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.
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.
"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." (Meta sells access not data)
Google has been doing this for a while with YouTube
The data collection and surveillance will of course be used to support online advertising services. The ads can be delivered outside YouTube by other Alphabet business units or partners
There seems to be a myth that paying so-called "tech" companies solves the problem of data collection, surveillance and online advertising. As if for every subscriber the company will voluntarily collect less data, perform less surveillance and sell less ad services, leaving that money on the table
The truth is that these subscribers, by paying the companies that perform data collection, surveillance and advertising services, are actually subsidising the practice
If it's a tech company it's not "if it's free you're the product" it's just "you're the product" nowadays. I am so happy kids these days no longer trust tech because I'd hate to see how exploited they'd be otherwise.
People who spew I'd rather pay, I'd rather pay often majorly underestimate how expensive Google and Facebook would have to be in the western world to offset the ad revenue per person. The irony is this is especially true for you if money is no object to you, as you'd be disproportionately valuable to the ad machine. It's not going to be ten bucks folks.
> You paying just signals that you're someone to push more ads to and to harvest more data on
No, qqtt is correct that if you're paying, you get a vote. It may not be all that much of a vote, but it's more than you'd have if you weren't paying, and Meta will pay attention to it.
For a recent example of how this works, consider that with the post-October-7th wave of pro-Palestinian activism on US college campuses, a lot of rich Jews moved to squelch it as best they could -- not by offering new donations conditional on universities adopting their favored political positions, but by threatening to suspend their existing, habitual, "unconditional" donations.
> 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.
You’re a Meta decision maker presented with 3 options. Which one do you pick? (remember, you’re not you…you’re a Meta decision maker trying to justify a trillion dollar valuation).
- Possible additional ad revenues
- Possible additional subscription revenues
- Possible additional ad and subscription revenues
Insufficient information. Each option will address a different part of the market with a different size. Unless the potential revenue is estimated for each option, an informed decision is not possible.
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.
From what I can tell, that's already the case for these subscriptions. They give you some extra stuff but you're still getting ads, and they are still collecting your data
It seems like there's no solution, then: companies will always chase the next dollar that allows them to exceed growth expectations on the earnings call. It seems like no matter what, anti-user behavior in pursuit of profit is inevitable.
This is just a copy of the YouTube model, to your point. It's not that you're going to get a premier experience. It's that you'll be spared from full enshittification. Only tech bros could possibly think making the default subscription level so bad that it would drive revenue. But here we are.
These products already do what basically everyone wants them to do.
The problem is now people are conditioned to having their privacy violated so they are still the product and they will pay to be the product.
The network effects with a product like WhatsApp are strong so that this opens the door to dark patterns for the non paying customers. After enough time the same level of effort will go into the now subscription app that went into it when it was free.
Their offer for subscribers are nothing but beads and sequins. A genuine offer [the kind i could accept] should contemplate an ad, bot and algo-free experience.
> The thing that determines whether you’re the product isn’t whether you’re paying for the product: it’s whether market power and regulatory forbearance allow the company to get away with selling you.
Or more simply:
> Companies don’t make you the product because you don’t pay — they make you the product because you can’t stop them.
As far as feature development goes, Meta isn't looking under the couch cushions for change. If they want to invest in a feature, they will.
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.
Does Youtube Premium track and build profiles and use and sell them? I assume so because Google, but does Premium remove advertising (in the broad sense of the business model and profiling) or remove just ads? YT in general seems "kinder" than others at a few things, like you can remove history and activity and even get a blank homescreen.
Aside: I think it's funny how with an NYT subscription, you still get not only ads, but frequent article-covering ads for NYT subscriptions (asking to upgrade to a family account).
Someone willing and able to pay for something as frivolous as Instagram or Snapchat makes them priceless to an advertiser. They want to make it easier to identify those people.
But yeah, when Snapchat rolled out their subscription program, I was all set to buy it to get rid of the annoying ads and AI in my chat list, then I realized I could do none of that. So now I just use it a lot less, which is probably better for them anyway.
I paid for YouTube Premium until they started showing me ads for YouTube TV (and maybe YouTube Red at the time?). Cancelled and got into DNS adblocking.
None of the packages mention anything about removing ads do they? They're some silly premium features like custom stickers and themes. I don't see anything about removing ads.
Sisters, a 8B local model that hallucinates is better than that 50bn in sweaty VR shit they made. It is what it is, slap a monthly fee on the 3B model and move on, I suppose.
> this is probably a positive thing for Meta products
If it was a subscription that eliminated all ads AND enshittification anti-patterns, like not putting every single notification, 'share my...' and 'show me...' option on separate toggles helpfully sub-divided into a dozen or more separate pages - I would be all in.
Seriously, what if Meta just said, in effect, "give us $XX a year" and you will be a "VIP Account" that's invisible to all our analytics systems, data collection, aggregation and profiling. The only metric where you will even be visible to our reporting systems is "VIP Account Revenue" as your payments hit our account. We will not care (or even know) if your usage is literally zero minutes a year.
I'm sure all the reasons you're thinking of for why Meta would never do this are probably correct. Those same reasons are why the reasonable-sounding thought "this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay" is moot. I believe there is no subscription amount Meta would accept to genuinely shift their entire way of thinking about even a small subset of users. Therefore, this much smaller subscription won't actually change anything that matters. This is just the diary farm trying to collect extra money by renting plastic stall decorations to the cows their business owns and milks. By definition these features will be trivial and purely cosmetic because anything that actually changes user behavior, would impact the real business and will be decided based on that.
I used to think like that, but then I realized that
> if you are paying for the product, nothing guarantees that you are not the product anyway
Companies like money and they will have no qualms against double dipping. Even if you refuse to be their customer (and thus they lose the revenue coming from you) as long as the majority of their customers are ok with being a product, they will keep doing it.
The only way for this model to work, is for governments to put high pressure on tech giants to put the breaks on the whole surveillance & data selling business. Otherwise they will take your money and sell your data at the same time.
I wonder if fully forbidding personalised ads will actually make gdp of developed nations to shrink.
That’d be more relatable if they weren’t actively trying to remove encryption from their messaging to spy and serve even more ads at the same time they’re trying to charge a fee for the pleasure of giving them your data to sell.
You're right it's a good thing, but I think they're maybe 10 years too late. The issue is that their product is hateful, non-functional, and my feelings toward the brand are probably more negative than any other brand I can think of. So why would I give them money? It's a tough sell.
I don't think anyone ever paid the whatsapp subscription fee. I remember they announced it, nobody accepted paying it and the app kept functionning and they dropped the idea.
The only truth here is that meta is preparing for the AI bot apocalypse. When everything turns into AI noise, people will move on. Segmenting real (paying) users and bots is a strategy to sustain their business model, not welfare.
I have serious doubts that Meta is aiming to improve these products. Every time I open Instagram - ironically of course - it just seems like more and more AI slop.
> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product"
This is old school. Now we know for a fact from the "enshittification" concept that you are always the product. If they can keep abusing you AND make you pay on top of that, it's better than abusing you without making you pay.
There are no good monopolies, the solution really is to fight them.
Whatsapp metadata is one of the strongest signals about you. Your friends and family and your patterns of texting tells quite a bit information about you.
> 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.
Maybe. Or maybe this is the final stop on the route to enshittification: bill both the advertisers and the users.
That's ignoring that WhatsApp has been free for a long time and was end to end encrypted. Then a multi billion dollar corporation bought it and has slowly whittled away at it.
