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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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]
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Readit News
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?
YouTube have 114 million active channels. A small error rate of 0.001% would kill 1000 channels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like you, I used to believe this. Recent events have me re-examining my assumptions.
Thank FSM for ad blockers and nebula.
Dead Comment
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...
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.
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...
Or is that tweet about the parent post?
This gives google a lot of “oops, the system did it” leeway.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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