YouTube Gave me a Community Guideline Strike for a 1 Minute BASIC Sims 4 Tutorial!

[Sim Architect]

Here's the offending piece... Can you believe it???

I just need three of those to lose my entire channel!

[The_gh0stm4n]

I suppose the problems you are having are because someone at EA directly, or at least someone able to influence "the right people", has become aware of your channel. And consequently they are now slowly but surely making your life harder.

We have spoken about this in the past, and yes, I'm aware that there are "other channels" with similar content, and intact monetization. But I also believe these problems are because of your relatively close association with G4TW. Anadius for example also started having lots of trouble towards the end. So did other guest contributors, who had their direct downloads taken down rather easily. OK, maybe they were too naive to comprehend how copyright-reports-bots work, but even so, it doesn't change my original premise.

Looks like being "associated with G4TW" is becoming more troublesome these days?

And no, I'm pretty sure that your stuff did not fall victim to mass reporting or the like. I believe that most of the time, when something gets taken down, it is because someone with influence has arranged something.

[Sim Architect]

Thanks for your reply!

Well, I can't disagree with you, but I am with you and the rest of G4TW until our entire inflatable boat sinks and we all die in the frozen ocean without an expensive piece of jewelry to keep as a memento...

It s*cks because I need traffic from them, I wasn't uploading because of revenue because they barely pay me 15 dollars a month, sometimes less than that. The only benefit I was getting was exposure, and I feel that's how they got me in the end. They know that I am not profiting there, and that I feature my website address everywhere and that my audience watches my videos (which are intentionally not long, I don't want to upload lower quality long boring videos like most youtubers do these days), then goes to my website (and this forum) to get mods or read more detailed instructions.

Something automated flagged my video even before I had the chance to publish it and, what's worse, I can only have 3 hits (now 2) before they take my entire channel down.

Before you could upload your video as unlisted or private, their system would assess your video, if there was something wrong it would flag it, you had a chance to delete it and be done. Now, they are giving creators strikes even before their content goes live! That's awful because they don't point out exactly what I did and where I did it that made me get punished.

I exchanged a couple of emails with YouTube and their customer service is just way too depressing and they do whatever they can to NOT help you in any manner!

I complained to them that their stupid CC generation understand words incorrectly and assumes the worst from us, like instead of cheat or sheet. Instead of telling me how to fix it (before you could delete the auto generated CC and upload your own or fix theirs, now it does not remove the yellow icon anymore), they gave me a tutorial on how to watch videos without subtitles, can you believe that?

I also complained about the strike I got, made it very clear that my appeal was rejected on a two minute simple gaming tutorial and here's their reply:

Regarding the appeal that you have sent, we are not able to manually review that for you since that is handled by our internal team. It would be best to wait for a notification or response from them. We understand mistakes happen and you don’t mean to violate our policies — that’s why the first violation is only a warning. Note that you’ll only be warned once, and this warning will remain on your channel. The next time your content is found to violate the Community Guidelines you'll get a strike.

So, besides saying they won't help me, they repeat their own threat! Oh, and that's the SECOND reply because I already got a previous reply to my first email where they did not help me at all and this is the reply my SECOND email to them following up and pointing out they DID NOT answer to my questions neither presented me with a solution!

Then about the entire yellow icon situation (they flagged my most popular videos that weren't taken down by a strike with that one, even though they still serve ads but keep all the revenue to themselves), they also do whatever they can to NOT help:

Also, if your video's monetization $ icon in Video Manager changes between green (monetizing)   or   and yellow (limited or no ads)   or   , it's because our automated ads systems run multiple scans to determine whether a given video meets our advertiser-friendly content guidelines. We know our systems don't always get it right, so if you see a yellow icon and feel that it's a mistake, you can request a review. A review request gets sent to a human reviewer and their decisions help our systems get smarter over time. You may visit the Monetization icon changes between green and yellow Help Center article for more information.

Now, what do they want with that? Do they think people can't read? If I wanted them to parrot their help section I would have gone there and read it myself (which I did, but EVERYBODY knows their information is generic and useless)! I made it clear that I needed them to intervene and correct the situation. The entire community is upset because they keep killing monetization and even videos/channels without much explanation. I see a strong decline on YouTube's content quality, videos are getting more and more bland, long, boring, repetitive.

Creators that have enough following are terrified of losing their revenue, so they keep posting "safe content", now YouTube will also start busting safe content under the excuse we are "spamming" (their reason for the last strike against me).

I already stopped uploading tutorials on our Mods and Repacks to avoid strikes. I thought that I would be able to upload simple tutorials on how to do things like cheating on Sims 4, building things etc. Now I can't even do that without worrying they will STRIKE ME instead of just giving me a yellow icon, meaning I can lose my entire channel and all my back links that took me 8 years to build!!!!

