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.