[haupt]

> There’s a fuss because people want something for nothing. This is not at all surprising or interesting.

That's entirely your opinion, but I do agree it is neither surprising nor interesting. It's almost a trope at this point that a company providing something like this ends up milking the consumer to the point the consumer just stops caring.

I don't think there's a productive discussion to be had here. There are obviously two camps and neither are going to see eye to eye anytime soon. What will happen is YouTube will keep trying to milk their users for attention as much as possible (since more attention = more ad time). At some point in the future there will be a tipping point where people just lose interest. And when that happens people will again blame people "want[ing] something for nothing".