Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to “spam and deceptive policies” (bsky.app)
381 points by richrichardsson 16 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 111 comments



That's shocking, sinevibes is a legit developer in the music/audio space. They made the FX for dreadbox's Typhon synth and several popular FX plugins for Korg logue synths. I'm subscribed to their newsletter and have never received spam. All their youtube channel had were demos of their products, as far as I recall. Like "here's how the dry synth sounds, here's how it sounds with reverb", can't even imagine how an algorithm thought it runs afoul of a spam or scam policy. Probably a mistake, hope it's fixed.


> can't even imagine how an algorithm thought it runs afoul of a spam or scam policy

Could a competitor cause the algorithm to think that, somehow, perhaps by engaging a service that reports the videos, in bulk, repeatedly from a seemingly diverse set of user accounts?


Or just an update in yourtube's new algorithm.

YouTube have 114 million active channels. A small error rate of 0.001% would kill 1000 channels.


The market is not that nasty, AFAIK. It's all pretty niche. And YT isn't the biggest marketing channel for this segment, I think. The forums have lively discussions of plugins by people that understand and use the stuff, and whose previous contributions you can easily look up.


It doesn't have to be due to "the market". It just takes one channel owner who thinks that sinevibes is unfairly stealing their attention and decides to be staggeringly petty about it.


Might be moot, but the shutdown email mentions "spam, scam or deceptive practices", not just "reasons".

Without any context about the owner of the channel, the reader has no way to know how unfair the shutdown is.

I understand from the HN thread that the dev is well known and that the shutdown seems unfair - but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation.

Best of luck to the channel's owner - let's hope the appeal ends up in front of a human being.

Now, let's all go back on youtube, to watch suggested videos about fake news interspersed with ads for crypto scam.


YouTube is notorious for that, though. With that context, this is one more instance, showing that the issue persists. I remember a German youtuber tried to unionize creators through IG Metall, though there doesn't seem to be any news in years so I'm not sure it went anywhere. https://fairtube.info/en/seite/press-coverage-of-fairtube/


I've had good luck with Firefox, ublock origin, and sponsorblock. Can't remember the last time I saw an ad, automated or otherwise. There's also an extension that changes your default page to "subscriptions" instead of "home." I do recall using the ad blocker to hide the side panel of video recommendations, too. At least for now, youtube really is a free ride for me.


Have you ever tried out librewolf? It's blue!


For what it's worth, I pinged someone about it.


> but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation

I'm not really sure what makes raging about this so hard for you. Current YouTube practice is equivalent to locking up a citizen for "thievery" and "reasons" without providing any evidence of such at any point.

And sure, few hundreds years ago this course of action would fly. But today we advanced a bit and demand that our justice is a bit more just. I don't see why we should demand less of the corporations. Or do we just accept their role as a pocket of feudalism in modern society? Accepting undemocratic small planned economies of corporations is one thing, accepting customers to be their serfs is another.


How does this make sense when zero percent of uploaded youtube videos are owned by the creators?

It’s not like they are paintings loaned to an art gallery, where the gallery might have some obligations to preserve, return, etc.

From what I understand there’s no liability even if the board of directors decide to shut down Youthbe tomorrow and permanently delete every uploaded video.


> How does this make sense when zero percent of uploaded youtube videos are owned by the creators?

Says who and why should citizens of democratic countries listen to them? YouTube is a staple. If you reach this size, there are gonna be some rules. At least there should be.

> From what I understand there’s no liability even if the board of directors decide to shut down Youthbe tomorrow and permanently delete every uploaded video.

They are welcomed to do that. But deciding to refuse service on arbitrary grounds to one client is something they shouldn't be allowed to do. Otherwise why not ban people because they are Jewish or gay or just at random to sow fear? When you offer your services to the public then you shouldn't be allowed to refuse service to any member of the public without a very good and specific reason.


But even new legislation, assuming it can be rammed through Congress within your lifetime, can’t retroactively apply to uploaded videos which already were copied in fact…?


I thought the point was about how easily one can feel rage about this not if the situation can realistically be improved in any way.


How does this matter?

The prior comment wasn’t posted randomly in some arbitrary location.

It was in response to a specific comment in a specific location.


