5 ms·

Doesn't this end up spiralling, though? As we've seen with Netflix, nothing stops the service from adding ads to a subscription feed. Sooner or later the press

Doesn't this end up spiralling, though? As we've seen with Netflix, nothing stops the service from adding ads to a subscription feed. Sooner or later the pressure to grow revenues is going to force Meta to do ads on their subscription accounts (especially since they can charge a premium on those ads). Then they introduce "premium" subscription accounts with no ads, then those get ads, then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads, and so on.

vGPU 3y ago
Or how the twitter premium and extra special super premium+ subscriptions both still have ads.
FerretFred 3y ago
>then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads Or rather their AI will by that time have disguised ads as to be not recognisable as ads :)
- figassis 3y ago
  Like toy unboxing on Youtube Kids
  - MandieD 3y ago
    Just one of the many reasons why I won’t let my kid use YouTube Kids and instead manually look up everything I’m ok with him watching on the main “Enhanced” site and watch it with him, then download the stuff he likes for use with VLC.
saghm 3y ago
Recently I've noticed that the Uber app (which I grudgingly use instead of Lyft due to a decline in drivers over the years in various areas near where I've lived to the point where it wasn't a viable option most of the time) will show me adds when I open it to check the ETA during a ride. This is something where I'm not paying a subscription but literally paying for the ride itself, because I obviously don't check the ETA of anything when I'm not riding. I guess this is their way of trying to find a path to profitability other than self-driving cars, but I'd genuinely rather pay an extra dollar or two per ride than have an ad take up close to half my screen.
- andirk 3y ago
  Things that are super time sensitive should never have distractions present. The Uber app trying to get me to buy cold upside down delivery food while I'm trying to get a ride is a terrible UX. Another example is Waze, the once most amazing map app ever made until bought by Google, has Jack n the Box ads (ok yeah I'm eating jack n the box right now, who cares!) overlaying my fkking map while I'm driving.
  - octacat 3y ago
    oh, tell it to the tram schedule app, popular in Poland. You pay subscription or you watch unskipable ads. Very cool when you have 3 minutes before your trap. And I am pretty sure just initializing the ads engine takes a half of a second or so. Ah, I guess UX is dead in 2023
    - _thisdot 3y ago
      Much worse with Indian Railways. The website is riddled with ads. And if you need to book an emergency ticket, the portal opens 10AM for everyone in India. Obviously the traffic gets too much. I keep the network tab open and its painful to see requests for ads hogging up the resources when you're trying to book an emergency ticket in a race against the nation. Booking one ticket involves solving 2 captchas. They even tried to involve advertising into these captchas. You had to type out some specific detail from the ad to get past it.
      - zsdfjifdpu 3y ago
        Have you found an optimal way to book Tatkal (emergency) tickets with higher success rate apart from paying private agents or paying a premium on ixigo app ?
      - octacat 3y ago
        oh, polish trains site is made by drunk students for a bottle of vodka... It is just terribly bad and haven't changed to the good side since like 10 years. They added some ads though and broke login for me during this time :D If you need to ride using several changes - just don't. You need to book each ticket separately. German had a lot of useless steps. Austrian was pretty good, but slooow to open initially. LEO express (Czech, but commercial trains/buses) was pretty ok but sometimes having bugs. I am kinda surprised how painful the train booking sites could be :D
Log_out_ 3y ago
There is always piracy as ground truth and I'm content with it.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  How do you pirate a social media product though?
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    By meeting people in real life?
  - mbork_pl 3y ago
    Does meeting people face to face and talking about what happened in your lives count as "pirating facebook"? ;-)
    - marcus_holmes 3y ago
      haha not yet. 2043: you have been fined for having an unlicensed social activity. Please ensure all future social activity is properly arranged via Facebook groups or a registered chat application.
      - mbork_pl 3y ago
        2053: your social credit score was decreased because of unlicensed social activity and dropped below an acceptable level. You were not fined and you still have a lot of money, but that doesn't matter, because you are not allowed to participate in any monetary transactions (in optimistic version: besides buying basic food).
        hnfong 3y ago
        2063: Your MetaFeed has not been accessed for 7 days in a row. Due to the inactivity, your MetaReality Bank account has been suspended. This is to protect all parties from potential unauthorized intrusion. You have 7 days grace period to contact our MetaAI Agent to reinstate the account by passing the EZ-Reverse-Turing-Test (v0.513) to prove you are a fully biological human. After the grace period, we will donate the assets held in your MetaReality Bank account to the NeoSingularity project for the benefit of greater humanity. In case you require financial assistance, you can always sign up to sell your brain compute for Meta Coins at the rate of 35MC/hour.
gnyman 3y ago
Yeah, this is one of the problems with for-profit. Even if the company could make the bottom line with only a subscription fee. Someone is willing to pay a lot for visibility, and they pay more the less other ads there is. So the paper/service/blog accepts one well paying ad. And nobody minds because it was just one ad. But look at that money, let's do another ad, just once. But this isn't the first and only so they pay a little less. So maybe we could put in two ads, I mean they are relevant and nobody cares. And suddenly ads are a commodity but you already have a ad-selling department and people willing to pay a little... I mean I don't think ads are exclusively bad, but it's just the nature of the system that they will get worse until they are bad.
EZ-E 3y ago
Large companies which have monopolies or near monopolies (Google with Youtube for example) will unfortunately likely go this way as they can get away with bullying users a lot before they are in any danger of losing market share.
zigman1 3y ago
Naive question, but when you sign up to pay for a service you are promised various functions or improvements, one of them is no-ads experience. If company then starts showing ads, isn't that breaking at least some consumer-protection laws?
- 3D30497420 3y ago
  I imagine it depends on what's in the terms and conditions. I expect companies structure these to provide considerable flexibility. Plus, I'd guess it also depends on how you define what constitutes an "advertisement". For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad? What if it is related to another show you watched? What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature? To the company, and per their T&C, these may not be "ads".
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    > For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad? Yes, if you can't disable that feature. They're clearly pushing it regardless of my preferences. > What if it is related to another show you watched? Yes, if you can't disable that feature because they are most likely pushing the cheapest crap they can that keeps me watching. > What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature? Yes, if you can't disable that feature because I can't tell if they're just trying to be helpful or steer me toward something with higher margins for their benefit. If I can't opt out then it's an ad
- leereeves 3y ago
  I don't think any consumer-protection laws require a company to continue offering a service forever. They could surely stop the ad-free service and start a new service with ads. But perhaps there are laws requiring companies to get explicit consent and not simply consider it a change in the existing service nor automatically sign people up for the service with the new terms (ads)? I think there should be. I'm not a fan of companies changing their terms at will without clear notification. Clear meaning a plain English description of what's changed, not just "We've changed our ToS, read this long legal document again."
0x0203 3y ago
Not showing the user ads is also only half the problem. As the article said, those who pay not to view them are the more valuable advertising targets. There's nothing about those plans, as far as I've seen, that says they're not still tracking usage patterns, viewing habits, etc... and selling that info on to others who don't have a paid ad-free option.
- grishka 3y ago
  As far as I understand, the paid plans only opt you out of the ads but not the rest of the growth hacking bullshit that all commercial social media platforms do to some degree.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I agree. I don't really object to ads as much as I object to the tracking that comes with them. Ad-free services that still do the tracking aren't really much of an improvement in my book.
ruszki 3y ago
Isn’t this just inflation in a different package?
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  Ah no, inflation is them increasing the price of the subscription as well.
JohnFen 3y ago
> nothing stops the service from adding ads to a subscription feed. True, but that's when you leave the service.

