This might be the first HN thread I’ve seen where the statement “regiwalled content is bad” is somehow attracting a lot of negative reactions…

There's a bit difference between breaking a scraper and sending Cease and Desist letters.

Also, blocking scraping is very rich (and expectedly hypocritical) for an AI company, which SpaceX is now.

Google has sent a cease and desist letter to youtube-dl. It didn’t work out well.

And of course, Google is an AI company, too.

Wasn't it a DMCA takedown actually?

There are probably some legal differences (IANAL), but isn’t the idea basically the same as in C&D?

It was the RIAA, not Google

It failed because it didn’t make any technical sense. The RIAA was trying to argue that YouTube’s proof-of-work JavaScript challenges were some kind of DRM and by running JavaScript YouTube-dl was circumventing DRM

I don't get it, are you implying everyone who's not a fan of this change is a Google employee?

Maybe he's saying everyone who works at Google works on breaking yt-dlp...?

Judging by the amount of work that's being done on youtube that does nothing but make things harder for third party tools, without bringing any benefit to anything or anyone else, that might not be far from the truth. :)

To me Google's actions wrt yt-dlp seem to be more of the "look here mr. music industry, we're doing something" rather than a serious attempt at blocking it.

Google is in strong enough position against the music industry that they could just tell them off, because where else is the music industry going to go?

Pretty sure it was a satirical joke.

Most people on HN don't work at Google. And most would probably agree that both Google and Twitter are being user-hostile.