C'mon, it's the oldest trick in MBA book: make a much-used service paid, make the free version of it terrible and you force people to get the paid service.
You seem to be attacking a different statement that no one says: "if the product isn't free, you aren't the product". There's no "if and only if" in the maxim.
Pretty sure you agree that if the product is free, the company is definitely getting value by monetizing something else of yours. It very much is true as written.
> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product"
As of late, not many times. Because it’s become clear that for the big players you’re the product even if you pay. See for example Netflix or Hulu, where you pay a subscription and are advertised to.
Except their "impersonation protection" subscription sounds more like a racket than a product. Basically, pay us or we'll spoil your brand. Now, they want to charge point addicts for getting access to very basic and limited stats about their 2 seconds videos.
Meta’s reputation has eroded so much that many will view this as an act of desperation rather than a chance to reframe social media. The idea of paying for social media to become the customer rather than the product has been both discussed and tried. There is such a deep lack of trust from years of bad deeds that I doubt anything positive will come out of this.
Not just that, but there's no mention of removing ads or tracking. So it sounds like people get to pay for the privilege of being the product on a platform which has degraded to the point of being absolutely useless.
I can't imagine the economics would work to support anything close to what they make from the ads & tracking model. They'd probably have to charge $39.99/month from everyone to compete.
It's very difficult to do business in Western Europe without Whatsapp. I have probably asked more than 60 people to switch to Signal and the social burden it introduces (i.e. asking a new acquaintance to install a new app) can have negative signalling effects (e.g. you don't adapt, create more work, why do you care so much about privacy, etc.)
I personally abhore Facebook (and IG,Whatsapp) and don't want to use any of them; I have uninstalled/reinstalled Whatsapp many times. Out of practical concern, I now only use Whatsapp in business settings where it would create tension and create social awkwardness not to. But I dislike the fact that I do.
Yep, same in South Africa. I still haven't accepted those T's & C's from a few years ago so can't chat with most businesses. In some cases there is no other option, so I just... don't use that company.
On the other hand, I've convinced a lot of my friends to get Signal. I'm the only person that they speak to on Signal, but that's fine ;)
All my close family now use Signal after me and a sibling pushed for this. That's 30+ persons. The network is growing too, since all children and new partners join in 1:1 and groups.
We like having two apps: WA for friends, Signal for family. There are only few reasons to mix the two.
All my close family now use Signal after me and a sibling pushed for this. That's 30+ persons. The network is growing too, since all children and new partners join in 1:1 and groups.
We work on helping people move to Signal from WhatsApp. It'll be easier once they have a Communities feature, as WhatsApp is very far ahead there.
The main advice we got is that although you need to migrate individuals, the main focus should be on migrating channels. If you have a family group chat, that's the target. Tell people about how Meta spies on them, etc, and then support everyone in the channel to individually set up Signal if necessary.
In my experience: Only for drug dealers, cheaters, people doing sex stuff secretly for whatever reason (e.g. not being out of the closet), "underground/alternative vibe" communication channels (e.g. raves, hackers) and russophiles...
I would be willing to pay for IG subscription that's ad-free. It's gotten hilariously terrible right now that every 3-4 stories has a 2-page ad with a button on it. It's gotten so bad to the point where I stopped checking stories.
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
You can ditch all that and talk to your friends (text them or call them or visit them) for almost free, actually. You can keep up with people without a middleman.
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.
$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.
I believe you can get close to that with various Instagram mods for Android. They have advanced features like only show posts from followers and stuff like that. I switched to one of them after realizing the 5 second ad breaks I got were only there because I disabled personalized advertising.
That was the premise of halloapp.
I think it was $5 a month and encrypted like WhatsApp, and you had a feed only from your contacts.
It was founded by a guy who worked for WhatsApp for a long time. Apparently it went under in 2024.
I think messaging is just a commoditized service. People will not pay for it
I basically don't use Facebook any more because of this. Opening the app shows me the most sensationalist, fearmongering and outrage bait content they can find. It's worse than news channels (I haven't watched TV for 20 years). I have auto play turned off, and every few months the setting gets turned back on.
The first few posts I see scrolling through:
- US adds mandatory tips ahead of world cup.
- Woman dies after being hit by Audi in city center.
- There was a huge queue for women's toilets at a tech conference.
- 50% off mattresses.
- Some influencer I don't follow bought 20 rolls of 3M tape from Lidl.
Do I still have friends, do they still post stuff? I only see them in the reels/stories section at the top.
The only reason why I still have Facebook is because of groups. It's the main 'groups' tool people use in my country, so there are various local groups I am part of.
I've seen too many of those privacy-respecting alternative social networks. Problem is that you'll post things only for yourself, which may be cool if you don't care about actually having friends there.
There is not a single subscription in the world I would pay more than $20/month for personal purposes, unlimited (and I do mean unlimited) LLM tokens very much included.
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
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.
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.
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.
1/ meta products trigger organic conversations. People post on Instagram and Facebook that they’re traveling and I will reach out to them if I’m close by. People don’t use Signal that way.
2/ the Facebook groups are very useful for local communities. As a traveler, I reach out to Expat groups for feedback.
Right. If being on meta is what keeps the "friendship" going and leaving the platform would have negative effect on the relationship, then on my opinion it wasn't a friendship to begin with. But that might just be my outdated view of how humans work.
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.
I maintain Meta accounts for two purposes. Facebook Marketplace, and following local businesses on Instagram because it's become the de facto platform for many artists/bars/restaurants/popups to distribute information. I don't add friends, I don't "like" posts, and I don't doomscroll the garbage they put in my feed.
I'm willing to give Meta the information that I enjoy old cars, bar trivia, and breakfast sandwich pop-ups.
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.
Haha I love the super out of touch takes on here sometimes. Not using WhatsApp or Facebook where I live absolutely introduces major difficulty to communication and even every day interactions where almost 100% of communication in various social groups is happening on these platforms. Should I ask them to move?
I'm in Europe, with a bunch of non-geeky friends, coming from all walks of life who have Signal installed.
As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.
I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.
WhatsApp as the only contact point is a pretty strong signal that the user is from a developing world country. I'm not from that part of the world, so I don't use WhatsApp.
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...?
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.
I don't think it would be difficult to explain, especially in a professional capacity, that you don't use Whatsapp or Facebook because it does not meet your privacy requirements of your business.
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.
> 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.
All it would take is WhatsApp going paid plans only. All of Europe will switch to Telegram as primary messaging platform in a couple of days.
Hence a paid only WhatsApp will never happen until every plausible alternative will be made impossible either by acquisition or by law.
Ha, I fell for that the first time, not getting me twice. That was my wake up call for how insular the HN bubble is and how utterly convinced people here are that they represent or understand normies.
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 am a happy Instagram user. As a Ukrainian, this is the only connection left with lots of my friends now as we are scattered around the world. And I would happily pay $2.99/m for Instagram to have those better features.
Problem is, facebook WILL raise the prices on these subscriptions every few months until they could not anymore. So I will have to pay probably like $12.99/m in a couple of years.
Nice little detail - WhatsApp was a $1/year subscription before they sold to Zuckerberg ... with the exact subscription cost now conspicuously missing from the app's Wikipedia page.
Except it wasn’t for all users. IIRC it either didn’t show for all, or it was the WinRAR equivalent of you being able to say “maybe later” and it left you alone for a long while.
