This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta plans to charge European users $17 a month for an ad-free version of Instagram and Facebook.
Meta joins TikTok, which confirmed it’s testing its own ad-free subscription plan Monday after Android Authority found a prompt for a $4.99 service buried in the app’s code.
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has its famous $8-a-month blue check mark (which also comes with fewer ads and other dubious features), and anyone who isn’t already paying YouTube is familiar with its promotions for the $13.99 ad-free experience.
There’s no word from TikTok about its fledgling subscription tests, but the comments sections on videos about the app’s premium plan are full of users who say they’d love to sign up.
This is a radical departure from the business model that ran social media for the past few decades, where you offer your eyeballs to the advertising gods in exchange for free connections to friends and content creators.
Over the last twenty years, airlines have found ways to charge customers for options that used to be free, including checked bags, seat selection, and priority boarding.
The original article contains 815 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Well, Fediverse it is. When thousand people pay for thousand servers, it’s better for everyone - no ads and no fees and the ones hosting the content don’t need the money to survive. Some people will voluntarily donate to you, most will not, but in the end everyone is happy.
It works for Wikipedia, which is probably the single most important site on the Internet.
It also works for podcasts, well enough to produce an enormous amount of high-quality content, both from independent productions and networks.
I just wish that Wikipedia didn’t donate the money that people donated to it to other charities.
They recently donated a million dollars of their donations to other charitable causes and in theory I’m fine with that but in practice I feel like sort of tricked or betrayed and I just don’t like it.
I refuse to ever donate to them again until they swear to never ever do that again.
If it makes you feel any better about not donating, Wikipedia makes money hand-over-fist and absolutely does not need your donation. Their financials are public; they’ve been in the black for YEARS. They only beg for money because it works. It’s gross and exploitative.
Wikipedia also has to regularly beg for donations and is probably something of an outlier.
Pretty much every podcast I’ve ever heard has sponsors and built-in ads, or at least shout-outs.
I do think Patreon-style funding is a really good model, but ultimately, most people will not pay for a thing if they can get it for free and tell themselves that other people will pay for it instead. Exceptions to that exist, but they’re rare.
Wikipedia get big donations from big cooporations and wealthy people unlike most other donation based app
Last line of the article: “Just like choosing not to ride on airplanes isn’t really an option, for many, using social media isn’t much of a choice either.”
Holy crap. We have reached that point. As someone with no social media, it just amazes me how people have let these apps become ingrained in their lives. Sad in my opinion.
someone with no social media
Doesn’t Lemmy qualify? Well, it’s definitely not paid.
Depends. Everyone claims they are on social media platforms to stay in touch with family and friends. I know no one on here and am fine with the anonymity. So it’s up to you if you count this.
I personally never counted Reddit and am not counting Lemmy as a social media. Both Reddit and Lemmy are just a really huge forum which contains many subforums.
See, to me, all of those people are willing to trade their privacy for convenience. And the fact that others are getting rich off of sifting through and collecting all of this data also is wrong in my opinion. To each his/her/their own, but I still think it’s sad how dependent people have become on social media.
See, to me, all of those people are willing to trade their privacy for convenience
They are, in exchange for a free service.
And the fact that others are getting rich off of sifting through and collecting all of this data also is wrong in my opinion.
So how should social media companies make money?
To each his/her/their own, but I still think it’s sad how dependent people have become on social media.
Social media is an undisputed upgrade over what came before. Back in the day if you wanted to stay in contact with someone, the only methods of doing so opened floodgates for abusive pricks to make your life a living hell. If you wanted to have group discussions about a certain topic, your only real option was in person.
To your point, there is nothing wrong with making a social media account to serve a specific purpose. Just having the account doesn’t mean you have to install the app and post everything about yourself. If you have one for family, set it all private and only share things you would post publicly. Same for dating, work, etc. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing. I did give up all the major social media, but there was a time I needed to make a Facebook account to coordinate with student clubs that I was an advisor for. Once I no longer did the advising, I deleted the account. Yeah, they have the data I shared. Dates and times of student meetings and recommendations on how students organize events. Nothing to clutch pearls about.
For example if I meet a woman I like, it’s infinitely more socially acceptable to ask for her instagram than it is for her number after meeting.
Is this really a thing now? Any idea why it’s considered more acceptable? It’s definitely not a thing in my social circles and it got me curious.
