Ask HN: How to Contact YouTube?

[abrownbag]

I recently had my life’s YouTube channel(5yr/20k subs) deleted overnight with no possible way to recover or even get in contact with support.

You can read the full story here: https://twitter.com/gabnworba/status/1384242020659519494?s=21

I’m wondering if anyone here went through anything similar and/or found a way to get in touch with anyone at YouTube.

I don’t have the social reach to get in touch and HN is my last hope at maybe finding someone on the inside to hear my story.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[niebeendend]

If I’m reading your Medium post right, you created 20 channels and ripped off other people’s Twitch clips into YouTube clips? I’m not sure what you were expecting given that’s not your content.

If you are in California, you should have a right to a copy of your data under CCPA data portability. If you’re in the US but in another state, I’m not sure.

[meowface]

Exactly. OP very blatantly deserved the ban. They detail exactly what they did in their blog post.

I'm not saying this to attack the OP's character or anything. This behavior is just clearly in the wrong and would and should be banned by any platform. It would have to be banned in order for a provider to retain their DMCA safe harbor protection, but even if it wasn't a legal requirement, there's no doubt it still needed to be and would be banned.

[abrownbag]

I'm sorry I didn't make this clear in the medium post but thats NOT what I was doing. The shorts channels weren't even monetizable. Please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26919770

[ev1]

It doesn't need to be monetizable. It's wholesale theft, not fair use, and like those terrible shitty "exposure" pages where they steal art, post it on instagram covered in watermarks for likes and views and the generic message "if you want this taken down email us!! 100 emoji 100 emoji"

[meowface]

I responded in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26919770

[abrownbag]

They're not rips. They are reformatted clips with proper attribution and links to the parties channel.

Most of us on twitch want our clips to be seen in hopes it drives traffic back to our content. There are many shameless channels ripping content and promoting it as their own but mine where never like that and many smaller streamers commented on the videos allowing me to promo them even more.

Once some of the channels took off I even had submissions I was able to add.

Sorry for the ramble but I really don't want people I was just out stealing content...

Also I am in California but unsure how to exercise that right with youtube.

[killingtime74]

Do you think attributing content means you have copyright?

[abrownbag]

No. What I’m saying is I don’t even know what I’ve copyrighted as I never received any notification from YouTube about any strikes.

[scpedicini]

Attribution is irrelevant if you're lifting them wholesale - and you're really stretching the definition of "fair use" since you're not obtaining consent from the actual content creators.

[x1798DE]

No idea if what OP is doing is or isn't fair use, but fair use doesn't require the content creator's permission, and in fact if you have the content owner's permission you generally don't need to invoke fair use at all (since they are in a position to simply grant you permission to use their content).

[ev1]

There is basically no chance that stealing the entirety of someone else's content (a full clip), no commentary, no parody, just a straight reupload onto their own account for views/subs is fair use.

[marto1]

> life’s YouTube channel

Never ever ever rely on a single proprietary platform to run your business.

Setup something temporary for your followers like a bitchute channel or similar until (hopefully) you get your main channel back.

And then spend some time to diversify your media spread.

[abrownbag]

Good advice. I have some of them on twitch and in discord. Unfortunately a wide section of followers do not crossover. No matter what I do they don’t seem to want to leave their home platform(YouTube).

[fragmede]

Nah it's shit advice that blames you, the victim for making that choice of platform, rather than finding fault with the platform's behavior. The opportunity costs to you of supporting multiple platforms takes away from producing content. You end up with a fraction of the same number of users, just spread across multiple platforms, and crucially, the platforms aren't all the same. What plays well on YouTube won't play well on twitch nor SnapChat nor Instagram nor TikTok nor Reddit. There's not zero crossover, but as you've found, it's negligible. Go to where your users are, collect email addresses as backup, but spreading yourself thin across all possible platforms is not the recipe for success GP poster thinks it is.

