Facebook and Instagram to offer ad-free service in UK for up to £3.99 a month

Ten years ago, I wrote something [1] arguing that it is impossible to escape ads by paying, as long as the product is content:

> Here’s why I believe you will not escape ads by paying for your content: people who can afford to pay for content are people with money, or people with buying power, in other words, the exact same people advertisers look to target. The more buying power you demonstrate, the more advertisers will target you. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in. With the way the world currently works, selling ads, it seems, will always be more profitable than selling content.

[1] https://hliyan.github.io/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escap...

i only have a burner FB account that i can use to check some local businesses and follow a local lost-pets group.

i have no friends and have never posted or liked anything, so my feed is almost exclusively algorithmically-pushed content. and there are a couple of thoughts about it:

- even though i haven't explicitly told you anything about myself except for looking at a couple local business, it's amazing how much it has been able to fine-tuning the feed to me. it has figured out my politics (not typical in my area), my favorite sports team (not local to my area), and my taste in standup comedy. all from watching me passively scroll.

- that being said, even though they've clearly learned some things about me, >90% of the feed is absolute clickbait shite. reposted reddit AITA threads meant to get rage-induced engagement, lots of cartoons/memes where the punchline is cropped out of the bottom of the image so you need to click to see it, lots of videos that implore you 'watch til the end!' so they can get over whatever view-time threshold is needed.

- for some reason, there are lots of people that are more than willing to actually engage with and comment on these threads. i know that i'm a bit of an outlier on the social media spectrum, but I cannot wrap my head around the logic that would lead to me seeing some engagement-farm meme roundup and then wanting to add in a comment like "LOL, so true! Very funny!". this isn't your friend where you want to tell them you liked their joke. why are you talking to the spam robot?!

These paid offerings should include not only an ad-free experience, but also getting rid of all the dark patterns and other manipulative crap Meta loves doing in their apps and services. You know, preferences that actually stick forever, notifications that only notify you of things that actually happened, feeds that only contain content from accounts you follow and don't force-feed you recommendations, all that.

The day instagram "proposed" me this deal is the day I uninstalled the app from my phone, it's been a few months now, 0 regret. I can take ads, but for some reason this was the final straw

The entire previous history of humanity we only had non-targeted ads in newspapers, on billboards, and on TV and radio, and everyone was ok with that. But suddenly, on the internet, it's somehow "not possible" to have advertising that isn't personalized or even dynamic at all. How so?