Why doesn't youtube shut down their public web api?

whoareu@lemmy.ca to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 80 points –

so we already know that youtube doesn't like people freeloading their bandwidth using something like invidious, piped, newpipe etc. why don't they just close the public web api and require a login or something. by requiring login they can keep track of what users are watching and if a user is watching thousands of videos daily they can rate limit that user.

are they afraid of losing their user if they do so? I personally don't think it can affect their business or profit. It will cut down their cost of bandwidth and computation costs. so why don't just cut off users that don't bring any revenue??

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Projects using YouTube API have to agree to ToS. That's why Google want them to use API instead of web scraping.

God bless you, Chad 3rd Party Web Scraper! 🫡

Me being like:

Not a Scraper or API user

Has no use for the data

Sees meme

Becomes Scraper because Cool 1337 HaxorMan

Prediction:

Becomes addicted to it

It's the path I followed with using Linux, the terminal and a tiling window manager.