[abrownbag]

I understand where he's coming from. Maybe having some branded url with a hosted alternative and shipping that to emails could have helped in the inevitable event something like this happened?

But I feel this post. This has been my exact experience. As someone who used multiple platforms to build an audience and try and grow I have retained some crossover but at the end of the day losing that source of revenue is just too big of a hit.

I don't know how I could possibly convince youtubers not to watch my videos on youtube realistically...

[serf]

>Nah it's shit advice that blames you, the victim for making that choice of platform, rather than finding fault with the platform's behavior.

>not the recipe for success GP poster thinks it is.

It's not shit advice, it's not victim-blaming like you make it out to be, and I think your tone is unwarranted.

One should play defensively around the kind of companies that treat users/creators this way; one of the only ways to take a defensive stance against large conglomerates is to seek alternative means that do not include them.

>spreading yourself thin across all possible platforms is not the recipe for success GP poster thinks it is.

More 'success', whatever you quantify that as, isn't what is implied in GPs advice; defensive poising and longevity is the implied advantage, which it turn leads itself to the success of a business in the long-term.

It isn't victim blaming when any other 'victimized' business group is advised towards multiple redundancy. It's not victim blaming when an executive officer suggests that a group invest in generators after a non-controllable black-out renders production lower than it could have been.

I get that your point is that other alternatives are un-populated, and that Mega-Corp-YouGoogle is really the only show-in-town with an audience for most creators; but let's step back and view this from afar and ask another question : "Is it healthy that there is only one venue on the entirety of the internet for this activity? Should I propagate that fact to everyone I advise and give those with power even more power by trying to push a 'truth' that no alternatives exist?"

> The opportunity costs to you of supporting multiple platforms takes away from producing content.

Yeah, a business-person who focuses on protecting the business rather than outputting product generally produces less product; the hardened business model more than makes up for that after the first 'act-of-god' proves that the redundancies that the efforts were put towards actually saved the day.

If a company is abusing you, take your business elsewhere. There are other streaming services, there are other content hosts, and there is no end to outrage against Google.

Eventually one of these services will catch, and Google's power will dwindle. It's not hopeless.

[busterarm]

It's inertia.

Tbh I subscribe to like 200+ youtube channels. Probably like 5 of them talk about having their regular video content on another platform. I don't watch twitch streams.

If more of the creators I cared about uploaded their videos to other platforms, I would switch.

Be the change you would like to see in the world.

[Irongirl1]

+1 meowface 23.

Sorry, I'm pitching in because I can't help myself. I agree with meowface23 and it is for a really weird reason. I spent the last few weeks watching compilation videos just like you describe except they are of military personnel returning home <they are awesome and sweet, but really scary> because I need the emotional lift, but these videos weren't meant to be wildly shared. They contain identifying information which could be very dangerous to our armed forces. I think they should be taken down, honestly, but that's not my bailiwick. The owners of the content intended them to seen where they were placed <otherwise they would have placed them on other platforms themselves>. If I understand what you are doing correctly, you are violating their express intentions for your own benefit.

[nromiun]

Unfortunately many people are going through the same process these days. The only thing that seem to work is public support on Twitter. So send your complaint to @YouTube and tell your followers to do the same (if you can still contact them on some other platform).

[abrownbag]

So I did try this: https://twitter.com/gabnworba/status/1384242020659519494?s=2...

any likes or rts are appreciated but even with the youtube fanbase I had I don't think I'll be able to hit a big enough splash to get them to look my way.

I'd imagine I'd need thousands upon thousands of rt's to be noticed and I can't even get in touch with my youtube fanbase as... I no longer have a youtube.

[nromiun]

One thing you should know is that YouTube (and other Google services) is really, really sensitive to things like scripts, bots and copyright content. They might have connected those 20 channels you created to your main account and yourself. After that they might have thought you were a spammer. Recently they even banned some people because they were automatically updating their titles using a script.

But they don't give feedback for why they ban someone so we will never know why they did it.

