cross-posted from: https://feddit.rocks/post/3214
So I created an open-source Lemmy bot to reply to posts/comments with YouTube links with converted Piped links to preserve your privacy.
Piped is an open-source alternative privacy-friendly frontend to YouTube. You can watch the same content from YouTube without connecting to Google’s servers.
You can find the source code at: https://github.com/TeamPiped/lemmy-piped-link-bot
You can find Piped’s source code at: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
PS: I’m the author of Piped :P
Do the content creators miss out on views bc of this?
Good question, but I think it would be the least of a creator’s worries. Creators get paid for ad views, not for video views. Since Piped doesn’t show ads and doesn’t help YouTube’s recommendation algorithm figure out who else would like the video, it will be harder for the creator to pay their bills (they can’t all be MBKHD) and find an audience.
To be fair, YouTube ad loads have gotten obnoxious, and I understand why people are wary of Google. I’m just glad I don’t depend on unpredictable YouTube income.
Unfortunately, yes since for views to be counted, we have to make some tracking requests to YouTube.