And I was refering to specific phrase of it.

Namely:

> but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation


Okay… so how does it matter in relation to the prior two comments?


At this point I have no idea, so have a nice day. ;-)


> Current YouTube practice is equivalent to locking up a citizen for "thievery" and "reasons" without providing any evidence of such at any point.

No, it's not even that remotely, and to equate the two shows massive ignorance.

This is like a book publisher of its own accord (without the government forcing them to) deciding that they do not want to publish your book anymore. Unless you have an explicit and enforceable contract with them that says otherwise then they're well within their rights to stop publishing your book.

If you don't like it then don't use their platform, and if you're using YouTube to host things for your business then it would be a really good idea to have a backup host in place that you can direct users to.


Show me a book publisher comparable to YouTube. Quantity is quality. YouTube is more akin to a small country than a book publisher.


YouTube is also not locking you in a cell and physically depriving you of your freedom as opposed to the original analogy.

There's no book publisher as big as YouTube/Google but that doesn't break the analogy, and there are plenty of other places you can host video online.


Maybe locking up is wrong analogy. Rather YouTube is just torching everything you've built instead.

> There's no book publisher as big as YouTube/Google

There's nothing as big as YouTube/Google and that's why analogy breaks.

Your analogy with publishers works only if there's relevant competition and there's none. YouTube is analogue to state publisher and others are underground small printers who's main occupation is printing opposition leaflets. There's no competition between YouTube and those entities.


> but it's always hard to share the outrage in this situation

Clarification needed indeed: i did not meant "hard to share" because I don't feel empathy for the creator ; I meant "hard" in the sense that:

* I did not know beforehand anything about the creator,

* Neither the post, nor, surprisingly, the HN thread, gave much context about what the creator where accused of

* But the thread was full of outrage ; that I was, unfortunately, not entirely comfortable sharing.

But again, moot point - I completely agree that youtube automated moderation is a living advertisement for human moderation.


> But today we advanced a bit and demand that our justice is a bit more just.

Like you, I used to believe this. Recent events have me re-examining my assumptions.


I'm astounded by how crap the ads on Youtube now are. Back when the Adcopalypse happened they stated they were going to clean up the ads shown, but now it's just AI generated crap.


You could have looked up Sinevibes, they have a good internet presence.


This is a pretty good comment, except I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make with the last line.


I wanted to highlight the irony of youtube closing a channel for "scams", given that about half of the few ads I still see in youtube are for crypto scams, fad diets, fake cancer medecines, etc...

Thank FSM for ad blockers and nebula.


My channel suffered the same fate. I had a few original songs on it and a few original videos on it. Never got a warning or copyright strike or any sort of notice. Just boom shut down.


Affer the shut down on YouTube, did you post them elsewhere? That way, people can still watch it.


I lost 1-2 videos due to a lost hard drive, but I have not found alternative video hosting. Any that you recommend?

The title on HN needs to be updated. Right now it says "YouTube shut down 15 years old audio developer's channel for "reasons""

It can be read as saying the age of the person is 15 years old. But the developer said they had the channel for 15 years, not that they are 15 years old:

"How they are willing to insanely shut down a 15-year-old channel with not a single issue on record, without any warning or question, is beyond crazy." [0]

[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/sinevibes.bsky.social/post/3lhbep5p...


Done. I had the same issues with it myself when I initially wrote it, but couldn't think of a better wording at the time. Hopefully it's less confusing now.


"Audio developer's fifteen-year-old channel" would do it.


after 15...


This happens all the time in Google Play, how do you protect against random take downs? You have several copies of your dev account or channel. That's it, you become a spammer to defend against the bot that "protects" us from spammers.


That's a bad advice. Firstly, Google is known to ban developer accounts "by association". They will easily ban all of your copies all at once. Secondly, apps are identified by globally unique package IDs. If one account has claimed an ID, no other account can use it ever again. So even if you do republish your app, you have no way to make your existing users update to that version. It will be considered a different app both by Google Play and Android itself.


Probably even worse for the advice is that client accounts can be associated with a banned developer's account...I remember reading a dumpster-fire of an ASK HN (a tire fire for the people actually effected).


