I'm going to go against the grain here and say this is probably a positive thing for Meta products, and honestly every other "free" service to provide these kinds of revenue avenues.
How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers.
By having material subscription revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.
Yes, in many ways Meta gets to have their cake and eat it too, because the ads are still there even with the plans, but this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay that they can invest in other ways outside of strictly advertising.
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.
This was always a naive saying. The reality had always been "if the product is offered by an advertising company, you are the product" or maybe even "if the product was funded by VC, you are the product"
When you are the product, subscriptions are a feature being sold to the the advertisers. They make you more valuable. It signals that you have money and that you spend it on frivolous, money-burning luxuries. While the economy collapses around us, it's increasingly important for advertising agencies to surface consumers who still have money to burn so can sell access to them more efficiently. Adding subscriptions is Meta's way of convincing you to volunteer for more expensive, more lucrative ad placements while earning a token bit of revenue while they're at it.
While you're right that it may give some experience-minded product designers some fresh leverage to say "we should add feature X so that we have more high-value users to sell", it does not change that you are the product at the end of the day and that selling access to you and your data is still the highest priority objective.
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.
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.
It’s amazing how strong the Meta FOMO is. I stopped using Facebook over 10 years ago and never even opened Instagram or WhatsApp, and I really am not missing out on anything in life. My actual friends know how to contact me and they do! And it’s really not that hard to say “Sorry I don’t have Whats App, just call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.”
If someone is prepared to not be my friend because they only want to communicate via a Meta app, then I don’t see why I’d want them as a friend.
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?
How do they not have email when it's required to sign up for various sites, plus having android phones requires gmail, plus official documents, bank accounts, job applications etc. tend to ask for email; email is used for work as well...?
Notice how in the last several years, a lot of popular sites have allowed signing up with phone numbers, no email address required. Besides making the service more accessible to a generation that doesn’t use email, getting a person’s phone number is great for profiling them for advertising reasons.
In many countries, either WhatsApp or a PSTN number for receiving an SMS is used today for the things that you think are done with email. I have lived in two countries that have highly digitized government services, and they were provided over an official app where email wasn’t part of the signup flow.
Sure, maybe some people use email at work (but WhatsApp has eaten into even that in some regions), but then that address is so associated with work that they don’t use it for social contacts.
Everyone is free to define “need” and who their friends should be as strictly as they want, because, sure, some people could become total hermits. But it’s not going to strike most people as a reasonable definition.
You mention “FB and Instagram”, and I haven’t used either in a decade myself. But the OP did mention “Meta products” and you are ignoring the elephant in the room: WhatsApp. In many countries it has completely replaced the PSTN: you cannot contact a business (they won’t answer normal calls and may not post email addresses), cannot get the necessary info on how to check into the reception-less accommodation one booked, and one will find it hard to maintain contact with people one may well wish to maintain contact with.
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.
Tell your school board to use a dedicated messaging platform built for schools. Cite privacy laws. That's what I did, and it worked.
Unless you're talking about parent groups. Because then you're fucked. Every parent group everywhere uses Facebook or Whatsapp and don't care that not everybody uses it. You will be excluded.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the philosophy: “you’re not missing out on anything worthwhile by being excluded by people who want to exclude you.” Don’t voluntarily interact with people who make “uses a particular app” a condition of that interaction.
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.
I would pay $49.99/mo for an unlimited plan that brings me only my friends' status updates (not their hyper-political likes and comments), just their life updates. Daily stories are great too. But JUST that, no influencers, no ads.
I realize Meta's data shows that our user revealed preferences tells them that we like all the dopamine hijacking garbage but that's like saying "Well users like drugs, so we gave them more". Let me pay you to give me just the vitamins, and none of the sugar.
I think I would pay it. The peace of mind knowing that my every move isn't tracked and being used to sell me stuff or engagement bait me is invaluable tbh
I paid for youtube premium for a few months under the reasoning that I hate those auto playing make money ads so much. Certainly paying for peace is worthwhile.
Youtube legitimately has some quality content. But I ended my subscription because fundamentally, streamlining the path to more Youtube usage is self-enabling devil’s work.
