I wasn't even able to get my one of my best friends' access to their account restored when they had all the correct info and the automated account recovery form was breaking with absolutely useless error messages.
That's the problem and why moderation is so difficult. It's incredibly difficult to scale.
Anything that allows people to appeal negative actions will be abused by bad actors. Spend some time on the League of Legends or World of Warcraft forums or subreddits and you'll see people claiming to have been suspended or banned for no reason, until eventually a moderator or CS rep will come in and say "Actually you were banned because you spammed racial slurs in the game and told a teammate to kill themselves."
Now imagine how many people put copyrighted music in their YouTube and afterwards appeal the inevitable copyright strikes on their video because they think it somehow falls under fair use or think putting "No copyright infringement intended" in the description absolves themselves of any wrong-doing.
There would at least be a path forward for the little guy.
The platform being so dominant is the root cause - if the person above has the ability to move away, google will change (for the betterment of the OP).
> Google One is a membership that gives you more storage to use across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. Plus, you can redeem exclusive benefits, back up data from your phone, and get support for everything Google from our team of experts.
That's more than a lot of platforms give. The trend lately is to give no information about why other than pointing at a list of rules and picking one, so as not to "let bad actors game the system". Sure, then let's just get rid of the right to know which crimes the government may accuse you of committing, and just say "we determined you broke the law, you go to jail for X years, no we won't tell you what you did, if we did then criminals could find loopholes!" while happily jailing innocents.
I honestly started to do a chargeback on the promo charge, but I guarantee you I'd lose access to all google services because of a tos violation if I did that. Lesson learned. Never do business with a monopoly provider, you have no recourse.
fi used to be cheaper for me because I would use $20 line + $10 data. Now mint is undercutting them on both price and giving more data.
Having them claim that I'm violating their promotion because they can't deliver the service promised by their coverage map is infuriating.
But competing with YT is nearly impossible. Maybe YTubers should start talking about some sort of association.
Like some sort of union of workers with similar interests?
Out of curiousity, is there any actual process that is kicked off when someone posts into the support forum or the subreddit?
Or are there just some employees who happen to browse those boards in their free/20% time - and if they feel particularly moved by some post, they can try to rally up enough internal support to do something about it?
Because with all due respect, that's not support, that's charity.
A plumber that wants to promote their business and it's reliability should not be required to make funny scripted videos using the "OhNo song" just to get views.
A doctor that pops pimples should not be required to make funny or gross scripted videos using the "OhNo song" just to get views.
A musician that want's to promote their music as well should not be required to make funny scripted videos using the "OhNo song" just to get views, especially because that song is probably not their own, and it has nothing to do with their music.
None of those "creators" should be required to pay to promote/boost their originally produced content either (especially when they're primarily promoting "OhNo by Creeper", but somehow that's become a widely accepted thing as well... It's all dumb, and pretty much a modern-day pyramid scheme.
If you spend most of your time working on designing thumbnails and writing scripts, finding daily trending hash tags, and in shooting and editing videos according to success advice, you're simply not working on improving your "bread and butter". As trends become coveted goals, the overall quality of content declines as well, and it burdens attention spans of viewers overall (just look at how many videos now over-use jump cuts, overly excited and sensationalized dialogue, and zoom effects)... :\
This is what also encourages content theft as an easy route to getting views and likes that ultimately do nothing good for most people... It's popularity without profit for anyone but the platform.
People get frustrated only after years of trying to climb the mountain and finding out there is nothing at the top, the platform loses it's foothold, and then is replaced by something new... Rinse and repeat... Friendster, Myspace, Mp3.Com, Napster, etc... :\
You're right that it can't be solved with code, but can't it be solved by leveraging power as a scarce resource? Hiring is incredibly expensive so at some point they have to give. And if they don't, well, at least you're not contributing to the problem.
And Google is a company with primarily software engineers…
The challenge is to moderate a popular service where any user can upload content that many actors will try to abuse.
Even putting aside that YouTube is partly supported by ads, there is no known solution as far as I know, short of turning YouTube into an old fashioned TV channel with only a few vetted content creators allowed to upload.
As for the human powered appeal process, how to design it so that it is not spammed/abused as easily as the upload?
It's easy to explain everything away because of evil corporation, but those are also actual technical issues.
> * They're content with algorithmic approaches to spam prevention and other moderation that results in numerous false positives and don't see the problem with that.
