14 ms·

Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

290 points by tambourine_man 5mo ago

suddenlybananas 5mo ago
It's a real shame private messaging has ended up being almost exclusively closed-source without any kind of open API.
- jjordan 5mo ago
  How did we let this happen? We used to have open protocols, apps like Pidgin that would bring multiple chat clients together under one interface, IRC, Skype P2P, etc. etc. Was it spammers that caused this mass migration to ever more closed platforms?
  - tim-projects 5mo ago
    They all still exist, but we don't have the collective courage to use them when it means you might miss a status update from your friends.
  - NegativeK 5mo ago
    The vast majority of people aren't aware of open versus closed protocols. If enough people they want to communicate with are using it to counterbalance how frustrating it is, they'll use it. It happened because businesses realized there's profit in lock in, and they threw resources at it. Open protocols are still there and still used, but we're sad because the smaller userbase is frustrating. Just like how people still publish human written content to personal blogs, but they're proportionally non-existent.
  - WarmWash 5mo ago
    Closed platforms have salaried teams of workers and salaried teams of marketers. Often they usually have user friendly support too. Open-source always has a certain level of "jank" that tends to decimate interest from common folks.
- regexorcist 5mo ago
  In the EU at least WhatsApp is being forced to interop with other messaging apps. I believe it's being rolled out at the moment.
  - tgv 5mo ago
    Yeah, there are precisely two apps that can exchange with Whatsapp: one is still in beta, the other is by invite only, and for "professional networking" or something like that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746476
- carlosjobim 5mo ago
  The world still runs on email.
karel-3d 5mo ago
I can't imagine paying for Facebook but I can imagine paying for WhatsApp. It's a great app that's for free and has no ads.
canyp 5mo ago
Seems absolutely unhinged. I don't know who'd pay to doomscroll AI-generated slop and fake news. $49.99 for the top plan, lol.
- DANmode 5mo ago
  But they know who.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- fullshark 5mo ago
  All I can think of is people who need those accounts for professional reasons (i.e. public relations)
rossjudson 5mo ago
I think that subscribing to another person's life prevents you from living your own. Also, "Everything is Lies, I Guess".
YesBox 5mo ago
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.
- fontain 5mo ago
  The main problem is that premium subscriptions don’t generate that much revenue when compared to ads alone. The users who pay are the most valuable users to advertisers and the users who don’t pay are the least valuable. Discord generates about $1 in revenue per user compared to Facebook at closer to $100. For Discord at $1 per user, any subscription that’s a few dollars or more is probably paying for the lost advertising revenue, but it wouldn’t translate for Meta so they aren’t including ad free which drastically reduces the value. I’ll be surprised if Meta’s subscriptions are as popular as Discord’s without being advertising free. Cosmetics are liked amongst Discord’s audience of nerds, but not Meta’s audience of normal people. Very interested to see how this works out for Meta. Since they’re not excluding ads, it’s basically free money, so they may as well offer these subscriptions.
  - rhines 5mo ago
    I wish these companies didn't need to make billions in revenue. There's no reason why a small company couldn't manage a site like Discord, make enough to pay their developers, and be successful. But instead every company needs to become a unicorn and pay investors billions.
  - lukeschlather 5mo ago
    I actually cancelled my Discord subscription because they've gradually been adding more intrusive ads and subscriptions don't protect you from ads.
  - Marsymars 5mo ago
    > The users who pay are the most valuable users to advertisers and the users who don’t pay are the least valuable. But also, definitionally, the users who are willing to pay the most are the ones who the see ads as the biggest anti-value (i.e. cost) to themselves - so they'll be the ones most likely to not use the service if they're not given an ad-free option - cutting down the average user value anyway.
j45 5mo ago
Maybe they could sell privacy/encrypted messages in the subscription after removing it.
Animats 5mo ago
"It's free and always will be" - Facebook
- ravenstine 5mo ago
  Whenever companies make statements like this and then people act surprised when they backtrack, I can't help but think of a bit of my favorite dialogue from Star Trek Enterprise. HARRIS: We had an arrangement! KRELL: You did what I wanted. I don't need you anymore. HARRIS: You agreed that both our governments would benefit if the two of us worked together. KRELL: And you believed me.
- avaer 5mo ago
  "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg
  - alex1138 5mo ago
    Followed by him overwriting people's email addresses and constantly fucking around with privacy settings Ohhhh but he was young! Be easy on him (/s)
    - shevy-java 5mo ago
      Not only that, but Spybook aka Facebook, also connected offline information, e. g. I think if I recall it was dental care or something like that. I don't remember the year (edit: a google search led me to this article from 2018, but I could swear this was several years before that - see https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43668607 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43668607), but it was scary that they go and sniff for ALL data they can find about people. This brings mega-corporation to a new level of Evil. And I haven't even gotten to talk about Google here, yet ...
- dataflow 5mo ago
  https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-always-be-a-version-of-facebook-that-is-free.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-a...
meta_ai_x 5mo ago
Friendly reminder: HN opinion about this will be completely-out-of-touch with reality
- alex1138 5mo ago
  What reality? The reality is almost nobody likes using Facebook (and many people can't anyway because they get banned while the racist thing or whatever they report never gets taken down) because it doesn't work, messages are hit and miss, nobody sees any status updates, and it's 20 ads per post
pj_mukh 5mo ago
I 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 more". Let me pay you to give me just the vitamins, and none of the sugar.
- kleton 5mo ago
  > only my friends' status updates I think that is the Feed's tab, though I have not used the blue app in a long time
- tim-projects 5mo ago
  Pay each of your friends $50 one per month, to switch to signal. Problem solved
  - freedomben 5mo ago
    $50 per month for unlimited, not $50 per friend, so your solution only works if you only have 1 friend, so it would work for me (self-deprecating joke) but may not for GP.
    - lostlogin 5mo ago
      > Pay each of your friends $50 one per month It an outlay of $50 a moth. Probably better to pay 50/number of friends though.
      - rkomorn 5mo ago
        $50 a moth? How about just a lightbulb and an open window?
        lostlogin 5mo ago
qweiopqweiop 5mo ago
Those features sound so narcissistic to me
iLoveOncall 5mo ago
It's insane that those subscriptions don't remove ads. That's the only thing I would even remotely consider paying for on any meta product. In the current state those subscriptions will just show your friends that you're a huge loser who's willing to pay for custom backgrounds.
- fontain 5mo ago
  Unfortunately, Meta’s ad business is so effective that they would need to charge hundreds of dollars per year for an ad free service just to keep revenue stable. I suspect anything less than $25 per month would be loss making for them.
  - timpera 5mo ago
    They do offer a €8/month ad-free Instagram subscription in the EU. I'm subscribed, it's pretty cool.
    - Cider9986 5mo ago
      If you used Android you can get this for free or just use it on the web with an adblocker.
  - chistev 5mo ago
    And even then, they wouldn't remove ads since they'd want to add to their profits!
  - mrweasel 5mo ago
    The last numbers I saw are almost 10 years old now, and then it was $65 per year in profit for a Facebook user, in the US, a little less for someone in the EU and almost nothing in most other places. Are there new numbers that one can access? I can imagine the value has gone up, but hundreds of dollars seem like a lot.
- figglestar 5mo ago
  People who pay subscriptions are exactly the sort of people you want to advertise to the most since they've signaled they have money. It's like flashing a big wad of cash in a seedy bar.
SilverElfin 5mo ago
Who is this for? Is it just a way to monetize dying platforms before they inevitably become worthless?
- dreamcompiler 5mo ago
  The last stage of Doctorow's enshittification cycle is "Then, they die." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
princevegeta89 5mo ago
Interesting. Instagram and Facebook both seem to be filled with AI-generated fake crap today. Even the so-called news items that I see there seem to be fake. I don't even know who would be subscribing. Especially to Facebook as of today.... It is filled with pretty low quality content overall. On the other side, WhatsApp has been getting filled with a lot of bloat. And even today, I find it confusing to use communities in WhatsApp. The entire navigation and experience around that feature confused me a few times. There's been more and more push towards the AI crap on WhatsApp as well. The only good thing about WhatsApp is, it is used by everyone that I know, so I can connect with them pretty easily and make calls, etc. I hope they don't enshittify it too much to the point where I'll go and use Signal full time.
