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.
Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
391–400 of 533 posts
Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
#392I 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 mor…
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.
Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's nice, but used to what end, especially if you are not a Instagram/Facebook user, and have a decent ad-blocker set up?
Your signals are not only used to advertise to you but people like you and people who know you.
Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
#394So 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.
Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
#395I 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.
Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
“full” premium removes all advertising, and it’s quite pricey in the US. “Lite” premium removes ‘most’ ads but doesn’t allow downloads at all.
I believe the ads that "lite" Premium doesn't remove are on anything that has ContentID music in it, as they have to pay higher fees to the record labels for those.
Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
#397Nice 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.
Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> Guess how many of them will actually do it?
That's how much they value your friendship then :)
Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
#399I'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…
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.
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.
Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
#400I 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.
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”