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Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

(github.com)
798 points bertman | 1 comments | 12 Nov 25 10:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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yupyupyups ◴[12 Nov 25 17:22 UTC] No.45902856[source]▶
Even when the so called "ad-pocalypse" happened, this wasn't as big of an issue as it is today.

What's going on with Google being extra stingy seems to correlate well with the AI boom (curse). I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube. Not just new popular videos that are on fast storage, but old obscure ones that probably require more resources to fetch. This is unnatural, and goes contrary to the behaviour pattern of normal users that YT is optimized for.

I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general. If I'm right, they deserve the bulk of the blame imo.

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Alex2037 ◴[12 Nov 25 18:07 UTC] No.45903508[source]▶
>I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube.

certainly, but for Google, that bandwidth and compute is a drop in the bucket. at the scale Google operates, even if there were a hundred such bots (there aren't - few companies can afford to store exabytes of data), those wouldn't even register on the radar. of course, like the other social media oligarchs, Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content, but even that isn't their motivation here - "login to prove you're not a bot :^)" was ALWAYS going to happen, even without the AI bubble.

enshitiffication is unstoppable and irreversible, and Google is its prophet - what they don't kill, they turn to shit.

>I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general.

even before the AI bubble, every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare, for the same reason those fuckass blogs are built with FOTM javascript frameworks - there's nowt so queer as webshits.

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1. yupyupyups ◴[12 Nov 25 19:41 UTC] No.45905256[source]▶
>every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare

Lol, that's so true.

>Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content,

Yeah, data is money. Reddit are doing the same thing, but even more aggressively. You want API access? Pay an astronomical amount of money for it, that is other people's content. Reddit also hosts a much small amount of media relative to YT.

For YT, I'm not so sure the increase in traffic is a drop in the bucket for them. It can depend a lot on which videos are being fetched. Cheap storage is cheap only for storing a large amount of data, not doing an unusual amount of (random) access.

Who knows.