[meowface]

You overwhelmingly deserved it. Seriously. I'm not saying this to be a dick or to be cruel; I'm basing it solely on what you wrote in your blog post.

You made a bot that did absolutely nothing but steal content from other creators and upload it on your own channel for views and ad revenue. This is not only obviously a violation of YouTube's ToS, but also obviously illegal and unethical. They banned it after three separate strikes.

This is unedited and uninterrupted, from your blog:

>Flash forward to the beginning of this year and my agency AMG told me about this amazing new thing on YouTube called: Shorts. If you’re unfamiliar shorts are sub sixty second videos shot in horizontal format. Basically, they’re TikToks on YouTube and YouTube was pushing them HARD. With some quick tests, I figured out that a channel with no subs was getting more short video views than my main channel by over ten-fold.

>This is exactly where my tech mind jumped in. I obviously had the first thought any developer has. Can I automate it? I mean countless clips were just freely available on twitch. Heck, they were even sorted by most viewed. I’d seen many successful top clip channels on youtube. All I had to do was edit them into short-form content and bam free real-estate right? Armed with google colab, which is way too powerful to be free by the way, I was well on my way to my demise.

>Honestly, it was easier than I even expected. In the beginning, I had dreams of grandeur. I was doing lots of machine learning in my free time and so I was imagining fancy ml algos that automagically found the webcam and edited the video the clips into amazing short-form content. Of course after about an hour I just settled on the easiest shit that worked. Use a headless browser to rip the clips from twitch, some FFmpeg magic to format them, and then another headless instance to upload to YouTube (on a side note did you know YouTube’s own upload API won't let you PUBLISH videos unless you have a fully-fledged approved app and even then you can’t even choose the game title when uploading). I learned so many cool tricks about web automation, authentication, and video editing here but again a story for another time.

>All you really need to know is that at the end of the day I had a working system. It would take the top x number of twitch clips for any given game in the last 24hrs and edit them into shorts. It would then go and upload them to YouTube and TikTok. Once I had it set up I made twenty different short channels. It worked even better than I expected. Short-form content was pushed so hard that some of the channels even passed my main channel in subs. The Minecraft Shorts channels specifically hit 30k subs and Call Of Duty Shorts hit 40k follows on TikTok! It was honestly really cool to see it work out so well but nothing good lasts forever.

This is purely parasitic content theft. It's not good. It's the opposite of fair use. It would be a major injustice if they reinstated your account. If the strikes did all come at once as you suggest (but which you weren't able to confirm, it seems?), the scope and degree of the infringement left them no other option. If you make a new channel on YouTube, please just make your own content in the future instead of trying to profit from other people's.

In all honesty, you'll probably look back at this in a few years and feel grateful. Even if it wasn't permanently banned, if you ever wanted to actually start using your channel for real in the future, it would've had this immense and indelible smirch on it, which the community probably would have dug up and pilloried you for once it inevitably bubbled up to the level of a scandal. This kind of behavior also isn't a good look for employers, due to the liability and many other reasons.

I think you should consider this a good lesson and move on from it and completely dissociate from anything tied to this old misadventure. This is a chance at a fresh reset that you otherwise might not have ever received.

[abrownbag]

That's the thing! If you read the post I NEVER received ANY warnings... Legit just banned for three strikes over night with NO emails about any of the copyright strikes. No way to appeal or contact youtube about what videos had strikes or on what channel. All I have is speculation based on the termination emails I received.

I need to make this clear now. NONE of the videos were MONETIZED... None of the channels reached watch-time criteria to be monetized because youtube doesn't count shorts. ALL clips where EDITED into shorts and given proper attribution back to the streamers with links in the description and video etc. Some of the streamers even commented and I was able to pin/promo their streams in the comments as well!

MY MAIN CHANNEL. That is ALL purely my content was INCLUDED in the ban. I made the shorts channel in the youtube channel switcher section and they didn't have emails associted. Somehow I could still get emails to my [e-mail] account through random page emails like: [e-mail] (they route to my main I guess?)

