Apologies. Unboxing and Flip-through videos are all gone and any links to them are broken. I know these were helpful and I apologize for any inconvenience.
The trigger seems to be a flip-through of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which YouTube blocked almost immediately, despite it being behind an adult content filter. I didn’t appeal the ruling, despite Ballad being a classic photobook.
Less than a week later, they removed my entire channel. I filed an appeal and a bot denied it within minutes and closed my entire account.
I’m working to get the videos back from YouTube, and I may attempt to find another place to store them, but I haven’t really decided yet.
Going forward, I’ll still use the unboxing header image for continuity sake, and I may swap the video for some images of spreads or something. Again, it’s very early days and I’m not sure what I’m going to do just yet.
If you have any ideas or thoughts, please share them, and apologies again for any inconvenience.
So sorry this happened. Your channel was a valuable archive. I assumed it was a copyright claim and I was upset about it, as you have sold me more books than the publishers’ newsletters ever could.
Just curious… Did Google delete your whole account, including Gmail, Docs, everything? Do you have access to your data anymore?
I hope you can find a new home for your videos.
It was actually regarding the handful of images of naked people in a handful of books I’ve unboxed over the years… I’ve never had a copyright claim and never could, as far as I understand, and no publisher ever said one word in the nearly 10 years I made those videos.
I lost everything for a brief period, but Gmail, Docs, etc. remain functional. I was also able to use Google Takeout to retrieve most all of the videos. They lost or couldn’t find about 50 of the 800 or more (I don’t know the exact number yet). I’m trying to decide if I want to rebuild a new YouTube channel and be very careful with what I show, or to just let it die. I’m really on the fence about it.
If you don’t want to self-host, there will always be some degree of censorship, but I still think your archive is valuable and should be preserved, even partially. I’m not sure what robotic Google would do if you re-upload content from a channel that was banned, though. It would be great if you could reach a human and have them reinstate your channel.
Ya… If I want to rebuild the channel, I think I’ll have to reshoot most everything, even my music-making nonsense and whatnot. I could maybe stick everything on Archive.org or something, and I’ll see what self-hosting will cost me, though I’m more interested in providing the public service than uploading whatever I want. There might be a way to reach a human at YouTube, but I have no idea how to go about it. There are layers and layers of bots and ai to get through, and I’m small potatoes.
If I let it die, though, I may as well shut down the blog too. As it stands now, I’ll have to at least edit nearly every post, as the vast majority have a YouTube video inserted that now shows “unavailable because it was on a channel that has been terminated.”
I can’t even begin to express how traumatic this is for me, and I hate to be dramatic. It’s nearly 10 years of work gone. It’s a portion of my identity and feeling of worth as a human gone, wiped out in seconds. I can’t think about it too much or I break down.
I can imagine… Good luck, whatever you decide. I’ll keep following your blog RSS while it’s there.