smartusers

It's just going to push the smart people with self respect to other platforms. YouTube will then cater to the captive ad tolerant audience that's left and the quality of the whole platform will degrade. More people will leave, the quality will drop, the number of ads will go up, etc. This will reduce the quality of video on YouTube until what you basically have now on reddit: a hot trash fire. Sure you can milk these people for a while, but eventually they'll follow the crowd elsewhere. Cable TV -> Netflix.