I'm sorry that I'm not a very good writer and didn't detail all this in my medium post but I was definitely NOT just ripping content as my own and getting paid for it. I only had revenue from my MAIN channel which was terminated with the rest.

[meowface]

I've revised my post to cover the copyright strike situation as you state here. If I understand correctly, you don't actually know if you received the three strikes overnight, right? I imagine it's possible the notices were somehow sent to an email you didn't realize was connected, and if that's the case, the notices might have actually spanned more than one day and you just didn't realize until the final one came.

I agree that you have a right to obtain the notices. Hopefully they provide them to you. But, either way, I'm pretty sure you won't be and shouldn't be getting your account back.

I think even if it turns out they did send you all three strikes at the same instant, they would still be completely in the right here due to the channel apparently being so dedicated to bad faith content pinching and infringement. It probably could've theoretically racked up dozens of strikes.

And it doesn't matter if you gave attribution. You only didn't monetize them because your account wasn't (yet) able to - you surely would have if you had the option. You said it yourself:

>With no way for me to really monetize them, I stopped running the scripts (which would be around the beginning of this month).

Giving attribution is better than not giving attribution, but it's still not close to sufficient. There are lots of channels that make tons of stolen profit off of creators (mostly TikToks and Twitch streams; fancy that...) through ads, sponsorship deals, affiliate links, etc. You very probably would've ended up like all those other exploitative, parasitic content-stealing channels after enough time if you could have and if YouTube didn't shut it down.

Some/many probably use bots like you tried to. They often include attribution. They never include consent from the creators they steal from, and they give the creators they steal from 0% of the profits they make from those creators' stolen content.

The creators often don't even know it's happening. "It's free promotion!" is not a good excuse; if you actually wanted to be a legitimate promoter, you would have done it legitimately, by contacting people and offering such services and working out a content uploading and revenue sharing agreement with each individual ahead of time.

[abrownbag]

I never received any emails about strikes no even though I would get notification emails about comments etc to [e-mail] through those randomly generated page emails? I'm not sure how youtube works when you don't make the channels with an email.

I would just like to put on record it was never my intention to steal from other content creators. The initial idea came as a service I could provide to streamers. I pivoted as one of my streamer friends became popular through a popular clip channel. I figured Instead of trying to charge my friends for a service if I could get one clip channel big enough I could just reproduce that success for all our own clips...

I mean like the first rule of tech is don't be a dick right???

I just feel like it's very unfair of you to assume I'd eventually go down a specific route before it played out.

Also losing my entire livelihood for a programming project hurts enough even without your words.

[meowface]

>I would just like to put on record it was never my intention to steal from other content creators.

I believe you. But that's still what you ended up doing.

>The initial idea came as a service I could provide to streamers.

Then why didn't you make it a service you could provide to streamers, instead of skipping the service and agreement part and just uploading the content first without their knowledge? A little like offering a security service by showing up outside a store with a gun and taking some money off of each customer in exchange for the protection you're graciously providing to the store owner (who has no idea this is going on). Not saying what you did is at all like a protection racket; just trying to illustrate that the difference between a service and a racket is full, up-front consent and explicit agreements.

>I pivoted as one of my streamer friends became popular through a popular clip channel. I figured Instead of trying to charge my friends for a service if I could get one clip channel big enough I could just reproduce that success for all our own clips...

Why not provide this service for your friends for free and offer it to everyone else for a fee, then? (I get the actual reason; I'm just saying it's wrong. Unfortunately, many [not all] "growth hacks" are unethical.) I understand your intention here, but it seems like you may have been placing your friends above strangers to the point of not fully thinking about how the strangers were affected.

>Also losing my entire livelihood for a programming project hurts enough even without your words.

The project could've generated clips and you could've reached out to creators and showed them how the bot worked, with examples, and worked out an arrangement with anyone who was interested. It would've been the same programming project, except it would be ethical, legal, and perhaps directly profitable.

