Today is a somber day in history for me as this was when the YouTube bots inadvertently flagged my channel as a spammy and shut off my YouTube channel.

This had some rippling effects within my access to Google services and products as only one of my two accounts were shut down. Since they were tied to the same email/account, I could not switch or pull data I created such as videos, playlists, subscriptions, etc. to attempt to start fresh.

They had poorly paid workers and high quotas back then, barely any bots, but the process was just the same nearly 10 years ago as it is now. Sumbit your appeal and (in that time) get rejected hours later.

Nearly a month later of making cases to those who had ties, I was sent a DM on Twitter saying it was "YouTube's mistake", and my account was restored fully. This is still the case for channels who don't have MCNs or contract agreements with YouTube: you have to plead your case outside of their platforms to get shit fixed.

Thus began my foray to de-google, which has not faired too well. The staying power of that trillion dollar company is strong. It at least got me off of Google Fi (Project Fi at the time) and Chrome. Likely within the year, I'll be off of Docs for personal cloud storage and online editing.

#storytelling #degoogle #youtube