Comment by madamelic 5 days ago
It's also not some "oopsie". It's almost certainly not news but these sites want these 'one more' behaviors.
Years ago, I designed a minimalist YouTube player that removed video suggestions and autoplays but used their player, didn't evade ads, etc. I got banned by Google because they disallow any alternative site for YouTube, only embeds are allowed.
Pretty sure I am still banned on all Google APIs too.
You should never expect to have rights to anyone's server API endpoints, esp outside of their TOS, which is basically what trying to build your own front-end independent of youtube.com is. However, with most browsers, you have all the rights to build extensions that hide divs and change styling and add new elements with data that's already loaded (as long as you're not calling API endpoints that aren't called by the site's source though, you run into the same problems again) which would accomplish everything you were trying to do.
> Thankfully, it's rare because people using ad blockers is apparently rare on the whole.
I wish this were the case. There's quite a number of websites that use Admiral's services to detect adblockers. Admiral got 19m dollars in funding last year, so I imagine the adblock threat is meaty enough.
The insidious nature of ad-supported “free” media where end user is the product delivered to advertisers means that even if you reverse engineer some service and develop a third-party client that totally respects ads and all and simply reduces the addictiveness, tweaks the algo, etc., you are still reducing their revenue because people will see fewer ads if they spend less time on the service and probably have more fulfilling lives.
This business model is poison. Service operator’s interests will never be aligned with the interests of the users unless they are paying customers.
(By contrast, if the users were paying customers, Google would have no problem with your client—it would in fact be saving money on compute & traffic.)
> I got banned by Google because they disallow any alternative site for YouTube, only embeds are allowed.
I'm sorry that happened to you, but that seems like a perfectly reasonable policy.
In fact, I would have assumed that's the case before reading your comment.
If it didn't evade ads though, while it's their right to have such a policy with their site, it's still quite a display of the utter contempt they have for their users. Unless they really believe with a straight face that 24 is a healthy optimum for 'YouTube watch hours per day.' Because that's the only number that would cause their brain-hacking to stop.
"You'll consume using our dark-patterned, unhealthy interface which we deeply tuned to maximize addiction and obsession, or you'll GTFO!" -Google.
YouTubes users are content creators and advertisers. The people watching the videos are the product.
Were you using their embedded player or some other method to play the raw streams?
The embed links back to YT which is a major part of why they provide it for off-platform playback.
But if they somehow singled you out for overuse of the embed that seems rather arbitrary
Yep! I was using their embedded player. I thought I was doing everything right but didn't read the ToS because in my mind, ToS is just blocking silly things like "please don't use our product to build nuclear weapons", not "please don't use our product to play videos on another site".
Struck me as very anti-user and BigCorpo.
It was the project that solidified never building on someone else's 'lawn' again.
In case you want that same functionality now, I use the following three extensions to tame Youtube dark patterns:
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/df-utube-distractio...
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/clickbait-remover-f...
- https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/blocktube/bbeaicapb...