Part of the issue is just the systems on the backend. I had my account removed about 3 years ago for some mistaken flag of copyright infringement, having never uploaded a video. I had 7 years of liked videos and curated playlists, that I wanted to save. Compounding the personal severity, some of the channels I'm subscribed to contained personal private videos from friends that had passed away.
It took me 4 days to get my account restored, and required calling into both Google and Youtube, as well as emailing, and contacting friends that worked at Google to get internal numbers. All because they have some system that accidentally flagged an account with zero uploads, and Google still lacks any real form of public customer service.
Might I highly recommend something like youtube-dl to save those precious videos and playlists locally. You never know when they're going to shut down your account again or go under.
Yep, I did that at the time, for the important videos. Still haven't found a good playlist backup, aside from using the API, not wanting to store all those videos (something like 2000 videos at this point across 30 lists, not including my watchlist or likes which is ~2500 videos).
I think they're safe from going under, but do worry about them shutting my account down again by accident.
youtube-dl handles playlist backup, annotation download, subtitles, thumbnails, etc. - no need to download the video or anything you don't want to (or you can download postage stamp previews, etc). shrug best archival solution I've found so far.
> Yep, I did that at the time, for the important videos. Still haven't found a good playlist backup, aside from using the API, not wanting to store all those videos (something like 2000 videos at this point ...
This is going to sound snarky but here goes ... Sounds like the problem is not wanting to store an admittedly large number of videos but not liking the service of the company doing it for you at no charge.
Advertising or data-mining supported services are not free. We are still paying in time or headspace or personal data, so it is perfectly valid to have a problem with the quality of service we receive in exchange for that payment.
That's fair, most of the videos have no or little personal value, if bit rot occurred I most likely wouldn't notice up to around a 20% change.
Average length of time of those videos is around 5 minutes, total size ~135 hours, or ~150-200GB.
I could store a personal mirror, of much larger size for almost nothing, disregarding legality of such, but the data is less important than the references in a large number of cases. I don't care about the content as much as the ideas the references help recall, in most cases.
They're pretty safe from going under now, but what about when the next big breakthrough is at a competitor? Presumably you want to keep your memories past the 5-10 year visibility that technology cycles at.
I assume this hosed your main Google account, right? Not just your access to YouTube?
That's the part that really rubs me the wrong way. That, for example, your nest thermostat (or email, or phone, etc) might not work right because you uploaded the wrong video one day.
> I assume this hosed your main Google account, right? Not just your access to YouTube?
Nope, it was just the Youtube account. When they did the Google+ transition, I generated a new Google account for my Youtube account, but linked it to my normal Google account.
I actually found out about the account removal because of message in Gmail that I had missed for 2-3 days.
My Youtube account got banned 10 years ago with videos on it I made as a teen that are now gone forever. 7 years ago or so I had tried emailing their customer support which of course didn't get me anywhere. Is there any way I can get those videos back? Unfortunately I don't have any contacts at Google, but if I were to get in hold with someone who works there, is there anything in particular I should direct them to do?
I should be upfront and say that I got banned for uploading a video that was deemed inappropriate. I don't really fault them for banning the account, I just wish they had given me the chance to back up my other perfectly appropriate videos. I know those videos probably still exist on some hard drive on a Google server.
What i don't get i why they do these "hard" bans. Would have been more helpful and long term friendly to basically take the videos off air and forbid the account from uploading any more videos, but leave the account itself active.
>You should be extremely grateful you were actually able to reach anyone and get it restored at all.
Nitpicky, but no he shouldn't, he should feel lucky, sure, but grateful? No, he should feel angry that it happened in the first place, and only somewhat placated that they restored it.
Absolutely feel a little grateful, to the people that I was able to reach. And somewhat lucky that I had contacts, to escalate if necessary, though I did manage to go through public channels.
And yes, I'm absolutely livid still over the fact that their system couldn't observe a purely consumer account, with only a few small comments, could be flagged as copyright infringing. Had I been unable to reach a human for manual review of the nonsense of my account status, I'm positive I wouldn't have regained access.
I often wonder what people do for all the videos they make of their kids. I do not want to lose them, but in the age of HD video, where do you store them for the long term?
Depending on how much content you have a small drive array should be fine if you're willing to down size to 720p^. Or willing to upgrade to higher capacity than what I share below.
An hour of 720p = ~1.15GB
An hour per week for a year is ~60GB. On a hard drive, you can fit 30 years of data at that rate into a 2TB drive. Or you could put almost a year of data onto a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc (50GB).
^I personally have a really hard time seeing quality gains in video above that.
For local redundancy, use a RAID 1 or RAID 5 setup, either in one of your home systems, or you can buy a simple NAS solution like a Drobo, and set it up for mirroring to multiple drives. The NAS unit ($350-500) + 3-4 4TB HDD's (~$120/each), or $700-1000 which will last years.
