Mark's situation: Update · 4:32pm Nov 11th, 2019
So, Youtube's working on their problems... somewhat.
Lemme explain if you're not interested in a 10 minute video. Basically, Mark got a call from Susan, the head of Youtube and from the sounds of it, things weren't corporate speak. She was genuinely shocked by all of this, and wanted to help.
There was also a reddit post from an actual Youtube staff member. Did a bit of digging, and I managed to find it.
Good morning, everyone. I'm a software engineer in anti-abuse at YouTube, and occasionally moonlight for our community engagement team, usually on Reddit. I can't give full detail for reasons that should be obvious, but I would like to clear up a few of the most common concerns:
- The accounts have already been reinstated. We handled that last night.
- The whole-account "ban" was a common anti-spam measure we use. The account is disabled until the user verifies a phone number by getting a code in an SMS. (There might be other methods as well; I haven't looked into it in detail recently.) It's not intended to be a significant barrier for actual humans, only to block automated accounts from regaining access at scale.
- The emote spam in question was not "minor", the accounts affected averaged well over 100 messages each, within a short timeframe. Obviously, it's still a problem that we were banning accounts for a socially-acceptable behavior, but hopefully it's a bit more clear why we'd see it as (actual) spam.
- The appeals should not have been denied. Yeah, we definitely f**ked up there. The problem is that this is a continuation of point (3): for someone not familiar with the social context, it absolutely does look like (real) spam. We'll be looking into why the appeals got denied, and follow up on it so that we do better in the future.
- "YouTube doesn't care." We care, it's just bloody hard to get this stuff right when you have billions of users and lots of dedicated abusers. We had to remove 4 million channels, plus an additional 9 million videos and 537 million comments over April, May, and June of this year. That's about one channel every two seconds, one individual video every second, and just under 70 individual comments per second. The vast majority of all of it due to spam.
And you know what... Yeah, I can believe all of this. The fact is, Youtube's staff recognizes all of this as being a problem, and while we still have no word from them on a certain clause... it does prove they're not 'Oh, they must be monsters!' and they aren't all corporate drones. They are admitting they fucked up.
Need I say more?
A surprise to be sure but a welcome one.
squee! I've gotten my phone to the point where it auto-suggests that!
5153640
Hmmm, maybe Mark should speak out about that eh? When someone with 25 million subscribers calls Youtube out... Seems they do listen.
Well this certainly seems promising...
Not entirely convince. I don't believe also Youtube is run by monsters, but that there are cabals and factions of people who are either agenda driven or incompetent and those who truly want to make things good.
So wait and see if they are truly genuine in fixing this mess, because I'm seeing other videos like this popping.
This is pretty much what I though was going to happen.
5153669
That is possible, yes, but it's also possible Youtube's staff is simply overworked. I mean, it's a big job. It's all down to just that and simple human error I feel.
Geeks and Gamers will get their channel back eventually.
5153710
Oh it's not a possible, they are overworked, they always were.
Also Geeks and Gamers haven't lost their channel. They are a conglomeration of creators reuniting under one channel talking mostly about Star Wars and box office movies. It's the guy's personal channel that had been stolen.
5153643
Let's hope he does. Or somebody does, anyway.
Interesting, thanks for the news again.
Have you seen anything on the new COPPA stuff or whatever?
5154767
Not really. Haven't been paying much attention to that, I've been more interested in Mark's situation and the terms of service for Youtube.