With Reddit shutting down its API setting a precedent in the corporate tech world (and Reddit was a major outlier in that a ton of their users are technical minded and support third party clients, YouTube does not have that kind of userbase and will not get backlash for it), Twitter doing whatever the fuck they’re doing, and Google already hellbent on destroying ad blockers, the days of Newpipe, Invidious, and Freetube are numbered. Wouldn’t be surprised if they implement Netflix level DRM tomorrow that makes alt clients impossible. I say savour your alt clients while you can guys, you won’t be able to soon.
Nah, we’ll just switch to webscraping if APIs get locked behind a paywall. Let’s see how those sites handle it when millions of people are using a scraping based client in the future. I can imagine it feeling a lot like being the victim a relentless ddos attack.
This is exactly what the proposed Web Integrity API seeks to prevent. That’s what makes it terrifying.
Hmm, so no API, no scraping, nothing but some ad infested privacy invading unusable mess. I guess isolating from the whole web is becoming an increasingly appealing option.
Show me me a 10ft wall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder.
No matter what they try, there will always be someone that manages to completely bypass those bullshit blocks.