At least for YouTube, viewbotting is very much a thing, which undermines trust in the platform. Even if we were to remove Google ads from the equation, there’s nothing preventing someone from crafting a channel with millions of bot-generated views and comments, in order to paid sponsor placements, etc.

The reasons are similar for Cloudflare, but their stances are a bit too DRMish for my tastes. I guess someone could draw the lines differently.

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ACCount37 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

If any of this was done to combat viewbotting, then any disruption to token calculation would prevent views from being registered - not videos from being downloaded.

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supriyo-biswas 3 days ago | parent [-]

From my perspective both problems are effectively the same. I want to count unique users by checking for asset downloads and correlating unique session IDs. People can request the static assets directly, leading to view booting and waste of egress bandwidth.

The solution: have clients prove they are a legitimate client by running some computationally intensive JS that interacts with DOM APIs, etc. (which is not in any way unique to big tech, see Anubis/CreepJS etc.)

The impact on the hobbyist use case is, to them, just collateral damage.

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ACCount37 3 days ago | parent [-]

No, the difference is: if I'm fighting viewbots, I want zero cues to be emitted to the client. The client should NEVER know whether its view is being counted or not, or why.

Having no reliable feedback makes it so much harder for a viewbotter to find a workaround.

If there's a visible block on video downloads? They're not fighting viewbots with that.

	▲	supriyo-biswas 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		For general spam deterrence I agree, but how do you prevent paying for the bandwidth in this case?

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wzdd 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Youtube has already accounted for this by using a separate endpoint to count watch stats. See the recent articles about view counts being down attributed to people using adblockers.

Even if they hadn't done that, you can craft millions of bot-sponsored views using a legitimate browser and some automation and the current update doesn't change that.

So I'd say Occam's razor applies and Youtube simply wants to be in control of how people view their videos so they can serve ads, show additional content nearby to keep them on the platform longer, track what parts of the video are most watched, and so on.

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rwmj 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm sure that's a problem for Youtube. What does it have to do with me rendering Youtube videos on my own computer in the way I want?

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pwg 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> What does it have to do with me rendering Youtube videos on my own computer in the way I want?

It doesn't. That interferes with google's ad revenue stream, which is why YT continues to try to make it harder and harder to do so.

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bitwize 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You don't have that right. When you view copyrighted content, you do so at the pleasure of the licensor.

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rwmj 3 days ago | parent [-]

How you watch copyrighted content has never been something that copyright has controlled.

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bitwize 2 days ago | parent [-]

If the content needs to be copied or downloaded in order to be watched, you may do so exclusively under terms set by the licensor, period. You may not even get fair use rights, as to get the content in the first place you might have to agree to terms of service waiving them, and being found to use the content in an unapproved way would be grounds for cutting off your access.

	▲	rwmj 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So in other words, copyright doesn't cover it, thanks for confirming that. The click through contracts you describe have no legal force where I live.

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imiric 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Like another comment mentioned: that's a problem for YouTube to solve.

They pay a lot of money to many smart people who can implement sophisticated bot detection systems, without impacting most legitimate human users. But when their business model depends on extracting value from their users' data, tracking their behavior and profiling them across their services so that they can better serve them ads, it goes against their bottom line for anyone to access their service via any other interface than their official ones.

This is what these changes are primarily about. Preventing abuse is just a side benefit they can use as an excuse.

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sporkxrocket 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a viewer, this is not even remotely my problem.

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ForHackernews 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> which undermines trust in the platform

What? What does this even mean? Who "trusts" youtube? It's filled with disinformation, AI slop and nonsense.

	▲	supriyo-biswas 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I provided an example is given right after that sentence. Trustworthiness of the content is an entirely separate thing.
	▲	attila-lendvai 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		you forgot the excessive censorship, of course to "fight disinformation"... it even became an interesting signal which "disinformation" they deem censorship-worthy.