I miss it, I found more fun stuff, especially comment sections, but I would say my lemmy feed has more quality.

But I tried reading books instead of endless doom scrolling

I do not understand the position where companies first provide a good service and and than later reduces the experience and functionality. YouTube especially, when they are providing a platform but not the content.

Their AI would easily see that I more or less gave them free money since I wasn’t a high consumer putting any load on their data centers. I paid to remove the worst ads around to just see a few trailers and videos for the kids.