The problem isn't scale. Scale is just how they made a lot of money. If you make a dollar a billion times you made a billion dollars.
The problem is that good customer support costs more than $1. It costs more than what they make from the average user, so the average user can't have it. That would still be true if they had 100 times less users. It's a result of the service being free, not the service being large.
The vast majority of Google users will never need customer support, and those who do probably will mostly have easy problems.
There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this.
The channel in question has 100K+ subscribers and 17M+ views. That's probably a sizable amount of profit for Google from ads. It it really so unfathomable that google could tune their ban bot from "ban this video/channel/account immediately" to "signal a human to have a look and decide on what to do, maybe after talking to the channel creator"? That's just ridiculous to me.
> There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this.
Your treating the instant case as the common one, but it's not. And you don't know that until after you've done an investigation, which means you don't know it when deciding whether to allocate resources to an investigation.
It's trivial to game subscribers and views. If having more gets you something then all the actual garbage channels will have plenty and you're back to square one.
Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.
If google cannot even make a bot to detect fake views and subscriptions, then why the hell do advertisers give them money at all if only those bots watch the ads anyway?
And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming?
It's not trivial to game subscribers and views. Such gaming is a problem, and they are pretty surely not really close to perfect detection rates, but they aren't that bad either. And everytime I dare use a public VPN google/YT puts big fat captchas in front of me.
>Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.
Not impressed. Not every "content claim" leads to a takedown, or account strike. And not every content claim is the same. If they cannot distinguish between one coming from e.g. Sony vs one coming from e.g. <random script kiddy> then what the hell are they doing? There is such a thing as reputation.
> If google cannot even make a bot to detect fake views and subscriptions, then why the hell do advertisers give them money at all if only those bots watch the ads anyway?
Because the ad slots are sold at auction. If 20% of the views are bots then the price should go down and advertisers get 20% more ad views (and the same number of real ones) for the same dollar. Assuming the advertisers are rational and informed; if not then the explanation for why they do it is that they're irrational or uninformed.
> And why would they think that a ban bot - which has far reaching consequences - is ok, if they cannot even prevent view gaming?
One thing doesn't appear to have anything to do with the other.
They have a ban bot because people keep trying to sue them or threaten them with adverse legislation if they don't take stuff down fast enough.
> And everytime I dare use a public VPN google/YT puts big fat captchas in front of me
Because you're doing the opposite of what scammers do. You're using the one IP address with a terrible reputation. They use a million IP addresses with good reputations, e.g. from a botnet full of machines that were innocent users last month.
> If they cannot distinguish between one coming from e.g. Sony vs one coming from e.g. <random script kiddy> then what the hell are they doing? There is such a thing as reputation.
You would think so, except that a ton of the erroneous takedowns come from the biggest senders, because they use garbage automated methods to send them.
Meanwhile if they give privileged access to major companies then everybody else would be complaining that they're discriminating against small content creators by not honoring their takedowns like they do for Sony.
Alphabet could pay for proper customer service, though. It's not as if they're doing badly. Come on, 40b in revenue and nearly 7b profit last quarter [0]. Unfortunately it won't happen unless they're forced to.
Absolute numbers are useless. How much of that profit is from YouTube rather than search, and how much is that per-user? When the answer comes out to be something like $1/year, how much customer service does that buy?
Do you think charging users for support could be a feasible option? I'd pay $100 for a call with a representative who can call shots on Youtube's strike reviews.
It would solve the cost problem, but people would hate it. You'd have to pay even if you won because they have to pay the customer service rep either way.
And it would open up a new trolling vector. Now the troll files complaint after complaint and forces you to pay $100 over and over again.
What could work is to do loser pays. If someone wants to object to your video, they have to post $100, and so do you if you want to get it reinstated. Then whoever wins the dispute gets their money back. And extra points for having a builtin troll deterrent.
The problem is that good customer support costs more than $1. It costs more than what they make from the average user, so the average user can't have it. That would still be true if they had 100 times less users. It's a result of the service being free, not the service being large.