Is Hooktube a fraud?

The only alternative is something that has nothing to do with Youtube.
Hooktube and youtube-dl make requests to Google.
We must make sacrifices.

Well obviously. Nobody in their right mind would set up and operate petabytes of networked storage in order to keep copies of "Radom Bullshit #35418987367 Ultra HD 4k 10 Hour Version" etc.

pretty sure hooktube doesn't show up in bing or google searches, which is a good enough reason for me to use it.

I believe Google is too big to be tracking that. They focus more heavily on signed in users. For people with user accounts they build a profile of what they like and then suggest videos from channels you have recently watched (Note: not channels you are subscribed to, there is a difference) If you stop watching a channel for a while / start watching it through youtube-dl when you go back to youtube with your account they'll try to pressure you into watching that video that you used to always watch. For Android, 99% of people have a youtube account and for a family of normals they will have multiple phones. Google wants to track each of these users accurately, so they don't want to risk the ambiguity of who was watching the embed. Of course they could still be tracking them, but at this current time, youtube focuses primarily on data collected that is tied to a user account so that they can try to maximize the amount of hours they spend on youtube.

I think it still would be better to have a hooktube embed so that people who don't have it setup don't get driveby'ed by the embed and thumbnail that it loads. mpv can also play videos from hooktube.

Facebook has shadow profiles on unregistered people, google popbably does too. But of course having an account makes tracking you trivial.

Are you sure?

Most of the time they shouldn't even embed anything at all and instead just webm/mp4 it.

Well, you're half right.

Guys, let's write a local web-frontend for youtube-dl to lure normies in!

Actually that doesn't sound so bad. Open source it and make it a local server that you have to install yourself. Everybody uses their own youtube-dl executable on their own machines. Then you use a plugin or something that intercepts all traffic on your machine for "youtube.com/watch?v=ENLWEfi0Tkg" and redirects it to a local NAT address you specify like "192.168.1.2:3000/watch?v=ENLWEfi0Tkg". Some nigger posts an actual youtube link, you click on it, and you go to your own little youtube-dl client that downloads and throws it up in the browser player without google being any the wiser.