If you find yourself watching low-quality videos, that’s a problem with your selection of content, not the platform itself.
Not because google took it away to protect that sweet advertising money.
The amount of ppl shamelessly stanning for companies has just gotten ridiculous.
Paying a small fee for a superior service is common sense and has nothing to with “stanning” for companies.
I also don’t even pay attention to upvotes 99% of the time, as it’s pretty unlikely that an old lecture about Hegel hosted on a philosophy channel is going to be clickbait. The clickbait stuff is almost always immediately obvious just from the title and thumbnail image alone.
But if any kind of sponsorship of a video counts as “shameless stanning” to you then yeah the whole concept of YT is just not going to be your jam.
I assume it isn’t free to stream a four hour lecture to my device, so I don’t have an issue paying a small fee to do so. $20/month is nothing compared to the value I get from it.