this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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What's the traffic on invidious? Like, while I don't necessarily agree with the ad-block-block, the profit motive makes sense given their ubiquity. But are there really enough users of alternate YouTube frontends that Google is capturing any meaningful profit? Especially when developer hours are expensive and could be used elsewhere on more valuable projects?
Honestly, dev hours are probably a pittance compared to the potential revenue of more ads watched and/or additional YT prem subscriptions.
I feel it's just a side effect of them trying to block ai companies stealing large amounts of videos for training models. They see too many downloads from a datacenter IP address and require user login to continue
Openai's whisper often recognizes mangled words as "please like and subscribe" so they're actively stealing videos and their subs (the manually created ones by companies like "caption+ by js", which creators paid hundreds of dollars to make, not the free ones made by Google automatic transcriber or whisper itself) to improve their models so they can make profit
"Stealing"
Stealing, without the quotation marks. If you copy something and profit off it without crediting, compensating or asking permission to who paid for it, it's stealing. We can't downplay it as "but they just downloaded 700k hours of videos and 200k pirated books for training a simple model that they're charging users $20 a month, what's the issue"
If you copy something for personal enjoyment without profiting from it, then it's not stealing.
I get your point, it's just hard to give a shit when one amoral megacorp takes some profit away from another. Google owns and profits from YouTube videos and occasionally throws a few pennies to the creators if they haven't broken this week's selection of ever-changing arbitrary rules.
Probably Google just wants to block them not because they care about the creators but because it's costing them bandwidth money.
From the new agreement that they had with warner bros for creating closed captions, it looks like Google is also stealing the subs for training, they had direct access
It just sucks that someone pays hundreds of dollars to have a human create subs for a show, then that is used without credit or permission for training a model (actually whisper accidentally credits moments of silence with the name of the subbing groups used for training)