Point being: Im not convinced paying money to these companies is ultimately going to result in a healthier, more safe more private experience, no matter what they claim.
Signal is designed with the assumption that data is sensitive and you should err on the side of destroying it.
Facebook is designed more as a shared scrapbook, with the assumption that data is precious and you want to share it with your community, and you should err on the side of oversharing so you don't lose any precious moments. Signal is in no way a replacement for Facebook.
When Facebook was food this was how it was used and what people liked. Nobody would care what they've done to the product in the past 10 years to optimize for money over mental health
> Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years? Its nothing like this at all.
I use it all the time. Yesterday I was talking to a friend, and we were reminiscing about visiting another friend's house, and we looked up some old birthday party invitations to help us remember when we had been there.
Honestly it's all there, if you use the "feeds" view in the menu it cuts out all the random influencer garbage. The search, especially the event search, is not great, but honestly I hope they don't touch it because I'm more worried about them enshittifying it further than I am about getting some creature comforts.
$50 per month for unlimited, not $50 per friend, so your solution only works if you only have 1 friend, so it would work for me (self-deprecating joke) but may not for GP.
A friend and I have been running a private Matrix server for almost a decade now, it's very lacking in comparison to what the average chat user (especially discord) is used to.
No custom emojis, no self-chat, embeds are inconsistent (e.g. encrypted rooms), multi-image uploads aren't a thing in many clients, adding text when sending an attachment isn't a thing, just to name things we've run into over the years. Most of these have been brought up to the devs many years ago, only to spend forever in spec hell and never actually make it into a release.
We're just tolerating these, because we explicitly moved off discord to have control over our data, but being tech savvy we can handle this. It's nowhere near good enough that I could use it with less savvy people.
Everything about matrix is cumbersome and glitchy. I have last tried to use it a few years ago and it seemed that Riot/Element had the only decent clients, and those were all Electron on desktop and also seemingly for profit. Signal has the electron problem, as well as many others (like the backup UI being abhorrent), but at least the core functionality works without fuss.
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
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.
Ehhh, what I'm paying for is FB/Insta's ability to bring everyone onto one platform and encourage them to post regularly. RSS, AOL Messenger etc, never were able to do that with any decent success.
That they went past that to just kill their own golden goose is what is now reversible via a payment plan. That might be their only saving grace on this now managed decline.
But FB/Insta haven't been able to get everyone onto one platform. Generations are balkanized across FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp (all of which Meta bought precisely because it can’t manage with its original social network), and TikTok.
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.
Not only that, but Spybook aka Facebook, also connected offline information, e. g. I think if I recall it was dental care or something like that. I don't remember the year (edit: a google search led me to this article from 2018, but I could swear this was several years before that - see https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43668607), but it was scary that they go and sniff for ALL data they can find about people. This brings mega-corporation to a new level of Evil. And I haven't even gotten to talk about Google here, yet ...
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:
I didn't see it mentioned that this hid ads. I would be surprised if it did, since facebook makes way more than $4/month off many of it's users, they would be leaving a ton of money on the table if they only charged that to remove ads.
I'd have been happy to pay for a WhatsApp-like service if they had not been acquired. Flawless service for like a decade, no complains. Only issue was the difficulty of moving between Android and iOS.
Meta? Fuck off. We all know they're already doing awful stuff with our data, they've had more bugs last year than all of whatsapps previous history combined, and whatever price they request now is step one for enshittification.
Discord subscriptions seem to be working. People like to customize their profile (ie express themselves), even though profiles are not something frequently interacted with (that's the surprising part!)
I have a server (for my game) with about 1000 people. Out of the 300 people logged in, 50 of them have custom profiles.
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
Forgive me for not wanting to write up the history of the game's development. It boils down to product market fit, innovation, and fantasy fulfillment/fun.
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 wish these companies didn't need to make billions in revenue. There's no reason why a small company couldn't manage a site like Discord, make enough to pay their developers, and be successful. But instead every company needs to become a unicorn and pay investors billions.
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.
> There are also other features like Super Heart animated reactions for Stories, custom app icons, customizable fonts for profile bios, and access to additional pins for your profile.
