I really don’t much like YouTube anymore. I haven’t for years now, but it, like Google, is one of those necessary evils in the digital life of most everyone. I’ll fully admit it’s where a majority of the video content I watch originates, but that’s simply because everyone puts their content there, and I watch for that, not because I like the site.
Anyway, YouTube likes to make changes from time to time, usually under the guise of improving the quality and usability of the service. In most cases, all they do is mess things up and anger the user base for about a week, then things get back to normal.
Yesterday, the YouTube API (Application Program Interface — basically a standardized way for programmers to access data from a given website) was updated yet again, this time involving subscriber counts. This was a somewhat controversial update as it rendered the real time subscriber count features of sites like Social Blade useless — they will round subscriber numbers, rather than show exact values. Annoying for those who like to track realtime numbers, but for most users not much of a change in the end.
Google, of course, keeps a record of these changes on their revision history page. The update is a short one, only showing this feature being implemented, but something else is amiss here.
I was going to work on another AVGN episode review when I saw that, for whatever reason, the download button on YouTube video pages was gone. At first I thought just the Firefox add-on I was using was broken, and tried another one. Then another. Then a third. Then a few websites, and even a stand-alone application — none of them would work.
That’s when it hit me to actually see when the last API update was which was, as mentioned above, yesterday, September 10th. Okay, so they updated things… and the change log mentions nothing of this.
Of course not. Why would it? Why would Google tell everyone “oh, by the way, we made it where your little download programs don’t work again.” Sure, tell them and watch as they have them working again that very same day, rather than let what’s actually going on happen.
What might that be, you ask? People getting mad that they don’t work and leaving 1 star ratings, as one thing among many. Whittle away consumer faith that any given add on or application will work to download videos so that users either stop doing it or pay for YouTube Red which, if memory serves, allows people to download videos for offline enjoyment.
It’s obvious, though, that they changed something major, and that’s something you would only want to do during a planned update phase, anyway — not on a whim, so it makes sense that it would be a part of such an update, so when the API changes they can log just that subscriber reporting change, and not have to mention the exploited download API call being closed off, or at the very least have a “mystery” update that doesn’t explain what was changed, but state that a change was made.
As I write this I remembered that a bunch of AVGN episodes are on archive.org, and so I should be good going forward, until this problem is fixed and / or I run into a missing video there, but yeah, it’s still an annoyance, to say the least.
If you have been trying to download a video on YouTube and it doesn’t work, that’s why.
Edit: As of the evening of the 11th, my preferred YouTube Downloading add on was working fine after an update. That, thankfully, didn’t take long. Good job!
Its sadly a normal thing for companies these days to chop parts of their products off in order to sell them as separate products or act like they are some sort of plus, its honestly not that different from blackmail just done really badly (since in this case it doesn’t work).
Reminds me of that controversy with Assassins Creed where they were blocking custom made quests that gave a bunch of exp because they happened to sell exp multipliers as microtransactions (though they denied it).