[HN Gopher] YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
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YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work
I just wanted to share an experience as a warning to fellow users
of hacker news and in the hope that somehow someway 7 years and
countless hours can be recovered. I've never posted anything like
this, but this is the only place I have any hope of a human
response after youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal
training for our company. My wife started a company that helps
people transition from colleges in their home country (for instance
the IIT system in India) by translating their credit system into
the American educational credit system. She utilized a youtube
channel with unlisted videos to explain to internal employees the
nuances of difficult evaluation types, for instance how to
determine for CEGEPs in Quebec the difference between upper
secondary and post secondary. Another example would be how to award
credits for MBBS programs from U.K modeled educational system (West
Africa, India etc). Youtube sent her 3 strikes in one week. On
videos that were 4 years old, indicating cyber bullying. These
videos were unlisted and literally contained only incredibly dense,
rather boring videos covering the nooks and crannies of various
educational systems and how they relate to each other. When she
responded, she received an auto reply that stated you get a reply
within 2 business days. No further response despite repeated
requests within the system, then tweets, and finally submitting a
new appeal form from scratch to which the reply was nothing can be
done because too much time had passed. This content was incredibly
time intensive to create and was basically another job on top of
her position as CEO. As a small company this was a devastating
blow. Her work youtube account is now removed. Personally the
cynic in me speculates that google cleans out low hanging fruit,
using metrics, and there was nothing in the content that triggered
the bot at all, just a case of over 700 somewhat lengthy videos
that were getting almost no traffic, and they get to delete them
and hide behind the byzantine garbage fire that is their "support".
If you work for the youtube division and can help, I'm begging you
please send me a message or reply to this post, it seems this is
the only way to rectify this kind of problem. If there is anyway to
download the videos that is all we are asking for. -jdh
Author : jdhendrickson
Score : 16 points
Date : 2022-02-19 22:45 UTC (15 minutes ago)
| implying wrote:
| As useless and pithy it is to say "just restore from backup",
| having your livelihood (or a significant time investment) depend
| on a system far outside of your control, where you have no
| service guarantees or even a billable relationship, is a fairly
| shaky ground to stand on. Ultimately if you spend your time
| producing digital assets, you should have taken action to ensure
| you had ownership and control over them somewhere.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Thanks for the reminder. Personally I do my part to caution all
| of my friends and family to not host things they don't want to
| lose somewhere where they aren't paying the bills. It's odd that
| otherwise smart businesspeople think that companies will store
| their files forever, without being paid for it.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for
| our company
|
| I don't mean to be an asshole, but nobody guarantees you that
| your videos will stay up perpetually on YouTube. Especially if
| you've got hundreds of private or unlisted videos, it doesn't
| particularly surprise me that YouTube would pull them down, even
| if only for petty reasons. If you've been following the state of
| their website over the past few years, this sort of behavior is
| becoming quite common, and even among YouTubers with millions of
| followers I don't think I've seen them reverse a claim of this
| scale.
|
| Yes, it's a shame. If you don't have them on your own computer
| though, then are they really yours? It's a hard way to learn that
| local backups are important, and "the cloud" isn't a panacea for
| your storage needs.
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(page generated 2022-02-19 23:00 UTC)