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.