What guarantees that final users can't protect themselves against phishing, because who knows if that new name, with completely incompatible history belongs to the same owner or not?


People uploading the Hollywood library do it like this:

Have channels with playlists and channels with 1 movie each. Add one of the playlists to the description (that playlist may not contain that movie)

The movies one by one vanish from the playlists and are uploaded again on new channels.

The playlist channels seem to last for a really long time.


How does that even work on YouTube? You publish each video to every backup channel? You'd still lose followers and views surely.


We need decentralized services that are not subject to the whims of whichever power hungry billionaire is in charge this week


a computer can never be held accountable — therefore a computer must never make a management decision


For anyone who hasn't seen this before, it's from an IBM internal training document in 1979.

Sadly the original source was lost in a flood and IBM archives do not have a copy: https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1798170111058264280

Edit: here's a better link https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...


Seen what, all I see is a tweet that there isn't an archive?

Or is that tweet about the parent post?


I just pulled together a bunch of notes here, since linking to Twitter sucks now (logged out users can't navigate conversations): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...


Thanks for the source of the quote. It's very interesting: Seeing "a computer can never be held accountable" is something where the cynic in me immediately expected "we just solved accountability, boys!", and not "this must never be allowed to happen". Especially from IBM...

On topic: I think our whole current Ad-economy is cancerous-- the decoupling of incentives between platforms and consumers/customers is IMO a bad trend for all of us long term (both sides), and having public attention/sentiment basically permanently on sale is yet another can of worms. I really hope we can learn to deal with this before it ruins our society. On the other hand, there are so many possibilities opening up, and generally just things improving without anyone much noticing, I'll still take unaccountable, capricious corporate overlords any day of the week in exchange. I would not want to live in any other time in the past if I had to make an honest choice.

Maybe the "customer support via HN/twitter" model can save the day here at least for this (as ugly as that whole concept is).


Unless of course you don’t care about accountability.

This gives google a lot of “oops, the system did it” leeway.



And the market is the ultimate unaccountability machine. Just pay attention to how people use it as a justification sometimes.


People who sign-off on the programs to do the task can be held accountable, they just aren't. It's not about computers, it's about the legal system.


That's a really fascinating, but horrible, point.

Every AI decision becomes a way to shirk responsibility, even more than just automated ones (because then its "your" rule).

Welcome to the brave new world of AI-decision laundering.


The same can be said of any bureaucracy's function. It isn't your fault that you made an abhorrently stupid decision, you were just following the directive. Not to say it isn't a problem, but that it isn't new.


That makes it a great point, not a horrible one.


I think they mean its reality and implications are horrible.


Yes, thank-you.


You mistook my meaning.

Great thought from op.

Horrible implications.


While not the case here, I feel like if some system really does have a lower error rate than humans on some task, then it'd be wrong to rule it out just because it can't be held accountable or punished. To me those are primarily means to reduce mistakes, opposed to requirements or ends onto themselves.


Same happened to an app that I published on Play Store, I don't even care that much, I only feel bad for the people that bought the premium version of it. Overall the takeway is that your product is never safe and you shouldn't only rely on these big platforms for marketing/distribution.



It bothers me a lot the ideological hatred for regulations commonly found on HN. This is exactly a showcase why regulations for digital markets/marketplaces need to exist.

We simply cannot trust huge platforms to care about the small to medium developers, people who are essentially powerless against a behemoth like Google or Apple. You get your app taken down, your account locked and the only recourse left would be spending six to seven figures in lawyers while risking losing the case altogether.

It's disgusting.


Right now you're correct that the only form of recourse users have is to sue the companies, but you're not entirely correct that it takes spending six figures.

You can sue them in San Mateo county and have the case adjudicated in a court which does not allow lawyers for either side and which has the power to compel a Google or a Facebook to reverse an erroneous moderation decision.

https://www.engadget.com/how-small-claims-court-became-metas...


Multiple appearances, endless time wasted, and maybe four figures of expenses to show up in person is still not affordable.

And then you get Meta failing to show up, but asking for a set-aside afterwards because... they failed to show up.

It's aggressive customer contempt. This is someone's livelihood, possibly their entire livelihood, and these bobbleheads treat it like a joke.


