If you ever wondered why the likes of Google and Cloudflare want to restrict the web to a few signed, integrity-checked browser implementations?
Now you know.
Now you know.
I disagree with the framing of "us vs them".
It's actually "us vs us". It's not just us plebians vs FAANG giants. The small-time independent publishers and creators also want to restrict the web because they don't want their content "stolen". They want to interact with real humans instead of bots. The following are manifestations of the same fear:
- small-time websites adding Anubis proof-of-work
- owners of popular Discord channels turning on the setting for phone # verification as a requirement for joining
- web blogs wanting to put a "toll gate" (maybe utilize Cloudflare or other service) to somehow make OpenAI and others pay for the content
We're long past the days of colleagues and peers of ARPANET and NFSNET sharing info for free on university computers. Now everybody on the globe wants to try to make a dollar, and likewise, they feel dollars are being stolen from them.
- small content creators who want to make their content accessible to individuals
- companies that want to gobble up public data and resell it in a way that destroys revenue streams for content creators
- gatekeepers like Cloudflare who want to ostensibly stop this but will also become rent-extractors in the process
- users who should have the right to use personal tools like yt-dlp to customize their viewing experience, and do not wish to profit at the expense of the creators
We should be cautious both that the gatekeepers stand to profit from their gatekeeping, and that their work inhibits users as well.
If creators feel this type of user (often a dedicated fan and would-be promoter) is a necessary sacrifice to defend against predatory data extractors… then that’s absolutely the creator’s choice, but you can’t say there’s a unified “us” here.
Also there's a lot of misalignment between users and providers at the cultural level - the society is yet to fully process the implications of "digital revolution" (and copyright industry meddling with everything isn't helping). A big chunk of that boils down to the same thing that started "the war on general-purpose computing": producers have opinions on how their products should be used, and want to force consumers to only use them as prescribed.
Whether it's because they want to exploit the consumers through a side channel (e.g. ads), or to "protect intellectual property", or because they see artistic value in the integrity of their creation, or because they think they know better than customers - reasons are many, but underneath them all, is the core idea the society hasn't yet worked out: whether, and to what degree, are producers even morally entitled to that kind of control.
My personal answer is: they're not (nor they are to their old business models). But then it's producers, not consumers, who have all the money and control here.
Those were already public. The issue is AI bot ddos-ing the server. Not everyone has infinite bandwith.
> owners of popular Discord channels turning on the setting for phone # verification as a requirement for joining
I still think that Discord is a weird channel for community stuff. There's a lot of different format for communication, but people are defaulting to chat.
> web blogs wanting to put a "toll gate" (maybe utilize Cloudflare or other service) to somehow make OpenAI and others pay for the content
Paid contents are good (Coursera, O'Reilly, Udemy,...). But a lot of these services wants to have free powered by ads (for audience?).
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The fact is, we have two main bad actors: AI companies hammering servers and companies that want to centralize content (that they do not create) by adding gatekeeping extension to standard protocols.
I'm not in it for the dollar. I just want the licenses I put on my content/code to be respected, that's all. IOW, I don't what I put out there to be free forever (as in speech and beer) to be twisted and monetized by the people who re in this for the dollar.
Nowadays, producing anything feels like being the cows udder.
I wish we could all just stop fighting the truth of the tech -- it costs ZERO to make copies of things, and adjust accordingly.
Patreon (and keep it real, OnlyFans) are roughly the only viable long term models.
I'm sure some music creators may have, years ago, been against CD recorders, or platforms like Napster or even IRC-based file transfer for sharing music. Hell, maybe they were even against VCRs back in the day. But they were misguided at best.
People who want to prevent computer users from freely copying data are, in this context at least, part of "them" rather than "us".
This is why the DMCA will never be repealed, DRM will never go away, and there is no future for general purpose computing. People want access digital content, but the creators of that content wouldn't release it at all if they knew that it could be copied endlessly by whomever receives it.
I have heard someone trying this approach with music albums and succeeding at it. The album is more likely to go viral due to the easiness in sharing, while you'll always find consumers who volunteer to pay you. While the returns per copy is low, the large number of copies means that your profits may be higher than if it were DRM-encumbered. Musicians may also like the fact that there are no powerful middlemen that they have to contend with. In fact, this is what YouTube creators already do when they choose alternative monetization paths like Patreon.
What's really needed is for people to support and encourage this model and such creators. We used to earlier blame them saying that people choose convenience and short term savings over long term market health. But that's no longer applicable. People are so fed up with being exploited under consumerism that they've started boycotting these big players to regain their independence and self sufficiency. The real issue preventing open digital markets is just the lack of awareness of their existence. This message has to be spread somehow.
Just look at the hordes of people advocating Brave, which is a series scam company project.
... or just keep their site on the Internet. There hasn't been any major progress on sanctioning bad actors - be it people running vulnerable IoT crap that ends up being taken over by a botnet, cybercriminals and bulletproof hosters, or nation state actors. As long as you don't attack targets from your own geopolitical class (i.e. Russians don't attack Russians, a lot of malware will just quit if it spots Russian locale), you can do whatever the fuck you want.
