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Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by Sohcahtoa82 on Monday December 13, 2021 @01:48PM (#29542874)
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.

Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by logicalmonster on Monday December 13, 2021 @01:56PM (#29542963)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by jedberg on Monday December 13, 2021 @05:59PM (#29545827)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by root_axis on Monday December 13, 2021 @07:56PM (#29546825)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by muzani on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @01:43AM (#29548923)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by tmaly on Monday December 13, 2021 @06:58PM (#29546376)
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.

Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by chii on Monday December 13, 2021 @10:02PM (#29547700)
"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).

Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by johnmaguire on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @09:57AM (#29552193)
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.

Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by nanidin on Monday December 13, 2021 @02:37PM (#29543484)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by m348e912 on Monday December 13, 2021 @02:36PM (#29543468)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by LocalH on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @12:41PM (#29554561)
>"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.

Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by markdown on Monday December 13, 2021 @02:28PM (#29543360)
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.
Re:Ask HN: Best Way to Contact YouTube by specialist on Monday December 13, 2021 @05:31PM (#29545542)
If sufficient moderation -- for ad supported businesses exploiting user provided content -- cannot or will not be performed, then perhaps moderation is not the problem.