M
Story
Tell HN: YouTube gave my username switzerland to a half government organization
I had the username @switzerland since 20.03.2006. Swiss tourism had another username since 17.10.2006. Now recently google gave my username away to swiss tourism without any notification. Their other username was fine for literally 20 years.

Worse, the app still showed my username for a long time meanwhile youtube.com/@Switzerland already showed that of swiss tourism (Schweiz Tourismus) and I was not aware of that. Hence, I lost it some months ago.

Why do I tell you? You might loose your username and you aren't even aware of it.

  • faebi
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  • 2 days ago
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Interesting https://www.youtube.com/Switzerland is still mine, but my user handle is gone. https://www.youtube.com/@Switzerland goes to swiss tourism but they have the handle @switzerland
This is unsurprising. They do this a lot with especially short usernames. I recently saw an interview with a German youtuber (@dima) where they talked about how youtube gave them this channel. In that case the channel still contained private videos and information of the previous owner, which I find somewhat shocking.

Easy fix: use youtube without a channel, e.g. using newpipe or yt-dlp.

  • KomoD
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  • 17 hours ago
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> but my user handle is gone.

Did you ever have it? When they introduced handles you had to specifically claim that name, otherwise you get @(name)-(random), it doesn't matter if you had /Switzerland as a channel url.

  • leros
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  • 20 hours ago
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I'm sure their terms of service allows them to do stuff like this
Who cares? It's not your platform, you're just an user
Precisely, and for a platform that markets itself as "your videos your platform" this is an important point to raise and remind folks of. Youtube is not yours or your friend. Avoid unless being paid, or deriving other value somehow.
  • faebi
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  • 1 day ago
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It's a soft reminder of that