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Comment by Thomashuet | Hacker News Reader

Short version: a service known for evading YouTube's bot protection is complaining that ByteDance is bypassing their own protections. I agree that it's not nice from ByteDance but I find it hypocrite from Cobalt to call it evil.

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> cobalt was created for public benefit, to protect people from ads and malware pushed by its alternatives

can't say the same for bytedance, which is designed to exploit users with various ads

It was created for donation money, lets not do mental gymnastics to justify one type of scraping and vilify another. Scraping is scraping and it's either all fair game or it's not all fair game.

I feel like you’re missing the point on purpose? Cobalt is asserting that it’s doing good based on the shadier behaviour of its competitors. But can you justify Cobalt in isolation any more than you can justify whoever was scraping it?

Yes.

You can't compare that... cobalt doesn't DDOS YouTube

Cobalt is also completely free, without ads or any other monetization besides donations, it's purely meant to help normal people download videos for normal people purposes. It's not like they're a for-profit data harvesting outfit complaining about getting abused by another for-profit data harvesting outfit.

You're just saying that Cobalt is small and non-profit so they must be good and YouTube and ByteDance are big and rich so they must be evil. But if you only look that what they are actually doing here, it's very similar: bypassing protections to use a service in a way that the service provider doesn't like.

Bytedance and youtube are evil, but not beacause they are big and rich. Cobalt is good, but not because they are small and a non-profit.

If bytedance are so big and rich why don’t they implement their own scraping solution instead of abusing a small service like cobalt.

...Because someone scraping from a Bytedance IP range is not necessarily Bytedance, just like requests from an AWS IP do not imply Amazon authored the spider

In isolation, a thief masquerading as a security system technician and an actual technician both do good work by checking on your home security. You can't meaningfully say one is better than the other, because even though one is secretly casing out your home so he can rob it later, in isolation they're doing the same thing.

Cobalt is bypassing protections to allow legitimate Youtube users to download single videos without causing harm and with no monetary incentives. Bytedance is mass downloading thounsands of videos, all for monetary incentives while heavily breaking the TOS and potentially ignoring copyright laws. Similar, but one is doing way more harm than the other.

> and with no monetary incentives

Donations are a monetary incentive

> while heavily breaking the TOS and potentially ignoring copyright laws

Cobalt also breaks the TOS and ignores copyright laws, personally I don't think that matters but having a double standard when one company does it "It's ok when they do it" and when one you don't like does it you try to use copyright laws and TOS as a weapon just makes me think it really isn't about TOS or copyright is it.

Also just gives YouTube ammunition to impose stricter protection against smaller violators like cobalt, like self running yt-dlp

Cobalt didn’t say the DDOS was evil, they said:

“bytedance's scraper was specifically built to go around cloudflare & other web security solutions, which is just genuinely evil”

So I would say it’s a fair comparison.

> built to go around cloudflare

Then they either didn't set up CF correctly or they just use the mode in most headless browsers that bypasses default CF protection when CF is not in attack mode.

I don't see the hypocrisy here. Cobalt is a small, free service that results in Google (or so the argument goes) making less profit. ByteDance are a giant money printing machine using that free service for their own ends. They have more than enough resources to not abuse a free one.

Let's say hypothetically Cobalt was made by ByteDance as a way to scrape youtube and have a scapegoat. Is it still okay?

If your opinion changes because the owner is different, even though the service stays the same, that's hypocritical.

Of course it isn't hypocritical. It's like the old story of the poor man stealing bread to feed his starving family, of course circumstances matter. It's silly to suggest otherwise.

Using Cobalt doesn't do anything to feed their family. It's an old poor man stealing a blu-ray DVD vs a rich young man stealing a blu-ray DVD.

Apples to oranges - abusing an undocumented API of a foreign service to mass-scrape another one by proxy is not the same as sending singular, user-created requests.

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