Any idea why it’s considered more acceptable?
Because it’s far less susceptible to abuse. The block button will deal with anyone being a creep or asshole.
If someone wanted to be abusive, they could come by the address you gave them to send letters or bombard your phone with abuse via the number you gave them for texting.
Even for phones that can block calls and texts coming from a given number, withheld numbers are a thing and they could still sign you up to all sorts of SMS services.
Last line of the article: “Just like choosing not to ride on airplanes isn’t really an option, for many, using social media isn’t much of a choice either.”
That, and not only is not riding on an airplans an option for a lot of people, its their reality for a lot of people and out of reach financially. Way to be completely out of touch, Gizmodo. Couldn’t have used a worse example lol.
Depending on where you are and where you’re going, an airplane ride isn’t that expensive. Just a matter of why you need to do so, and if you’re willing to put up with budget airline issues. Oh and I guess the carbon footprint.
Dunno your financial situation, but a lot of people are having a hell of a time affording groceries, gas, rent, and utility bills, let alone a plane trip or even a vacation right now. And as for the carbon footprint, typically flying is more carbon friendly than driving somewhere at scale (a plane with ~100 people as opposed to ~50-100 cars on the road).
Here in Ireland, it’s often faster to go to the hospital emergency department by hopping on a flight to Belgium or Germany than to drive to a Dublin hospital. Before Covid, it used to be cheaper as well.
I think you’re misreading it. In the same way as there are people that need to ride on planes (for example for their job, or to move to where they have a job, etc), there are people that need to use social media.
For example, if you own an online store you really need to have a social media presence. Same if you are an artist, and live off of commissions. I’m sure there are plenty more examples.
Yeah that’s one of the stupidest comparisons that they could make. Transportation is a necessity, sharing what you’re doing to the entire world isn’t a necessity. I’m 37 and grew up with MySpace and I was part of Facebook back when it was still The Facebook and was only open to 4 years universities (I got in about 2 years after I was created).
I wouldn’t give two shits if every social media company was destroyed tomorrow, including Lemmy and Reddit. They’re just time killers to me.
I never scroll my facebook wall, but in my country people use fb messenger instead of whatsapp to communicate with each other, so I’m stuck with it as a communication tool. Also, most of birthday/event invites come with a facebook event, so I would also miss those.
It’s just so integrated in to a lot of people’s lives, that it would be hard to remove individually.
I am going to say this, and it’s because this is such a cliche’ response to me at this point, but I call bullshit. People making these excuses are laughable to me now with this. You aren’t talking about scaling Mt. Everest levels of effort here. Everyone you are communicating with has a phone number, and you could take the time to call them if you wanted to communicate with them, use text messaging, or email. As for the birthdays and events, go to the dollar store, or an equivalent and buy a calendar. They sell them with cute pics, or funny quotes, or whatever. Then mark the dates down. It’s fucking comical to me now how people act about getting rid of facebook. If facebook was waking up every morning and driving you to work, then yeah, it might be hard, but come on people… I feel like I am watching a b movie where everyone has been put in a trance and is just walking around mindlessly all saying the same mantra. “It’s too hard. Can’t break free.” And none of this has even touched on privacy, of which there is none on facebook. People spouting this are just willing to give up any shred of privacy for some minor convenience and it’s frustrating to watch.
Facebook has been slowly becoming worse, I don’t know if it’s the algorithm just not showing me stuff I’m interested in, or all the people that posted interesting stuff left, but I’m using it less and less.
Reddit’s quality has gone downhill, lemmy is okay but still small.
The algorithm is really trash. I interact with a posts once then the algorithm think i want to see more for days or even weeks. One of my passion is to listen to unpopular hip hop artists yet the algorithm only shows mainstream artists and not even posts about their music but about their personal life instead. I’m glad they added a chronological feed. There’s a couple of facebook groups that are interesting like a group about my neighbourhood group or the running group of my city ,it’s also great to find local events
Did you just said… underrated? 🧢😎🎤🎵
https://youtu.be/HsU7Yi6qxe4?si=6MfoAnF_4G9hX0mB
Give a listen to this my man 🎧🎶
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/HsU7Yi6qxe4?si=6MfoAnF_4G9hX0mB
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Exactly. I’d honestly rather have paid social media than engagement algo and ad-driven social media. When your algorithms chase engagement over all else, it leads to real harms, like the youtube alt-right pipeline. Fediverse ain’t perfect, but I like that there’s no engagement-chasing algorithm, no ads, just donations.