- shevy-java 5mo ago
  > Instagram and Facebook both seem to be filled with AI-generated fake crap today. Also youtube, unfortunately. Google does not understand that AI is slowly killing youtube. I am an expert cat video person, so noticing AI slop is not so hard, but it takes a few seconds (e. g. a mother cat punishing the young cat for "overreach" - the way how the AI video insinuated reality was of course completely false, AI spam slop that lies to real humans). I'd rather wish Google would not waste my time (then again, why am I still using youtube ... one day I'll be degoogled for good. The sooner Google is gone from this planet, the better.)
  - princevegeta89 5mo ago
    And also, pretty much any internet-generated social media content, basically. Reddit is another classic example. If you look at many posts in subreddits containing a huge number of users, you could easily tell it is AI-generated, especially these idiotic "Am I the asshole" posts or "askreddit" posts and any other posts involving interesting situations. Not just that. Even comments, some of those are basically AI crap, cleverly disguised as real users. It is such a waste, honestly. AI has brought upon us a low-quality world to live in, out of nowhere. This is such a pity.
  - CuriouslyC 5mo ago
    Shorts are a dumpster fire in terms of fake content. Full length videos are a lot better, as YT has been cracking down on AI generated regular videos, though there are still a fair number of AI narrated/scripted videos and deepfakes of prolific interviewees.
shevy-java 5mo ago
> In an announcement, Meta’s head of product, Naomi Gleit, noted that “more fun features” will be added in the future. Thank you - I don't want any of that. What exactly are "fun" features, anyway? Do they take away from my time?
yokoprime 5mo ago
That's not happening
flufluflufluffy 5mo ago
> There are also other features like Super Heart animated reactions for Stories, custom app icons, customizable fonts for profile bios, and access to additional pins for your profile. Ahh, remember the days of livejournal/myspace, where we got all of those “features” for free because your profile is literally a fucking webpage
- AlienRobot 5mo ago
  Imagine paying for the privilege to display an animated icon. I blame Bethesda and their horse armor for this.
drnick1 5mo ago
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.
- Starman_Jones 5mo ago
  The hardest part about not using Meta products is deciding not to use meta products. When I stopped using Facebook, I had resigned myself to spending a lot of time and effort to stay in touch with my friends and family. As it turns out, all I had to do was mention that I was using Signal, and the people closest to me, then pretty close to me, then kinda close to me all started using that too. The network effect cuts both ways.
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    It’s amazing how strong the Meta FOMO is. I stopped using Facebook over 10 years ago and never even opened Instagram or WhatsApp, and I really am not missing out on anything in life. My actual friends know how to contact me and they do! And it’s really not that hard to say “Sorry I don’t have Whats App, just call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.” If someone is prepared to not be my friend because they only want to communicate via a Meta app, then I don’t see why I’d want them as a friend.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - doom2 5mo ago
      The annoying thing is how many businesses and communities rely on Meta platforms instead of their own websites and sometimes it's the only way to contact them. If I want to check if the small neighborhood grocery has something in stock? No phone, only Instagram DMs. When I was on vacation abroad and wanted to see if an out of the way farmers market was still happening despite rain? Only Facebook. The good thing is that it isn't everywhere: Taiwan, Japan, and China usually have apps like Line or WeChat as options. In Europe there's more usage of WhatsApp (which is still Meta owned but also not social media). But in the US (and countries in the Americas), I still see a heavy reliance on Instagram and Facebook.
CuriouslyC 5mo ago
Honestly don't know how Meta keeps customers. Facebook is hanging on for dear life with geriatrics and marketplace. Insta is a cesspool of fake content that needs to die in a dumpster fire. Not sure why you'd use WhatsApp over alternatives like Signal now. It's almost like the people still using Meta services are metaphorical bots or low agency human beings.
- derwiki 5mo ago
  WhatsApp: all school stuff seems to be coordinated over WhatsApp
- mrweasel 5mo ago
  Yes, you could use Signal, but my take is that people don't want yet another account for something. Facebook works and it has all the other activities people need to keep track of. For most you wouldn't be replacing Facebook or WhatsApp with Signal, you'd add Signal to an already busy phone. People don't care about the platform, they just want shit to work and for better or worse, Facebook works for them.
lolive 5mo ago
I barely use all those services. But I wonder how i would react if Reddit became a paywall.
- chistev 5mo ago
  With the constant Enshittification. It's only a matter of time.
  - lolive 5mo ago
    Will usenet resurrect from there? As usual the BIG issue is the search engine.
TZubiri 5mo ago
It's time for that EPS to turn into BV baby!
pioyi 5mo ago
Just use email...
- cryo32 5mo ago
  This is a brilliant take. I was talking to friends the other day and we were reminiscing about the old days where you'd email and phone people. And if there was a family event you'd shove a quite write up and some photos on your personal web site and email the links out to people. Some parts of the family would mail a newsletter around periodically. We decided to do the same again.
- tapoxi 5mo ago
  My Mom (70s, retired special ed teacher) got the family on Signal and it's a breeze to do video calls or send pictures/messages to people. They occasionally have a donation popup but it's one of the easiest and least intrusive programs I've ever used, and it just works.
- the_af 5mo ago
  Email is not chat and it's certainly not Instagram. Your suggestion will only work for people who are not really users of WhatsApp or Instagram.
  - jjulius 5mo ago
    No, the suggestion "only" works for those of your friends who truly value you. If they want to connect with you, they'll find a way. If they don't, they won't.
    - the_af 5mo ago
      Ah, yes, "truly value". The measure of how much one is valued is whether people are willing to move out of a chat app due to some sort of nerd principle. Needless to say, I disagree. I value my (various groups of) friends more than I value moving out of WhatsApp, and for what anyway? WhatsApp is perfect for our needs. If it becomes paid-only, we'll move out of it, but not before. I don't need dealing with this kind of nerdy crusade. And I need to have WhatsApp installed anyway for different family members [1] and the parent school groups and official comms from school. Sorry, but that suggestion is a no-go in the real world. It only works in the micro-bubble of HN. --- [1] Let me preempt your likely "but convince all of your family of using <thing> instead...". No. Just no.
aspectop 5mo ago
for insta and Facebook ok but for whatsapp they just wanna suck any kind of money they can. Soon whatsapp will be bloated with ads all over
- chistev 5mo ago
  Soon? They have ads already.
  - the_af 5mo ago
    Interesting. There are no ads for messaging. I only use WhatsApp for messages (individual and groups). I've never used status updates or any other nonsense (I don't even understand why one would want to do status updates, but some people seem to use them). All of this to say: ads are only in status updates and channels (no idea what this is, never used one) and apparently not in every region.
    - aspectop 5mo ago
      the channel’s in whatsapp is just so annoying, i have seen mostly channels are created based around promotion of their products no usecase and yeah no ads on WhatsApp till now
qqtt 5mo ago
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 revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising. Yes, in many ways Meta gets to have their cake and eat it too, because the ads are still there even with the plans, but this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay that they can invest in other ways outside of strictly advertising.
- qwertox 5mo ago
  > "if the product is free, you are the product" I feel like this is no longer true. You are now the product regardless of you paying for it or not.
- pertymcpert 5mo ago
  Agreed. Nothing wrong with charging for a product.
  - sunaookami 5mo ago
    You are paying with your data already.
- apsurd 5mo ago
  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.
  - scns 5mo ago
    > they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads Streaming services claiming prior art here.
torben-friis 5mo ago
I'd have been happy to pay for a WhatsApp-like service if they had not been acquired. Flawless service for like a decade, no complains. Only issue was the difficulty of moving between Android and iOS. Meta? Fuck off. We all know they're already doing awful stuff with our data, they've had more bugs last year than all of whatsapps previous history combined, and whatever price they request now is step one for enshittification.