> The new "Plus" plans are tailored to each individual app, with Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus focused more on social expression, while WhatsApp Plus focuses on personalization and messaging.
If only Google Plus lived long enough to see this day...
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
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 $1 per user, any subscription that’s a few dollars or more is probably paying for the lost advertising revenue, but it wouldn’t translate for Meta so they aren’t including ad free which drastically reduces the value.
I’ll be surprised if Meta’s subscriptions are as popular as Discord’s without being advertising free. Cosmetics are liked amongst Discord’s audience of nerds, but not Meta’s audience of normal people.
Very interested to see how this works out for Meta. Since they’re not excluding ads, it’s basically free money, so they may as well offer these subscriptions.
I wish these companies didn't need to make billions in revenue. There's no reason why a small company couldn't manage a site like Discord, make enough to pay their developers, and be successful. But instead every company needs to become a unicorn and pay investors billions.
> The users who pay are the most valuable users to advertisers and the users who don’t pay are the least valuable.
But also, definitionally, the users who are willing to pay the most are the ones who the see ads as the biggest anti-value (i.e. cost) to themselves - so they'll be the ones most likely to not use the service if they're not given an ad-free option - cutting down the average user value anyway.
A new paid social media network with high privacy settings would defeat meta products quite easily. From what I understand, it costs around 27$ a year per user for Meta to run the business. At 5$ per month with limitations on size of your profile (like number of pictures), it would be quite easy to run a social media of this sort. This kinda of social media is what eventually everyone will move towards (and currently want). Small social circles, extremely private, and connections and discovery in very limited ways that allow you to maintain privacy and your 'inner' circle.
Social media is here to stay, unfortunately. Meta, LinkedIn, X, I wouldn't invest in the long term.
No data collection for any other reason than security practices, and for reasons that pertain to public security (not necessarily legal). A 30 day retention policy would be more than enough. Without discovery, public profiles, advertising and usages targeted towards you engaging more with the platform, the data collection and telemetry becomes quite unnecessary.
If you are paying for the usage (mostly server and development costs), your data need not be used for anything other than actually improving the product and security.
Currently the data is purely to extract profits and keep you hooked. This is what they have made you believe social media is about. Its not. You aren't hooked on iMessage and FaceTime scrolling reels and wasting hours. It's actually used to connect with people.
I think this is all theatrics to avoid EU regulation. Subscriptions for Meta products have already been a thing in the EU for several months.
It went a bit like this:
- EU mandates that users should be given the option to opt out from non-essential cookies.
- Meta responds by implementing an ad-free subscription-based model in EU, which allows them to dodge regulation.
- EU of course sees through their scheme and prepares to sanction them.
- Meta rolls-out subscriptions worldwide, so that it becomes harder for EU to claim that subscriptions were specifically created for dodging EU regulation.
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.
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.
WhatsApp feels like one of the few products where people might actually pay. It's become critical infrastructure for communication in many countries, not just another social app.
I don't mean irreplaceable. I mean it's become the default communication layer for a huge number of people, which gives it a level of importance beyond a typical social app.Sure, people would move. But the value isn't WhatsApp itself it's the fact that everyone you need to talk to is already there. That's what makes it hard to replace overnight.
I was paying for the ads-free subscripton for instagram and I recently I canceled as a way to reduce social media usage. And the ad version of Instagram is so annoying that it is helping a lot more.
If this new sub becomes a status signaling, it might work.
The article mentions that this is a subscription for additional features. It doesn't say anywhere that you won't get ads. I think the ads-free subscription option is only available in certain markets, like the UK.
Facebook is so doomed. I recently logged in (after close to 10 years), and whooah the feed was wild.
90% was these weird pages having very sexual teasing shorts, or bikini girls / latex pants etc. None of the pages were something is had ever seen before, or even followed.
The rest 9% was AI gen low qulity shorts, and the remaining 1% was actually from someone i did was friends with, but even thise seemes like some tool had generated them, as in "follow my new business page" etc.
The facebook that once was seem to be totally gone by now, and im not even sure what it is anymore.
I never got an instgram account, but i guess its the same low quality shit over there.
I cant see many paying for whatsapp or facebook/instagram. These are now taken for granted as being "free". Im pretty sure users would just migrate to signal/telegram/other if it ever became a paid service.
Tell ya what. Give me an absolute guarantee - legally-enforced - that you'll never share any of my data ever again (unless subpoenaed or warranted) and will stop using my news feed as an ad feed, and I might consider it.
Fire Mark Zuckerberg into the stratosphere and I'll will you my worldly possessions.
I do not need any of the three, so i will not pay.
True, a lot of other people i know, including family and corpo, use Whatsapp. I will not pay to stay in contact with them. They can go back to sms or email if they want to. Or pay for me.
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.
was never end to end, was you to server and then server to other party. Meaning Zuky boi always had access to your messages in clear (and NSA + all other 3 letters agencies)
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.
No, the suggestion "only" works for those of your friends who truly value you. If they want to connect with you, they'll find a way. If they don't, they won't.
> 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
So now you can pay $3.99/mo for the privilege of custom profile fonts and animated reactions while still getting served ads between Reels. Truly the premium doomscrolling experience.
This seems smart of them in the sense that many creator/website owners have lost significant traffic that Google used to send their way and so are reluctantly pivoting back to paying more attention to social - for discovery.
But speaking as someone who deleted a high following FB page that I probably shouldn't have because the back end of it was so infuriating, I don't understand this offering. It seems like a lot of bling and clutter. Most people who need to use Meta for biz reasons want the same thing - live support that is not a bot or a human that may as well be a bot.
And not to get too granular but if you've used IG lately, for example, you notice that trying to do anything on the back end (eg: set up up some boosted posts or schedule things) takes the user through a maze and sometimes you end up in the old legacy Facebook pages, which has links that don't relate to any of the contemporary features. It sounds minor but it essentially barely functions and each click to confirm something sends you to another section to confirm something else. You also need a FB page to do anything on an IG page and a tonne of other petty thwartings. The fact that their brand new subscriptions/Meta platform seems just as confusing is alarming. I don't know how a company with this much money can not design an un-hellish back end or offer reasonable customer support.
Their A.I. monitoring is also completely off the chain, closing accounts and locking profiles for opaque reasons that cannot be questioned.
I feel like I can explain this away with what I imagine happened in most middle managers driven development companies:
the most factorio-esque spaghetti decision driven sunk cost fallacy thing ever.
I use WhatsApp for almost all my communication with family and friends. I'm also happy to pay for things that improve my experience.
...but it's unclear what this subscription would give me. The announcement has no real details, the article is light on detail, and the WhatsApp website has no mention of this subscription.
I get that it's hard. What I want is a good text and call app, and that's hard to charge for at scale. But every feature that Meta has added to justify charging (AI, stories, profiles, etc), makes the product worse for me and makes me less likely to pay for it.
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.
You probably couldn't even sell an Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp bundle for ~$25 per month.
This sort of looks like a subscription for influencers, organisation and "power users". Even if you turned off the ads, most of people feed, from what I've seen are basically ads they signed up for, e.g. posts from companies, so I doubt that most even care.
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.
The last numbers I saw are almost 10 years old now, and then it was $65 per year in profit for a Facebook user, in the US, a little less for someone in the EU and almost nothing in most other places.
Are there new numbers that one can access? I can imagine the value has gone up, but hundreds of dollars seem like a lot.