Ahh, remember the days of livejournal/myspace, where we got all of those “features” for free because your profile is literally a fucking webpage
Interesting. Instagram and Facebook both seem to be filled with AI-generated fake crap today. Even the so-called news items that I see there seem to be fake. I don't even know who would be subscribing. Especially to Facebook as of today....
It is filled with pretty low quality content overall. On the other side, WhatsApp has been getting filled with a lot of bloat. And even today, I find it confusing to use communities in WhatsApp. The entire navigation and experience around that feature confused me a few times. There's been more and more push towards the AI crap on WhatsApp as well.
The only good thing about WhatsApp is, it is used by everyone that I know, so I can connect with them pretty easily and make calls, etc. I hope they don't enshittify it too much to the point where I'll go and use Signal full time.
> 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.)
And also, pretty much any internet-generated social media content, basically. Reddit is another classic example. If you look at many posts in subreddits containing a huge number of users, you could easily tell it is AI-generated, especially these idiotic "Am I the asshole" posts or "askreddit" posts and any other posts involving interesting situations.
Not just that. Even comments, some of those are basically AI crap, cleverly disguised as real users. It is such a waste, honestly. AI has brought upon us a low-quality world to live in, out of nowhere. This is such a pity.
Shorts are a dumpster fire in terms of fake content. Full length videos are a lot better, as YT has been cracking down on AI generated regular videos, though there are still a fair number of AI narrated/scripted videos and deepfakes of prolific interviewees.
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.
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.
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?
The vast majority of people aren't aware of open versus closed protocols. If enough people they want to communicate with are using it to counterbalance how frustrating it is, they'll use it. It happened because businesses realized there's profit in lock in, and they threw resources at it.
Open protocols are still there and still used, but we're sad because the smaller userbase is frustrating. Just like how people still publish human written content to personal blogs, but they're proportionally non-existent.
Yeah, there are precisely two apps that can exchange with Whatsapp: one is still in beta, the other is by invite only, and for "professional networking" or something like that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746476
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
Honestly don't know how Meta keeps customers. Facebook is hanging on for dear life with geriatrics and marketplace. Insta is a cesspool of fake content that needs to die in a dumpster fire. Not sure why you'd use WhatsApp over alternatives like Signal now.
It's almost like the people still using Meta services are metaphorical bots or low agency human beings.
How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers.
By having material subscription revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.
Yes, in many ways Meta gets to have their cake and eat it too, because the ads are still there even with the plans, but this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay that they can invest in other ways outside of strictly advertising.
it being against what your payment contract states just means they’ll reinvent and rename the tiers.
Streaming services claiming prior art here.
I won’t give away the plot, but it’s so realistically absurd it’s sad, hilarious and terrifying all at once.
This was always a naive saying. The reality had always been "if the product is offered by an advertising company, you are the product" or maybe even "if the product was funded by VC, you are the product"
When you are the product, subscriptions are a feature being sold to the the advertisers. They make you more valuable. It signals that you have money and that you spend it on frivolous, money-burning luxuries. While the economy collapses around us, it's increasingly important for advertising agencies to surface consumers who still have money to burn so can sell access to them more efficiently. Adding subscriptions is Meta's way of convincing you to volunteer for more expensive, more lucrative ad placements while earning a token bit of revenue while they're at it.
While you're right that it may give some experience-minded product designers some fresh leverage to say "we should add feature X so that we have more high-value users to sell", it does not change that you are the product at the end of the day and that selling access to you and your data is still the highest priority objective.
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.
If someone is prepared to not be my friend because they only want to communicate via a Meta app, then I don’t see why I’d want them as a friend.
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?
In many countries, either WhatsApp or a PSTN number for receiving an SMS is used today for the things that you think are done with email. I have lived in two countries that have highly digitized government services, and they were provided over an official app where email wasn’t part of the signup flow.
Sure, maybe some people use email at work (but WhatsApp has eaten into even that in some regions), but then that address is so associated with work that they don’t use it for social contacts.
