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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably paying would toggle on/off personalization of the ads, but then also they'd charge extra for the ads they show to "paying high-quality users" or something, so they can double-dip both sides.
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 reve…
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.
Yeah this is the worst, never pay for something that has ads. It's teaching these companies it's ok.
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 reve…
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.
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.
Yeah this very much a "like Discord" move, and it does work
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 reve…
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 reve…
> "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.
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 reve…
It's because you'll still be the product even if you pay.