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No More YouTube

11/13/2019

I just saw a video from Markiplier (by now old news) on YouTube about people's YouTube accounts getting banned based on bad machine-learning algorithms. The issue isn't really that YouTube accounts got suspended, but that the entire account got suspended, and even after manual review, remained suspended, for no conceivable reason. (Manual review, very likely, just means someone getting through a quota getting paid minimum wage running on two hours of sleep, just clicking through the ticket system.)

I don't doubt that this particular instance will be resolved, but there's still something else that's really problematic here-- The fact that it was able to happen in the first place. Based on entirely unpredictable causes, people's accounts were shut down. Just gone. Way more than YouTube-- Their email was gone, too, as well as anything associated with their Google account.

Google has fixed this particular instance, but they won't fix the root problem-- The blind idiot god at the center of the universe. They will continue to use the horrendously bad machine-learning algorithm based on dubious rules that are hardly followed anyway.

Since it is 100% impossible for me to determine what can cause this and I really can't afford to lose my entire Google account, there are two things that I'm going to do.

First of all, I will cease any interactive behavior on YouTube. I will continue to be a YouTube viewer because, sadly, creators have not been moving to BitChute. I didn't comment much at all before, but now I never will. But then there are the videos. I will not be uploading any videos to YouTube at all anymore. Not that I was uploading a lot before, but I have some math tutorial videos that were actually pretty popular. My videos lately have mostly been music (with still images). Those will be uploaded exclusively to BitChute now.

Secondly, I will move away from Gmail and into Fastmail. Probably Fastmail. Maybe ProtonMail. This is long overdue. I can't afford to have my email shut down because of arbitrarily-flagged behavior in one of my many Google accounts.