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.