To do offsite, in case of fire, you can clone backups onto another harddrive or every few weeks or months onto blurays and store them at a relatives, safety deposit box, or somewhere else you consider safe and accessible. Or you are willing, for offsite matters, go a cloud provided like Google, Box, DropBox, which will charge you $10-20/mo for a TB of storage on their servers, you can use that.
I personally, don't use much offsite storage, for most of my data. I make occasional Blu-Ray or thumbdrive clones of important files and keep them in my bedroom, and accessible if I have to run. And while traveling I'll bring a set of thumbdrives with me.
Because of these, Alexa O'Brien, Microstopped, and a few other incidents I've seen on HN, I've become very concerned about Google's power over my life, arbitrary moral decisions, and lack of customer service.
Within a week I will take my phone number out of Google Voice. I plan to change emails in the coming months as well. I've started to do regular backups of my Google Drive. I've also started to do any searches on controversial topics in Firefox on DuckDuckGo. If any of my side projects become valuable enough, I'll probably move them off GCS as well.
I'm a little weird in the way I think, so maybe I'm the only one so concerned. I'm probably too paranoid. But sometimes I lose a little sleep thinking about the potential consequences of Google randomly closing my account.
Post a blog on how you pull it off, I'm looking to go this route too. I knew when google bought YouTube it would eventually go down the tube. I got rid of my television years ago but all the standard ads rolling into YouTube makes it closer to old broadcast tv ad experience in one off fashion.
How do you plan to change emails? I'm thinking of moving out of Gmail too but didn't decide on a service yet. Office 365 with Exchange sounds good but it's like moving from one monopoly to another I guess.
Fastmail is the best of the non-gmail email providers imo. Plus they're a simple business: you give them money and they give you email. You should check them out.
I only skimmed their website, but I didn't see user aliasing[edit: they do aliasing & wildcards], or shared accounts. In fact any real mailbox features?
I am becoming concerned about the power Google has over my life (have been for a while). They know what you're reading (Chrome, even in incognito mode via DNS), what your thinking (web searches), who you're in contact with (Gmail, Android + their Apps), not to mention maps and what they do with your photos/ drive data. Even patient data with the NHS sharing data with Deepmind[0]. The company needs to broken up as the Did with Microsoft years ago.
Fastmail user here. I had problems with spam too when I first signed up, but then I discovered I could change the spam protection level from "Standard" to "Aggressive" in the mail settings screen (the default is "Standard"). That immediately solved almost all of my spam problems.
I never had that problem, unless you mean things like the occasional Facebook or Twitter notification ending up in spam, but I didn't care about those.
Also, Gmail definitely has a problem with false positives. At the small agency where I worked a few years ago, a lot of our internal company emails were ending up in spam folders. It got so bad that I had to go around adding our company email domain to the spam exclusion filters just to make sure that my co-workers were receiving my emails.
I assume gp is referencing the necessity of training the spam filter.
I didn't have big problems with it, except for a monthly student loan payment confirmation email that fastmail refused to classify as not spam no matter how many times I so marked it.
In general, I found gmail's spam filter to be the best. If, however, you don't need to regularly interact with lots of new email addresses, fastmail will work fine for you.
This is exactly it. I found myself having to manually classify spam/notspam for the first time in over a decade.
This might be fine for some or even most people but if like me you’d prefer to spend less time on email not more it may not be the best choice as an email provider.
Nothing against the service, just be prepared to manually train a spam filter
Likewise, I try to completely avoid Google as much as possible now too. When I have some free time I'm going to finish moving off of GMail to most likely Fastmail. Ditto for using DDG too.
I've done exactly this. Moved to Fastmail for my email; Dropbox, and Resilio Sync, for my cloud storage; DDG for searches in general, with google as a backup (it really is the best unfortunately).
The general rule for me is to use paid, or free and open source[0], services. As long as I'm either a community member or a customer, and not a product, I feel safer.
Yeah, it's hard to get this right, and while they've been overly aggressive on copyright claims for a while, I'm glad that they're finally expanding this hardline stance against extremist content too. Though I'm not surprised it took literally funding Hezbollah (in contravention of UN SCR 2178 I might add) for them to take a look at what their monetisation schemes were enabling. A lot more to go though. When opening an incognito tab and searching something as innocuous as "feminist" gives the results it does, it's not hard to see youtube as being one of the foremost contributors to extremism, especially in kids. Real change won't happen until flagged videos get penalised in recommendations and search results too.
Extremism is still just a political viewpoint. It's not inherently more wrong than the others. You're saying Google should impose popular US culture and politics on the world. Including taking sides in conflicts between other countries. It's pretty arbitrary and could easily be wrong.
If you're worried about kids, better ban violent movies, video games, the news, and angry music. No, people have tried "think of the children" before but the children turned out fine.