vGPU 3y ago

Or how the twitter premium and extra special super premium+ subscriptions both still have ads.

FerretFred 3y ago

>then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads Or rather their AI will by that time have disguised ads as to be not recognisable as ads :)

figassis 3y ago
Like toy unboxing on Youtube Kids
- MandieD 3y ago
  Just one of the many reasons why I won’t let my kid use YouTube Kids and instead manually look up everything I’m ok with him watching on the main “Enhanced” site and watch it with him, then download the stuff he likes for use with VLC.

saghm 3y ago

Recently I've noticed that the Uber app (which I grudgingly use instead of Lyft due to a decline in drivers over the years in various areas near where I've lived to the point where it wasn't a viable option most of the time) will show me adds when I open it to check the ETA during a ride. This is something where I'm not paying a subscription but literally paying for the ride itself, because I obviously don't check the ETA of anything when I'm not riding. I guess this is their way of trying to find a path to profitability other than self-driving cars, but I'd genuinely rather pay an extra dollar or two per ride than have an ad take up close to half my screen.

andirk 3y ago
Things that are super time sensitive should never have distractions present. The Uber app trying to get me to buy cold upside down delivery food while I'm trying to get a ride is a terrible UX. Another example is Waze, the once most amazing map app ever made until bought by Google, has Jack n the Box ads (ok yeah I'm eating jack n the box right now, who cares!) overlaying my fkking map while I'm driving.
- octacat 3y ago
  oh, tell it to the tram schedule app, popular in Poland. You pay subscription or you watch unskipable ads. Very cool when you have 3 minutes before your trap. And I am pretty sure just initializing the ads engine takes a half of a second or so. Ah, I guess UX is dead in 2023
  - _thisdot 3y ago
    Much worse with Indian Railways. The website is riddled with ads. And if you need to book an emergency ticket, the portal opens 10AM for everyone in India. Obviously the traffic gets too much. I keep the network tab open and its painful to see requests for ads hogging up the resources when you're trying to book an emergency ticket in a race against the nation. Booking one ticket involves solving 2 captchas. They even tried to involve advertising into these captchas. You had to type out some specific detail from the ad to get past it.
    - zsdfjifdpu 3y ago
      Have you found an optimal way to book Tatkal (emergency) tickets with higher success rate apart from paying private agents or paying a premium on ixigo app ?
    - octacat 3y ago
      oh, polish trains site is made by drunk students for a bottle of vodka... It is just terribly bad and haven't changed to the good side since like 10 years. They added some ads though and broke login for me during this time :D If you need to ride using several changes - just don't. You need to book each ticket separately. German had a lot of useless steps. Austrian was pretty good, but slooow to open initially. LEO express (Czech, but commercial trains/buses) was pretty ok but sometimes having bugs. I am kinda surprised how painful the train booking sites could be :D