sometimelurker 5mo ago
is meta low on $? why would they do this?
- Painsawman123 5mo ago
  after they introduced Community notes, it isn't far fetched to say that they're simply copying Twitter...
  - chistev 5mo ago
    Zuckerberg copying? Who would have thought.
- brcmthrowaway 5mo ago
  Paying FU money to folks creating dashboards takes a toll.
righthand 5mo ago
A lot of posters here are missing the part where people use Meta products to market their art, performance artists, visual artists, musician, digital entertainment artists, craftsmen, etc all rely on the network effect to be discovered. Until you can replace that then people wont just use email, txt their audience, etc. And just to say it is actually sad there is no alternative because most of those artists dont really gain a valuable network effect from posting there. But it is how younger unestablished peoples establish themselves as existing. There are entire comedy/music scenes that essentially require you to have an Instagram account.
ethanpil 5mo ago
Anyone here remember the early days of WhatsApp, pre-Facebook, when it required an annual subscription fee of $1?
- embedding-shape 5mo ago
  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.
  - angled 5mo ago
    Absolutely, I just linked to this in another comment, I couldn't easily find another story: https://www.techspot.com/news/63504-whatsapp-waves-goodbye-annual-subscription-fee-testing-ad.html https://www.techspot.com/news/63504-whatsapp-waves-goodbye-a...
  - alex1138 5mo ago
    20 billion dollars to steal people's phone numbers Anything Zuckerberg needs antitrust immediately
  - mjamesaustin 5mo ago
    A small annual subscription is a great way to add friction to bots. I truly wish every platform I used had one.
qingcharles 5mo ago
I've so far been unable to find these options in any of the apps in the USA. Anyone spotted them?
danpalmer 5mo ago
I use WhatsApp for almost all my communication with family and friends. I'm also happy to pay for things that improve my experience. ...but it's unclear what this subscription would give me. The announcement has no real details, the article is light on detail, and the WhatsApp website has no mention of this subscription. I get that it's hard. What I want is a good text and call app, and that's hard to charge for at scale. But every feature that Meta has added to justify charging (AI, stories, profiles, etc), makes the product worse for me and makes me less likely to pay for it. They're in a hard place.
kwanbix 5mo ago
Before Meta aquisition, I paid 1 dollar per year for WhatsApp. Now it iwl be 35.88.
- ablation 5mo ago
  I've never paid for it, and never will. You don't HAVE to subscribe to "WhatsApp Plus" you know.
chistev 5mo ago
Do you know of any successful business without a Meta presence? Is that really possible in this age? Really interested to know. They have a stranglehold on everything. It's inescapable.
- skybrian 5mo ago
  How about Costco?
tgrowazay 5mo ago
A link to the mirror that doesn’t force you to disable adblocker: https://archive.is/xGwsz https://archive.is/xGwsz
boredatoms 5mo ago
Does the subscription turn off ads?
- bastawhiz 5mo ago
  I looked for this in the article and I couldn't find any mention of it. I suspect no. And I suspect that's why it's not mentioned in the article: they think people won't notice.
- Cider9986 5mo ago
  Shameful reporting that this isn't mentioned.
odo1242 5mo ago
It sounds a lot like Discord Nitro
nicechianti 5mo ago
[dead]
notsydonia 5mo ago
This seems smart of them in the sense that many creator/website owners have lost significant traffic that Google used to send their way and so are reluctantly pivoting back to paying more attention to social - for discovery. But speaking as someone who deleted a high following FB page that I probably shouldn't have because the back end of it was so infuriating, I don't understand this offering. It seems like a lot of bling and clutter. Most people who need to use Meta for biz reasons want the same thing - live support that is not a bot or a human that may as well be a bot. And not to get too granular but if you've used IG lately, for example, you notice that trying to do anything on the back end (eg: set up up some boosted posts or schedule things) takes the user through a maze and sometimes you end up in the old legacy Facebook pages, which has links that don't relate to any of the contemporary features. It sounds minor but it essentially barely functions and each click to confirm something sends you to another section to confirm something else. You also need a FB page to do anything on an IG page and a tonne of other petty thwartings. The fact that their brand new subscriptions/Meta platform seems just as confusing is alarming. I don't know how a company with this much money can not design an un-hellish back end or offer reasonable customer support. Their A.I. monitoring is also completely off the chain, closing accounts and locking profiles for opaque reasons that cannot be questioned.
- NamlchakKhandro 5mo ago
  I feel like I can explain this away with what I imagine happened in most middle managers driven development companies: the most factorio-esque spaghetti decision driven sunk cost fallacy thing ever.
zemo 5mo ago
So who will buy their cursed campus when they collapse?
- abixb 5mo ago
  Maybe Oracle can acquire it back and put a few more giant hard-drive-inspired buildings there (it was orignally Sun Microsystems' campus).
arrty88 5mo ago
Time to delete these apps. They were novel like MySpace and live journal but now they make the wrong people rich with no value add
compounding_it 5mo ago
A new paid social media network with high privacy settings would defeat meta products quite easily. From what I understand, it costs around 27$ a year per user for Meta to run the business. At 5$ per month with limitations on size of your profile (like number of pictures), it would be quite easy to run a social media of this sort. This kinda of social media is what eventually everyone will move towards (and currently want). Small social circles, extremely private, and connections and discovery in very limited ways that allow you to maintain privacy and your 'inner' circle. Social media is here to stay, unfortunately. Meta, LinkedIn, X, I wouldn't invest in the long term.
- yalogin 5mo ago
  What exactly are privacy expectations of a social media app/network? Has that been quantified?
  - compounding_it 5mo ago
    No data collection for any other reason than security practices, and for reasons that pertain to public security (not necessarily legal). A 30 day retention policy would be more than enough. Without discovery, public profiles, advertising and usages targeted towards you engaging more with the platform, the data collection and telemetry becomes quite unnecessary. If you are paying for the usage (mostly server and development costs), your data need not be used for anything other than actually improving the product and security. Currently the data is purely to extract profits and keep you hooked. This is what they have made you believe social media is about. Its not. You aren't hooked on iMessage and FaceTime scrolling reels and wasting hours. It's actually used to connect with people.
- whiplash451 5mo ago
  > it costs around 27$ a year per user for Meta to run the business And a lot of this is probably spent maintaining the ad machine
- Sol- 5mo ago
  Do you really believe that, given all the failed social media competitors? The network effects seem too strong.
andrew_kwak 5mo ago
[dead]
przm 5mo ago
I’d genuinely pay for Instagram if it didn’t show me reels and slop content, and instead showed only content from people I follow
herf 5mo ago
Guess you can't pay to get end-to-end encryption back in Instagram DMs? They dropped it a couple weeks ago.
- unnouinceput 5mo ago
  was never end to end, was you to server and then server to other party. Meaning Zuky boi always had access to your messages in clear (and NSA + all other 3 letters agencies)
derencius 5mo ago
I was paying for the ads-free subscripton for instagram and I recently I canceled as a way to reduce social media usage. And the ad version of Instagram is so annoying that it is helping a lot more. If this new sub becomes a status signaling, it might work.
- brianmiddleton 5mo ago
  The article mentions that this is a subscription for additional features. It doesn't say anywhere that you won't get ads. I think the ads-free subscription option is only available in certain markets, like the UK.
HeartStrings 5mo ago
Thanks for the generous spyware offer, I’m just gonna keep using Signal.
rhubarbtree 5mo ago
I paid for a while, but they kept showing me crap in the feed rather than posts I wanted to see. Stupid videos etc. So I cancelled.
submeta 5mo ago
I cannot imagine that students, kids, or half the world where paying 3 usd a month is impossible, will keep using whatsapp when they have to pay a fee. They will look for alternatives immediately. Telegram? But actually this is a good move. I tried to convince my family and friends to use alternatives, without success. But now I see hope. Have stopped using FB and IG years ago, was stuck with WhatsApp because of half the world using it.
wg0 5mo ago
The fundamental problem is - users base is flattened out so are the ad revenues. Now we need something new to show to the shareholders and that is this.
rupatiwari25 5mo ago
WhatsApp feels like one of the few products where people might actually pay. It's become critical infrastructure for communication in many countries, not just another social app.
