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??

  • starman@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Projects using YouTube API have to agree to ToS. That’s why Google want them to use API instead of web scraping.

  • cAUzapNEAGLb@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    Reddit did that and then instantly multiple serious competitors began to siphon off their power users both out of principle and practicality, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

    YouTube i think understands to not cross the line because if they no longer have a monopoly on mid to long form content their golden goose dies. People are already on edge after a long sequence of attacks against non-premium users.

    Personally, If they do do that, and at least some amount of the channels I care about move to a different platform, I’ll happily move with them and cancel my YouTube premium.