alt Hacker Newsi replied as much to a sibling comment but i think this is a way to wiggle out of robots.txt, identifying user agent strings, and other traditional ways for sites to filter for a bot.
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mvdtnz • yesterday at 11:10 PM
I mean if they want to "wriggle out" of robots.txt they can just ignore it. It's entirely voluntary.
Right but those things exist to prevent bots. Which this is.
So at this point we're talking about participating in the (very old) arms race between scrapers & content providers.
If enough people want agents, then services should (or will) provide agent-compatible APIs. The video round-trip remains stupid from a whole-system perspective.