And that is how we end up with darknet services where you can trivially order a DDoS taking down a website you don't like or, if you manage to get your opponent's IP leaked during an online game, their residential IP address. Pay with whatever shitcoin you have, and no one is any wiser who the perpetrator is.
Oh really? Does Linus's Floatplane go to this extent to prevent users from downloading stuff? Does Nebula? Does whatever that gun youtuber's version of video site do this?
Does Patreon?
Fast forward fifty years and smell the rot. That same fiscal recklessness Congress spending like drunken sailors while pretending deficits don't matter has bled into every pore of society. Why wouldn't it? When BlackRock scoops up entire neighborhoods with Fed-printed cash while your kid can't afford a studio apartment, people notice. When Tyson jacks up chicken prices to record profits while diners can't afford bacon, people feel it. And when some indie blogger slaps a paywall on their life's work because OpenAI vacuumed their words to train ChatGPT? That's the same disease wearing digital clothes.
We're all living in Nixon's hangover. The "us vs us" chaos you see Discord servers demanding your phone number, small sites gatekeeping against bots, everyone scrambling to monetize scraps that's what happens when trust evaporates. Just like the dollar became Monopoly money after '71, everything feels devalued now. Your labor? Worth less each year. Your creativity? Someone's AI training fuel. Your neighborhood? A BlackRock asset on a spreadsheet.
And Washington's still at it! Printing trillions to "save the economy" while inflation eats your paycheck alive. Passing trillion-dollar "infrastructure bills" that somehow leave bridges crumbling but defense contractors swimming in cash. It's the same old shell game: socialize the losses, privatize the gains. The factory worker paying $8 for eggs understands this. The nurse getting lectured about "wage spirals" while hospital CEOs pocket millions understands this. The teenager locking down their Discord because bots keep spamming scams? They understand this.
Weimar happened when money became meaningless. 1971 happened when promises became meaningless. What you're seeing now the suspicion, the barriers, the every-man-for-himself hustle is what bubbles up when people realize the whole system's running on fumes. The diner owner charging $18 for a burger isn't greedy. The blogger blocking AI scrapers isn't a Luddite. They're just building levees against a flood Washington started with a printing press half a century ago.
The tragedy is that we're all knee-deep in the same muddy water, throwing sandbags at each other while the real architects of this mess the political grifters, the Fed bankers, the extraction-engine capitalists watch dry-eyed from their high ground. Until we stop accepting their counterfeit money and their counterfeit promises, we'll keep drowning in this rigged game. The gold window didn't just close in '71. The whole damn social contract rusted shut.
The gold standard is objectively terrible economic policy and "society was better when I was young" has been a meme for thousands of years.
It feels nice to attribute everything bad to this one weird trick, but it's fake.
Gold "terrible"? Tell that to the single mom paying 40% of her paycheck to rent a BlackRock-owned apartment. Why's BlackRock her landlord? Because fiat made debt cheaper than dirt. They borrowed billions at 0% from the Fed, bought entire neighborhoods, and jacked rents. Under gold? Interest rates would've spiked, crushing their leveraged bets. But nah. We got "QE Infinity" instead. Today's policy is literally cronyism with extra steps: print to bail out banks which causes inflated assets which squeezes workers. Rinse. Repeat.
With the current system, they (the central bank) can just increase some people's numbers in some spreadsheets, and the effects are extremely indirect. Nominally this is in exchange for assets of equal value so the situation returns the normal after some time, but that hasn't been happening - the amount of money created this way has not been decreasing at any meaningful rate.
And corporate bailouts are downright cheap compared to the federal budget.
Well the US hasn't defaulted so changing how a default works wouldn't really affect the trajectory we took. And a default would be pretty catastrophic either way.
> nor to reuse the bonds to back money.
I don't know what you mean here.
Actually, by moving off the gold standard, it defaulted on dollars (at the time a kind of gold bond) rather than defaulting on dollar-denominated government bonds.
This choice was made some decades before the official day on which the gold standard ended. By 1971, it had already printed dollars to pay its bonds and didn't have nearly enough gold for foreign countries to be able to withdraw all their gold.
Greed and corruption absolutely festered under the gold standard. Boss Tweed embezzled a fortune from New York City coffers, Vanderbilt strong-armed railroads, and Rockefeller crushed competitors with predatory pricing. But here's the huge distinction: gold acted like a leash on a rabid dog. It didn't kill the beast, but it kept it from devouring the whole goddamn village. When robber barons got too greedy in the 1800s, their schemes imploded under gold's brutal discipline. Jay Cooke's bank collapsed in 1873? No Fed stepped in with trillions in printed cash to resurrect his corpse. Markets purged the rot, losers ate shit, and the system reset in years. Not decades of zombie corporations propped up by cheap debt. Corruption back then was like a bar fight: bloody, ugly, but contained. Tweed stole existing gold coins. He couldn't order the Treasury to mint him a fresh fortune overnight.
