I'm not completely sure what you're getting at with that; none of this is a rebuttle to my point that Youtube is not an optional service. People can't opt out of Youtube without also opting out of a huge part of culture and a huge number of everyday resources, and without severely inconveniencing not only themselves but also the people around them who will reasonably resent them for making that choice.

That's what a network effect is. It punishes people who try to move away from a service by forceably separating them from a shared community and separating them from unrelated services and resources. Understand that Youtube is not primarily a service for hosting videos, it is a middleware that sits between viewers and content producers, and it hosts videos on the side because doing so allows it to control that relationship between creators and viewers.

So it's cool that PluralSight exists, but PluralSight is not a replacement for Youtube. Again, I kind of think you know that, given how confident you were further up the thread about how there was nowhere for a mass exodus from Youtube to go. You're not jumping into conversations about network effects saying that PluralSight is going to take over. You're pointing out (correctly) that there is no alternative to Youtube.

I have to keep saying, I really honestly think you should be able to understand what network effects are, because you seem to be demonstrating an understanding of them elsewhere.

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This also really misses the point of what people are talking about above in regards to why Youtube's business model is problematic. Ads are part of the problem, but another part is privacy, and the other part is predatory market pricing and monopolization. Paying for Youtube premium does nothing to fix privacy issues that most Google critics have; in fact it makes data collection even easier. I did pay for Youtube Premium back in the day, and while I was paying I watched videos signed out with an adblocker and through 3rd-party clients, because that's obviously the more private option even if you want to support Youtube. Paying for Youtube Premium doesn't get rid of the need to block ads/tracking on Youtube.

It also does nothing to address concerns with Youtube as an advertising business. Paying for Youtube Premium does nothing to opt you out of the advertising economy even within Google properties, and it does nothing to encourage the company away from advertising as a business model. That data will still be harvested and used to show you ads in every other place where Google can show them to you.

Nor does it do anything to strengthen artist support networks off of Youtube, as opposed to paying for content directly and donating directly to artists (which I heavily encourage). Youtube Premium increases artist dependencies on Youtube as the primary funding source for content. This is (imo) an obviously negative outcome for pretty much everyone, there are very few artists and content producers who are happy with the direction that Youtube's algorithms are going and with the hoops they're forced to jump through to keep those algorithms happy. Creator moral on Youtube is pretty low right now, and it might be helpful to start supporting those artists more directly so they don't feel like Google owns their entire livelihood.

"If you value YouTube enough" misses the point that I don't value Youtube. I don't want to support Youtube, I resent that I'm forced to use Youtube, if it was possible for me to drop the service without the punishment of the network effects I'd do it in an instant. The only reason I use Youtube at all is because I don't have a choice. And I'd be happy to see the product fail and for a better general video hosting market to emerge from its corpse, I think that would be a great outcome for everyone including artists/makers.