What's up stackers!
Wanted to share a recent update on CASCDR.
TLDR: YouTube cracked down hard on access to third party scraping/APIs so we had to discontinue some services that rely on them (for now) in favor of an RSS focus.
We have changed our YouTube agent to an RSS Agent which performs substantially the same task with only a slight UX twist:
Before: use YouTube as a proxy for surfacing relevant content
After: browse content by RSS feeds to analyze podcasts
A Temporary Armistice Broken
We knew the day would eventually come when big tech would start limiting our access to information. Like Xitter last year , YouTube has begun cracking down on anonymous access & web scraping.
We decided it was time to implement the plan we made long ago and abstract out the YouTube source content in favor of the open RSS feeds.
We know of several other projects especially on nostr that were likewise affected. While this affront to the free and open internet is unsurprising it is disappointing. If your app was affected by the YT crackdown feel free to reach out for help.
On a personal level this sucked for me because I was on vacation enjoying time with family and traveling for Bitcoin 2024 when this issue arose. That slowed us down quite a bit. Despite that, our team was able to put in a heroic effort and restore the core functionality our users need using RSS instead of YouTube. Thanks to everyone who was patient with us in the meantime.
Our team put in a heroic effort and got us back on track. I am incredibly proud of the people at CASCDR and our team of tenacious, savvy devs.
Our Response Timeline & Roadmap
- Outage occurred [Friday July 19]
- Implemented proxy measures to circumvent crack down on 1 out of 3 services (it initially succeeded) [Friday July 19 ~6pm]
- Discovered the banning was more aggressive than first thought, hard pivoted to RSS [Saturday July 20]
- Complete Testing and Release [just now, Wednesday July 24]
Roadmap:
- UX Optimizations on the RSS Agent (make it easier to search and explore analysis of particular podcasts a la carte) -> currently we just pull the most recent episode but plan to open it up in the coming days.
- Restoration of batching/automation tools like CHADBot & CASCDRVision-like clip generation
- More sophisticated AI analysis and research tools (SOON(^TM))
Closing Thoughts + CASCDR Mission
Thanks to everyone who has supported us and remained patient despite these difficulties. We will continue to press forward with our vision of creating human centric, liberty focused applications that help individuals use the AI revolution to succeed without the fear of surveillance, censorship or other predatory behavior. I welcome your thoughts in the comment section below!
Onward.