> If you go to the side table of the stand, you can purchase a lemonade, no hassle, no sermon. But people are incredibly opposed to this because they genuinely believe that they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost.

How dare people genuinely believe they are entitled to this lemonade at no cost, when it's got a huge sign that says "FREE LEMONADE"!

Youtube has every right to take down the free lemonade sign and paywall off their service, but they wont because they know they make far more money luring in the people who come for the free videos, sucking up their personal data, and then increasingly abusing them until some number of suckers cave and start paying into their protection racket scheme.

A racket is exactly what youtube premium is too. Never pay someone for protection against the very harms they're causing you. There's nothing to stop them from demanding increasing amounts of protection money whenever they feel like it, which is exactly what Google has done. Repeatedly. Most recently sticking their oldest suckers with a 62% hike in protection fees. (https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1jqzu4g/et_tu_yout...)

Don't encourage or try to justify that kind of shit. Just put on a pair a headphones and enjoy the sweet lemonade Google chooses to offer for "free". Don't forget that even with those headphones, Google is still collecting every scrap of data they can get from you and your device while you're using their service and that they'll happily leverage all of that data against you in any way they can think of, any time they feel it might benefit them. That price is itself high enough, but for me still worth what I'm getting from the content I view.

I don't see where YouTube has a sign saying its free. It's openly ad supported.

It's also an optional website/app. No need to get heated, you can use another service.