Even in countries where the cost to sue is low (mine), it's at lest 20 hours, and low 4-figure at the very least (unless it's against an employer, in that case unions will foot the bill, or against the state/an elected official, an anti-corruption NGO will do it for you)


I guess this gives Facebook even more incentive to re-incorporate in Texas and move the headquarters there.


Google is just egerious on another level, the difference between them is that while Apple might clampdown on some obscure rule (or due to the random reviewer assignment), they're usually at least human and unless in litigation can be reasoned with to an extent.

Google otoh is more like, bot/automated system takes things down and unless you happen to catch the eyes of someone in the particular department of Google you're SHOL because they don't want to give away "security secrets".

Point in case, the Terraria dev losing his Google account while making a Stadia port that couldn't get his account back despite having internal Google contacts (maybe he eventually got it back but not before the damage was done).


For those that rely on social media, this is probably the biggest upside to there being social media platforms... not all of them will take you down at once.

Other than that, this is probably because the content owner has a product called "Switch", and they are not as big and mighty as Nintendo. Makes me think that if you are creating a brand or product name, better use a made-up word


Another company has a store called Super Mario, and the courts are reasonable enough to realize that they don't compete: https://ticotimes.net/2025/01/30/david-vs-goliath-costa-rica...


I don't buy the switch speculation. Since we have zero info it sounds too arbitrary.


My 13 year old son's Youtube account (not just channel) was banned without explanation or recourse. Multiple appeals resulted only in generic "stay in the corner and reflect on what you've done" replies but no indication of what he did wrong.

Even if he did upload something questionable, or his account was hacked or whatever the case may be, why ban his paid Youtube Premium account and not just the channel? Why not share the so-called questionable content with the parent so I can help him avoid another strike in future?

Even if opening another Gmail account is trivial, the hassle of setting up Google Family, Youtube Premium, Fortnite, Steam and every other account linked to his Gmail address is a massive pain.

Not sure where I'm going with this other than Google doesn't seem to care about paying customers.


Could it be related to them selling a product called Switch? Although unrelated, could match some overzealous Nintendo filter. Who are on a quest against anything emulation recently.


The platforms are opaque in their Kafkaesque bureaucratic nonsense.

But equally consistent is the narratives of the deplatformed are presented from one side, 100% victim, 0% responsible.

I know it’s hard when facing a faceless, robotic, powerful enemy - but going full one-side is just playing into the powerless-game framework of the platforms. Step up, own the full spectrum of your choices - and whatever the outcome, it’s more of a learning experience and you’re more empowered - rather than just “right”.

Also engage Black Swan techniques for dealing with abstruse bureaucracies.


I'm a fellow audio dev and I have a hard time understanding who they even made MAD, they look very innocuous. Only thing I can see is they have one Bluesky post celebrating Independence day for Ukraine. That's it.

This is either a test shot, or some private grudge, and an obvious SWATting using YouTube automated systems. Someone tip off Google? This is beyond egregious. I started digging through their social media posts expecting they'd be some kind of noisy advocate, but nada. They seem totally innocuous and most of what they have to say, even in replies, is about their synth design work.

Even if I was missing something, I saw nothing TOS-violating or even within the same universe as that. Is this the new normal?


Why hire and pay actual humans to moderate and review false takedowns when you can have the free labor of other community platforms (like twitter, hn, reddit) organically raise only the high impact support tickets for you? It is literally jira, but free, IQ 1000


Mistake? Haha, we don't make mistakes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s


Same happened to oluv, one of the few honest audio review guys. His channel got attacked by scammers, his content stolen and hit with fraudulent IP claims. Youtube has become a cesspool.


The Internet generally has devolved towards the lowest common denominator, which is the cesspool or below. Social media and content sharing sites just concentrate and magnify it.

IMO, good content creators need to go back to self-hosting as their primary location, preferably on a decent host that won't just shut them down though if they make sure they have full control of the domain name at least and a good local/backup copy of everything, getting up and running elsewhere if that host goes tits-up is relatively easy. Then upload to youtube/others as secondary channels, so you can take advantage of the infamous algorithms for exposure, the interaction features¹, and to save bandwidth²³.

