John's Other Blog

Kicked off YouTube

For some reason my YouTube account was permanently cancelled. I just found out about it yesterday and am not exactly sure when it happened. There is no appeal when something like this happens, or even a way to find out why it happened. Google/YouTube has no phone support or customer service, and their terms of service say they can and will do whatever they want to do.

I'm fortunate I didn't have too many embedded videos and it won't be too much work to reload the videos that I care about onto another video site and then reembed them in the places where I had the YouTube ones posted, such as this blog. When this happened I did some checking to see what other people have done. Some people have invested enormous amounts of time and money for years in YouTube videos, only to have everything suddenly wiped out with no warning and no recourse. I didn't find any solutions, just tales of woe.

The lesson I draw from this is that the Internet is a very big place and there is no reason to put all your eggs in any one of its many baskets. Attachment to any one site or user account is unwise. Keep everything backed up in multiple places and have transfer and repositioning mechanisms ready to go at all times, no matter what you are doing. The Internet is wonderful but it can also be cold and treacherous when we are trying to use resources that someone else owns and controls.

We must compete for attention on the net and we must also be prepared always, like good guerrilla fighters, to melt into the digital swamp then pop out cheerfully somewhere else when competitors or bad luck ruin some little place in the sun we've momentarily found for ourselves. This is another version of backing up your data.

I'm a very small and insignificant entity with no defenses when a giant corporation lies to me or double-crosses me, and this happens a lot. I have to stay fit, flexible, mobile and thick-skinned. I sometimes wonder, is anyone really big enough to be immune to these things? If they were would that be good? I'm not sure. There are certain advantages to being obscure and minuscule--that is to say, to KNOWING that you are obscure and minuscule, which is the human condition.

posted by johncgreen@gmail.com @ 10:48 AM