What do you guys suggest I should do? I need their traffic. I can't find anything similar to YouTube. Dailymotion was awful, they are like a ghost site, I got no traffic from them at all, almost all my views came from my embeds and they even nuked me without explanations either.

Vimeo is a paid platform, they have a free tier that would be enough, but they only host your videos, they don't send you traffic or have a website with tons of viewers to offer your content, so I can't get traffic from them neither monetize views.

Yandex doesn't seem to have a service, I saw a couple of results when searching for videos there, but they were from other video hosting sites, many of them terrible adult content mixed with normal stuff, it was worse than searching on the Pirate Bay.

It would be really nice to have an alternative to upload videos where they'll be seen, so we can publish them and get traffic, back links, possibly monetization per view.

YouTube (and Google) treat us like because they know there's no competition at all. I have been searching for months and I can't find a suitable alternative as a creator or a user. I have been using Twitch but they're for streaming, not uploading, sadly. It would be awesome if they started to let us set up channels like we do on YouTube, since it's a gaming focused platform, if people started watching pre-recorded content there often we could tap on that traffic.

Sorry for my long post, I really appreciate any ideas. I wonder if I go ahead and start uploading to Vimeo (until they nuke me like Dailymotion did) or somewhere else.

Below is the offensive video (I tried uploading it to Facebook Video in hopes it would attract viewers), can anybody tell me what's wrong with it?

[The_gh0stm4n]

No point in appealing these warnings or bans. If you don't get a canned reply, you're getting a response from an underpaid and mistreated Indian (or Chinese) "content reviewer". Because apparently, paying North Americans or Europeans to do that work is too expensive?

Either way, these foreign content reviewer might not even speak English that well, and would have to translate your appeal. And even if they do speak English well, they are getting their directives from upper management in California, U.S.A. In other words, to not grant appeals unless sanctioned by upper management.

We all have gotten a lot of exposure over the past years as part of G4TW, I think that plays a huge role here. The fact that you were terminated quickly from Dailymotion is probably due to someone with influence "keeping an eye" on you.

I can't offer more substantial advice at that point, but try working more with your website. Also try backing up your most important videos first of all, from YouTube, with some video-downloader, if you don't have them anymore on a hard-drive. That way you can at least preserve them. After that, I don't know. There is indeed not much competition for YouTube, and there won't be, for some time to come. You can try video.mail.ru, though I'm not familiar enough with how much they endorse so-called "adult content".

I can only imagine that it's hard, but people will need to realize that the golden era of using American-hosted mass platforms (Facebook, YouTube, even Discord) to direct traffic to one's - pirate - websites, is coming to an end. If it hasn't, already. I still remember the old Admin claiming all the time that "G4TW needs to be on Facebook, because everybody else is on Facebook". That must have been around the year 2013. Needless to say, he wasn't around anymore when that house of cards collapsed. But I was, and sure, the page had a lot of followers.

I noticed that before the crackdown came, things started getting harder for us there. We were getting less and less post reach for starters. Then they started blocking links to G4TW-related platforms. 

Times change, and at some point it's best to move on. Sorry again I cannot offer more substantial advice.

[Sim Architect]

I was thinking the exact same thing!

They replied again to me saying that they'll look further (yesterday I sent them an email begging for them to look into it, with a blind copy to you, considering I have that channel for almost a decade and that I want to be safe to upload and that I am not the only person facing problems like this.

Today they replied saying they'd forwarded my request, I don't know if it's true or if it went to a void, but sometimes they can surprise us when they see we're really desperate. If not I will message them again in a couple of days.

I am concentrating 90% of my energy on my website, but I need traffic, and to get traffic I need google and social media, specially YouTube, where I am "more popular" (that was supposed to be a joke, but yes, it's the only social media that sends people to my site every now and then, the rest is kinda dead, even though I auto publish there too). I don't mind not being able to post the best tutorials there (you know why), but plain gaming tutorials and lets play videos like the last one that had issues should be allowed and they show people that I am not dead (yet).

I have a full backup of my channel (except for a few recent streaming videos, maybe), they have a very convenient tool called Google Takeout that allows you to download a backup of anything you have with Google.

Wow! Did Mail.Ru buy ICQ? It was the first messenger I ever used back in the 1997!!! OMG, perhaps we should all go back to it! Chatting on it was so much fun, you could see the other person typing, you could customize colors etc, much more customizable and private than what we see nowadays where apps like WhatsApp requires you to use your phone and your account name is your phone number, really crappy concept!

The platform for video seems very nice but it seems the number of views for most of the videos (I did some search for Sims 4) is dismal, sadly. I can host my own videos (or use Facebook for that), my major problem is publishing the videos on a place where it gets free traffic like YouTube. Otherwise I just place the videos on my own site directly and keep hoping Google still sends me a few people everyday

I agree with you on the piracy idea, but it's not what we do anymore. We share modded games nowadays that are designed towards people who want more privacy and less clutter (DRM, Origin Spyware etc) dragging their performance down while they play. I even have a statement on my website saying the content is designed for people who own a legal license (of course, I don't judge and I am all in favor of piracy whenever necessary, since people who can't afford won't buy it no matter what, but they advertise the pirated product for free). What drives me crazy is that to avoid issues I am not uploading any video related to those mods anymore, it was just a regular gaming tutorial instead to show people I am here, alive, and that they can visit my website if they like what they see there and want to view more content.

