Google isn't run by a megalomaniac, but it is run by MBA failsons who are driving it into the ground because of short-term thinking chasing profits, and the entire last decade of the tech industry and going further back to the 2008 bailouts has shown that "profit" has nothing to do with whether or not a corporation continues to exist. they basically don't have to play by the rules of the market (which is why Peter Thiel famously said that he hates market competition) and can do whatever they want. what are people gonna do if youtube makes using it a miserable experience where you need to be authenticated to watch anything? go somewhere else? people haven't really left twitter en masse and it's reached a point of user-hostility that is even worse than anything Google could ever turn into since it's simply too big to be bought by one guy.
as soon as the idiots who run Google now decide that they need to start squeezing even more money out of youtube, they'll start doing irrational shit like preventing people from scraping videos. they've already done this with their flagship product (the search engine) by intentionally making it into a worse experience to squeeze more profit out of it, and they still dominate the market. because they are simply too big to have to give a fuck.
I would like to be wrong here because I also unironically only use invidious, newpipe, and yt-dlp but I don't see things playing out any other way lol
@megan@georgia Google has billions of dollars at its disposal and de facto controls the internet. the only reason any of these third party things have continued to work as well as they have is because Google hasn't cared enough to really try to shut them down, but it absolutely can happen and in fact we've literally already seen this happen with other privacy frontends like nitter
@dushman@Suiseiseki I'm fucking cackling right now at suiseiseki calling nicotine "proprietary" like this freetard is so brain damaged by stallmanist nonsense that he's really just calling random shit proprietary as a synonym for bad. holy shit lmfao
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