[xfeeefeee]

It's really fascinating watching the constant push and pull in projects like yt-dlp and places like YouTube and TikTok. So many interesting techniques to make things more difficult for reverse engineering or making unofficial requests. There is even a tiny JavaScript engine iirc that calculates a special value that YouTube uses to verify requests.

[anigbrowl]

Companies should take the existence of things like this as a signal that something is wrong with their product. There's a lot of things wrong with YouTube these days. Their ad engine is just out of control, often sticking ads at both the beginning and the end of short videos, sticking ads in the middle of songs on music performance videos and so on. Amazingly, they've managed to make it worse than TV.

[jfil]

This logic only applies for companies in a competitive business environment.

YouTube is a video monopolist - they know that it is an awful service for viewers, but there's no need to improve things because where else would viewers go?

Unfortunately, they are also part of a conglomerate that has reached full dominance in several online markets that are not growing. And they need to show quarter-on-quarter growth to shareholders. So you can't capture more market share, and there aren't any more people discovering the Web, so you stick additional ads everywhere. These people know exactly what they are doing.