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
A lot of posters here are missing the part where people use Meta products to market their art, performance artists, visual artists, musician, digital entertainment artists, craftsmen, etc all rely on the network effect to be discovered. Until you can replace that then people wont just use email, txt their audience, etc.
And just to say it is actually sad there is no alternative because most of those artists dont really gain a valuable network effect from posting there. But it is how younger unestablished peoples establish themselves as existing. There are entire comedy/music scenes that essentially require you to have an Instagram account.
Interesting. There are no ads for messaging. I only use WhatsApp for messages (individual and groups). I've never used status updates or any other nonsense (I don't even understand why one would want to do status updates, but some people seem to use them).
All of this to say: ads are only in status updates and channels (no idea what this is, never used one) and apparently not in every region.
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.
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.
I cannot imagine that students, kids, or half the world where paying 3 usd a month is impossible, will keep using whatsapp when they have to pay a fee. They will look for alternatives immediately. Telegram?
But actually this is a good move. I tried to convince my family and friends to use alternatives, without success. But now I see hope.
Have stopped using FB and IG years ago, was stuck with WhatsApp because of half the world using it.
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.
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.
Yes, you could use Signal, but my take is that people don't want yet another account for something. Facebook works and it has all the other activities people need to keep track of. For most you wouldn't be replacing Facebook or WhatsApp with Signal, you'd add Signal to an already busy phone.
People don't care about the platform, they just want shit to work and for better or worse, Facebook works for them.
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.
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.
"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." (Meta sells access not data)
Google has been doing this for a while with YouTube
The data collection and surveillance will of course be used to support online advertising services. The ads can be delivered outside YouTube by other Alphabet business units or partners
There seems to be a myth that paying so-called "tech" companies solves the problem of data collection, surveillance and online advertising. As if for every subscriber the company will voluntarily collect less data, perform less surveillance and sell less ad services, leaving that money on the table
The truth is that these subscribers, by paying the companies that perform data collection, surveillance and advertising services, are actually subsidising the practice
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Isn't that the whole point of social media like Instagram? To convince the world you have disposable income and are living a lavish lifestyle?
Personally I like signaling that I have money. Why would you want people to think you're poor or cheap, except maybe when you're shopping for a car.
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If I'm paying and still getting unwanted ads...then I am no longer going to be paying.
I'm not sure what win Meta sees here.
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If it's a tech company it's not "if it's free you're the product" it's just "you're the product" nowadays. I am so happy kids these days no longer trust tech because I'd hate to see how exploited they'd be otherwise.
People who spew I'd rather pay, I'd rather pay often majorly underestimate how expensive Google and Facebook would have to be in the western world to offset the ad revenue per person. The irony is this is especially true for you if money is no object to you, as you'd be disproportionately valuable to the ad machine. It's not going to be ten bucks folks.
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> You paying just signals that you're someone to push more ads to and to harvest more data on
No, qqtt is correct that if you're paying, you get a vote. It may not be all that much of a vote, but it's more than you'd have if you weren't paying, and Meta will pay attention to it.
For a recent example of how this works, consider that with the post-October-7th wave of pro-Palestinian activism on US college campuses, a lot of rich Jews moved to squelch it as best they could -- not by offering new donations conditional on universities adopting their favored political positions, but by threatening to suspend their existing, habitual, "unconditional" donations.
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> 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.
You’re a Meta decision maker presented with 3 options. Which one do you pick? (remember, you’re not you…you’re a Meta decision maker trying to justify a trillion dollar valuation).
- Possible additional ad revenues
- Possible additional subscription revenues
- Possible additional ad and subscription revenues
to put a finer point on this: I pay for certain newspapers (well, digital subscriptions).
Still plenty of ads in the articles!
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Insufficient information. Each option will address a different part of the market with a different size. Unless the potential revenue is estimated for each option, an informed decision is not possible.
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.
> they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads
Streaming services claiming prior art here.
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Pray they don’t change the terms a second time.
From what I can tell, that's already the case for these subscriptions. They give you some extra stuff but you're still getting ads, and they are still collecting your data
If you don't pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you'd pay for the product.
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Yeah this is the worst, never pay for something that has ads. It's teaching these companies it's ok.
It seems like there's no solution, then: companies will always chase the next dollar that allows them to exceed growth expectations on the earnings call. It seems like no matter what, anti-user behavior in pursuit of profit is inevitable.
Is there a solution to this?
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This is just a copy of the YouTube model, to your point. It's not that you're going to get a premier experience. It's that you'll be spared from full enshittification. Only tech bros could possibly think making the default subscription level so bad that it would drive revenue. But here we are.
These products already do what basically everyone wants them to do.
The problem is now people are conditioned to having their privacy violated so they are still the product and they will pay to be the product.
The network effects with a product like WhatsApp are strong so that this opens the door to dark patterns for the non paying customers. After enough time the same level of effort will go into the now subscription app that went into it when it was free.
YouTube is a good example of this phenomenon.
The YouTube app on Android is terrible, even with the premium. Autoplay has been notoriously broken for years
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Their offer for subscribers are nothing but beads and sequins. A genuine offer [the kind i could accept] should contemplate an ad, bot and algo-free experience.
As Cory Doctorow is fond of saying
> The thing that determines whether you’re the product isn’t whether you’re paying for the product: it’s whether market power and regulatory forbearance allow the company to get away with selling you.
Or more simply:
> Companies don’t make you the product because you don’t pay — they make you the product because you can’t stop them.
As far as feature development goes, Meta isn't looking under the couch cushions for change. If they want to invest in a feature, they will.
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.
Does Youtube Premium track and build profiles and use and sell them? I assume so because Google, but does Premium remove advertising (in the broad sense of the business model and profiling) or remove just ads? YT in general seems "kinder" than others at a few things, like you can remove history and activity and even get a blank homescreen.
Aside: I think it's funny how with an NYT subscription, you still get not only ads, but frequent article-covering ads for NYT subscriptions (asking to upgrade to a family account).
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Someone willing and able to pay for something as frivolous as Instagram or Snapchat makes them priceless to an advertiser. They want to make it easier to identify those people.
But yeah, when Snapchat rolled out their subscription program, I was all set to buy it to get rid of the annoying ads and AI in my chat list, then I realized I could do none of that. So now I just use it a lot less, which is probably better for them anyway.
Those plans exist in Europe. Not sure if they're available elsewhere or how popular they are there
I paid for YouTube Premium until they started showing me ads for YouTube TV (and maybe YouTube Red at the time?). Cancelled and got into DNS adblocking.
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Are there ads on whatsapp? I've never seen one.
>> product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.
Like no ads? that's usually the #1 you pay for and no mention of that.
Do their subscriptions give people an ad free experience? Does it give them extra privacy?
To me it sounds like they no longer are making enough money, so now they are asking people to pay to be the product
None of the packages mention anything about removing ads do they? They're some silly premium features like custom stickers and themes. I don't see anything about removing ads.
> "if the product is free, you are the product"
I feel like this is no longer true. You are now the product regardless of you paying for it or not.
This is Meta. You will always be the product. This is like asking us to tip them in addition to all the horrible things they're doing either way.
Sisters, a 8B local model that hallucinates is better than that 50bn in sweaty VR shit they made. It is what it is, slap a monthly fee on the 3B model and move on, I suppose.
> this is probably a positive thing for Meta products
If it was a subscription that eliminated all ads AND enshittification anti-patterns, like not putting every single notification, 'share my...' and 'show me...' option on separate toggles helpfully sub-divided into a dozen or more separate pages - I would be all in.
