New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…
Original story (published on September 23, 2021) follows:
The Discord community is feeling attacked. Over the past few weeks, we have seen some of the biggest music bots on Discord going offline, all courtesy of YouTube.
Rythm and Groovy are some of the most popular music bots that let Discord users play music from YouTube videos and have more than 560 million users.
Google wanted the Rythm bot closed down within seven days, and the service has since complied with this cease and desist order by shutting down its bot on September 15th.
With these two massive bots taken offline, YouTube has triumphed! These bots that used YouTube’s API to deliver music to millions of users of Discord are no more and the users are livid!
While this can be seen as big data stamping its authority and squashing development and innovation, these services operated in a grey area, and even the founders of these platforms knew their days were numbered.
Speaking to The Verge, Yoav, the creator of Rythm bot said;
See, these bots enabled users to get music from YouTube videos directly, allowing users to bypass YouTube’s ads and seeing just how many Discord servers have these bots installed, it is impressive just how long they have lasted.
With both Rythm and Groovy officially offline, users are on the offense and their anger is directed at YouTube. Many of these users now want the Google-owned video streaming platform to step up and fill the gap it has created.
Even then, some tend to feel otherwise. A section of netizens feels like this is a proper move as the discord bots were siphoning YouTube’s bread.
Be that as it may, the Discord community is down by two awesome music bots and we would like to hear from you. What are your thoughts on this shutdown?
Should YouTube make a music bot for Discord after they’re done cracking down on Ryth and Groovy and the likes? Cast your vote below and we shall update this post with the results in a week’s time.
Update 1 (September 23)
11:25 am (IST): New reports now indicate that Discord has started testing YouTube integration with a new ‘Watch Together’ feature, presumably following the recent crackdown on third-party bots. More on that here.
Update 2 (September 25)
09:37 am (IST): The poll has ended and the final results are here. Around 76% of voters want YouTube to make a music bot for Discord. Roughly 17% think that it’s not really YouTube’s responsibility to do that.
The remaining votes are from those who aren’t familiar with Discord bots.
NOTE: We have these and many more YouTube stories in our dedicated YouTube section.
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