HACKER Q&A
📣 abrownbag

How to Contact YouTube?


I recently had my life’s YouTube channel(5yr/20k subs) deleted overnight with no possible way to recover or even get in contact with support.

You can read the full story here: https://twitter.com/gabnworba/status/1384242020659519494?s=21

I’m wondering if anyone here went through anything similar and/or found a way to get in touch with anyone at YouTube.

I don’t have the social reach to get in touch and HN is my last hope at maybe finding someone on the inside to hear my story.

Any help is greatly appreciated.


  👤 niebeendend Accepted Answer ✓
If I’m reading your Medium post right, you created 20 channels and ripped off other people’s Twitch clips into YouTube clips? I’m not sure what you were expecting given that’s not your content.

If you are in California, you should have a right to a copy of your data under CCPA data portability. If you’re in the US but in another state, I’m not sure.


👤 marto1
> life’s YouTube channel

Never ever ever rely on a single proprietary platform to run your business.

Setup something temporary for your followers like a bitchute channel or similar until (hopefully) you get your main channel back.

And then spend some time to diversify your media spread.


👤 Irongirl1
+1 meowface 23.

Sorry, I'm pitching in because I can't help myself. I agree with meowface23 and it is for a really weird reason. I spent the last few weeks watching compilation videos just like you describe except they are of military personnel returning home because I need the emotional lift, but these videos weren't meant to be wildly shared. They contain identifying information which could be very dangerous to our armed forces. I think they should be taken down, honestly, but that's not my bailiwick. The owners of the content intended them to seen where they were placed . If I understand what you are doing correctly, you are violating their express intentions for your own benefit.


👤 nromiun
Unfortunately many people are going through the same process these days. The only thing that seem to work is public support on Twitter. So send your complaint to @YouTube and tell your followers to do the same (if you can still contact them on some other platform).

👤 meowface
You overwhelmingly deserved it. Seriously. I'm not saying this to be a dick or to be cruel; I'm basing it solely on what you wrote in your blog post.

You made a bot that did absolutely nothing but steal content from other creators and upload it on your own channel for views and ad revenue. This is not only obviously a violation of YouTube's ToS, but also obviously illegal and unethical. They banned it after three separate strikes.

This is unedited and uninterrupted, from your blog:

>Flash forward to the beginning of this year and my agency AMG told me about this amazing new thing on YouTube called: Shorts. If you’re unfamiliar shorts are sub sixty second videos shot in horizontal format. Basically, they’re TikToks on YouTube and YouTube was pushing them HARD. With some quick tests, I figured out that a channel with no subs was getting more short video views than my main channel by over ten-fold.

>This is exactly where my tech mind jumped in. I obviously had the first thought any developer has. Can I automate it? I mean countless clips were just freely available on twitch. Heck, they were even sorted by most viewed. I’d seen many successful top clip channels on youtube. All I had to do was edit them into short-form content and bam free real-estate right? Armed with google colab, which is way too powerful to be free by the way, I was well on my way to my demise.

>Honestly, it was easier than I even expected. In the beginning, I had dreams of grandeur. I was doing lots of machine learning in my free time and so I was imagining fancy ml algos that automagically found the webcam and edited the video the clips into amazing short-form content. Of course after about an hour I just settled on the easiest shit that worked. Use a headless browser to rip the clips from twitch, some FFmpeg magic to format them, and then another headless instance to upload to YouTube (on a side note did you know YouTube’s own upload API won't let you PUBLISH videos unless you have a fully-fledged approved app and even then you can’t even choose the game title when uploading). I learned so many cool tricks about web automation, authentication, and video editing here but again a story for another time.

>All you really need to know is that at the end of the day I had a working system. It would take the top x number of twitch clips for any given game in the last 24hrs and edit them into shorts. It would then go and upload them to YouTube and TikTok. Once I had it set up I made twenty different short channels. It worked even better than I expected. Short-form content was pushed so hard that some of the channels even passed my main channel in subs. The Minecraft Shorts channels specifically hit 30k subs and Call Of Duty Shorts hit 40k follows on TikTok! It was honestly really cool to see it work out so well but nothing good lasts forever.

This is purely parasitic content theft. It's not good. It's the opposite of fair use. It would be a major injustice if they reinstated your account. If the strikes did all come at once as you suggest (but which you weren't able to confirm, it seems?), the scope and degree of the infringement left them no other option. If you make a new channel on YouTube, please just make your own content in the future instead of trying to profit from other people's.

In all honesty, you'll probably look back at this in a few years and feel grateful. Even if it wasn't permanently banned, if you ever wanted to actually start using your channel for real in the future, it would've had this immense and indelible smirch on it, which the community probably would have dug up and pilloried you for once it inevitably bubbled up to the level of a scandal. This kind of behavior also isn't a good look for employers, due to the liability and many other reasons.

I think you should consider this a good lesson and move on from it and completely dissociate from anything tied to this old misadventure. This is a chance at a fresh reset that you otherwise might not have ever received.


👤 fedormoiseev
With a quick search I found those support pages: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3545535 https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us

If you have 20k subscribers you may be eligible to contact their support.

Also you can try to find tweet at @YouTube.

Hope that helps.


👤 TedHartDavis
Turns out I didn't have an account here, created one to speak on this.

I have a feeling that the best way to go about this would just be to cause YouTube (well, Google) grief about this every day until you get something out of them -- though I'm not sure what to suggest in terms of gaining initial traction.

Do you have an archive.org (or similar) archive of the channel page(s)?


👤 type0
Seriously, try to reach and contact some prominent youtube creators in the gaming world. Try to make them do videos about this, maybe regular youtube users that see this can complain for your part. Don't give up. If everyone complains and tells Youtube that they'll move to LBRY and Odysee.com they might notice someday.

👤 techdragon
I wish I knew how to help. It sounds like you’ve become another casualty of the relentless GoogleTron, your blood and sweat now lubricate it’s soulless gears.

The over-reach by Google in response to simple copyright claims continues to be an appalling display of how little they care as a company. I don’t even mean how biased it is towards media companies, I simply mean they don’t care at all about any individual human, they are incapable of it. Never trust the GoogleTron

Good luck, I hope you can get someone with more pull to help!