The saying goes if you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Now, you’re both. Every big social media app is testing subscriptions. It's a business model that comes with a perverse incentive. Just like airlines, if you make life worse, more people will pay.
If you read the article, you’ll note that paid subscriptions are for ad-free services, which means your data is worthless, which means it won’t be sold.
The entire point of these models is to comply with EU rules on data harvesting.
Lol, it will still be sold. They are still tracking your attention span and clicks. I can already think of two or three correlation tests to sell to advertisers based on that information alone.
Except this change is occurring because of EU rules that don’t allow them to gather that data.
Those rules are dumb, sure, but this is the workaround - and personally it’s a workaround that I think is quite untenable. Social media succeeds because it is free.
Theres so few people who’d pay for it that all the social media companies would, hopefully, collapse and cure us of one of the worst technoplagues of the 21st century.
How did people think stuff like this would be funded?
I’m pretty anti corporation and capitalism, and pro open-source but this just sounds like regular inflammatory content.
There seems to be a disconnect on the internet that everything should be completely free, ignoring all the costs that go into setting up websites and web applications.
The money for it has to come from somewhere. If you want to protect your privacy (which you should) then you’d be better off paying for services like that than not. It’s been circlejerked to death but: If it’s free, you’re the product.
Even Lemmy is not immune. Sure it’s FOSS, but it’s not free to host. Someone has to pay for servers, data, web domains and more.
No matter what you do, if you want access to social media you’re going to have to shell out some cash, somewhere.
Edit: I might get the eventual “oh they’re going to make you pay AND still sell your data so why should you pay?” You don’t. You put your money elsewhere if you were even considering paying. Invest in Lemmy and the Fediverse. Invest in your local server. There’s plenty more options.
Exactly. I’d honestly rather have paid social media than engagement algo and ad-driven social media. When your algorithms chase engagement over all else, it leads to real harms, like the youtube alt-right pipeline. Fediverse ain’t perfect, but I like that there’s no engagement-chasing algorithm, no ads, just donations.
Would you be opposed to paying to use Lemmy? Someone’s gotta pay them bills. Currently it seems to be donation focused, but that might not scale. So what’s it going to be Player2@sopuli.xyz, ads, or a “premium Lemmy subscription”/tax/due/contribution?
I would argue that there is a fundamental difference to this forum style system consisting mostly of text and links, and a traditional ‘social media’ that is entirely photography and short form video. Correct me if I’m wrong, but TikTok, Facebook, etc. store all of the multimedia content on their services themselves, right? The costs cannot be comparable.
No way. Spinning rust isn’t getting any cheaper these days and these companies are expected to not only serve all their existing content, but allow for free uploading and storing in perpetuity. Google is a great example of one of these massive companies trying desperately to reduce the amount they have to store. They recently ended the free Google photos backups and they are more aggressive with deleting inactive YouTube accounts.
If they didn’t farm data and charged for it right in the beginning, maybe it would have lasted longer before turning to shit. But demanding payment while farming data is just insane.
Not to mention that they chose the absolute worst time to do this. They are just absolutely despised right now. They are either in the midst of scandal or scandal is just in their rearview. Why would anyone pay for this right now?
I look at FB less and less. I mostly use messenger to talk to people directly. Most of the feed is ads and the rest is pet photos, kids, pics of drinks/meals, memes, etc. Youtube has become an endless stream of auto insurance and grammarly ads.
I remember when cable tv first started the big promise was that since you were paying for it the cable channels would be ad free. Well that lasted about a week.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Airline seats could be fixed if the gov had any backbone but social media isn’t some essential service so good luck with it.
Imagine paying a company, who sells your data, to see memes
Fine. But imagining it is as far as I will go.
Mandatory blood sample to register.
If you read the article, you’ll note that paid subscriptions are for ad-free services, which means your data is worthless, which means it won’t be sold.
The entire point of these models is to comply with EU rules on data harvesting.
