93-year-old YouTuber back in business after being kicked off platform

  • Disclaimer: Former Technical Solutions Engineer for GCP, aka Support for Customers. Also Former Engineer on YouTube Caching.

    To get it out of the way, I do not agree that it should've taken a journalist to get involved to have this situation solved.

    However, I'd like to prompt Hacker News with how would you handle receiving support requests from a product that has >2.7B users. Almost all of which are non-directly revenue generating, across hundreds of different languages, in every conceivable location in the world.

    It's an extremely hard problem to solve, but I don't think anyone has got it right. I'll be playing devil's advocate in the comments. Keep me busy for my flights.

  • The automation should be setting flags on videos. Users should have preferences for opting in or out of flags with reasonable defaults. If there is a jurisdictional requirement in a users location YouTube sets the preference to disabled according to the law and shows a link to the regional law so users understand.

    Hence abuse is a local thing too. One can be getting flagged in one region but not in another. ‘Abuse’ amounts to getting certain flags auto-applied in some locations or whatever. Should not affect the account itself though.

  • Yet another instance of where the right thing is done by Google only if the journalists gets involved.

  • YouTube also blocks ex-muslim youtubers. Google has become another evil to deal with for them.

  • A company like Google should not be allowed to run a company like YouTube. They should be separate entities.