I'm not trying to roast you here at all. You don't seem like a malicious person. You're forthright about what you did. I just think this is a lesson you should take to heart and something you should move on from. If I were you I'd probably be trying to scrub all evidence of this, honestly, instead of trying to make a big deal of it. I know it stings a lot right now, but, trust me, I think you'll be very thankful for this in the future, even if it doesn't seem like it at the moment. Cut your losses.

[ipaddr]

"why didn't you make it a service you could provide to streamers, instead of skipping the service and agreement part "

Wait a minute. How would youtube know if he signed an agreement or not? Even if he did sign them youtube would have closed down the channel.

We have seen this before with more legimate channels and I highly doubt an agreement would have mattered.

[httpsterio]

You aren't actually entitled to three strikes. Just one blatant infringement is legally enough to terminate your account. YouTube neither has any guarantee that even I'd you get any notices that they're spanned out with says between. If you have more than 3 videos and they all get a strike at the same time, well then it's bye bye to the accounts.

And honestly, if you have 1 legit account and 20 operating on more sketchy waters, it's only reasonable that they ban all of your channels.

[fedormoiseev]

With a quick search I found those support pages: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3545535 https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us

If you have 20k subscribers you may be eligible to contact their support.

Also you can try to find tweet at @YouTube.

Hope that helps.

[abrownbag]

Okay so I've actually already attempted to use both of these links.

Unfortunately I can't log into youtube at all as my account has been terminated so there's no way to reach the support team even though I AM a member of the youtube creator program.

I fill out a form they sent me in an email(on my medium post) daily but still just get automated responses telling me to look at their copyright page or that my account doesn't exist.

I never tried the feedback button so I'll do that right now but I did make a twitter post: https://twitter.com/gabnworba/status/1384242020659519494?s=2...

never got enough traction to really get noticed unfortunately.

[TedHartDavis]

Turns out I didn't have an account here, created one to speak on this.

I have a feeling that the best way to go about this would just be to cause YouTube (well, Google) grief about this every day until you get something out of them -- though I'm not sure what to suggest in terms of gaining initial traction.

Do you have an archive.org (or similar) archive of the channel page(s)?

[abrownbag]

I've started a twitter post but the traction is pretty small yeh. I'm not sure I have the pull to get notice.

I never even thought of waybackmachine. I just checked and it said there was a pull from the 29th of January... I got excited too soon though as I loaded it nothing loaded.

For now the videos are still lost... Thanks for trying though

EDIT: Actually I was able to load the page after a long time but none of the videos seem to salvageable (they can't be accessed or downloaded just get errors). https://web.archive.org/web/20210129101353/http://youtube.co...

[type0]

Seriously, try to reach and contact some prominent youtube creators in the gaming world. Try to make them do videos about this, maybe regular youtube users that see this can complain for your part. Don't give up. If everyone complains and tells Youtube that they'll move to LBRY and Odysee.com they might notice someday.

[abrownbag]

I'm doing my best to have hope and reaching out to everyone I know but I've exhausted the resources I have as a smaller creator. Outlook bleak to be honest.

EDIT: Actually I haven't tried writing a letter and sending it to the address listed on contact... I'll do that today too

[techdragon]

I wish I knew how to help. It sounds like you’ve become another casualty of the relentless GoogleTron, your blood and sweat now lubricate it’s soulless gears.

The over-reach by Google in response to simple copyright claims continues to be an appalling display of how little they care as a company. I don’t even mean how biased it is towards media companies, I simply mean they don’t care at all about any individual human, they are incapable of it. Never trust the GoogleTron

Good luck, I hope you can get someone with more pull to help!

[abrownbag]

It’s okay! Thanks for taking the time to read/reply it means a lot.

Thanks everyone who upvoted to help raise awareness too. This was my last resort so I really appreciate all the help/kind words.

I really wish at the very least they would have given me a way to respond/contact them vs termination with no hope of response.