Seriously, what if Meta just said, in effect, "give us $XX a year" and you will be a "VIP Account" that's invisible to all our analytics systems, data collection, aggregation and profiling. The only metric where you will even be visible to our reporting systems is "VIP Account Revenue" as your payments hit our account. We will not care (or even know) if your usage is literally zero minutes a year.
I'm sure all the reasons you're thinking of for why Meta would never do this are probably correct. Those same reasons are why the reasonable-sounding thought "this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay" is moot. I believe there is no subscription amount Meta would accept to genuinely shift their entire way of thinking about even a small subset of users. Therefore, this much smaller subscription won't actually change anything that matters. This is just the diary farm trying to collect extra money by renting plastic stall decorations to the cows their business owns and milks. By definition these features will be trivial and purely cosmetic because anything that actually changes user behavior, would impact the real business and will be decided based on that.
> if the product is free, you are the product
I used to think like that, but then I realized that
> if you are paying for the product, nothing guarantees that you are not the product anyway
Companies like money and they will have no qualms against double dipping. Even if you refuse to be their customer (and thus they lose the revenue coming from you) as long as the majority of their customers are ok with being a product, they will keep doing it.
So, pay them to keep doing what they already do?
Yes. The difference is now the money is coming from you rather than selling your data. Which is what you want.
Of course, they could still sell your data anyway. That's why it's important to pay attention to their T&C.
The only way for this model to work, is for governments to put high pressure on tech giants to put the breaks on the whole surveillance & data selling business. Otherwise they will take your money and sell your data at the same time.
I wonder if fully forbidding personalised ads will actually make gdp of developed nations to shrink.
Govt won’t do it. They want that data too.
But here you are the product AND you pay for it. At least I think you still get ads and tracking…
That’d be more relatable if they weren’t actively trying to remove encryption from their messaging to spy and serve even more ads at the same time they’re trying to charge a fee for the pleasure of giving them your data to sell.
You're right it's a good thing, but I think they're maybe 10 years too late. The issue is that their product is hateful, non-functional, and my feelings toward the brand are probably more negative than any other brand I can think of. So why would I give them money? It's a tough sell.
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...
I don't think anyone ever paid the whatsapp subscription fee. I remember they announced it, nobody accepted paying it and the app kept functionning and they dropped the idea.
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Whatsapp wasn't owned by Facebook at the time..
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The only truth here is that meta is preparing for the AI bot apocalypse. When everything turns into AI noise, people will move on. Segmenting real (paying) users and bots is a strategy to sustain their business model, not welfare.
I have serious doubts that Meta is aiming to improve these products. Every time I open Instagram - ironically of course - it just seems like more and more AI slop.
> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product"
This is old school. Now we know for a fact from the "enshittification" concept that you are always the product. If they can keep abusing you AND make you pay on top of that, it's better than abusing you without making you pay.
There are no good monopolies, the solution really is to fight them.
>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.
To purchase a subscription, you need to value and trust the service. To trust the service the provider needs to show it can be trusted.
It’s Facebook. Why would anyone trust them?
Are there ads in WhatsApp? I never saw one. Facebook, I remember a lot of ads. Instagram, probably but I don't have an account there.
Whatsapp metadata is one of the strongest signals about you. Your friends and family and your patterns of texting tells quite a bit information about you.
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There are story ads now.
AI is expensive and ad revenue alone won't cover it.
> 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.
Maybe. Or maybe this is the final stop on the route to enshittification: bill both the advertisers and the users.
That's ignoring that WhatsApp has been free for a long time and was end to end encrypted. Then a multi billion dollar corporation bought it and has slowly whittled away at it.
C'mon, it's the oldest trick in MBA book: make a much-used service paid, make the free version of it terrible and you force people to get the paid service.
To me this is more like the arc of
1. Get cable TV there's no ads!
2. Everyone switches to cable
3. Cable now has ads too
Than what you describe but I feel like it's maybe more positive of a change than that. But just slightly.
In the US, cable had ads from day one. Especially considering originally it was just the OTA broadcasts bundled together.
Several of the first cable-only TV channels were ad supported from the start, and several others started including ads within a few years in.
> "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.
You seem to be attacking a different statement that no one says: "if the product isn't free, you aren't the product". There's no "if and only if" in the maxim.
Pretty sure you agree that if the product is free, the company is definitely getting value by monetizing something else of yours. It very much is true as written.
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> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product"
As of late, not many times. Because it’s become clear that for the big players you’re the product even if you pay. See for example Netflix or Hulu, where you pay a subscription and are advertised to.
It's because you'll still be the product even if you pay.
Agreed. Nothing wrong with charging for a product.
You are paying with your data already.
Except their "impersonation protection" subscription sounds more like a racket than a product. Basically, pay us or we'll spoil your brand. Now, they want to charge point addicts for getting access to very basic and limited stats about their 2 seconds videos.
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Meta’s reputation has eroded so much that many will view this as an act of desperation rather than a chance to reframe social media. The idea of paying for social media to become the customer rather than the product has been both discussed and tried. There is such a deep lack of trust from years of bad deeds that I doubt anything positive will come out of this.
Not just that, but there's no mention of removing ads or tracking. So it sounds like people get to pay for the privilege of being the product on a platform which has degraded to the point of being absolutely useless.
I can't imagine the economics would work to support anything close to what they make from the ads & tracking model. They'd probably have to charge $39.99/month from everyone to compete.
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It's very difficult to do business in Western Europe without Whatsapp. I have probably asked more than 60 people to switch to Signal and the social burden it introduces (i.e. asking a new acquaintance to install a new app) can have negative signalling effects (e.g. you don't adapt, create more work, why do you care so much about privacy, etc.)
I personally abhore Facebook (and IG,Whatsapp) and don't want to use any of them; I have uninstalled/reinstalled Whatsapp many times. Out of practical concern, I now only use Whatsapp in business settings where it would create tension and create social awkwardness not to. But I dislike the fact that I do.
Yep, same in South Africa. I still haven't accepted those T's & C's from a few years ago so can't chat with most businesses. In some cases there is no other option, so I just... don't use that company.
On the other hand, I've convinced a lot of my friends to get Signal. I'm the only person that they speak to on Signal, but that's fine ;)
All my close family now use Signal after me and a sibling pushed for this. That's 30+ persons. The network is growing too, since all children and new partners join in 1:1 and groups.
We like having two apps: WA for friends, Signal for family. There are only few reasons to mix the two.
All my close family now use Signal after me and a sibling pushed for this. That's 30+ persons. The network is growing too, since all children and new partners join in 1:1 and groups.
I think it is interesting to see how fractured things are even in western Europe.
I'm in Scandinavia, and at least here, Messenger is by far the most dominant messaging app.
Meta in general has a really tight grip here.
Whatsapp is also from Meta.
We work on helping people move to Signal from WhatsApp. It'll be easier once they have a Communities feature, as WhatsApp is very far ahead there.
The main advice we got is that although you need to migrate individuals, the main focus should be on migrating channels. If you have a family group chat, that's the target. Tell people about how Meta spies on them, etc, and then support everyone in the channel to individually set up Signal if necessary.
Same in Israel. Doctors, schools, etc all use WhatsApp. You can't live without it here.