- nicce 5mo ago
  It is just a name. If it disappears, people can switch over for something else in a day that works similarly. Is it then critical?
  - rupatiwari25 5mo ago
    I don't mean irreplaceable. I mean it's become the default communication layer for a huge number of people, which gives it a level of importance beyond a typical social app.Sure, people would move. But the value isn't WhatsApp itself it's the fact that everyone you need to talk to is already there. That's what makes it hard to replace overnight.
- lou1306 5mo ago
  Well people _used_ to pay for it, in fact. Except it was 3 EUR/year rather than 3 EUR/month...
dabedee 5mo ago
It's very difficult to do business in Western Europe without Whatsapp. I have probably asked more than 60 people to switch to Signal and the social burden it introduces (i.e. asking a new acquaintance to install a new app) can have negative signalling effects (e.g. you don't adapt, create more work, why do you care so much about privacy, etc.) I personally abhore Facebook (and IG,Whatsapp) and don't want to use any of them; I have uninstalled/reinstalled Whatsapp many times. Out of practical concern, I now only use Whatsapp in business settings where it would create tension and create social awkwardness not to. But I dislike the fact that I do.
- dgellow 5mo ago
  Telegram is fairly common in Western Europe
  - thejackgoode 5mo ago
    .. which is a worse option for different reasons than WhatsApp
    - yurishimo 5mo ago
      It does have a nice Bot API though. For building personal stuff or just sharing between friends, the risks can be mitigated (imo).
      - dgellow 5mo ago
        It also has the best cross-platform chat UX since pretty much forever, and just a generally really well polished interface.
    - k4rli 5mo ago
      Okay, what are the reasons? It's difficult to see how Meta is in any way more trustworthy than the country which Telegram is from. I trust TG secret chats much more than Whatsapp's supposed e2e.
  - 5mo ago
a1371 5mo ago
> The new "Plus" plans are tailored to each individual app, with Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus focused more on social expression, while WhatsApp Plus focuses on personalization and messaging. If only Google Plus lived long enough to see this day...
zimpenfish 5mo ago
If these subscriptions gave you access to the relevant APIs (via something like IFTTT is fine), I'd be happy to pay. But if you take away even read-only API access to services[0], I'm a) not going to pay and b) going to stop using your services. [0] I really don't feel like converting my Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp accounts to the "business" variants just to get access to the APIs.
donbreo 5mo ago
Will there finally be an option to disable calls completely? If not, I ain't paying.
Lapsa 5mo ago
[dead]
lblock 5mo ago
I already did not know what was included in my google one account. Now I can not know what included in my meta one account :)
maxehmookau 5mo ago
Wait, I'm paying and I still get targeted ads shown to me? But I do get "super reactions"? Come on.
m000 5mo ago
I think this is all theatrics to avoid EU regulation. Subscriptions for Meta products have already been a thing in the EU for several months. It went a bit like this: - EU mandates that users should be given the option to opt out from non-essential cookies. - Meta responds by implementing an ad-free subscription-based model in EU, which allows them to dodge regulation. - EU of course sees through their scheme and prepares to sanction them. - Meta rolls-out subscriptions worldwide, so that it becomes harder for EU to claim that subscriptions were specifically created for dodging EU regulation.
egorfine 5mo ago
I 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.
- fsflover 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - egorfine 5mo ago
    > 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.
    - LtWorf 5mo ago
      > Guess how many of them will actually do it? That's how much they value your friendship then :)
      - jjulius 5mo ago
        This is getting down voted, but it's true. I've ditched those forms of social media, and haven't really had trouble keeping in touch with most people I'd like to keep in touch with, whether it's emails, calls, texts or regular meets/activities in meatspace. The people in your life who truly care about you will make a genuine effort to remain in touch with you. If people don't want to make that effort, why do I need to be connected to what they're doing every day?
abcd_f 5mo ago
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.
- mimischi 5mo ago
  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.
meszmate 5mo ago
So 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.
b3lvedere 5mo ago
I 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.
rickcarlino 5mo ago
Meta’s reputation has eroded so much that many will view this as an act of desperation rather than a chance to reframe social media. The idea of paying for social media to become the customer rather than the product has been both discussed and tried. There is such a deep lack of trust from years of bad deeds that I doubt anything positive will come out of this.
- baggachipz 5mo ago
  Not just that, but there's no mention of removing ads or tracking. So it sounds like people get to pay for the privilege of being the product on a platform which has degraded to the point of being absolutely useless.
  - skeeter2020 5mo ago
    I can't imagine the economics would work to support anything close to what they make from the ads & tracking model. They'd probably have to charge $39.99/month from everyone to compete.
    - zamadatix 5mo ago
      $196.2 B ad revenue / 3.58 B daily users (as the average rate over the year) comes out to < $5/month from everyone. Of course, the trick is you don't actually get "everyone". You get the users with more money, who are more valuable ad targets. Still, $39.99/m seems like it'd be pretty high.
hmokiguess 5mo ago
Reminds me of the Discord Nitro thing which is toxic and awful to deal with if you have to use it for anything serious.
lenerdenator 5mo ago
Tell ya what. Give me an absolute guarantee - legally-enforced - that you'll never share any of my data ever again (unless subpoenaed or warranted) and will stop using my news feed as an ad feed, and I might consider it. Fire Mark Zuckerberg into the stratosphere and I'll will you my worldly possessions.
annagio_ 5mo ago
And the award of most stupid company that somehow is still alive goes to Meta! There are people who will subscribe and its sad.
phplovesong 5mo ago
I cant see many paying for whatsapp or facebook/instagram. These are now taken for granted as being "free". Im pretty sure users would just migrate to signal/telegram/other if it ever became a paid service.
phplovesong 5mo ago
Facebook is so doomed. I recently logged in (after close to 10 years), and whooah the feed was wild. 90% was these weird pages having very sexual teasing shorts, or bikini girls / latex pants etc. None of the pages were something is had ever seen before, or even followed. The rest 9% was AI gen low qulity shorts, and the remaining 1% was actually from someone i did was friends with, but even thise seemes like some tool had generated them, as in "follow my new business page" etc. The facebook that once was seem to be totally gone by now, and im not even sure what it is anymore. I never got an instgram account, but i guess its the same low quality shit over there.
specproc 5mo ago
You know what feature I'd love for WhatsApp? Out-of-office. "Hi there, I am no longer using WhatsApp. To contact me, please..."
nkotov 5mo ago
I would be willing to pay for IG subscription that's ad-free. It's gotten hilariously terrible right now that every 3-4 stories has a 2-page ad with a button on it. It's gotten so bad to the point where I stopped checking stories.
- kigiri 5mo ago
  it's possible in europe: https://help.instagram.com/923021729404927/?helpref=uf_permalink&parent_cms_id=1931381923922281 https://help.instagram.com/923021729404927/?helpref=uf_perma... Subscribe on Facebook.com or Instagram.com: €5.99 per month for one account, plus €4 per month (or price in applicable local currency) for each additional account in the same Accounts Center
akulbe 5mo ago
Do subscriptions make the ads go away? If not, it's hard to see much value proposition in them.
sim04ful 5mo ago
I'm rather surprised it took Meta this long in the wake of X introducing subscription plans quite long ago now.
- hbn 5mo ago
  Like the article mentioned, they already did fast-follow subscription when X did it with the Meta Verified subscription
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
> For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things. I was hoping the article was about ad-free, "promoted/suggested" free, followers-only feed, paid subscription. That's the only thing I'm willing to pay for. (I closed by FB account nearly 10 years ago, but still have IG. WhatsApp is the most useful - private groups for friends/family.)
1970-01-01 5mo ago
"It is free and always will be" ... "social media is over" ... "Facebook Plus $4/month" What a joke.
mnls 5mo ago
Extremely funny. First the fact that Techcrunch asks for adblock disabling and secondly that Meta from all companies has the nerve to ask for subscriptions. All the data harvesting isn't enough? All the terrible "studies"? The fact that Meta still exists as a company is a valid proof of a failed civilization. Did I mention that their products are mediocre at best?
fortyseven 5mo ago
I remember when "Facebook Gold" used to be a joke.