Spot on. False positives are part of the game when you're trying to improve on $1.3MM revenue/employee.
> * They think their support channels are more than adequate.
Anybody at any internal discussion would probably disagree with this, instead saying something along the lines of "there may be deficiencies with our support process but we can always improve them later on."
> * They think their bans result solely in bad actors being harmed and don't realize that shady businesses that actually do spam have endless fake companies at their disposal to keep on trucking.
Nobody thinks that the bans solely result in bad actors being harmed and the fact that there are endless fake companies is what necessitates these robot walls that don't have human connections. False positives will happen and a goal is minimizing them... however goal #1 is growing the product (which indirectly requires keeping false positives from getting too high) and goal #2 is preventing company liability (which directly requires that false negatives stay really low). When you have strong pressure to keep false negatives low and less pressure to keep false positives low, then you end up with a bias toward positive results.
OK, well, that's why we end up here. Is this helpful to OP? Probably not. Sorry, OP!
Algorithmic moderation will always have false positives. The question is how you deal with them: Do you have an appeals process that involves human review or do you just say "sucks to be you" and let the false positive be the user's problem?
In a similar way, car accidents will always happen. However the car industry decided (not completely on their own) to invest in safety so that when accidents do happen, they are less deadly.
> Anybody at any internal discussion would probably disagree with this, instead saying something along the lines of "there may be deficiencies with our support process but we can always improve them later on."
The mythical time of "later on". When exactly would that be?
And yes, you can always improve anything. This is a vaguely pleasant-sounding non-statement.
Why was the false positive generated? Why was the user unable to use the process in place to appeal? And then improve the root process cause.
This is what seems to be broken at Google and Facebook, and is the fundamental difference between a black hole support model (make problems invisible to us, because they never get to us) and one that works at scale. You're always going to have false positives, but I don't think anyone feels like the mega-corps actually have a process in place to monitor and improve the process for dealing with them.
Then there’s channels that do everything from outright stealing content to adding a voiceover to get around copyright, playing the real video in a frame surrounded with other content and on and on.
I don’t think I have a particular knack for it but I see way too many of these channels every single time I open YouTube. They’re all perfectly fine.
AND that’s what is extremely annoying. If the rules are applied by a bit but in a consistent way and mercilessly, people will either not break the rules by being aware or they’ll switch to something else where their stuff is not banned.
I would still be sad if they blocked my account. I'm actively trying to get better at making videos and there are some very nice memories on there (which I have saved locally, of course, but still).
Google employees (including YouTube employees) only do what gets them promoted. This is all Larry & Sergei's fault. Only governments can make them behave as responsible members of society. So here's what you can do:
1. Report bad business practices to the FTC [0] or the European Commission department for Justice and Consumers [1]
2. Report the problem to your elected representatives [2].
3. Use the company's products less or migrate to a better-behaved product. I've done this with Facebook, Instagram, Google Maps (Apple Maps is good enough now), Google Search (DuckDuckGo is good enough), and Facebook Messenger (iMessage is good enough).
[0] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/justice-and-consumers_...
Googlers are smart people, how can they believe in something this plain wrong?
They are probably highly skilled in the things they are selected for skill in. “Smart”, even when it is really high general IQ, doesn't translate to universal proficiency without dedicating time and effort to particular domains.
> how can they believe in something this plain wrong?
Strong selective pressure: people who don't have beliefs that fit with the current Google context and bureaucracy are less likely to be selected by, or select to work for, Google and, even if they are, are more likely to be selected out, or voluntarily depart.
See the destruction of the Ethical AI unit over issues very closely related to the conflict over blind faith in algorithmic approaches.
I suspect the rationale is something like "Well, you don't pay for your YouTube account (or don't pay that much) so you shouldn't expect good support or moderation."
they are smart enough to know that "improved customer service" will never get them that promotion
The System constructed by Googlers is so smart, the Googlers themselves are subject to a form of papal infallibility.
If we pressured companies like Google to hire people to do customer support and to review flagged videos manually, it would create more jobs and make using the internet a better experience. But for now, they can just choose not to, and save a buck.
I've had this discussion with Googlers here before and this is apparently what they actually believe.
* They're content with algorithmic approaches to spam prevention and other moderation that results in numerous false positives and don't see the problem with that.
* They think their support channels are more than adequate.
* They think their bans result solely in bad actors being harmed and don't realize that shady businesses that actually do spam have endless fake companies at their disposal to keep on trucking.