so we already know that youtube doesn’t like people freeloading their bandwidth using something like invidious, piped, newpipe etc. why don’t they just close the public web api and require a login or something. by requiring login they can keep track of what users are watching and if a user is watching thousands of videos daily they can rate limit that user.
are they afraid of losing their user if they do so? I personally don’t think it can affect their business or profit. It will cut down their cost of bandwidth and computation costs. so why don’t just cut off users that don’t bring any revenue??
I haven’t seen anyone mention it yet, but a reason might be that providing an API is cheaper than web scraping.
If people really want access to your data, they can just scrape your website, but that requires loading all the data through the website itself which requires loading millions or billions of video thumbnails, comments, descriptions, recommendations, etc. It’s much cheaper for them to send a JSON through an API, even though they might know that some people are trying to undermine them by using that data to circumvent their advertising.
Sure, but If they start requiring a login to watch video all the privacy frontend of YouTube will die since they will be able to apply rate limit to individual users easily. right now all they can do is shadow ban the IP of invidious instance temporary.
If they start requiring a login, YouTube is dead. The accessibility is what makes it popular.
I really don’t think requiring login will kill YouTube. only the privacy conscious people will leave but majority of people won’t even notice.
Yeah, youtube is pretty much unusable without login in due to all the shitty videos recommended by default.
Depends on how you use it.
I use youtube without login to see videos of specific creators or to search for specific videos.
I have no use for the recommending system.
It might.
YouTube’s business case is that it is the easiest to access video platform and pays out the most to content creators. Adding a login wall may be enough to allow a competitor to come in and compete against that, especially given how YouTube videos are embedded on other websites.
monopoly & lockin mitigate risk of migration.
That is the whole point of monopoly & lockin.
which is why it is the primary strategy being used against humankind, now.
By all factions, not just gov’t, business, or NGO’s, or churches, but ALL of them.
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Well sure, I was being overly dramatic. But once you require a login, then you’re no better than tiktok or Instagram. At that point, what’s the draw? They’ll lose a lot of traffic.