Telegram is fairly common in Western Europe
In my experience: Only for drug dealers, cheaters, people doing sex stuff secretly for whatever reason (e.g. not being out of the closet), "underground/alternative vibe" communication channels (e.g. raves, hackers) and russophiles...
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.. which is a worse option for different reasons than WhatsApp
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I would be willing to pay for IG subscription that's ad-free. It's gotten hilariously terrible right now that every 3-4 stories has a 2-page ad with a button on it. It's gotten so bad to the point where I stopped checking stories.
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 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.
Virtue signaling is free. Paying up for my virtues? Never.
Meta "average revenue per person" around $50 per year. Absolutely reasonable to replace with a subscription.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680125...
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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
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I mean, I'm paying about that for Google to hold onto all my personal memories via Photos, and all that I could actually use self-hosting for.
Meanwhile, FB has all my network that I can't recreate or self-host so yes, I would pay that.
You can ditch all that and talk to your friends (text them or call them or visit them) for almost free, actually. You can keep up with people without a middleman.
You'd do it once and figure out that none of your friends have regular status updates any more.
Pay each of your friends $50 one per month, to switch to signal. Problem solved
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.
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$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.
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Or, better, Mastodon or Matrix, which don't rely on a single, easy-to-target server.
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I believe you can get close to that with various Instagram mods for Android. They have advanced features like only show posts from followers and stuff like that. I switched to one of them after realizing the 5 second ad breaks I got were only there because I disabled personalized advertising.
That was the premise of halloapp. I think it was $5 a month and encrypted like WhatsApp, and you had a feed only from your contacts. It was founded by a guy who worked for WhatsApp for a long time. Apparently it went under in 2024. I think messaging is just a commoditized service. People will not pay for it
> we like all the dopamine hijacking garbage
I basically don't use Facebook any more because of this. Opening the app shows me the most sensationalist, fearmongering and outrage bait content they can find. It's worse than news channels (I haven't watched TV for 20 years). I have auto play turned off, and every few months the setting gets turned back on.
The first few posts I see scrolling through:
- US adds mandatory tips ahead of world cup.
- Woman dies after being hit by Audi in city center.
- There was a huge queue for women's toilets at a tech conference.
- 50% off mattresses.
- Some influencer I don't follow bought 20 rolls of 3M tape from Lidl.
Do I still have friends, do they still post stuff? I only see them in the reels/stories section at the top.
The only reason why I still have Facebook is because of groups. It's the main 'groups' tool people use in my country, so there are various local groups I am part of.
Did you check this out? https://isactiv.com/ - Private social network - exactly what you describe
I've seen too many of those privacy-respecting alternative social networks. Problem is that you'll post things only for yourself, which may be cool if you don't care about actually having friends there.
What you need is the Stories feature in Signal, then donate that $49.99/month (or however much you want) to their foundation.
Why? You are still giving up privacy. There is 0 reason to be using Meta products, let alone pay for them.
I pay $50/mo for internet, this is some nice ragebait.
You can change the feeds with extensions or modded apps for free and ads are blocked by default in any good browser.
There is not a single subscription in the world I would pay more than $20/month for personal purposes, unlimited (and I do mean unlimited) LLM tokens very much included.
> 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
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.
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
You can turn off political content in IG settings and additionally add hashtags/keywords to specifically filter out content that displeases you.
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.
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.
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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.
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My issues with Signal are two:
1/ meta products trigger organic conversations. People post on Instagram and Facebook that they’re traveling and I will reach out to them if I’m close by. People don’t use Signal that way.
2/ the Facebook groups are very useful for local communities. As a traveler, I reach out to Expat groups for feedback.
Right. If being on meta is what keeps the "friendship" going and leaving the platform would have negative effect on the relationship, then on my opinion it wasn't a friendship to begin with. But that might just be my outdated view of how humans work.
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.
I maintain Meta accounts for two purposes. Facebook Marketplace, and following local businesses on Instagram because it's become the de facto platform for many artists/bars/restaurants/popups to distribute information. I don't add friends, I don't "like" posts, and I don't doomscroll the garbage they put in my feed.
I'm willing to give Meta the information that I enjoy old cars, bar trivia, and breakfast sandwich pop-ups.
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The FOMO everyone here is responding with is wild.
>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.
Haha I love the super out of touch takes on here sometimes. Not using WhatsApp or Facebook where I live absolutely introduces major difficulty to communication and even every day interactions where almost 100% of communication in various social groups is happening on these platforms. Should I ask them to move?
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I'm in Europe, with a bunch of non-geeky friends, coming from all walks of life who have Signal installed.
As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.
I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.
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I'm not on what's app. So you need to switch to something else if you want to chat with me.
WhatsApp as the only contact point is a pretty strong signal that the user is from a developing world country. I'm not from that part of the world, so I don't use WhatsApp.
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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...?
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What's actually being said is that these people are not your friends/family and probably shouldn't be.
That definitely sounds harsher than intended. It's a meditation really. Nobody needs FB and Instagram. (please read as a meditation)
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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.
I don't think it would be difficult to explain, especially in a professional capacity, that you don't use Whatsapp or Facebook because it does not meet your privacy requirements of your business.
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.
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> 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.
All it would take is WhatsApp going paid plans only. All of Europe will switch to Telegram as primary messaging platform in a couple of days. Hence a paid only WhatsApp will never happen until every plausible alternative will be made impossible either by acquisition or by law.
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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.
The only way to know the correct meshtastic configs for Taiwan is to join the meshtastic Taiwan Facebook group.
Or attend an event in person. They advertise their in person events on the meshtastic Facebook group.
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
Ha, I fell for that the first time, not getting me twice. That was my wake up call for how insular the HN bubble is and how utterly convinced people here are that they represent or understand normies.
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.
I am a happy Instagram user. As a Ukrainian, this is the only connection left with lots of my friends now as we are scattered around the world. And I would happily pay $2.99/m for Instagram to have those better features.
Problem is, facebook WILL raise the prices on these subscriptions every few months until they could not anymore. So I will have to pay probably like $12.99/m in a couple of years.
> this is the only connection left with lots of my friends now as we are scattered around the world
Time to suggest them to join Mastodon and Pixelfed? Relying on a foreign, for-profit megacorp is a bad way to keep contact with friends.
> Time to suggest them to join Mastodon and Pixelfed
Sure. Guess how many of them will actually do it?
> Relying on a foreign, for-profit megacorp is a bad way to keep contact with friends.
I'd say it's exactly the opposite: relying on a foreign, for-profit megacorp is currently the best way to keep contact with friends.
Unfortunately.
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Have you had much success migrating entire friend groups over to platforms they’ve never heard of?
I think insisting on using weird products nobody in the real world knows about is a “bad way to keep contact with friends”
And the award of most stupid company that somehow is still alive goes to Meta! There are people who will subscribe and its sad.
Nice little detail - WhatsApp was a $1/year subscription before they sold to Zuckerberg ... with the exact subscription cost now conspicuously missing from the app's Wikipedia page.
Except it wasn’t for all users. IIRC it either didn’t show for all, or it was the WinRAR equivalent of you being able to say “maybe later” and it left you alone for a long while.
> The new "Plus" plans are tailored to each individual app, with Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus focused more on social expression, while WhatsApp Plus focuses on personalization and messaging.
If only Google Plus lived long enough to see this day...
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.
So, it seems like a good idea for Meta.
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
I just counted 35 online profiles with nitro. Same ~300 people online currently
tbh I mostly pay for nitro for cross-server, animated emoji
How’d you make a game with 1,000 people? It’s impressive.