Vanderbilt couldn't borrow billions at 0% interest from a central bank to buy every competitor; he had to convince investors with real profits, not financialized vapor. Fast-forward to today: fiat didn't invent greed. It weaponized it. LBJ funded Vietnam and the Great Society without raising taxes because the printer go brrr. BlackRock gobbles neighborhoods with Fed-subsidized debt while renters bleed. Tyson jacks food prices 20%, blames "inflation," and pockets record profits because fiat decouples prices from real value. Banks peddle toxic mortgages knowing the Fed will bail them out. Politicians pass $6T "stimulus" bills while your paycheck buys less bread than a 1950s factory worker's. That's the cancer Nixon unleashed in '71. Not corruption itself, but its metastasis into a globalized, systemic looting operation where elites privatize gains, socialize losses, and inflation becomes a tax on the powerless. Gold didn't stop crooks. It stopped crooks from becoming untouchable gods. The 1800s proved humans will always be greedy. Fiat just gave them the universe's credit card and told your grandkids to foot the bill.
The web as we knew it before ChatGPT was built around the idea that humans have to scavenge for information, and while they're doing that, you can show them ads. In that world, content didn't need to be too protected because you were making up for it in eyeballs anyway.
With AI, that model is breaking down. We're seeing a shift towards bot traffic rather than human traffic, and information can be accessed far more effectively and, most importantly, without ad impressions. So, it makes total sense for them to be more protective about who has access to their content and to make sure people are actually paying for it, be it with ad views or some other form of agreement.
Ads are coming to AI. The big AI push next will be context, your context all the time. Your phone will “help” and get all your data to OpenAI…
“It looks like you went for a run today? Good job, you deserve a treat! Studies show a little ice cream after a long run is effectively free calories! It just so happens the nearest Dairy Queen is running a promotion just for the next 30 minutes. I’m getting you directions now.”
But remember, the model is the engine.
Your ChatGPT, Claude’s, etc are products. They run on LLMs but also code and tools on the backend.
Run a local model all you want, it’ll never make a fillable PDF for you or remember your context on its own.
The reasons are similar for Cloudflare, but their stances are a bit too DRMish for my tastes. I guess someone could draw the lines differently.
The solution: have clients prove they are a legitimate client by running some computationally intensive JS that interacts with DOM APIs, etc. (which is not in any way unique to big tech, see Anubis/CreepJS etc.)
The impact on the hobbyist use case is, to them, just collateral damage.
Having no reliable feedback makes it so much harder for a viewbotter to find a workaround.
If there's a visible block on video downloads? They're not fighting viewbots with that.
Even if they hadn't done that, you can craft millions of bot-sponsored views using a legitimate browser and some automation and the current update doesn't change that.
So I'd say Occam's razor applies and Youtube simply wants to be in control of how people view their videos so they can serve ads, show additional content nearby to keep them on the platform longer, track what parts of the video are most watched, and so on.
It doesn't. That interferes with google's ad revenue stream, which is why YT continues to try to make it harder and harder to do so.
They pay a lot of money to many smart people who can implement sophisticated bot detection systems, without impacting most legitimate human users. But when their business model depends on extracting value from their users' data, tracking their behavior and profiling them across their services so that they can better serve them ads, it goes against their bottom line for anyone to access their service via any other interface than their official ones.
This is what these changes are primarily about. Preventing abuse is just a side benefit they can use as an excuse.
What? What does this even mean? Who "trusts" youtube? It's filled with disinformation, AI slop and nonsense.
it even became an interesting signal which "disinformation" they deem censorship-worthy.
- AI companies scraping YT without paying YT let alone creators for training data. Imagine how many data YT has.
- YT competitors in other countries scraping YT to copy videos, especially in countries where YT is blocked. Some such companies have a function "move all my videos from YT" to promote bloggers migration.
Like Google?
>scraping YT without paying YT let alone creators for training data
Like Google has been doing to the entire internet, including people’s movement, conversations, and habits… for decades?
Like Google competitors obviously.
> Like Google has been doing to the entire internet, including people’s movement, conversations, and habits… for decades?
Yes, but if you allowed to index your site (companies even spent money to make site better indexable), Google used to bring customers and AI companies bring back nothing. They are just freeloaders.
(not debating the validity of this reason, but this is the entire reason Youtube exists, to sell and push ads)
"Everyone else" do not allow to download music in an unencrypted format, so it makes sense if YT doesn't allow also.
I laugh at people who think ActivityPub or Mastodon or BlueSky will save us. We already had that, it was called e-mail, look what happened once everyone started using it.
If we couldn't stop the centralization effects that occurred on e-mail, any attempt to stop centralization in general is honestly a utopian fool's errand. Regulation is easier.
Regulation would be great. The EU does it well. It is lacking in the US, and will be for some time. And so we have to downgrade to technical mitigations against centralization until regulation can meet the burden.