• off_brand_@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    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?

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      14 hours ago

      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

        • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          2 hours ago

          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.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      2 days ago

      Honestly, dev hours are probably a pittance compared to the potential revenue of more ads watched and/or additional YT prem subscriptions.