290 points by tambourine_man 5mo ago

suddenlybananas 5mo ago

It's a real shame private messaging has ended up being almost exclusively closed-source without any kind of open API.

jjordan 5mo ago
How did we let this happen? We used to have open protocols, apps like Pidgin that would bring multiple chat clients together under one interface, IRC, Skype P2P, etc. etc. Was it spammers that caused this mass migration to ever more closed platforms?
- tim-projects 5mo ago
  They all still exist, but we don't have the collective courage to use them when it means you might miss a status update from your friends.
- NegativeK 5mo ago
  The vast majority of people aren't aware of open versus closed protocols. If enough people they want to communicate with are using it to counterbalance how frustrating it is, they'll use it. It happened because businesses realized there's profit in lock in, and they threw resources at it. Open protocols are still there and still used, but we're sad because the smaller userbase is frustrating. Just like how people still publish human written content to personal blogs, but they're proportionally non-existent.
- WarmWash 5mo ago
  Closed platforms have salaried teams of workers and salaried teams of marketers. Often they usually have user friendly support too. Open-source always has a certain level of "jank" that tends to decimate interest from common folks.
regexorcist 5mo ago
In the EU at least WhatsApp is being forced to interop with other messaging apps. I believe it's being rolled out at the moment.
- tgv 5mo ago
  Yeah, there are precisely two apps that can exchange with Whatsapp: one is still in beta, the other is by invite only, and for "professional networking" or something like that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746476
carlosjobim 5mo ago
The world still runs on email.

karel-3d 5mo ago

I can't imagine paying for Facebook but I can imagine paying for WhatsApp. It's a great app that's for free and has no ads.

canyp 5mo ago

Seems absolutely unhinged. I don't know who'd pay to doomscroll AI-generated slop and fake news. $49.99 for the top plan, lol.

DANmode 5mo ago
But they know who.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
fullshark 5mo ago
All I can think of is people who need those accounts for professional reasons (i.e. public relations)

rossjudson 5mo ago

I think that subscribing to another person's life prevents you from living your own. Also, "Everything is Lies, I Guess".

YesBox 5mo ago

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.

fontain 5mo ago
The main problem is that premium subscriptions don’t generate that much revenue when compared to ads alone. The users who pay are the most valuable users to advertisers and the users who don’t pay are the least valuable. Discord generates about $1 in revenue per user compared to Facebook at closer to $100. For Discord at $1 per user, any subscription that’s a few dollars or more is probably paying for the lost advertising revenue, but it wouldn’t translate for Meta so they aren’t including ad free which drastically reduces the value. I’ll be surprised if Meta’s subscriptions are as popular as Discord’s without being advertising free. Cosmetics are liked amongst Discord’s audience of nerds, but not Meta’s audience of normal people. Very interested to see how this works out for Meta. Since they’re not excluding ads, it’s basically free money, so they may as well offer these subscriptions.
- rhines 5mo ago
  I wish these companies didn't need to make billions in revenue. There's no reason why a small company couldn't manage a site like Discord, make enough to pay their developers, and be successful. But instead every company needs to become a unicorn and pay investors billions.
- lukeschlather 5mo ago
  I actually cancelled my Discord subscription because they've gradually been adding more intrusive ads and subscriptions don't protect you from ads.
- Marsymars 5mo ago
  > The users who pay are the most valuable users to advertisers and the users who don’t pay are the least valuable. But also, definitionally, the users who are willing to pay the most are the ones who the see ads as the biggest anti-value (i.e. cost) to themselves - so they'll be the ones most likely to not use the service if they're not given an ad-free option - cutting down the average user value anyway.

j45 5mo ago

Maybe they could sell privacy/encrypted messages in the subscription after removing it.

Animats 5mo ago

"It's free and always will be" - Facebook

ravenstine 5mo ago
Whenever companies make statements like this and then people act surprised when they backtrack, I can't help but think of a bit of my favorite dialogue from Star Trek Enterprise. HARRIS: We had an arrangement! KRELL: You did what I wanted. I don't need you anymore. HARRIS: You agreed that both our governments would benefit if the two of us worked together. KRELL: And you believed me.
avaer 5mo ago
"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg
- alex1138 5mo ago
  Followed by him overwriting people's email addresses and constantly fucking around with privacy settings Ohhhh but he was young! Be easy on him (/s)
  - shevy-java 5mo ago
    Not only that, but Spybook aka Facebook, also connected offline information, e. g. I think if I recall it was dental care or something like that. I don't remember the year (edit: a google search led me to this article from 2018, but I could swear this was several years before that - see https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43668607 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43668607), but it was scary that they go and sniff for ALL data they can find about people. This brings mega-corporation to a new level of Evil. And I haven't even gotten to talk about Google here, yet ...
dataflow 5mo ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-always-be-a-version-of-facebook-that-is-free.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-a...

meta_ai_x 5mo ago

Friendly reminder: HN opinion about this will be completely-out-of-touch with reality

alex1138 5mo ago
What reality? The reality is almost nobody likes using Facebook (and many people can't anyway because they get banned while the racist thing or whatever they report never gets taken down) because it doesn't work, messages are hit and miss, nobody sees any status updates, and it's 20 ads per post

pj_mukh 5mo ago

I 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 more". Let me pay you to give me just the vitamins, and none of the sugar.

kleton 5mo ago
> only my friends' status updates I think that is the Feed's tab, though I have not used the blue app in a long time
tim-projects 5mo ago
Pay each of your friends $50 one per month, to switch to signal. Problem solved
- freedomben 5mo ago
  $50 per month for unlimited, not $50 per friend, so your solution only works if you only have 1 friend, so it would work for me (self-deprecating joke) but may not for GP.
  - lostlogin 5mo ago
    > Pay each of your friends $50 one per month It an outlay of $50 a moth. Probably better to pay 50/number of friends though.
    - rkomorn 5mo ago
      $50 a moth? How about just a lightbulb and an open window?
      - lostlogin 5mo ago

qweiopqweiop 5mo ago

Those features sound so narcissistic to me

iLoveOncall 5mo ago

It's insane that those subscriptions don't remove ads. That's the only thing I would even remotely consider paying for on any meta product. In the current state those subscriptions will just show your friends that you're a huge loser who's willing to pay for custom backgrounds.

fontain 5mo ago
Unfortunately, Meta’s ad business is so effective that they would need to charge hundreds of dollars per year for an ad free service just to keep revenue stable. I suspect anything less than $25 per month would be loss making for them.
- timpera 5mo ago
  They do offer a €8/month ad-free Instagram subscription in the EU. I'm subscribed, it's pretty cool.
  - Cider9986 5mo ago
    If you used Android you can get this for free or just use it on the web with an adblocker.
- chistev 5mo ago
  And even then, they wouldn't remove ads since they'd want to add to their profits!
- mrweasel 5mo ago
  The last numbers I saw are almost 10 years old now, and then it was $65 per year in profit for a Facebook user, in the US, a little less for someone in the EU and almost nothing in most other places. Are there new numbers that one can access? I can imagine the value has gone up, but hundreds of dollars seem like a lot.
figglestar 5mo ago
People who pay subscriptions are exactly the sort of people you want to advertise to the most since they've signaled they have money. It's like flashing a big wad of cash in a seedy bar.