They're players, not devs.
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Yeah this very much a "like Discord" move, and it does work
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 $1 per user, any subscription that’s a few dollars or more is probably paying for the lost advertising revenue, but it wouldn’t translate for Meta so they aren’t including ad free which drastically reduces the value.
I’ll be surprised if Meta’s subscriptions are as popular as Discord’s without being advertising free. Cosmetics are liked amongst Discord’s audience of nerds, but not Meta’s audience of normal people.
Very interested to see how this works out for Meta. Since they’re not excluding ads, it’s basically free money, so they may as well offer these subscriptions.
I wish these companies didn't need to make billions in revenue. There's no reason why a small company couldn't manage a site like Discord, make enough to pay their developers, and be successful. But instead every company needs to become a unicorn and pay investors billions.
> The users who pay are the most valuable users to advertisers and the users who don’t pay are the least valuable.
But also, definitionally, the users who are willing to pay the most are the ones who the see ads as the biggest anti-value (i.e. cost) to themselves - so they'll be the ones most likely to not use the service if they're not given an ad-free option - cutting down the average user value anyway.
I actually cancelled my Discord subscription because they've gradually been adding more intrusive ads and subscriptions don't protect you from ads.
Reminds me of the Discord Nitro thing which is toxic and awful to deal with if you have to use it for anything serious.
A new paid social media network with high privacy settings would defeat meta products quite easily. From what I understand, it costs around 27$ a year per user for Meta to run the business. At 5$ per month with limitations on size of your profile (like number of pictures), it would be quite easy to run a social media of this sort. This kinda of social media is what eventually everyone will move towards (and currently want). Small social circles, extremely private, and connections and discovery in very limited ways that allow you to maintain privacy and your 'inner' circle.
Social media is here to stay, unfortunately. Meta, LinkedIn, X, I wouldn't invest in the long term.
Do you really believe that, given all the failed social media competitors? The network effects seem too strong.
> it costs around 27$ a year per user for Meta to run the business
And a lot of this is probably spent maintaining the ad machine
What exactly are privacy expectations of a social media app/network? Has that been quantified?
No data collection for any other reason than security practices, and for reasons that pertain to public security (not necessarily legal). A 30 day retention policy would be more than enough. Without discovery, public profiles, advertising and usages targeted towards you engaging more with the platform, the data collection and telemetry becomes quite unnecessary.
If you are paying for the usage (mostly server and development costs), your data need not be used for anything other than actually improving the product and security.
Currently the data is purely to extract profits and keep you hooked. This is what they have made you believe social media is about. Its not. You aren't hooked on iMessage and FaceTime scrolling reels and wasting hours. It's actually used to connect with people.
I think this is all theatrics to avoid EU regulation. Subscriptions for Meta products have already been a thing in the EU for several months.
It went a bit like this:
- EU mandates that users should be given the option to opt out from non-essential cookies.
- Meta responds by implementing an ad-free subscription-based model in EU, which allows them to dodge regulation.
- EU of course sees through their scheme and prepares to sanction them.
- Meta rolls-out subscriptions worldwide, so that it becomes harder for EU to claim that subscriptions were specifically created for dodging EU regulation.
If these subscriptions gave you access to the relevant APIs (via something like IFTTT is fine), I'd be happy to pay.
But if you take away even read-only API access to services[0], I'm a) not going to pay and b) going to stop using your services.
[0] I really don't feel like converting my Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp accounts to the "business" variants just to get access to the APIs.
"It's free and always will be" - Facebook
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
Followed by him overwriting people's email addresses and constantly fucking around with privacy settings
Ohhhh but he was young! Be easy on him
(/s)
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"don't be evil"?
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.
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The fundamental problem is - users base is flattened out so are the ad revenues.
Now we need something new to show to the shareholders and that is this.
Time to delete these apps. They were novel like MySpace and live journal but now they make the wrong people rich with no value add
You know what feature I'd love for WhatsApp? Out-of-office.
"Hi there, I am no longer using WhatsApp. To contact me, please..."
WhatsApp feels like one of the few products where people might actually pay. It's become critical infrastructure for communication in many countries, not just another social app.
It is just a name. If it disappears, people can switch over for something else in a day that works similarly. Is it then critical?
I don't mean irreplaceable. I mean it's become the default communication layer for a huge number of people, which gives it a level of importance beyond a typical social app.Sure, people would move. But the value isn't WhatsApp itself it's the fact that everyone you need to talk to is already there. That's what makes it hard to replace overnight.
Well people _used_ to pay for it, in fact. Except it was 3 EUR/year rather than 3 EUR/month...
I was paying for the ads-free subscripton for instagram and I recently I canceled as a way to reduce social media usage. And the ad version of Instagram is so annoying that it is helping a lot more.
If this new sub becomes a status signaling, it might work.
The article mentions that this is a subscription for additional features. It doesn't say anywhere that you won't get ads. I think the ads-free subscription option is only available in certain markets, like the UK.
I think that subscribing to another person's life prevents you from living your own. Also, "Everything is Lies, I Guess".
Facebook is so doomed. I recently logged in (after close to 10 years), and whooah the feed was wild.
90% was these weird pages having very sexual teasing shorts, or bikini girls / latex pants etc. None of the pages were something is had ever seen before, or even followed.
The rest 9% was AI gen low qulity shorts, and the remaining 1% was actually from someone i did was friends with, but even thise seemes like some tool had generated them, as in "follow my new business page" etc.
The facebook that once was seem to be totally gone by now, and im not even sure what it is anymore.
I never got an instgram account, but i guess its the same low quality shit over there.
Will there finally be an option to disable calls completely? If not, I ain't paying.
I cant see many paying for whatsapp or facebook/instagram. These are now taken for granted as being "free". Im pretty sure users would just migrate to signal/telegram/other if it ever became a paid service.
Tell ya what. Give me an absolute guarantee - legally-enforced - that you'll never share any of my data ever again (unless subpoenaed or warranted) and will stop using my news feed as an ad feed, and I might consider it.
Fire Mark Zuckerberg into the stratosphere and I'll will you my worldly possessions.
I do not need any of the three, so i will not pay.
True, a lot of other people i know, including family and corpo, use Whatsapp. I will not pay to stay in contact with them. They can go back to sms or email if they want to. Or pay for me.
I already did not know what was included in my google one account. Now I can not know what included in my meta one account :)
Thanks for the generous spyware offer, I’m just gonna keep using Signal.
I paid for a while, but they kept showing me crap in the feed rather than posts I wanted to see. Stupid videos etc. So I cancelled.
Anyone here remember the early days of WhatsApp, pre-Facebook, when it required an annual subscription fee of $1?
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.
Absolutely, I just linked to this in another comment, I couldn't easily find another story: https://www.techspot.com/news/63504-whatsapp-waves-goodbye-a...
A small annual subscription is a great way to add friction to bots. I truly wish every platform I used had one.
20 billion dollars to steal people's phone numbers
Anything Zuckerberg needs antitrust immediately
Guess you can't pay to get end-to-end encryption back in Instagram DMs? They dropped it a couple weeks ago.
was never end to end, was you to server and then server to other party. Meaning Zuky boi always had access to your messages in clear (and NSA + all other 3 letters agencies)
Just use email...
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.
Email is not chat and it's certainly not Instagram. Your suggestion will only work for people who are not really users of WhatsApp or Instagram.