I know that YouTube does not like people driving traffic away from them (fair enough), but it's NOT against their policy if you upload content that is consistent with your title and thumbnail (check), not misleading (check) and that's not an empty video with just an URL and a request to visit your site (check). I even told them that I mention that they can visit my website to see more content and that I also have stuff that I can not upload to YouTube anymore (again, they might not like it, but I made it clear that I did that to conform to their policy and if they didn't nuke my content I'd upload everything to their platform as I used to do in the "golden era").

Facebook was awful much before YouTube, they want you to pay them for exposure, at least YouTube doesn't do that yet (well, you can cut the line if you pay them, of course, but in our case we'd pay 10 dollars for each 5 cents of revenue, or less). YouTube started burying my videos long ago, and they yellow icon demonetize my best performing videos without saying what's wrong, and the last time it happened and I complained, instead of helping me they sent EA to nuke my videos with 2 copyright strikes in a row (5 minutes between them, a third one would have killed my decade old channel last year). This time they can't do it because my content complies, but they still show ads on all my videos but they don't give me the revenue, neither offer my best videos as suggested or on search results. Most of my views for my Sims 3 tutorial, for example, are from embeds

I still get some traffic from their site, and I still make 10 ~15 dollars a month, so I am good so far, but I am not putting too much energy because video requires way more work and time, unless if it's live streaming, because I have to remove tons of mouth noises and long pauses, plus cut (too) boring parts.

You're absolutely right now, and we'll hopefully survive to see. I hope things get a bit better after getting worse. I do my best to make it clear that we're the "good guys" and not evil people.

If we go down, we go together LOL, but I hope we can bounce back up somehow.

[The_gh0stm4n]

Yes, the mail.ru-group have purchased ICQ, I believe a decade ago already or so. About this:

(...)

I agree with you on the piracy idea, but it's not what we do anymore. We share modded games nowadays that are designed towards people who want more privacy and less clutter (DRM, Origin Spyware etc) dragging their performance down while they play. I even have a statement on my website saying the content is designed for people who own a legal license (of course, I don't judge and I am all in favor of piracy whenever necessary, since people who can't afford won't buy it no matter what, but they advertise the pirated product for free). What drives me crazy is that to avoid issues I am not uploading any video related to those mods anymore, it was just a regular gaming tutorial instead to show people I am here, alive, and that they can visit my website if they like what they see there and want to view more content.

Nice, you're almost arguing like a lawyer now.   I know this was something that you & also @Dracos66 brought up back then. You may also remember that I myself am not too thrilled about that line of argumentation. You may have a point in the end, but it's a very slippery slope, to say the least. I myself have tried avoiding the use of words such as "crack", but honestly, I don't think it helps much.

Even if we put up some sort of disclaimer similar to yours, and even if you/we have a point from a legal perspective, there is also the political dimension. If you are unpopular, you can absolutely get thrown under the bus, even if you are still within the bounds of the law. That's called Realpolitik.

A lot of other repackers put disclaimers such as "if you liked the game, then support the developers" in their installers. I believe that while it seems to be a friendly gesture, it falls into the same category.

Another commonly-underestimated dimension is the perspective of copyright holders and their influence on legislation and jurisprudence. It may be argued that piracy-consumers, if they just like something enough and have money, will purchase the legal product. OK. But what if copyright holders view it differently? After all, the main point of these "ISP warning letters" is to create a culture of fear. And if nobody can torrent anything, anymore, without using a good VPN, then that can ALSO entice people to spend unnecessary money.

I also see the trend with most mainstream games going towards online-only, with your classic singleplayer  crack  No-CD-fix being present with Indie developers, who may - for various reasons - not want to invest in a proper DRM-technology.

[Sim Architect]

True. Those who have more power are the ones who cry less.

[The_gh0stm4n]

True. Those who have more power are the ones who cry less.

Maybe at this stage it's worth picking your 'battles' more wisely. I would not continue with YouTube. Or if you do, then put in as little effort as possible in your uploads. But the end is going to come, of that I am sure.

[Sim Architect]

Amen!

[Sim Architect]

YouTube uncensored my video, yay!!!!

Please, if you have the chance, watch it, below, uncut, tell me what could be possibly unwelcomed by the community in it!?



At least I might eventually die from the new virus, but my video will live... hopefully?

Two weeks of begging paid off. I am not going to likely make any money from it, but at least I don't feel like an innocent person that got a death row sentence anymore.

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