Ask HN: How to Contact YouTube?
You overwhelmingly deserved it. Seriously. I&#x27;m not saying this to be a dick or to be cruel; I&#x27;m basing it solely on what you wrote in your blog post.<p>You made a bot that did absolutely nothing but steal content from other creators and upload it on your own channel for views and ad revenue. This is not only obviously a violation of YouTube&#x27;s ToS, but also obviously illegal and unethical. They banned it after three separate strikes.<p>This is unedited and uninterrupted, from your blog:<p>&gt;Flash forward to the beginning of this year and my agency AMG told me about this amazing new thing on YouTube called: Shorts. If you’re unfamiliar shorts are sub sixty second videos shot in horizontal format. Basically, they’re TikToks on YouTube and YouTube was pushing them HARD. With some quick tests, I figured out that a channel with no subs was getting more short video views than my main channel by over ten-fold.<p>&gt;This is exactly where my tech mind jumped in. I obviously had the first thought any developer has. Can I automate it? I mean countless clips were just freely available on twitch. Heck, they were even sorted by most viewed. I’d seen many successful top clip channels on youtube. All I had to do was edit them into short-form content and bam free real-estate right? Armed with google colab, which is way too powerful to be free by the way, I was well on my way to my demise.<p>&gt;Honestly, it was easier than I even expected. In the beginning, I had dreams of grandeur. I was doing lots of machine learning in my free time and so I was imagining fancy ml algos that automagically found the webcam and edited the video the clips into amazing short-form content. Of course after about an hour I just settled on the easiest shit that worked. Use a headless browser to rip the clips from twitch, some FFmpeg magic to format them, and then another headless instance to upload to YouTube (on a side note did you know YouTube’s own upload API won&#x27;t let you PUBLISH videos unless you have a fully-fledged approved app and even then you can’t even choose the game title when uploading). I learned so many cool tricks about web automation, authentication, and video editing here but again a story for another time.<p>&gt;All you really need to know is that at the end of the day I had a working system. It would take the top x number of twitch clips for any given game in the last 24hrs and edit them into shorts. It would then go and upload them to YouTube and TikTok. Once I had it set up I made twenty different short channels. It worked even better than I expected. Short-form content was pushed so hard that some of the channels even passed my main channel in subs. The Minecraft Shorts channels specifically hit 30k subs and Call Of Duty Shorts hit 40k follows on TikTok! It was honestly really cool to see it work out so well but nothing good lasts forever.<p>This is purely parasitic content theft. It&#x27;s not good. It&#x27;s the opposite of fair use. It would be a major injustice if they reinstated your account. If the strikes did all come at once as you suggest (but which you weren&#x27;t able to confirm, it seems?), the scope and degree of the infringement left them no other option. If you make a new channel on YouTube, please just make your own content in the future instead of trying to profit from other people&#x27;s.<p>In all honesty, you&#x27;ll probably look back at this in a few years and feel grateful. Even if it wasn&#x27;t permanently banned, if you ever wanted to actually start using your channel for real in the future, it would&#x27;ve had this immense and indelible smirch on it, which the community probably would have dug up and pilloried you for once it inevitably bubbled up to the level of a scandal. This kind of behavior also isn&#x27;t a good look for employers, due to the liability and many other reasons.<p>I think you should consider this a good lesson and move on from it and completely dissociate from anything tied to this old misadventure. This is a chance at a fresh reset that you otherwise might not have ever received.