YouTube has disabled the account of plugin developer Sinevibes, citing violations of the platform’s “spam, deceptive practices and scams policy.” There’s no rational reason for that, and it’s the latest chilling example of how severely dominant tech platforms can disrupt businesses. Updated: it’s fixed; great to see. Here’s more:
This morning, Sinevibes’ Artemiy woke up to this email from YouTube:

Updated: the issue is fixed! All of the below remains relevant, though – it’s great that it’s possible to accelerate an appeal! (And to everyone who evidently helped with that, thanks!) But the better solution for everyone would be to reduce false positives, make sure there’s human oversight, and create a review process that’s easily understood and used by the creators who, over the years, have given YouTube its value.
Here’s what that looks like:

The text below was written before the account was restored (apparently via an expedited process):
Before I get into the rant, you can follow Sinevibes here:
Sinevibes tells CDM they’ve run this channel for well over a decade and not once had so much as a copyright flag or any other issue. It’s completely out of the blue, which makes it even more disruptive.
This kind of suspension is too familiar on platforms from the tech oligopoly. It’s immediate – and massively disruptive. In Sinevibes’ case, it broke countless news posts (including on this site) and dozens of product pages at Plugin Boutique – a huge workload for small developers to take on. You can appeal, but that process lacks transparency, and even if it works, it’s slow: YouTube indicates a minimum time of 2 days or more, and anecdotal evidence suggests it can be far longer than that. Imagine that as an outage or loss of uptime, which is essentially what this is.
Based on my knowledge of why this is happening, there can be two major culprits:
Flaws in AI and heuristics – with less human oversight. Massive platforms like YouTube increasingly rely on machine learning algorithms to identify problem content. The problem is that when machine learning fails, it can fail in unpredictable ways. I mean, large language models can even start spitting out “destroy all humans” language without warning. This isn’t exactly comparable, but assume that false negatives for any machine-based algorithm can appear more irrational than those from human moderators – because they’re not produced by humans. Machine learning doesn’t behave like rule-based heuristics, either, because it is built on a fundamentally different, more complex model.
Relying on AI will always mean some false positives, and the only way to correct that is through some kind of human review. Don’t take my word for it: listen to the data scientists, who’ll always indicate those false results. Or listen to Pardee Legal Research Center (LRC) at the University of San Diego, for example. Machine learning can become more accurate, but not 100% accurate.
There aren’t any recent cuts to content moderation personnel at YouTube that I’m able to find – a January restructuring effort appears to have impacted other teams; see reporting by The Verge and Variety. But even with over 7000 total employees, it’s safe to assume the sheer scale of YouTube — plus the company’s preference for machine learning solutions — means human oversight of cases like this is pretty tight.
There’s another potential problem – and it’s related:
Humans flagging content without cause. This is essentially vandalism, leading to the same weak points on these platforms: machine analysis, little oversight, and poor transparency and review processes.
Here’s my hope for this in the future:
YouTube, please fix this. I mean, I know some Googlers read CDM, so – yes, I support a) any effort you have to reach your colleagues and b) anyway in which I can bolster if you’ve already been raising the visibility of these kinds of problems! And I’m sure someone out there is already a Sinevibes user, so – help!
No, switching is not enough. Sinevibes was already a heavy Vimeo user, so even relying on multiple platforms isn’t sufficient. YouTube achieved market dominance by squeezing out competitors, and now it’s a little late to tell independent producers to just solve a solution up against a company with a $2.5 trillion market capitalization and a CEO standing next to the President of the United States.
Should you consider the dangers of ensh*ttification and that “you are the product” rather than the customer? (2013 reference! We did see this coming.) Yes, obviously. Should that mean you think about paying, as on Vimeo? Should you check out PeerTube? Sure!
Will that solve things? No, obviously not entirely. But that doesn’t mean we have to pretend this isn’t happening. I think a lot of the emphasis on just switching to other platforms is probably itself a bit misplaced; the practical choice for a lot of us is to add redundancy, which in tech is always a good solution. And that means making some effort to ease some of that administrative overhead for ourselves – because I don’t think we can rely on outside companies to do that for us.
I just got a flood of notices from Facebook suggesting random CDM articles were linking to “violent” and “sexual” content – for stories on, like, an oscillator module. These problems are regularly impacting our results and reach.
Honestly, beyond everything else, remember:
- A lot of what you’re seeing is not human.
- It’s very often not your fault. It is out of your control.
- Keep pointing out bugs.
- Keep researching alternatives and having backup plans to switch to them in a hurry.*
*Yes, Plugin Boutique, this means you, too.
And for everybody dealing with everything right now, well –