Also make sure your identity everywhere is, well, identifiable - so if youtune/InsertIdentityHere goes down someone searching for InsertIdentityHere can easily find the instances hosted on other sharing sites or your central one.

More work of course, but not massively so especially if it is (or is intended to be) a money making channel rather than purely a hobby project, and worth it long-term if take-downs happen.

--------

[1] I would not want to manage public comments and such on a self-hosted instance, fighting spam, hate, and other such issues can become a full-time job.

[2] Essentially using them as CDNs.

[3] You might have to give low quality versions of videos to most public requests to your main site⁴, sending users to yt/other for HD+, perhaps serving ad-free high quality videos direct to those who support you via payment (via Patreon or similar).

[4] And make sure you have appropriate throughput limits⁵ in place so “going viral” doesn't result in a massive bandwidth overage bill.

[5] This could be site-wide, though you could implement finer grained controls, perhaps if a particular item becomes temporarily “too popular” start serving a _really_ low quality version and more obvious links to TY/Vimeo/… until things die down.


If you are choosing to use Google products, you are choosing to solidify their monopolist position and they will thank you by randomly killing your account. Don’t use Google products.


At some point Youtube is going to cull the long-tail to save money. It will be an Alexandria burning sort of moment.


Don't worry, you can appeal at the GMAFIA robot. Who will instantly deny you.


Just like with Facebook/Instagram, if your account gets taken over and then banned because the hackers used it for spam/scams, there’s no way to get your account back. There’s an “appeal” button where a robot instantly denies your appeal without any opportunity to provide evidence. It’s not a joke.

Once you’re locked out, you’re fucked. Meta doesn’t give a shit about its users, that’s the only way this business model can work.

Now for me, I try to use Meta products as little as possible. But my partner gets a significant amount of business leads from Instagram, it’s quite lucrative for her, so she took quite a hit when she lost that account and had to start over.


> with Facebook/Instagram, if your account gets taken over and then banned because the hackers used it for spam/scams

Happened to one of my relatives recently. Their (at least 10 years old) Facebook account has been linked by some hacker (I don't know how) with some unknown Instagram account, which then misbehaved, and the FB account was suspended as a result. A message says that the decision can be appealed from the unknown Instagram account to which we never had access and is not anymore linked. Reddit is full of people that had the exact same issue. Drives me crazy the fact that there's absolutely no way to talk to any human to solve this.


> Meta doesn’t give a shit about its users, that’s the only way this business model can work

Heh. Not really. Meta poured tens of billions in the last few years in their VR effort, with almost no results to show. With that money, they could have literally given a few minutes of human customer support to each and every of their users.


The future they want: you'll have nothing and be happy (to be still alive).


"Because THAT'S what heroes do."

- The AI bot costing billions in development, compute and energy who just banned your account based on a false positive


The irony in taking down a channel for spam and deceptice practices, when most YouTube advertisements are exactly that, yet are nearly impossible to get pulled



Is there a chance the account was taken over by spammers and shutdown before OP ever got a chance to review things? Even if so, I suppose Google should suspend the account.


I am sure this will end up all well in the end for the channel. I also get it why you can't have anything but automated filtering as a first pass on the volume youtube deals, it's absolutely understandable. This, however, might be a learning on youtube's end to include "if filter returns that this channel is literally hitler, but channel is also >xy years old or >subs or >views take it at least for a human consideration before inconvenience". Ultimately it won't render anything new to youtube as a platform, they'll still have to deal with automated and then human appeal process, but at least it will gain some confidence to content creators that the broom isn't all that thick.


Note that the channel was 15 years old, not the person running it.


Yes, sorry for the awful wording. I've updated it to hopefully be less confusing.


This keeps happening, and it can end someone's company, and livelihoods.

Can people sue, and seek punitive damages large enough to be punitive to a trillion-dollar company?


> Can people sue, and seek punitive damages large enough to be punitive to a trillion-dollar company?

If they can, should they be able to? If I run a website I think I should be allowed to decide what content is on there, and taking space in my DB is not a human right. I should be able to just rm -rf / without asking permission. I would be an asshole, but I'm paying the bills and I decide what my site is. I shouldn't even need a TOS that states that I can, I shouldn't have to keep promises I've never made.