No, the suggestion "only" works for those of your friends who truly value you. If they want to connect with you, they'll find a way. If they don't, they won't.
> 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
Imagine paying for the privilege to display an animated icon.
I blame Bethesda and their horse armor for this.
So now you can pay $3.99/mo for the privilege of custom profile fonts and animated reactions while still getting served ads between Reels. Truly the premium doomscrolling experience.
This seems smart of them in the sense that many creator/website owners have lost significant traffic that Google used to send their way and so are reluctantly pivoting back to paying more attention to social - for discovery.
But speaking as someone who deleted a high following FB page that I probably shouldn't have because the back end of it was so infuriating, I don't understand this offering. It seems like a lot of bling and clutter. Most people who need to use Meta for biz reasons want the same thing - live support that is not a bot or a human that may as well be a bot.
And not to get too granular but if you've used IG lately, for example, you notice that trying to do anything on the back end (eg: set up up some boosted posts or schedule things) takes the user through a maze and sometimes you end up in the old legacy Facebook pages, which has links that don't relate to any of the contemporary features. It sounds minor but it essentially barely functions and each click to confirm something sends you to another section to confirm something else. You also need a FB page to do anything on an IG page and a tonne of other petty thwartings. The fact that their brand new subscriptions/Meta platform seems just as confusing is alarming. I don't know how a company with this much money can not design an un-hellish back end or offer reasonable customer support.
Their A.I. monitoring is also completely off the chain, closing accounts and locking profiles for opaque reasons that cannot be questioned.
I feel like I can explain this away with what I imagine happened in most middle managers driven development companies: the most factorio-esque spaghetti decision driven sunk cost fallacy thing ever.
I've so far been unable to find these options in any of the apps in the USA. Anyone spotted them?
Seems absolutely unhinged. I don't know who'd pay to doomscroll AI-generated slop and fake news. $49.99 for the top plan, lol.
All I can think of is people who need those accounts for professional reasons (i.e. public relations)
But they know who.
I use WhatsApp for almost all my communication with family and friends. I'm also happy to pay for things that improve my experience.
...but it's unclear what this subscription would give me. The announcement has no real details, the article is light on detail, and the WhatsApp website has no mention of this subscription.
I get that it's hard. What I want is a good text and call app, and that's hard to charge for at scale. But every feature that Meta has added to justify charging (AI, stories, profiles, etc), makes the product worse for me and makes me less likely to pay for it.
They're in a hard place.
So who will buy their cursed campus when they collapse?
Maybe Oracle can acquire it back and put a few more giant hard-drive-inspired buildings there (it was orignally Sun Microsystems' campus).
Before Meta aquisition, I paid 1 dollar per year for WhatsApp. Now it iwl be 35.88.
I've never paid for it, and never will. You don't HAVE to subscribe to "WhatsApp Plus" you know.
It's insane that those subscriptions don't remove ads. That's the only thing I would even remotely consider paying for on any meta product.
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.
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.
The hurdle is instagram makes ~$27/mo per user from ad revenue.
Would you pay $27/mo for instagram?
You probably couldn't even sell an Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp bundle for ~$25 per month.
This sort of looks like a subscription for influencers, organisation and "power users". Even if you turned off the ads, most of people feed, from what I've seen are basically ads they signed up for, e.g. posts from companies, so I doubt that most even care.
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.
The last numbers I saw are almost 10 years old now, and then it was $65 per year in profit for a Facebook user, in the US, a little less for someone in the EU and almost nothing in most other places.
Are there new numbers that one can access? I can imagine the value has gone up, but hundreds of dollars seem like a lot.
They do offer a €8/month ad-free Instagram subscription in the EU. I'm subscribed, it's pretty cool.
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And even then, they wouldn't remove ads since they'd want to add to their profits!
It's a real shame private messaging has ended up being almost exclusively closed-source without any kind of open API.
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.
They all still exist, but we don't have the collective courage to use them when it means you might miss a status update from your friends.
Closed platforms have salaried teams of workers and salaried teams of marketers. Often they usually have user friendly support too.
Open-source always has a certain level of "jank" that tends to decimate interest from common folks.
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.
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
The world still runs on email.
A lot of posters here are missing the part where people use Meta products to market their art, performance artists, visual artists, musician, digital entertainment artists, craftsmen, etc all rely on the network effect to be discovered. Until you can replace that then people wont just use email, txt their audience, etc.
And just to say it is actually sad there is no alternative because most of those artists dont really gain a valuable network effect from posting there. But it is how younger unestablished peoples establish themselves as existing. There are entire comedy/music scenes that essentially require you to have an Instagram account.
I’d genuinely pay for Instagram if it didn’t show me reels and slop content, and instead showed only content from people I follow
for insta and Facebook ok but for whatsapp they just wanna suck any kind of money they can. Soon whatsapp will be bloated with ads all over
Soon? They have ads already.
Interesting. There are no ads for messaging. I only use WhatsApp for messages (individual and groups). I've never used status updates or any other nonsense (I don't even understand why one would want to do status updates, but some people seem to use them).
All of this to say: ads are only in status updates and channels (no idea what this is, never used one) and apparently not in every region.
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It sounds a lot like Discord Nitro
Does the subscription turn off ads?
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.
Shameful reporting that this isn't mentioned.
is meta low on $? why would they do this?
after they introduced Community notes, it isn't far fetched to say that they're simply copying Twitter...
Zuckerberg copying? Who would have thought.
Paying FU money to folks creating dashboards takes a toll.
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.
I can't imagine paying for Facebook but I can imagine paying for WhatsApp. It's a great app that's for free and has no ads.
I cannot imagine that students, kids, or half the world where paying 3 usd a month is impossible, will keep using whatsapp when they have to pay a fee. They will look for alternatives immediately. Telegram?
But actually this is a good move. I tried to convince my family and friends to use alternatives, without success. But now I see hope.
Have stopped using FB and IG years ago, was stuck with WhatsApp because of half the world using it.
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.
Those features sound so narcissistic to me
I barely use all those services. But I wonder how i would react if Reddit became a paywall.
With the constant Enshittification. It's only a matter of time.
Will usenet resurrect from there? As usual the BIG issue is the search engine.
Maybe they could sell privacy/encrypted messages in the subscription after removing it.
That's not happening
A link to the mirror that doesn’t force you to disable adblocker: https://archive.is/xGwsz
Friendly reminder: HN opinion about this will be completely-out-of-touch with reality
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
It's time for that EPS to turn into BV baby!
> In an announcement, Meta’s head of product, Naomi Gleit, noted that “more fun features” will be added in the future.
Thank you - I don't want any of that.
What exactly are "fun" features, anyway? Do they take away from my time?
Who is this for? Is it just a way to monetize dying platforms before they inevitably become worthless?
The last stage of Doctorow's enshittification cycle is "Then, they die."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
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.
Yes, you could use Signal, but my take is that people don't want yet another account for something. Facebook works and it has all the other activities people need to keep track of. For most you wouldn't be replacing Facebook or WhatsApp with Signal, you'd add Signal to an already busy phone.
People don't care about the platform, they just want shit to work and for better or worse, Facebook works for them.
WhatsApp: all school stuff seems to be coordinated over WhatsApp
Wait, I'm paying and I still get targeted ads shown to me? But I do get "super reactions"? Come on.
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Do you know of any successful business without a Meta presence? Is that really possible in this age? Really interested to know.
They have a stranglehold on everything. It's inescapable.
How about Costco?