That definitely sounds harsher than intended. It's a meditation really. Nobody needs FB and Instagram. (please read as a meditation)
You mention “FB and Instagram”, and I haven’t used either in a decade myself. But the OP did mention “Meta products” and you are ignoring the elephant in the room: WhatsApp. In many countries it has completely replaced the PSTN: you cannot contact a business (they won’t answer normal calls and may not post email addresses), cannot get the necessary info on how to check into the reception-less accommodation one booked, and one will find it hard to maintain contact with people one may well wish to maintain contact with.
And I hate it. I had deactivated all my Meta accounts but reactivated WhatsApp because of school stuff.
Unless you're talking about parent groups. Because then you're fucked. Every parent group everywhere uses Facebook or Whatsapp and don't care that not everybody uses it. You will be excluded.
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 delete a FB acct? It reactivates. Fun! Almost like the company is built off fraud
I realize Meta's data shows that our user revealed preferences tells them that we like all the dopamine hijacking garbage but that's like saying "Well users like drugs, so we gave them more". Let me pay you to give me just the vitamins, and none of the sugar.
Yeah you'd do it to prove a point. 6 months later, no way in hell.
Youtube legitimately has some quality content. But I ended my subscription because fundamentally, streamlining the path to more Youtube usage is self-enabling devil’s work.
Point being: Im not convinced paying money to these companies is ultimately going to result in a healthier, more safe more private experience, no matter what they claim.
Meanwhile, FB has all my network that I can't recreate or self-host so yes, I would pay that.
Facebook is designed more as a shared scrapbook, with the assumption that data is precious and you want to share it with your community, and you should err on the side of oversharing so you don't lose any precious moments. Signal is in no way a replacement for Facebook.
That's... Just not true
> Facebook is designed more as a shared scrapbook
Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years? Its nothing like this at all.
I use it all the time. Yesterday I was talking to a friend, and we were reminiscing about visiting another friend's house, and we looked up some old birthday party invitations to help us remember when we had been there.
It an outlay of $50 a moth. Probably better to pay 50/number of friends though.
No custom emojis, no self-chat, embeds are inconsistent (e.g. encrypted rooms), multi-image uploads aren't a thing in many clients, adding text when sending an attachment isn't a thing, just to name things we've run into over the years. Most of these have been brought up to the devs many years ago, only to spend forever in spec hell and never actually make it into a release.
We're just tolerating these, because we explicitly moved off discord to have control over our data, but being tech savvy we can handle this. It's nowhere near good enough that I could use it with less savvy people.
I think that is the Feed's tab, though I have not used the blue app in a long time
I’ve been considering it but I am not sure if it drops just ads or suggested posts as well.
That they went past that to just kill their own golden goose is what is now reversible via a payment plan. That might be their only saving grace on this now managed decline.
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.
Ohhhh but he was young! Be easy on him
(/s)
Meta? Fuck off. We all know they're already doing awful stuff with our data, they've had more bugs last year than all of whatsapps previous history combined, and whatever price they request now is step one for enshittification.
I have a server (for my game) with about 1000 people. Out of the 300 people logged in, 50 of them have custom profiles.
So, it seems like a good idea for Meta.
See for yourself: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
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.
We decided to do the same again.
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.
Ahh, remember the days of livejournal/myspace, where we got all of those “features” for free because your profile is literally a fucking webpage
I blame Bethesda and their horse armor for this.
Thank you - I don't want any of that.
What exactly are "fun" features, anyway? Do they take away from my time?
The only good thing about WhatsApp is, it is used by everyone that I know, so I can connect with them pretty easily and make calls, etc. I hope they don't enshittify it too much to the point where I'll go and use Signal full time.
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.)
Not just that. Even comments, some of those are basically AI crap, cleverly disguised as real users. It is such a waste, honestly. AI has brought upon us a low-quality world to live in, out of nowhere. This is such a pity.
In the current state those subscriptions will just show your friends that you're a huge loser who's willing to pay for custom backgrounds.
Was it spammers that caused this mass migration to ever more closed platforms?
Open protocols are still there and still used, but we're sad because the smaller userbase is frustrating. Just like how people still publish human written content to personal blogs, but they're proportionally non-existent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
It's almost like the people still using Meta services are metaphorical bots or low agency human beings.