The problem here is using YouTube and Google products that are known for these kinds of shutdowns, with no way to get in touch with a human. They are known to censor and remove access to truths they disagree with, and those truths are subject to change.

Instead of trying to change companies we don't support, we should help companies we do support get the traction they need. Educate people and de-google.


Tech titans have too much arbitrary power.


Live by the platform, die by the platform


Likely was mass reported? fake copyright strikes? account hacked? it is a possible explanation.

Sinevibes makes audio plugins and other stuff for makes synthesizers, so I am not sure what it is about...

Meanwhile, Youtube does not lack of crypto scam channels with millions of subscribers...


Hope your story bubbles up enough to get real support from Google.


Sometimes I wish it would all just burn down so we could have a do over. The currently players in the market aren't good stewards.


Always run and advertise your own website. There is no protection against deletion from social media for whatever reason they are going to come up with.


"These days it feels like the only way you get resolution to this automated bullshit is to post on some social media platform or other."

Just leave for another platform, especially if you're making content people would actively seek out. Who even watches Youtube at this point?


When Poland was in the Soviet bloc (post-WWII until 1989), there was the "Main Office for the Control of Press, Publications, and Performances." Every censor working there was known by their full name, and you could even negotiate with them on certain issues when publishing a book, movie, etc. This was classic censorship but based on some old-fashioned rules.

Now, Big Tech can censor your work while providing only a vague explanation, with no clear feedback channel to protest or request more information. How would you call that?


Digital Dictatorship.


Which is worse, Big Brother or lots of little brothers?

Let's try both!


What free market advocates fail to accept is that an unregulated monopoly position, whether it was arrived at "fairly" or "unfairly", includes Big Brother, bureaucracy and whatever other malpractice is profitable, every time. Because the choice of whether to pay a price for mutually beneficial provision of goods and services is gone through whatever mechanism is sustaining the monopoly. The benefits of a market disappear; Participation is no longer voluntary. Monopolies are the worst combination of traits typically associated with corporate and government organizations.


[flagged]


This is what I've had to do. I got my channel banned from YouTube despite never getting a strike, and only one warning. Admittedly some of my videos can be a bit provocative but nothing too bad, and many not even that. When they've been flagged before I had appealed and gotten them reapproved, so I was under the impression that I was following the community guidelines appropriately. A sudden ban was unexpected.

Worse though is that banning your channel actually disables your entire YouTube account so I can't even watch YouTube with that account now! Not to mention playlists being gone, though I was able to get data from Google Takeout. That part was the most frustrating for me. I was even a premium subscriber!

And I've made videos for other people that have been around for years that I can't reupload due to the terms of the ban, which is also disheartening. I had started working under a different name before all this for much more artistic and abstract work, at the demand of the people I was working with, which now makes a lot more sense why they were pushing for that. I'm still uncertain if "me" being banned is all my personas or just the one that was banned; there are no obvious connections between them though.

Anyway, self hosting isn't too bad, though certainly need to ensure your hosting is capped so you don't get a giant bill if there is a sudden influx of viewers.

Thankfully I have enough donations to keep running with only a small amount I have to pay to cover the difference. Hopefully I don't have to end up using ads.

However the notable takeaway from all this is that there is no real competitor to YouTube! Nothing even comes close.


YouTube is still a big platform, but I notice that they've lost their monopoly on hosting and distributing long-form video as of ~a few years ago. IMO the way to look at it now is that all the major social media platforms are video platforms. X, insta, TikTok, etc. all allow posting long videos directly to the platform.


Youtube still has the monopoly for "outside users". Most other platforms force you to create an account to view the video, even the ones that historically didn't (ahem, twitter).

Imagine you sold a product for general popularion, and wanted to publish a tutorial video somewhere online... except for self-hosting it, youtube is the only viable option, sadly.


TikTok doesn't require an account to view videos.


There is tremendous friction on mobile for watching TikTok videos without an account. I do not have a TikTok account and have had videos just not work without signing up. Not sure if they have been AB testing this or something because once in a while the video does work.


This is by design. It tease you with some content, than force you to install app at random interval. Many Chinese apps do this. I think Meta is doing this now as well




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: