There are methods (due to various regions having various prices) that one can find YTP cheaper than listed - but I'll leave that up to people to explore.
My data is worth way more to me and, obviously, them.
Want to justify $14/m? Try giving me feature in-line with me as a viewer or customer. Instead it'd rather drop the service entirely. So they're going to war with me, and eventually i'll just leave.
Frankly though i'm happy to see these moves affect the community. I want to see more competition, and i'd love to give money ($7/m seems good to me) to a company that is more in-line with features i want.
So your suggestion is to just turn off recommendations? You can hide them from view using the chrome extension unhook if you want to see what that experience is like. I do it myself when I'm trying to avoid distractions but when I'm actively looking for them i turn it off.
And if you can't even imagine something other than the dumb "global toddler average" can exist, then it's just very sad
And I know what the non suggest experience is like, it's great, also removing the comments is nice, but then there is plenty of other rec nonsense that's harder to disable (especially on a phone). So yes, that's ONE OF the options I suggest, though you haven't said what's wrong with it, does it not count as an alternative to toddler average?
Give me some examples of alternatives for choosing videos for a homepage where you don't track any data about the viewer.
It doesn't count as an alternative because it requires you to know what you want to view next in advance every time.
There's literally no context where it makes sense for these sociopaths to not advertise to us. They'd put ads under our eyelids if they could. They'd put ads in our dreams.
At that point, people would revolt to the extent money loses its meaning.
and then they'll add ads to premium too
To me this has never been a valid reason (and there have been many) to not get Premium.