SilverElfin 5mo ago

Who is this for? Is it just a way to monetize dying platforms before they inevitably become worthless?

dreamcompiler 5mo ago
The last stage of Doctorow's enshittification cycle is "Then, they die." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

princevegeta89 5mo ago

Interesting. Instagram and Facebook both seem to be filled with AI-generated fake crap today. Even the so-called news items that I see there seem to be fake. I don't even know who would be subscribing. Especially to Facebook as of today.... It is filled with pretty low quality content overall. On the other side, WhatsApp has been getting filled with a lot of bloat. And even today, I find it confusing to use communities in WhatsApp. The entire navigation and experience around that feature confused me a few times. There's been more and more push towards the AI crap on WhatsApp as well. The only good thing about WhatsApp is, it is used by everyone that I know, so I can connect with them pretty easily and make calls, etc. I hope they don't enshittify it too much to the point where I'll go and use Signal full time.

shevy-java 5mo ago
> Instagram and Facebook both seem to be filled with AI-generated fake crap today. Also youtube, unfortunately. Google does not understand that AI is slowly killing youtube. I am an expert cat video person, so noticing AI slop is not so hard, but it takes a few seconds (e. g. a mother cat punishing the young cat for "overreach" - the way how the AI video insinuated reality was of course completely false, AI spam slop that lies to real humans). I'd rather wish Google would not waste my time (then again, why am I still using youtube ... one day I'll be degoogled for good. The sooner Google is gone from this planet, the better.)
- princevegeta89 5mo ago
  And also, pretty much any internet-generated social media content, basically. Reddit is another classic example. If you look at many posts in subreddits containing a huge number of users, you could easily tell it is AI-generated, especially these idiotic "Am I the asshole" posts or "askreddit" posts and any other posts involving interesting situations. Not just that. Even comments, some of those are basically AI crap, cleverly disguised as real users. It is such a waste, honestly. AI has brought upon us a low-quality world to live in, out of nowhere. This is such a pity.
- CuriouslyC 5mo ago
  Shorts are a dumpster fire in terms of fake content. Full length videos are a lot better, as YT has been cracking down on AI generated regular videos, though there are still a fair number of AI narrated/scripted videos and deepfakes of prolific interviewees.

shevy-java 5mo ago

> In an announcement, Meta’s head of product, Naomi Gleit, noted that “more fun features” will be added in the future. Thank you - I don't want any of that. What exactly are "fun" features, anyway? Do they take away from my time?

yokoprime 5mo ago

That's not happening

flufluflufluffy 5mo ago

> There are also other features like Super Heart animated reactions for Stories, custom app icons, customizable fonts for profile bios, and access to additional pins for your profile. Ahh, remember the days of livejournal/myspace, where we got all of those “features” for free because your profile is literally a fucking webpage

AlienRobot 5mo ago
Imagine paying for the privilege to display an animated icon. I blame Bethesda and their horse armor for this.

drnick1 5mo ago

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.

Starman_Jones 5mo ago
The hardest part about not using Meta products is deciding not to use meta products. When I stopped using Facebook, I had resigned myself to spending a lot of time and effort to stay in touch with my friends and family. As it turns out, all I had to do was mention that I was using Signal, and the people closest to me, then pretty close to me, then kinda close to me all started using that too. The network effect cuts both ways.
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  It’s amazing how strong the Meta FOMO is. I stopped using Facebook over 10 years ago and never even opened Instagram or WhatsApp, and I really am not missing out on anything in life. My actual friends know how to contact me and they do! And it’s really not that hard to say “Sorry I don’t have Whats App, just call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.” If someone is prepared to not be my friend because they only want to communicate via a Meta app, then I don’t see why I’d want them as a friend.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - doom2 5mo ago
    The annoying thing is how many businesses and communities rely on Meta platforms instead of their own websites and sometimes it's the only way to contact them. If I want to check if the small neighborhood grocery has something in stock? No phone, only Instagram DMs. When I was on vacation abroad and wanted to see if an out of the way farmers market was still happening despite rain? Only Facebook. The good thing is that it isn't everywhere: Taiwan, Japan, and China usually have apps like Line or WeChat as options. In Europe there's more usage of WhatsApp (which is still Meta owned but also not social media). But in the US (and countries in the Americas), I still see a heavy reliance on Instagram and Facebook.

CuriouslyC 5mo ago

Honestly don't know how Meta keeps customers. Facebook is hanging on for dear life with geriatrics and marketplace. Insta is a cesspool of fake content that needs to die in a dumpster fire. Not sure why you'd use WhatsApp over alternatives like Signal now. It's almost like the people still using Meta services are metaphorical bots or low agency human beings.

derwiki 5mo ago
WhatsApp: all school stuff seems to be coordinated over WhatsApp
mrweasel 5mo ago
Yes, you could use Signal, but my take is that people don't want yet another account for something. Facebook works and it has all the other activities people need to keep track of. For most you wouldn't be replacing Facebook or WhatsApp with Signal, you'd add Signal to an already busy phone. People don't care about the platform, they just want shit to work and for better or worse, Facebook works for them.

lolive 5mo ago

I barely use all those services. But I wonder how i would react if Reddit became a paywall.

chistev 5mo ago
With the constant Enshittification. It's only a matter of time.
- lolive 5mo ago
  Will usenet resurrect from there? As usual the BIG issue is the search engine.

TZubiri 5mo ago

It's time for that EPS to turn into BV baby!

pioyi 5mo ago

Just use email...

cryo32 5mo ago
This is a brilliant take. I was talking to friends the other day and we were reminiscing about the old days where you'd email and phone people. And if there was a family event you'd shove a quite write up and some photos on your personal web site and email the links out to people. Some parts of the family would mail a newsletter around periodically. We decided to do the same again.
tapoxi 5mo ago
My Mom (70s, retired special ed teacher) got the family on Signal and it's a breeze to do video calls or send pictures/messages to people. They occasionally have a donation popup but it's one of the easiest and least intrusive programs I've ever used, and it just works.
the_af 5mo ago
Email is not chat and it's certainly not Instagram. Your suggestion will only work for people who are not really users of WhatsApp or Instagram.
- jjulius 5mo ago
  No, the suggestion "only" works for those of your friends who truly value you. If they want to connect with you, they'll find a way. If they don't, they won't.
  - the_af 5mo ago
    Ah, yes, "truly value". The measure of how much one is valued is whether people are willing to move out of a chat app due to some sort of nerd principle. Needless to say, I disagree. I value my (various groups of) friends more than I value moving out of WhatsApp, and for what anyway? WhatsApp is perfect for our needs. If it becomes paid-only, we'll move out of it, but not before. I don't need dealing with this kind of nerdy crusade. And I need to have WhatsApp installed anyway for different family members [1] and the parent school groups and official comms from school. Sorry, but that suggestion is a no-go in the real world. It only works in the micro-bubble of HN. --- [1] Let me preempt your likely "but convince all of your family of using <thing> instead...". No. Just no.

aspectop 5mo ago

for insta and Facebook ok but for whatsapp they just wanna suck any kind of money they can. Soon whatsapp will be bloated with ads all over

chistev 5mo ago
Soon? They have ads already.
- the_af 5mo ago
  Interesting. There are no ads for messaging. I only use WhatsApp for messages (individual and groups). I've never used status updates or any other nonsense (I don't even understand why one would want to do status updates, but some people seem to use them). All of this to say: ads are only in status updates and channels (no idea what this is, never used one) and apparently not in every region.
  - aspectop 5mo ago
    the channel’s in whatsapp is just so annoying, i have seen mostly channels are created based around promotion of their products no usecase and yeah no ads on WhatsApp till now

qqtt 5mo ago

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 revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising. Yes, in many ways Meta gets to have their cake and eat it too, because the ads are still there even with the plans, but this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay that they can invest in other ways outside of strictly advertising.

qwertox 5mo ago
> "if the product is free, you are the product" I feel like this is no longer true. You are now the product regardless of you paying for it or not.
pertymcpert 5mo ago
Agreed. Nothing wrong with charging for a product.
- sunaookami 5mo ago
  You are paying with your data already.
apsurd 5mo ago
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.
- scns 5mo ago
  > they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads Streaming services claiming prior art here.

torben-friis 5mo ago

I'd have been happy to pay for a WhatsApp-like service if they had not been acquired. Flawless service for like a decade, no complains. Only issue was the difficulty of moving between Android and iOS. Meta? Fuck off. We all know they're already doing awful stuff with our data, they've had more bugs last year than all of whatsapps previous history combined, and whatever price they request now is step one for enshittification.

sometimelurker 5mo ago

is meta low on $? why would they do this?

