Ask HN: YouTube shutdown my account with private channel of my kids memories
I had memories of my kids stored for 6 years as private yt videos. I uploaded yesterday a video of my son elongating his eyes and mouth with funny face. I think that caused my YouTube account to be shutdown. I lost the appeal too.Please advise if there is any hope to recover
Perform a Google Takeout, all my videos were there from my banned YouTube account.
Thanks for giving the OP some firsthand advice that answers his question and might actually work, rather than chiding him with some variant of "You shouldn't have trusted YouTube in first place ('you big dummy', implied)". That type of "advice" accomplishes nothing, other than maybe boosting the ego of the person making it.
> That type of "advice" accomplishes nothing, other than maybe boosting the ego of the person making it.
That depends on whether anyone other than OP ever reads the comment thread.
probs talking about me. My replies works as a warning to someone reading the post. The Google download is actually a nice tip tho.
People don't make these posts to serve as cautionary tales for others, they're usually asking for help.
You’re right, we need more tech support requests on HN.
They tend to get moderated away most of the time, which you can help by flagging them or emailing them to hn@ycombinator.com. Supercilious PSAs don't do any of that.
It's very common on HN. I do it too. Mostly because we spend a lot of effort avoiding these platforms, and when something bad happens to a person because of it, we can shout, "Ha! My paranoia is justified!"
If you're working day to day as an engineer, you end up mostly thinking in unhappy cases and 99.99% uptime scenarios, so it actually seems like helpful advice.
Exactly this. My actual comment emerges more from fear rather than ego.
Thanks for the tip! I hope this works, as YouTube banned all my private christmas videos from the 80s.
Must've been a pretty wild Christmas party.
By the standard at the time, probably lame.
My parents had until couple of years ago photos and 8mm film from my early childhood where I staggering around in just shoes. I hated clothes even in winter.
These days that would be classified as child pornography and likely land them in prison. They were upset about destroying innocent memories but.. well..
Times change, not always for the better.
I wish! It's me as a child running around in a t-shirt, waiting for Santa. Apparently that's not allowed.
In this kind of cases I always bring up POSSE[0] (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)
Never use someone else's platform as the only location for anything you're not prepared to lose at a moment's notice.
[0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE
Peloton has no way to recover secondary account passwords and thus my wife lost all her workout history. I couldn’t believe it when customer service told me. All you can do is create a new account.
> Not having backups
Lesson learned I hope.
Never leave your treasures in the house of someone you literally don't know.
Is this a warning against banks?
[flagged]
People lose access to gmail and google photos all the time too, fwiw.
I think the point navjack27 is trying to make is that YouTube is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job. It's intended to be a platform where users can share content, not a data storage service.
Yes. I would extend that. An external hosted service - Google, Microsoft, whatever - wrong tool for the job. Great for easy access but not really a long-term repository. You can lose access to the account through so many ways. And there's no guarantee these services will always be there. Get a few flash drives. Do some backups. Maybe even store some "offsite" with a relative. Just have to remember to update periodically.
>Get a few flash drives. Do some backups.
I'd advise using mechanical HDDs instead. The portable USB-connected ones are quite inexpensive these days. The problem with flash is that it loses charge over time and your data can disappear. This shouldn't happen if you plug it in and power it up regularly, but for something you want to just store and forget about and maybe look at again in 5 or 10 years, it's not a safe storage method.
If a video is set to private, doesn't that mean that knowing the link won't work unless I'm signed into the right account?
That doesn't help.
Years ago I tried uploading my daughter's recital to youtube as a unlisted/private video to share with out of state relatives.
Thanks to the music, it got an instant copyright strike. That was the last time I uploaded to youtube :-/
*facepalm*
And that would presumably be evidence of however many doofuses trying to upload their entire music library to YouTube privately.
It both doesn't make sense - you're making a private collection - and also does; YouTube have a for-profit music streaming service.
I guess we're now entering an era where we don't just have to worry about *just* paperclip maximization, but also the dimension of "how many paperclips the humans are leaving in the training data when they walk away from the LLM" :/ - in this case, if you upload 1000 songs into a private playlist then fine, maybe penalize that. But for a single video? That's messed up.
Edit: never mind, I've been corrected below, sorry. (Original wrong comment follows for context.)
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No, YouTube has no concept of authorized viewers the way Google Docs/Drive does.
YouTube private videos only need the URL.
You're thinking of "unlisted". There is also a "private" option where you can invite people by Google Account that they have to be logged into.
I don’t think that’s accurate. YouTube has “unlisted” and “private”. What you refer to is unlisted. Private is only for the owner of the video.
And also for anyone you explicitly share it with, they have to be logged in.
I can't help with the account closure, but I can guarantee you that your account was not closed because of a face your kid made. That's not something any automated tool would detect, and if it was private nobody should have reported the video either which would have triggered anything.
I can tell you that YouTube is not the right place for storing family videos. Google Photos is more appropriate for that, and you should be using Google Takeout on a regular basis to back everything up to a hard drive or secondary cloud service.
We should all be aware by now that what in 1995 was "my hard drive stopped working and I lost all my data", is now in 2024 "my account got closed and I lost all my data". As consumers, we now back up primarily not because disks break, but because we lose access.
(I'm not condoning Google here, just saying that this is the sad reality with any cloud provider.)
Frankly I don't think any Google service is the appropriate place to be storing irreplaceable family data.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but also consider the costs associated with trying to setup and manage your own backup. Easy for many of us here, but the “average” person faces not only the technical barriers, but the actual cost of devices. People don’t have $400 for an emergency [1] but need to spend $100-$300 for a level backup - and it’s just an insurance device.
Google is offering to painlessly, invisibly backup your photos. It’s not hard to see why peeled go with it, and trust it to be there.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/shed.htm
I think it's as fine as any other major cloud service as long as you have a backup.
And for irreplaceable family data, you should always have a backup. That's the main point here.
I would even go further and say: why store the pictures in the cloud at all? Keep them local always (with backups). If you want to share photos with others, send them explicitly (via email or chat). Many advantages:
- access is forbidden by default to everyone except you
- you don’t know what the platform providers will do with your photos anyway (you cannot trust them anymore)
- you can access your photos offline