Log_out_ 3y ago

There is always piracy as ground truth and I'm content with it.

marcus_holmes 3y ago
How do you pirate a social media product though?
- squarefoot 3y ago
  By meeting people in real life?
- mbork_pl 3y ago
  Does meeting people face to face and talking about what happened in your lives count as "pirating facebook"? ;-)
  - marcus_holmes 3y ago
    haha not yet. 2043: you have been fined for having an unlicensed social activity. Please ensure all future social activity is properly arranged via Facebook groups or a registered chat application.
    - mbork_pl 3y ago
      2053: your social credit score was decreased because of unlicensed social activity and dropped below an acceptable level. You were not fined and you still have a lot of money, but that doesn't matter, because you are not allowed to participate in any monetary transactions (in optimistic version: besides buying basic food).
      - hnfong 3y ago
        2063: Your MetaFeed has not been accessed for 7 days in a row. Due to the inactivity, your MetaReality Bank account has been suspended. This is to protect all parties from potential unauthorized intrusion. You have 7 days grace period to contact our MetaAI Agent to reinstate the account by passing the EZ-Reverse-Turing-Test (v0.513) to prove you are a fully biological human. After the grace period, we will donate the assets held in your MetaReality Bank account to the NeoSingularity project for the benefit of greater humanity. In case you require financial assistance, you can always sign up to sell your brain compute for Meta Coins at the rate of 35MC/hour.

gnyman 3y ago

Yeah, this is one of the problems with for-profit. Even if the company could make the bottom line with only a subscription fee. Someone is willing to pay a lot for visibility, and they pay more the less other ads there is. So the paper/service/blog accepts one well paying ad. And nobody minds because it was just one ad. But look at that money, let's do another ad, just once. But this isn't the first and only so they pay a little less. So maybe we could put in two ads, I mean they are relevant and nobody cares. And suddenly ads are a commodity but you already have a ad-selling department and people willing to pay a little... I mean I don't think ads are exclusively bad, but it's just the nature of the system that they will get worse until they are bad.

EZ-E 3y ago

Large companies which have monopolies or near monopolies (Google with Youtube for example) will unfortunately likely go this way as they can get away with bullying users a lot before they are in any danger of losing market share.

zigman1 3y ago

Naive question, but when you sign up to pay for a service you are promised various functions or improvements, one of them is no-ads experience. If company then starts showing ads, isn't that breaking at least some consumer-protection laws?

3D30497420 3y ago
I imagine it depends on what's in the terms and conditions. I expect companies structure these to provide considerable flexibility. Plus, I'd guess it also depends on how you define what constitutes an "advertisement". For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad? What if it is related to another show you watched? What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature? To the company, and per their T&C, these may not be "ads".
- phone8675309 3y ago
  > For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad? Yes, if you can't disable that feature. They're clearly pushing it regardless of my preferences. > What if it is related to another show you watched? Yes, if you can't disable that feature because they are most likely pushing the cheapest crap they can that keeps me watching. > What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature? Yes, if you can't disable that feature because I can't tell if they're just trying to be helpful or steer me toward something with higher margins for their benefit. If I can't opt out then it's an ad
leereeves 3y ago
I don't think any consumer-protection laws require a company to continue offering a service forever. They could surely stop the ad-free service and start a new service with ads. But perhaps there are laws requiring companies to get explicit consent and not simply consider it a change in the existing service nor automatically sign people up for the service with the new terms (ads)? I think there should be. I'm not a fan of companies changing their terms at will without clear notification. Clear meaning a plain English description of what's changed, not just "We've changed our ToS, read this long legal document again."

0x0203 3y ago

Not showing the user ads is also only half the problem. As the article said, those who pay not to view them are the more valuable advertising targets. There's nothing about those plans, as far as I've seen, that says they're not still tracking usage patterns, viewing habits, etc... and selling that info on to others who don't have a paid ad-free option.

grishka 3y ago
As far as I understand, the paid plans only opt you out of the ads but not the rest of the growth hacking bullshit that all commercial social media platforms do to some degree.
JohnFen 3y ago
I agree. I don't really object to ads as much as I object to the tracking that comes with them. Ad-free services that still do the tracking aren't really much of an improvement in my book.

ruszki 3y ago

Isn’t this just inflation in a different package?

marcus_holmes 3y ago
Ah no, inflation is them increasing the price of the subscription as well.

JohnFen 3y ago

> nothing stops the service from adding ads to a subscription feed. True, but that's when you leave the service.