You paying just signals that you're someone to push more ads to and to harvest more data on, since it means you have disposable income to spend on something as useless as instagram or facebook.

Meta isn't going to stop harvesting all your information just because you pay for a subscription, they'll harvest and sell your data AND take your money.

Heard it here on HN: problem is paying a subscription is purely additive. eventually, inevitably, they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads, etc.

it being against what your payment contract states just means they’ll reinvent and rename the tiers.

Aren't people here old enough to recall paying for WhatsApp's original subscription fee?

Circa 2016: https://www.techspot.com/news/63504-whatsapp-waves-goodbye-a...

Id pay money to not see ads. Like YouTube premium. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. Can’t believe they rolled out all these different plans and left out the one thing a lot of people would buy.

So, pay them to keep doing what they already do?

>How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well

Well, now they will keep doing what they are doing while being paid because your data is their business model.

> "if the product is free, you are the product"

This is not true. You are the product whether you are paying or not.

If the company thinks they can make money by selling your data/attention/access, they will do so. Paying them does not stop them from monetizing you.

These new paid tiers will be slowly enshitified just like most modern paid plans.

It's because you'll still be the product even if you pay.

Agreed. Nothing wrong with charging for a product.

The hardest part about not using Meta products is deciding not to use meta products. When I stopped using Facebook, I had resigned myself to spending a lot of time and effort to stay in touch with my friends and family. As it turns out, all I had to do was mention that I was using Signal, and the people closest to me, then pretty close to me, then kinda close to me all started using that too. The network effect cuts both ways.

The sticky bit I have is facebook marketplace - it's wiped out the other classified marketplaces in my area.

I'm not making any serious money off the old stuff I sell, but the alternative to selling it (or even giving away low-value stuff that's still functional) on facebook is basically just throwing it out / destructively recycling it.

You are years behind. It was in 2016 that, when traveling and wanting to exchange contacts with cool local people I met, I first began to get the response “My e-mail address? I don’t have email.” Already then many younger people were only on social media, and it was expected that you would exchange those contacts. And some countries never had the email moment at all, so even older people don’t use it.

Ditto for phones, if you mean the PSTN – as time goes on, fewer and fewer people have ever really used that. When people around the world are communicating via their smartphones with a phone-number-based protocol, it’s overwhelmingly WhatsApp, and guess who owns that?

i missed a flight once (it was a small private cessna while on vacation). turns out they had tried calling me on WhatsApp, which i don’t use.

Good luck trying to not use Meta products (specifically WhatsApp) as a (non-tech) professional outside the US needing to communicate with their counterparts.

The best compromise for such people, I guess, would be a work phone number that's solely for business WhatsApp communication.

>It's really not as hard as it seems

Only on HN could someone post a take like this without getting laughed at. Outside our very geeky HN bubble, hardly anyone (let's say in Europe, but all my friends in the US use it as well) uses anything other than WhatsApp. There's literally zero reason for the average user to switch.

> Just stop using Meta products. It's really not as hard as it seems. Nobody needs FB to communicate with friends and family. Send texts or emails or use your phone.

I'm in WhatsApp groups with friends who live abroad, SMS is not an option. We could use another chat app, but then I'd have to convince every friend from every group to use something else. WhatsApp is what every friend I have agrees on.

I belong to several hobby groups that exist only on Facebook or Reddit (or Discord, but I dislike it for several reasons). I'd like to ditch both Facebook and Reddit, but that would mean leaving those hobby groups, and given the joy they bring me, I'm not willing to pull the plug yet.

So you see, it's really not that easy.

I don’t know about other places, but in SF, everything around schools is coordinated over WhatsApp—you’d be really doing your children a disservice to opt out.

And I hate it. I had deactivated all my Meta accounts but reactivated WhatsApp because of school stuff.

Actually it... is but not (just) for the reasons people give (social utility)

You delete a FB acct? It reactivates. Fun! Almost like the company is built off fraud

I'm thinking about it, but WhatsApp has a real hold on the Brazilian population. Removing it would mean losing the primary way my family and many people I know communicate. It’s ubiquitous here, sadly.

There are lots of other important uses for these platforms.

For the down voters: Such as finding local business information or events in your community, and tons of other stuff which isn't anywhere else.

Facebook + Instagram already has more current information than the rest of the web combined.

You'd do it once and figure out that none of your friends have regular status updates any more.

I don't believe for a second you'd pay $50 per month!

Yeah you'd do it to prove a point. 6 months later, no way in hell.

Pay each of your friends $50 one per month, to switch to signal. Problem solved

Why? You are still giving up privacy. There is 0 reason to be using Meta products, let alone pay for them.

Meta offers it in EU: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/11/facebook-and-instagram-to-...

I’ve been considering it but I am not sure if it drops just ads or suggested posts as well.

What you need is the Stories feature in Signal, then donate that $49.99/month (or however much you want) to their foundation.

I am surprised someone hasn't made a really nice equivalent to Obsidian for Mastadon and just released it for free on the app stores. I am sure one could host a very cheap mastadon instance on a low cost VPS

> only my friends' status updates

I think that is the Feed's tab, though I have not used the blue app in a long time

This is absurd. You're just asking for reasonable control over data that ostensibly belongs to you. Moreover, this minimum functionality was resolved years ago with RSS. That you'd be willing to pay so much reflects how well every tech company is doing at using tech against its own users.