Here’s the thing though. You realize that they’re not going to stop with this right?
It’s going to be paid, they’re still going to track you, they are going to offer tiers of service and the higher tier you belong to the more serotonin and dopamine you get out of participating on the platform.
You’re still going to be seeing ads, maybe not at first, you know to get you into the system but once you’re locked in they’re going to start showing you ads again or they’re going to charge you much much more money.
I am well aware that at a certain level all of the computer hardware and compute time and electricity and network costs a significant amount of money.
But the amount of money they are charging people will never be enough. They could get $1,000 a month from every human being on the planet and they would still want more money because it’s not about providing a service it’s about making money and there is no amount of money that is enough money, and the only thing stopping these companies from stooping lower and lower in the pursuit of more money is the fact that they have to court the people that have the money to get the money.
There’s this tendency in more leftist and anti-authoritarian circles to imagine that the big corporations and the billionaires have a literally infinite pie of money and therefore they can fund all things for free.
And while they do have a lot of money, when you’re scaling things to a general population, things get very very expensive. Facebook has to pay for a ton of infrastructure and bandwidth and hire a lot of very expensive employees. That has to be paid for somehow, and even Zuck himself wouldn’t be able to cover it all for very long. In music, Spotify has never turned a profit. Movies cost massive amounts of money to produce and very often fail to make the budget back.
While it is true that one individual person blocking ads or pirating doesn’t make a material difference, if everyone did that, we simply wouldn’t have any of this stuff at all.
Tl;dr people need to read more Kant.
Except you can’t just pretend like every single business’ expenses are legit, nor can you ignore the fact that the thing they’re selling is our content.
Meta wants $17 bucks. For what? They’re not making shit. My friends posts the content, for free.
So what’s the $17 bucks for? How much of that is going toward executive bloat and other garbage? How much is going towards their PR team, their marketing, their fucking lobbyists??
When I donate a few bucks a month to the open source apps I use, I know that money is going to the people that created and maintain the thing.
This shit is about keeping these companies and their investors rich. It has fuck all to do with keeping the lights on, it’s soley about keeping the line going up.
And again, all of this, and they’re not even making the damn content.
If you think that the only thing required to run services like Facebook and Instagram is a supply of content, by all means, make your own platform. But you’ll pretty quickly discover that developing the infrastructure required to handle hundreds of millions of people uploading hundreds of gigabytes of data every minute isn’t actually a trivial problem, and that there’s a reason Facebook pays hundreds of engineers a lot of money. Meta’s labor costs, excluding sales, marketing, and admin, were 15 billion dollars in 2022. Just keeping the lights on for service as that scale is not a simple task at all, let alone actually building anything new.
If you want to get content from your friends, the postal service is perfectly well-equipped to deliver that, or you can of course simply meet up with them in person. But if you want a platform with essentially everyone you’ll ever meet on it that’s capable of hosting and sending almost any content you can imagine instantly for free, that does actually take money to build. Undoubtedly, there is some money that’s siphoned back towards investors as well, but their products also wouldn’t exist at the scale they do now without the 26 billion dollars of debt that they also have right now, which obviously needs to be re-paid.
I get that you’re probably not actually looking for answers to those questions, but my point is that they do have answers if you actually cared. Again, if you don’t think they’re actually providing any value, then do the obvious thing and don’t use them. After all, by your own position, they’re not actually providing anything, right?
The money for it has to come from somewhere. If you want to protect your privacy (which you should) then you’d be better off paying for services like that than not. It’s been circlejerked to death but: If it’s free, you’re the product.
It was not always like this. When this “everything is free” craze started, in some cases the idea was to offer something free to attract customer to the paid services. In other cases the idea was to show how powerfull was something (Altavista for example was a demo to show how powerfull the Alpha processors were at the time) and were seen as another way to have some visibility. Other cases were investments from entities to offer a public service or something similar.
It is only when companies were born with only the free service to offer that what you say become true.
Even Lemmy is not immune. Sure it’s FOSS, but it’s not free to host. Someone has to pay for servers, data, web domains and more.
True, but the costs are way lower and are also distribuited. I can host my instance for a reasonable low price and if I want I can share the price with some friend for example.
See Lemmy as the old BBS, of course there is a price but it is the price of a passion/interest.