Extremism is political, but it can't be reduced to a simple difference in viewpoints. Cultural/moral relativism, beyond being a bit of a dead end philosophically, can certainly result in an inaction that opens the doors to political degeneration, anti-social behaviour, and terrorism.
As for other forms of media, we do prevent kids from accessing age-inappropriate stuff, more or less in line with developmental psych research [see: Huesmann, Moise-Titus, Podolski, & Eron (2003)]. YouTube is the odd man out here. The handwringing apologia over the appropriateness of a child entertainer using ethnic slurs would be laughable in any other medium.
Google has famously taken a stance on not being evil. It'd somewhat undermine this goal if it were unable to determine what evil is, and isn't.
Anyone that writes code connecting a query to some media content is in "the business of telling people what to think and control opinions" whether they like it or not. The concern is doing so responsibly.
> Though I'm not surprised it took literally funding Hezbollah (in contravention of UN SCR 2178 I might add) for them to take a look at what their monetisation schemes were enabling.
Fine. Google should demonetize the videos or channels, but they shouldn't take down the channels altogether.
> searching something as innocuous as "feminist" gives the results it does
What's innocuous about feminist?
> it's not hard to see youtube as being one of the foremost contributors to extremism
That's what extremists say. That's why lgbt subs are demonetized.
> especially in kids.
I always get suspicious when pretty bring up "kids" or exploit "kids" to support an agenda.
> Real change won't happen until flagged videos get penalised in recommendations and search results too.
I follow both Casey and the Trending page. This was his first video of his not in there. I'm so incredibly fed up with them. I hope Cloudflare Stream will help someone build a creator-friendly to YouTube, so it can burn in the dumpster fire it created.
YouTube isn't going to get replaced. Google still aren't still aren't really making any money from it. For the majority of YouTube's life, it's run at a loss for it's owner. Think about it; YouTube offers free, unlimited, original quality video storage. In fact, they're such a charity, they'll even compress down your original quality video down to a manageable size where thousands of people can be accessing it from across the globe at the same time with no bandwidth issues. If web video standards improve such as to allow 60fps playback, YouTube will automatically re-encode and re-compress your original file to match.
YouTube isn't great. As a community, it's a pretty bad caretaker. But it's the best that anyone will get. It almost seems like people have forgotten the pre-YouTube times where ebaumsworld was still the dominant video site and where they were actual gatekeepers to content.
The only way it gets replaced is if they upset the majority of their users. Which at this point, still isn't happening. The YouTube drama crowd isn't the majority of the site. The reason why late night clips get sent to the top of trending most often isn't because YouTube is in conspiracy cahootz with ABC. It's because that's what an 'average' YouTube viewer is most likely to want to watch and would most likely produce a predictable return.
For a successful YouTube competitor, it's going to take a large company with real balls to want to compete with Google and YouTube.
> I believe that OwnVideo is an important experiment in letting users retake control of their video content and in helping make the internet more decentralized, as it was originally designed.
I wonder how Google feels about vloggers leaving their platform, and if they would actively try to stop them, e.g. by downranking videos that refer to videos on other websites.
Slightly off topic (sorry), but if Google can't manage YouTube and its users, how is Sidewalk Labs going to fare any better trying to run whole cities?
Let me be the hater:
Serves you right for trusting a corporation. :)
In seriousness, use youtube-dl or similar tools and mirror your content. If you're a content creator and can make anywhere from $1500 to $5000+ a month, surely it isn't a big problem to buy a NAS at some point. You have no excuse not to do so in this age.
Corporations don't care about people, it's shameful that this isn't a genetic memory of the entire Homo Sapiens species yet.
Is the author better off for leaving? No, why not continue to offer the videos on youtube not work during school. Keep posting the videos to your website and using the free time you have add in additional content.
Google might lose a little but it won't matter or be noticed by them. But the author will lose their income and free time. This seems to be an emotional choice but not a wise one.
If the offending videos are from 5 years ago chances are they earned the majority of what they will. Youtube may change a rule in the future but you can follow policy changes and in this case they gave a year or so grace.
This is an ideological move on the author's part, not a pragmatic one. He most likely knows that Google won't care, but he's of the opinion that he can't continue to endorse using YouTube in any way, and therefore he's taken his videos down.
Excellent initiative to create OwnVideo. I was wondering how much time it would take. Now find a way to add advertisment or tips to it and you might get rich. I would have implemented it in Go or integrated it with Hugo.
Because Google love removing everything for no reason, and they love it. There are lot of features that are being removed from Google's services for no reason. Example: Dark mode removed from Android OS without notice. And they just bring us annoying features instead. Google will die soon at 2030, they have no live, trust me.
It took me 4 days to get my account restored, and required calling into both Google and Youtube, as well as emailing, and contacting friends that worked at Google to get internal numbers. All because they have some system that accidentally flagged an account with zero uploads, and Google still lacks any real form of public customer service.