Lol, it will still be sold. They are still tracking your attention span and clicks. I can already think of two or three correlation tests to sell to advertisers based on that information alone.
Except this change is occurring because of EU rules that don’t allow them to gather that data.
Those rules are dumb, sure, but this is the workaround - and personally it’s a workaround that I think is quite untenable. Social media succeeds because it is free.
I love the idea of paid social media.
Theres so few people who’d pay for it that all the social media companies would, hopefully, collapse and cure us of one of the worst technoplagues of the 21st century.
Yeah web site cost money and developers need food. So its adds, subs or donations
It would just be corporations paying for it, and paying for ever more direct access to individuals.
Genuine concern,
How did people think stuff like this would be funded?
I’m pretty anti corporation and capitalism, and pro open-source but this just sounds like regular inflammatory content.
There seems to be a disconnect on the internet that everything should be completely free, ignoring all the costs that go into setting up websites and web applications.
The money for it has to come from somewhere. If you want to protect your privacy (which you should) then you’d be better off paying for services like that than not. It’s been circlejerked to death but: If it’s free, you’re the product.
Even Lemmy is not immune. Sure it’s FOSS, but it’s not free to host. Someone has to pay for servers, data, web domains and more.
No matter what you do, if you want access to social media you’re going to have to shell out some cash, somewhere.
Edit: I might get the eventual “oh they’re going to make you pay AND still sell your data so why should you pay?” You don’t. You put your money elsewhere if you were even considering paying. Invest in Lemmy and the Fediverse. Invest in your local server. There’s plenty more options.
No business that has investors has any right to claim any of this is about operating expenses.
Exactly. I’d honestly rather have paid social media than engagement algo and ad-driven social media. When your algorithms chase engagement over all else, it leads to real harms, like the youtube alt-right pipeline. Fediverse ain’t perfect, but I like that there’s no engagement-chasing algorithm, no ads, just donations.
Yet another reason not to use that stuff, as if we needed more
Would you be opposed to paying to use Lemmy? Someone’s gotta pay them bills. Currently it seems to be donation focused, but that might not scale. So what’s it going to be Player2@sopuli.xyz, ads, or a “premium Lemmy subscription”/tax/due/contribution?
I would argue that there is a fundamental difference to this forum style system consisting mostly of text and links, and a traditional ‘social media’ that is entirely photography and short form video. Correct me if I’m wrong, but TikTok, Facebook, etc. store all of the multimedia content on their services themselves, right? The costs cannot be comparable.
Storage is a negligible cost for companies of this caliber. Infinite growth with infinite profit is the root cause of these problems.
No way. Spinning rust isn’t getting any cheaper these days and these companies are expected to not only serve all their existing content, but allow for free uploading and storing in perpetuity. Google is a great example of one of these massive companies trying desperately to reduce the amount they have to store. They recently ended the free Google photos backups and they are more aggressive with deleting inactive YouTube accounts.
If they didn’t farm data and charged for it right in the beginning, maybe it would have lasted longer before turning to shit. But demanding payment while farming data is just insane.
Not to mention that they chose the absolute worst time to do this. They are just absolutely despised right now. They are either in the midst of scandal or scandal is just in their rearview. Why would anyone pay for this right now?
*looks around at Lemmy*
I love y’all.
Enshittification
Not exactly. It’s the age of stockholders, and doing what’s best for them is the law. They expect unlimited growth
I look at FB less and less. I mostly use messenger to talk to people directly. Most of the feed is ads and the rest is pet photos, kids, pics of drinks/meals, memes, etc. Youtube has become an endless stream of auto insurance and grammarly ads.
I refuse to be both.
You want me to dodge ads and try to scrape my data from your service in order to use it? Fine.
Want me to pay for the service? Maybe…
I will not support double dipping while pushing ads in my face. Fuck right off.
I remember when cable tv first started the big promise was that since you were paying for it the cable channels would be ad free. Well that lasted about a week.
Yeah, strong feelings of deja vue.