[jkldotio]

Censorship and demonetisation on YouTube seems to be happening to people fairly regularly, and without appeal, via poorly calibrated algorithms, corporate pressure and to satisfy mobs of complaining people for various reasons. The rules seem to be vague to the point of meaninglessness and it seems even the stars of the platform who often share managers and production companies with other stars have difficulty getting in touch with YouTube to resolve issues.

I think most content producers have wised up to this and diversify their audience over multiple platforms. If you rely on the income putting all your eggs in the YouTube basket is a massive risk until they clean up their processes (there are many automated and social methods to do some of this but they seem completely uninterested in doing it).

[infinitesoup]

> Censorship and demonetisation on YouTube seems to be happening to people fairly regularly, and without appeal, via poorly calibrated algorithms

Demonetization happens when a video doesn't meet their "advertiser-friendly" policy, but there is an appeal process where you can have a human look at it to determine if the original assessment was wrong [0]. Do you have data to support your claim that their algorithms are "poorly calibrated"?

Can you provide some examples of "censorship"? They do have policies that things like graphic content or spam is not permitted and will be removed from the site, but I think that's reasonable.

> It seems even the stars of the platform who often share managers and production companies with other stars have difficulty getting in touch with YouTube to resolve issues.

YouTube provides email support with a 1-business day response time to all creators [1], and the bigger channels get their own Partner Managers [2].

[0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7083671

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3545535?hl=en

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/yt/creators/benefit-levels.html?noap...

[tramparam]

When Pewdiepie (person on your [2] link on Silver & Up banner) complains [0] that YouTube isn't communicating enough, most people will agree that problem is at their side.

>Demonetization happens when a video doesn't meet their "advertiser-friendly" policy, but there is an appeal process where you can have a human look at it to determine if the original assessment was wrong [0]. Do you have data to support your claim that their algorithms are "poorly calibrated"?

It happens all the time when content creators are using content under fair use. Jim Sterling goes over demonetisation with ContentID [1] and latest changes [2] in his videos. I don't know if he have used that email support, but it would be fair to assume that he have tried and gave up.

[0] https://youtu.be/aQVMnW6LGfM?t=222

[1] https://youtu.be/cK8i6aMG9VM?t=62

[2] https://youtu.be/gkfQsQlI8T8?t=96

[urgerestraint]

> YouTube provides email support with a 1-business day response time to all creators [1], and the bigger channels get their own Partner Managers [2].

Multiple demonetized channels have stated that they have not received responses via the official support channels. It's all well and good stating a 1-business day response time, but if Youtube doesn't follow through that, where does that leave the content creators?

It's like businesses with support response SLAs that are cleared by the sending of a robo-email from their support system. No actual support has been rendered.

[Tinyyy]

Care to give some examples?

[jkldotio]

https://www.maxlaumeister.com/blog/google-is-deleting-your-f... has some, but anyone who's been following it knows it's happening beyond that. I am surprised that infinitesoup is apparently unaware of these issues given his account on HN is 591 days old and over it's history has posted about absolutely nothing but YouTube. Indeed an account on Reddit called infinitesoup, possibly unrelated I concede, has wall-to-wall comments on YouTube too. They all read like a superfan or possibly an employee of Google providing support. The usual etiquette on HN is to simply disclose an interest and then argue a point. While it's not against the rules I don't like having to do my own research and finding out the person posting links from Google support is likely a Google employee (the person connected with the Reddit account seems to be a Google employee, maybe this guy isn't).

Even if they are different accounts and this guy isn't a Google employee they haven't presented any other credible evidence for this wonderful support anyway. They have only presented a policy aspiration. Google is not Amazon; Google is notorious for bad customer support. Our prior belief for "will YouTube provide good support" shouldn't be very high given they are part of Google. Therefore it doesn't take many data points in the direction of poor support to confirm that.

There are clear and sometimes good reasons for what Google does, it's a great company with competent employees but let's not drink the Kool-Aid and pretend they have great customer support just because there is a policy document aspiring to have good response times.

[oxide]

There is no censorship IIRC, the entire thing was overblown. (shocking, huh?)

if you put blacklisted words in your tags, description or title your video gets demonitized. It isn't censorship of content whatsoever.

Did you really think youtube bots were watching every second of monetized content looking for the f-word?

[poopsintub]

Play store has had the same issue for years, and there really isn't an alternative either. You can try to diversify, but nothing compares to the android crowd due to low, low cost devices. Google doesn't want to pay for decent support for something making them a ton of money, why would they do it for YouTube? You're stuck. Play the game and play it well.