maybe there needs to be a new service to help the little guy? Bring back some form of the Don't be Evil

It doesn't scale.

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.

People have suggested that this can be solved by Big Tech charging money for premium support in some fashion. It's not a perfect solution, but it would weed out the most frivolous and unimportant claims and make supporting the desperate people manageable.

That would be terrible PR for them though. "YouTube banned me just so they could take my money to get help!" "Only rich people can get their YouTube accounts unbanned!" and so on.

This could be partially mitigated if the fee behaved more like a deposit, but overall I agree, Google has no incentive to go down this route, especially because taking people's money who are already upset with you is a recipe for legal headache.

Well, there are startups that take a deposit and then ban people for getting lower than 4.5 star ratings. They keep the deposit, even when the account is unbanned.

If the price were low enough, it would be a better option than the current status quo.

There would at least be a path forward for the little guy.

"better option" for whom? Because google has already chose the best option for themselves.

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).

This almost exists: Google One.

> 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.

The problem is that there is no path to forgiveness for someone that makes an honest mistake. “Terminate account, lock out from all content (email, calendars, videos, whatever), and refuse to communicate” is something akin to using the death penalty for every violation of the law. In many cases there are teachable moments and bringing out the banhammer + silent treatment for every infraction creates a suboptimal society.

Youtube could use this problem to their advantage by allowing users to validate algorithmic based flags. Youtube could present a user a video on their feed that has been algorithmically flagged for reasons xyz. You could be one of several folks that agree or disagree. If enough disagree, the ban doesn't go into effect.

>"Actually you were banned because you spammed racial slurs in the game and told a teammate to kill themselves."

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.

Nonsense! All you have to do is charge a few dollars more than cost to handle every single support query, and it will scale all the way to the moon.

If sufficient moderation -- for ad supported businesses exploiting user provided content -- cannot or will not be performed, then perhaps moderation is not the problem.

I bought a pixel this year with a $100 discount for signing up for google fi. Turns out, their map is a lie, and I was completely without coverage, so I sign up with my old provider. I then get a nastygram saying I'm going to be charged the full $100 because I cancelled google fi. $50 more than the non promo price.

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.

Just to add another anecdata I used google fi for ~4 yrs and was always pretty happy with it. Recently switched to mint just for sheer price competition -- ~$20 a month for a line + 5GB data beats fi coming in at like $50-60 for the same.

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.

I always felt giving your credit card to google for anything was a terrible idea. Privacy aside. A company with terrible support should never be allowed direct access to your credit card.

Did you return the phone within 15 days?

The carriers are starting to turn off service to 3g, and older 4g devices at the end of this year. I couldn't guarantee that I'd be able to get another phone like I needed, so I'm coughing up the $100, and I'm simply resolving to never trust google with my money again.

Having them claim that I'm violating their promotion because they can't deliver the service promised by their coverage map is infuriating.

The point of the 15 day return policy is to give you enough time to try their service, and if it doesn’t work for you, for whatever reason, to send the equipment back and cancel service. If you didn’t do that on time, well, that’s on you. You can’t have it both ways, to keep the equipment and get the discount while not using their service. That’s simply not what you agreed to. No carrier would let you do that.

The thing that makes me salty is that I'm being charged $50 MORE than if I had just bought the phone without google fi.

It won't happen unless they're forced to do so, or a competitor arises.

But competing with YT is nearly impossible. Maybe YTubers should start talking about some sort of association.

> Maybe YTubers should start talking about some sort of association.

Like some sort of union of workers with similar interests?

It seems like this would be more of a cartel.

Because producing creative videos is a limited resource than can be cornered?

Because creators have a business relationship with YouTube, not an employment one.

There have been a few attempts. It never goes anywhere and never will

This attitude is one of the reasons for why it will not go anywhere though. There are plenty of alternatives for YouTube. I think the problem is that there are actually way too many. We need only ONE replacement, and it has to get popular enough. The reason I am saying that we need only one replacement is that I do not expect creators to upload their videos to 100 different YouTube-likes.