most people are unable to manage their emails or even organize passwords. heck, most people don't even know what an internet browser is ...

philistine• 3 years ago

I've tried my hardest to eliminate any Amazon order from my life this year. Whenever I needed books, or a receiver, or a nose trimmer I've made sure to shop at the category leader instead of Amazon. I've resorted to them twice, for weirdo stuff I couldn't readily find anywhere else. Well turns out the weirdo stuff only Amazon carries is crap, and I'm two for two on returns this year with Amazon.

throwaway2990• 3 years ago

People buy beats??? But they are expensive for such poor audio quality…

I don’t understand Amazons destruction policy. I ordered some stuff a few years ago and it never arrived. Amazon replaced the order for me which arrived in 4 days. About 5 months later the original package showed up… I tried to contact Amazon about it and they just said keep it…

Yet when my kindle stopped working after a month they sent a replacement and asked for the old one to be destroyed…

nixgeek4• 3 years ago

Beats Fit Pro are decent exercise headphones for me. They’re largely immune to sweat and behave like any Apple earphones — easy pairing. They’re also less prone to falling out for my ears than the AirPods Pro.

https://www.beatsbydre.com/earbuds/beats-fit-pro

throwaway20373• 3 years ago

Is a credit card chargeback not possible? You case sounds very strong. If not possible, definitely try small claims court. It will make for a great blog post or Twitter thread.

ddtaylor2• 3 years ago

That is how you get your Amazon account terminated.

onlypositive• 3 years ago

Did you email jeff@amazon.com? That's what I do when I want bugs fixed.

2-718-281-8283• 3 years ago

I once had a very annoying problem with a DHL parcel station (in Germany). at some point I was so fed up that I looked up the names of the C-level management, guessed their email addresses and sent all of them a message. didn't really help much in the end but I got a response and it was internally escalated apparently.

2-718-281-8283• 3 years ago

those have been destroyed.

didn't amazon pledge to stop destroying functioning products or was that just in the EU?

unpopularopp• 3 years ago

I wish Google employees had the same empathy about their own customers as signaling about civil rights. Maybe you would be able to change the company for good.

And no “Google decides”. Google is not an AI (yet), people make decisions so everything “carefully reviewed” is [not] done by a human.

But honestly it’s high time to break up Google. 0 customer service and 0 consequences is incredibly crazy in 2023. Imagine getting away with stuff like this in a retail store, regulators would shot you down in a second.

donalhunt• 3 years ago

In general I think they do. The reason that these types of threads work, is that employees create a stink internally which results in issues being resolved.

TGIFs would often shed light on such policies and issues which resulted in behaviour changes. No idea if that's still the case though.

One thing I do have insight to from working at multiple companies is that for every error in applying policies there are often 10s or 100s of individuals trying the scam or abuse the same policies for their own gain. The amount of attempted fraud for non-profit / charity programs is eye opening. :/

hexo• 3 years ago

Sue them.

piva00• 3 years ago

Are you going to provide the funding? Going to court is expensive in any case, against a multibillion dollar with double digits billions of profits every quarter? Good fucking luck...

mekoka• 3 years ago

Keep it up Big Co. Soon you'll have to deal with all these small businesses that you're bullying unionizing.

AraceliHarker• 3 years ago

The gist is, don’t monetize outside of YouTube.

nikanj3• 3 years ago

Fortunately he was able to reach the real Google customer service (HN front page) and this issue will be fixed quite promptly.

nikanj3• 3 years ago

Called it, the issue is fixed and the decision wasn’t final after all https://twitter.com/craig1black/status/1645822291497062402

LightHugger• 3 years ago

I know people say "but they cant give good support at their scale" but really at some point, with the amount of money they make, the real answer is that they choose not to give support and therefore choose to treat people like shit. It shouldn't be accepted as it currently is.

dariusj18• 3 years ago

It's like how physical manufacturing will choose to save a few pennies on a part reducing the overall cost per unit, saving themselves millions at the expense of the actual quality. It's fine when you do it with one or two part, but when you do it with all the parts, you're just creating a crap product.

suddenclarity• 3 years ago

There are supposedly 2.7 billion active users. How many employees would they need to actually offer what people ask for with personal support? The size of these companies are incomprehensible for most people.

YouTube suspends a YouTuber's Patreon-exclusive account for self-impersonation

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