[Thomashuet]

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.

[lunarmony]

> 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

[whywhywhywhy]

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.

[appendix-rock]

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?

[h4x0rr]

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

[jsheard]

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.

[criddell]

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.

[afavour]

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.

[squeaky-clean]

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.

[ascpixi]

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.