Welcome to the Age of Paid Social Media

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.
- In tbe strict sense, probably. In what most people would call social media, probably not.
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.
- I think it’s referring to flights required (and paid) by your job. When a job of mine required me to be in Brussels in two days, I couldn’t tell them that I‘m hitchhiking there for the next month instead.
- 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.
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.
- Also, Facebook groups are now how most extracurriculars are handled in schools, so if you have kids and you want to be involved in their activities you don't have much of an option.
I think the author might be referring to businesses who use social media to reach and connect with customers, however if your customers don't see a value in paying for social media they won't use it and it won't be that necessary for those small and medium businesses.
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.
- 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.
- Yeah there absolutely have been consequences for me not using it. It’s hard to keep in touch with people and I only date weirdos who are cool with my strange lifestyle.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
I mean they’re probably taking about Shitfluencers and the people who’s careers she strictly online outreach based (YouTube)
If that's how you connect with a certain community it's not a serious option to stop using that kind of social media without solving the collective action problem of getting that whole community to switch.
I'm over here on lemmy giving it a go, but it is a real challenge.

I love the idea of paid social media.

Theres so few people who'd pay for it that all the social media companies would, hopefully, collapse and cure us of one of the worst technoplagues of the 21st century.

I'd pay some reasonable subscription, say $1 a month to the maintainer of lemm.ee for the promise to keep my data safe. To Zuck and Elon absolutely not.
- I pay like $2 or $3 a month to lemm.ee dev, its worth it to me.
It would just be corporations paying for it, and paying for ever more direct access to individuals.
Yeah web site cost money and developers need food. So its adds, subs or donations
Theres so few people who’d pay for it that all the social media companies would, hopefully, collapse and cure us of one of the worst technoplagues of the 21st century.
I would not be that sure. As long as they will offer the choice between paying with cash or with data, social media companies will survive.
- Yeah or you pay with your data or you pay with your money and they still steal your data like YouTube premium and etc

Imagine paying a company, who sells your data, to see memes

Fine. But imagining it is as far as I will go.
- Mandatory blood sample to register.
If you read the article, you'll note that paid subscriptions are for ad-free services, which means your data is worthless, which means it won't be sold.
The entire point of these models is to comply with EU rules on data harvesting.
- Lol, it will still be sold. They are still tracking your attention span and clicks. I can already think of two or three correlation tests to sell to advertisers based on that information alone.

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.
- 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

looks around at Lemmy*

I love y'all.

... but also pay to support your instance. Don't be a leech.

To be fair, you always paid it... just not with money...

Yet another reason not to use that stuff, as if we needed more

Would you be opposed to paying to use Lemmy? Someone's gotta pay them bills. Currently it seems to be donation focused, but that might not scale. So what's it going to be Player2@sopuli.xyz, ads, or a "premium Lemmy subscription"/tax/due/contribution?
- You can set up a Lemmy instance with just a docker file lmao it's not exactly a large scale operation to upkeep.
  If somehow every Lemmy instance went paid only, I'd host my own instance and invite my friends to use it too.
- I worry that donations may not be enough and people say that it's not expensive to run. Regardless, I don't think they're forcing me to identify myself and building profiles on me to sell to the highest bidder. I'll pay Lemmy for that.
  If I pay Facebook and Reddit they'll do both even if they say otherwise because I believe they lack ethics.
- If this was the only path forward I wouldn't even be here. Thankfully it isn't because I can run my own server/community and just connect it to the feddiverse.
- I would argue that there is a fundamental difference to this forum style system consisting mostly of text and links, and a traditional 'social media' that is entirely photography and short form video. Correct me if I'm wrong, but TikTok, Facebook, etc. store all of the multimedia content on their services themselves, right? The costs cannot be comparable.

I refuse to be both.

You want me to dodge ads and try to scrape my data from your service in order to use it? Fine.

Want me to pay for the service? Maybe…

I will not support double dipping while pushing ads in my face. Fuck right off.

I remember when cable tv first started the big promise was that since you were paying for it the cable channels would be ad free. Well that lasted about a week.
- Yeah, strong feelings of deja vue.
- If that was the case I might actually pay for cable TV.
This would be for an ad free version.
But they'd still farm our data so no thanks.

As in "they pay me to use their garbage?"

If else: "No."

Know what? "Still no." I already don't use it for free, they're gonna have to pay me substantially before I use it.

Agreed! Join me in the real world, it's free.

If they didn’t farm data and charged for it right in the beginning, maybe it would have lasted longer before turning to shit. But demanding payment while farming data is just insane.

Not to mention that they chose the absolute worst time to do this. They are just absolutely despised right now. They are either in the midst of scandal or scandal is just in their rearview. Why would anyone pay for this right now?

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.
No business that has investors has any right to claim any of this is about operating expenses.
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.

Not exactly. It's the age of stockholders, and doing what's best for them is the law. They expect unlimited growth

Airline seats could be fixed if the gov had any backbone but social media isn't some essential service so good luck with it.

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!

Social media has a natural moat because what matters it what users are there. As long as social media sites don't federate with each other, there will be an evolutionary pressure to start exploiting and get progressively worse as your users are locked-in and you can exploit them for the profit of your shareholders.

Paying improves the situation because the users are customers and not eyeballs to sell, but still -- they're there for their friends and follows. If they can't get those same friends and follows on another site, you can screw them as hard as you like.

Maybe this will finally get people to fuck off social media. It's toxic and good for nothing. I wish we had forums back and people would start using them again.
That lack of organization on the user side is really the killer. The best you can hope for is some organic movement like the abandonment of myspace.

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 🎧🎶
I only get fake prank videos on Facebook. Like the most ridiculous situations. I have no idea why. Whenever I need to go to FB for a legit reason, I just need to close it ASAP before I get the next fake prank video.
They have no idea what my interests are, which is great.

Enshittification

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Enshittification
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I look at FB less and less. I mostly use messenger to talk to people directly. Most of the feed is ads and the rest is pet photos, kids, pics of drinks/meals, memes, etc. Youtube has become an endless stream of auto insurance and grammarly ads.