I like both the piped bot and the tldr bot for the same reason: I don’t need to visit a horribly bloated, ads and scripts ridden web site, which most news sites are. So I take the bot as a really good service. Also consider that without it I’d say most will just read the title and may make conclusions based on that. I’d say that’s a bigger advantage than the downsides you mention.

(Yes I use adblocks and stuff. Most news sites are still a drag to visit and difficult to read.)

I think the bot is fine in principle. The YouTube web site is fucking terrible and it’s nice to introduce people who don’t use automatic redirects or 3rd party clients to an alternative.

My problem is that it would offer only piped.video links. We don’t know how long the piped.video instance will work, but well that’s the case for any instance. Ideally a bot would provide at least two links - piped and invidious, and maybe cycle or randomly choose instances. Perhaps under a spoiler tag.

Of course it’s up to community mods to choose, but I think bots like this or the tldr bot provide value even if they can cause that “Reddit moment”.

Lemmy: I don’t know, but I wouldn’t trust any bike helmet that I can’t compile myself from source. It’s best to just stay home behind (real) firewalls so the Big Bike doesn’t target you for your striped Linux socks.

Why is every comment just about the US? Skin color, school shooter drills, actor president, support for Russians by US politicians…

Lemmy try something more international:

France and Germany have founded the European Union.

First Japan, and now China (and Taiwan) and Korea are the technological superpowers.

Car industry in the UK basically doesn’t exist anymore.

Cuba is still communist af and yet looks like a chill place.

Czechoslovakia has split. (Funny how even 30 years after the fact some people don’t believe it, so I can imagine it being inconceivable before.)

There are 8 billon people.

We still don’t have nuclear-powered flying cars.

Looking forward to all the comments explaining how YouTube is different from toilet paper. Thanks in advance for the lessons!

That’s not really true anymore either. Now e.g. the streaming video services keep removing stuff all the time, and shift focus to producing new stuff. Their intent is to keep you subbed for the new content.

But even so, the limitations before was natural. You can’t ship a truck of magazines to everyone every month. You could still access old issues in a library tho. Cable TV couldn’t have everything all the time, but reruns and niche channels kept trying to fill the blanks.

Now the limitations are purely artificial. “You can only access what we say you can. Shut up and consume.”