Painsawman123 5mo ago
after they introduced Community notes, it isn't far fetched to say that they're simply copying Twitter...
- chistev 5mo ago
  Zuckerberg copying? Who would have thought.
brcmthrowaway 5mo ago
Paying FU money to folks creating dashboards takes a toll.

righthand 5mo ago

A lot of posters here are missing the part where people use Meta products to market their art, performance artists, visual artists, musician, digital entertainment artists, craftsmen, etc all rely on the network effect to be discovered. Until you can replace that then people wont just use email, txt their audience, etc. And just to say it is actually sad there is no alternative because most of those artists dont really gain a valuable network effect from posting there. But it is how younger unestablished peoples establish themselves as existing. There are entire comedy/music scenes that essentially require you to have an Instagram account.

ethanpil 5mo ago

Anyone here remember the early days of WhatsApp, pre-Facebook, when it required an annual subscription fee of $1?

embedding-shape 5mo ago
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.
- angled 5mo ago
  Absolutely, I just linked to this in another comment, I couldn't easily find another story: https://www.techspot.com/news/63504-whatsapp-waves-goodbye-annual-subscription-fee-testing-ad.html https://www.techspot.com/news/63504-whatsapp-waves-goodbye-a...
- alex1138 5mo ago
  20 billion dollars to steal people's phone numbers Anything Zuckerberg needs antitrust immediately
- mjamesaustin 5mo ago
  A small annual subscription is a great way to add friction to bots. I truly wish every platform I used had one.

qingcharles 5mo ago

I've so far been unable to find these options in any of the apps in the USA. Anyone spotted them?

danpalmer 5mo ago

I use WhatsApp for almost all my communication with family and friends. I'm also happy to pay for things that improve my experience. ...but it's unclear what this subscription would give me. The announcement has no real details, the article is light on detail, and the WhatsApp website has no mention of this subscription. I get that it's hard. What I want is a good text and call app, and that's hard to charge for at scale. But every feature that Meta has added to justify charging (AI, stories, profiles, etc), makes the product worse for me and makes me less likely to pay for it. They're in a hard place.

kwanbix 5mo ago

Before Meta aquisition, I paid 1 dollar per year for WhatsApp. Now it iwl be 35.88.

ablation 5mo ago
I've never paid for it, and never will. You don't HAVE to subscribe to "WhatsApp Plus" you know.

chistev 5mo ago

Do you know of any successful business without a Meta presence? Is that really possible in this age? Really interested to know. They have a stranglehold on everything. It's inescapable.

skybrian 5mo ago
How about Costco?

tgrowazay 5mo ago

A link to the mirror that doesn’t force you to disable adblocker: https://archive.is/xGwsz https://archive.is/xGwsz

boredatoms 5mo ago

Does the subscription turn off ads?

bastawhiz 5mo ago
I looked for this in the article and I couldn't find any mention of it. I suspect no. And I suspect that's why it's not mentioned in the article: they think people won't notice.
Cider9986 5mo ago
Shameful reporting that this isn't mentioned.

odo1242 5mo ago

It sounds a lot like Discord Nitro

nicechianti 5mo ago

[dead]

notsydonia 5mo ago

This seems smart of them in the sense that many creator/website owners have lost significant traffic that Google used to send their way and so are reluctantly pivoting back to paying more attention to social - for discovery. But speaking as someone who deleted a high following FB page that I probably shouldn't have because the back end of it was so infuriating, I don't understand this offering. It seems like a lot of bling and clutter. Most people who need to use Meta for biz reasons want the same thing - live support that is not a bot or a human that may as well be a bot. And not to get too granular but if you've used IG lately, for example, you notice that trying to do anything on the back end (eg: set up up some boosted posts or schedule things) takes the user through a maze and sometimes you end up in the old legacy Facebook pages, which has links that don't relate to any of the contemporary features. It sounds minor but it essentially barely functions and each click to confirm something sends you to another section to confirm something else. You also need a FB page to do anything on an IG page and a tonne of other petty thwartings. The fact that their brand new subscriptions/Meta platform seems just as confusing is alarming. I don't know how a company with this much money can not design an un-hellish back end or offer reasonable customer support. Their A.I. monitoring is also completely off the chain, closing accounts and locking profiles for opaque reasons that cannot be questioned.

NamlchakKhandro 5mo ago
I feel like I can explain this away with what I imagine happened in most middle managers driven development companies: the most factorio-esque spaghetti decision driven sunk cost fallacy thing ever.

zemo 5mo ago

So who will buy their cursed campus when they collapse?

abixb 5mo ago
Maybe Oracle can acquire it back and put a few more giant hard-drive-inspired buildings there (it was orignally Sun Microsystems' campus).

arrty88 5mo ago

Time to delete these apps. They were novel like MySpace and live journal but now they make the wrong people rich with no value add

compounding_it 5mo ago

A new paid social media network with high privacy settings would defeat meta products quite easily. From what I understand, it costs around 27$ a year per user for Meta to run the business. At 5$ per month with limitations on size of your profile (like number of pictures), it would be quite easy to run a social media of this sort. This kinda of social media is what eventually everyone will move towards (and currently want). Small social circles, extremely private, and connections and discovery in very limited ways that allow you to maintain privacy and your 'inner' circle. Social media is here to stay, unfortunately. Meta, LinkedIn, X, I wouldn't invest in the long term.

yalogin 5mo ago
What exactly are privacy expectations of a social media app/network? Has that been quantified?
- compounding_it 5mo ago
  No data collection for any other reason than security practices, and for reasons that pertain to public security (not necessarily legal). A 30 day retention policy would be more than enough. Without discovery, public profiles, advertising and usages targeted towards you engaging more with the platform, the data collection and telemetry becomes quite unnecessary. If you are paying for the usage (mostly server and development costs), your data need not be used for anything other than actually improving the product and security. Currently the data is purely to extract profits and keep you hooked. This is what they have made you believe social media is about. Its not. You aren't hooked on iMessage and FaceTime scrolling reels and wasting hours. It's actually used to connect with people.
whiplash451 5mo ago
> it costs around 27$ a year per user for Meta to run the business And a lot of this is probably spent maintaining the ad machine
Sol- 5mo ago
Do you really believe that, given all the failed social media competitors? The network effects seem too strong.

andrew_kwak 5mo ago

[dead]

przm 5mo ago

I’d genuinely pay for Instagram if it didn’t show me reels and slop content, and instead showed only content from people I follow

herf 5mo ago

Guess you can't pay to get end-to-end encryption back in Instagram DMs? They dropped it a couple weeks ago.

unnouinceput 5mo ago
was never end to end, was you to server and then server to other party. Meaning Zuky boi always had access to your messages in clear (and NSA + all other 3 letters agencies)

derencius 5mo ago

I was paying for the ads-free subscripton for instagram and I recently I canceled as a way to reduce social media usage. And the ad version of Instagram is so annoying that it is helping a lot more. If this new sub becomes a status signaling, it might work.

brianmiddleton 5mo ago
The article mentions that this is a subscription for additional features. It doesn't say anywhere that you won't get ads. I think the ads-free subscription option is only available in certain markets, like the UK.

