I've seen another YT dark pattern lately. I often skip ads with youtube-dl (download the video and watch offline). But sometimes I like to be even more aggres

I've seen another YT dark pattern lately. I often skip ads with youtube-dl (download the video and watch offline). But sometimes I like to be even more aggressive and skip the whole video, by using ytdl to download the closed caption text (VTT file) so I can read it instead of watching the vid. I have a python script that reformats the .vtt (a messy xml file full of timestamps and other markup) into something like readable text, and that worked pretty well until recently. Lately I've found that 1) more videos don't have auto transcription, and 2) the vtt files have gotten messed up so that the timestamps are no longer properly interspersed with the text. My script strips them all out except once per minute, so if I find something interesting or confusing in the transcript, I can quickly find that spot in the video and watch it. That doesn't work any more. The hack is still better than nothing but I wonder what YT is up to, messing up a feature like that, which was presumably done for accessibility reasons, so its breakage likely has consequences beyond annoying freeloaders like me.