I was hardening our applications to stop scraping and automation bots.
Then contributing to open-source to have better scraping and automation.
I wasn't purposely creating loop holes or anything because that's highly illegal. It's about making sure both sides "play nice", because the automation bots are frequently used by spammers/evildoers.
Cards on the table: for Google money I'd do it too. If they want to enshittify their product until the competition has a fighting chance, who am I to stop them? Sure, it's an annoying and anticonsumer thing to do. But making a "free" product's bad qualities harder to circumvent isn't the ethical hill I'm going to die on.
Yeah, I don't really get the argument here. As much as it sucks, it's not nearly as morally reprehensible as something like weapons. If you don't do it someone else will. It's not something a handful of devs are gonna make a difference in by boycotting and it isn't worth being fired over or not accepting a job over.
I would take the job just to make sure we can sabotage it. And I'm not even affected by their adblocker detection; I just yt-dlp and NewPipe the videos.
It was fine until "the adpocalypse", when advertisers pulled their ads because they were being shown with offensive videos.
While YouTube has been trying to fix the problem the quality of the ads has reduced. So many advertisers now only go through sponsorship, which doesn't give any share to YouTube.