HeartStrings 5mo ago

Thanks for the generous spyware offer, I’m just gonna keep using Signal.

rhubarbtree 5mo ago

I paid for a while, but they kept showing me crap in the feed rather than posts I wanted to see. Stupid videos etc. So I cancelled.

submeta 5mo ago

I cannot imagine that students, kids, or half the world where paying 3 usd a month is impossible, will keep using whatsapp when they have to pay a fee. They will look for alternatives immediately. Telegram? But actually this is a good move. I tried to convince my family and friends to use alternatives, without success. But now I see hope. Have stopped using FB and IG years ago, was stuck with WhatsApp because of half the world using it.

wg0 5mo ago

The fundamental problem is - users base is flattened out so are the ad revenues. Now we need something new to show to the shareholders and that is this.

rupatiwari25 5mo ago

WhatsApp feels like one of the few products where people might actually pay. It's become critical infrastructure for communication in many countries, not just another social app.

nicce 5mo ago
It is just a name. If it disappears, people can switch over for something else in a day that works similarly. Is it then critical?
- rupatiwari25 5mo ago
  I don't mean irreplaceable. I mean it's become the default communication layer for a huge number of people, which gives it a level of importance beyond a typical social app.Sure, people would move. But the value isn't WhatsApp itself it's the fact that everyone you need to talk to is already there. That's what makes it hard to replace overnight.
lou1306 5mo ago
Well people _used_ to pay for it, in fact. Except it was 3 EUR/year rather than 3 EUR/month...

dabedee 5mo ago

It's very difficult to do business in Western Europe without Whatsapp. I have probably asked more than 60 people to switch to Signal and the social burden it introduces (i.e. asking a new acquaintance to install a new app) can have negative signalling effects (e.g. you don't adapt, create more work, why do you care so much about privacy, etc.) I personally abhore Facebook (and IG,Whatsapp) and don't want to use any of them; I have uninstalled/reinstalled Whatsapp many times. Out of practical concern, I now only use Whatsapp in business settings where it would create tension and create social awkwardness not to. But I dislike the fact that I do.

dgellow 5mo ago
Telegram is fairly common in Western Europe
- thejackgoode 5mo ago
  .. which is a worse option for different reasons than WhatsApp
  - yurishimo 5mo ago
    It does have a nice Bot API though. For building personal stuff or just sharing between friends, the risks can be mitigated (imo).
    - dgellow 5mo ago
      It also has the best cross-platform chat UX since pretty much forever, and just a generally really well polished interface.
  - k4rli 5mo ago
    Okay, what are the reasons? It's difficult to see how Meta is in any way more trustworthy than the country which Telegram is from. I trust TG secret chats much more than Whatsapp's supposed e2e.
- 5mo ago

a1371 5mo ago

> The new "Plus" plans are tailored to each individual app, with Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus focused more on social expression, while WhatsApp Plus focuses on personalization and messaging. If only Google Plus lived long enough to see this day...

zimpenfish 5mo ago

If these subscriptions gave you access to the relevant APIs (via something like IFTTT is fine), I'd be happy to pay. But if you take away even read-only API access to services[0], I'm a) not going to pay and b) going to stop using your services. [0] I really don't feel like converting my Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp accounts to the "business" variants just to get access to the APIs.

donbreo 5mo ago

Will there finally be an option to disable calls completely? If not, I ain't paying.

Lapsa 5mo ago

[dead]

lblock 5mo ago

I already did not know what was included in my google one account. Now I can not know what included in my meta one account :)

maxehmookau 5mo ago

Wait, I'm paying and I still get targeted ads shown to me? But I do get "super reactions"? Come on.

m000 5mo ago

I think this is all theatrics to avoid EU regulation. Subscriptions for Meta products have already been a thing in the EU for several months. It went a bit like this: - EU mandates that users should be given the option to opt out from non-essential cookies. - Meta responds by implementing an ad-free subscription-based model in EU, which allows them to dodge regulation. - EU of course sees through their scheme and prepares to sanction them. - Meta rolls-out subscriptions worldwide, so that it becomes harder for EU to claim that subscriptions were specifically created for dodging EU regulation.

egorfine 5mo ago

I 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.

fsflover 5mo ago
> 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.
- egorfine 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - LtWorf 5mo ago
    > Guess how many of them will actually do it? That's how much they value your friendship then :)
    - jjulius 5mo ago
      This is getting down voted, but it's true. I've ditched those forms of social media, and haven't really had trouble keeping in touch with most people I'd like to keep in touch with, whether it's emails, calls, texts or regular meets/activities in meatspace. The people in your life who truly care about you will make a genuine effort to remain in touch with you. If people don't want to make that effort, why do I need to be connected to what they're doing every day?

abcd_f 5mo ago

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.

mimischi 5mo ago
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.

meszmate 5mo ago

So 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.

b3lvedere 5mo ago

I 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.

rickcarlino 5mo ago

Meta’s reputation has eroded so much that many will view this as an act of desperation rather than a chance to reframe social media. The idea of paying for social media to become the customer rather than the product has been both discussed and tried. There is such a deep lack of trust from years of bad deeds that I doubt anything positive will come out of this.

baggachipz 5mo ago
Not just that, but there's no mention of removing ads or tracking. So it sounds like people get to pay for the privilege of being the product on a platform which has degraded to the point of being absolutely useless.
- skeeter2020 5mo ago
  I can't imagine the economics would work to support anything close to what they make from the ads & tracking model. They'd probably have to charge $39.99/month from everyone to compete.
  - zamadatix 5mo ago
    $196.2 B ad revenue / 3.58 B daily users (as the average rate over the year) comes out to < $5/month from everyone. Of course, the trick is you don't actually get "everyone". You get the users with more money, who are more valuable ad targets. Still, $39.99/m seems like it'd be pretty high.

hmokiguess 5mo ago

Reminds me of the Discord Nitro thing which is toxic and awful to deal with if you have to use it for anything serious.

lenerdenator 5mo ago

Tell ya what. Give me an absolute guarantee - legally-enforced - that you'll never share any of my data ever again (unless subpoenaed or warranted) and will stop using my news feed as an ad feed, and I might consider it. Fire Mark Zuckerberg into the stratosphere and I'll will you my worldly possessions.

annagio_ 5mo ago

And the award of most stupid company that somehow is still alive goes to Meta! There are people who will subscribe and its sad.

phplovesong 5mo ago

I cant see many paying for whatsapp or facebook/instagram. These are now taken for granted as being "free". Im pretty sure users would just migrate to signal/telegram/other if it ever became a paid service.

phplovesong 5mo ago

Facebook is so doomed. I recently logged in (after close to 10 years), and whooah the feed was wild. 90% was these weird pages having very sexual teasing shorts, or bikini girls / latex pants etc. None of the pages were something is had ever seen before, or even followed. The rest 9% was AI gen low qulity shorts, and the remaining 1% was actually from someone i did was friends with, but even thise seemes like some tool had generated them, as in "follow my new business page" etc. The facebook that once was seem to be totally gone by now, and im not even sure what it is anymore. I never got an instgram account, but i guess its the same low quality shit over there.

specproc 5mo ago

You know what feature I'd love for WhatsApp? Out-of-office. "Hi there, I am no longer using WhatsApp. To contact me, please..."

nkotov 5mo ago

I would be willing to pay for IG subscription that's ad-free. It's gotten hilariously terrible right now that every 3-4 stories has a 2-page ad with a button on it. It's gotten so bad to the point where I stopped checking stories.

kigiri 5mo ago
it's possible in europe: https://help.instagram.com/923021729404927/?helpref=uf_permalink&parent_cms_id=1931381923922281 https://help.instagram.com/923021729404927/?helpref=uf_perma... Subscribe on Facebook.com or Instagram.com: €5.99 per month for one account, plus €4 per month (or price in applicable local currency) for each additional account in the same Accounts Center

akulbe 5mo ago

Do subscriptions make the ads go away? If not, it's hard to see much value proposition in them.

sim04ful 5mo ago

I'm rather surprised it took Meta this long in the wake of X introducing subscription plans quite long ago now.

hbn 5mo ago
Like the article mentioned, they already did fast-follow subscription when X did it with the Meta Verified subscription

insane_dreamer 5mo ago

> For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things. I was hoping the article was about ad-free, "promoted/suggested" free, followers-only feed, paid subscription. That's the only thing I'm willing to pay for. (I closed by FB account nearly 10 years ago, but still have IG. WhatsApp is the most useful - private groups for friends/family.)

1970-01-01 5mo ago

"It is free and always will be" ... "social media is over" ... "Facebook Plus $4/month" What a joke.

mnls 5mo ago

Extremely funny. First the fact that Techcrunch asks for adblock disabling and secondly that Meta from all companies has the nerve to ask for subscriptions. All the data harvesting isn't enough? All the terrible "studies"? The fact that Meta still exists as a company is a valid proof of a failed civilization. Did I mention that their products are mediocre at best?

fortyseven 5mo ago

I remember when "Facebook Gold" used to be a joke.