Nah once they know you can be fleeced for $50 per month, they also know there is much more money to extract from you. Their advertisers would be mad if they remove this juicy cohort of moneybags from their audience.

Whenever companies make statements like this and then people act surprised when they backtrack, I can't help but think of a bit of my favorite dialogue from Star Trek Enterprise.

HARRIS: We had an arrangement!

KRELL: You did what I wanted. I don't need you anymore.

HARRIS: You agreed that both our governments would benefit if the two of us worked together.

KRELL: And you believed me.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-a...

"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg

I'd bet good money this is mostly related to Europe's GDPR / DMA actions against Facebook. Ironically, I think Facebook would be in the clear to just charge everyone in Europe and dump ads altogether. :shrug:

You can get free profile decorations these days from watching ads (discord “orbs”). It would be interesting to know how many of those users have the nitro subscription badge next to their name

How’d you make a game with 1,000 people? It’s impressive.

Yeah this very much a "like Discord" move, and it does work

tbh I mostly pay for nitro for cross-server, animated emoji

The main problem is that premium subscriptions don’t generate that much revenue when compared to ads alone. The users who pay are the most valuable users to advertisers and the users who don’t pay are the least valuable. Discord generates about $1 in revenue per user compared to Facebook at closer to $100. For Discord at $1 per user, any subscription that’s a few dollars or more is probably paying for the lost advertising revenue, but it wouldn’t translate for Meta so they aren’t including ad free which drastically reduces the value.

I’ll be surprised if Meta’s subscriptions are as popular as Discord’s without being advertising free. Cosmetics are liked amongst Discord’s audience of nerds, but not Meta’s audience of normal people.

Very interested to see how this works out for Meta. Since they’re not excluding ads, it’s basically free money, so they may as well offer these subscriptions.

I looked for this in the article and I couldn't find any mention of it. I suspect no. And I suspect that's why it's not mentioned in the article: they think people won't notice.

This is a brilliant take. I was talking to friends the other day and we were reminiscing about the old days where you'd email and phone people. And if there was a family event you'd shove a quite write up and some photos on your personal web site and email the links out to people. Some parts of the family would mail a newsletter around periodically.

We decided to do the same again.

My Mom (70s, retired special ed teacher) got the family on Signal and it's a breeze to do video calls or send pictures/messages to people.

They occasionally have a donation popup but it's one of the easiest and least intrusive programs I've ever used, and it just works.

Remember clearly the first time that message popped up, asking for $1/year, and I think you could basically "skip for now" and then it'd pop back up again later again. I remember thinking how brilliant it was, just hitting 100K active users in a year would be $100K, more than enough for a person, and at their scale they'd make it work long-term. Then of course eventually the $20B purchase happened and it became a product in someone's portfolio instead essentially.

All I can think of is people who need those accounts for professional reasons (i.e. public relations)

But they know who.

Imagine paying for the privilege to display an animated icon.

I blame Bethesda and their horse armor for this.

Soon? They have ads already.

The hurdle is instagram makes ~$27/mo per user from ad revenue.

Would you pay $27/mo for instagram?

People who pay subscriptions are exactly the sort of people you want to advertise to the most since they've signaled they have money. It's like flashing a big wad of cash in a seedy bar.

Why would they remove the ads from users who have proven that they would even pay for a Facebook subscription?

Unfortunately, Meta’s ad business is so effective that they would need to charge hundreds of dollars per year for an ad free service just to keep revenue stable. I suspect anything less than $25 per month would be loss making for them.

after they introduced Community notes, it isn't far fetched to say that they're simply copying Twitter...

Paying FU money to folks creating dashboards takes a toll.

How did we let this happen? We used to have open protocols, apps like Pidgin that would bring multiple chat clients together under one interface, IRC, Skype P2P, etc. etc.

Was it spammers that caused this mass migration to ever more closed platforms?

In the EU at least WhatsApp is being forced to interop with other messaging apps. I believe it's being rolled out at the moment.

The world still runs on email.

> Instagram and Facebook both seem to be filled with AI-generated fake crap today.

Also youtube, unfortunately. Google does not understand that AI is slowly killing youtube.

I am an expert cat video person, so noticing AI slop is not so hard, but it takes a few seconds (e. g. a mother cat punishing the young cat for "overreach" - the way how the AI video insinuated reality was of course completely false, AI spam slop that lies to real humans). I'd rather wish Google would not waste my time (then again, why am I still using youtube ... one day I'll be degoogled for good. The sooner Google is gone from this planet, the better.)

With the constant Enshittification. It's only a matter of time.

What reality? The reality is almost nobody likes using Facebook (and many people can't anyway because they get banned while the racist thing or whatever they report never gets taken down) because it doesn't work, messages are hit and miss, nobody sees any status updates, and it's 20 ads per post

The last stage of Doctorow's enshittification cycle is "Then, they die."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

WhatsApp: all school stuff seems to be coordinated over WhatsApp