11 ms·

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 kin

by qqtt 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
Agreed. Nothing wrong with charging for a product.
- sunaookami 4mo ago
  You are paying with your data already.
apsurd 4mo 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 4mo ago
  > they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads Streaming services claiming prior art here.
  - apsurd 4mo ago
    I just remembered there’s a black mirror episode about this. The paid subscription evolution by a “health tech” startup let’s say. I won’t give away the plot, but it’s so realistically absurd it’s sad, hilarious and terrifying all at once.
    - abound 4mo ago
      For those who might want to watch it, the episode is called "Common People", and it's a pretty brutal one.
    - moron4hire 4mo ago
      I was just watching that episode literally now and had to nope out of it halfway through because it was making me sick to my stomach.
  - kps 4mo ago
    Too young to remember cable TV?
  - blitzar 4mo ago
    Sounds like my Amazon Prime subscription - now with more Ads.
  - vincnetas 4mo ago
    cable TV would like to have a word with you :)
- micromacrofoot 4mo ago
  Yeah this is the worst, never pay for something that has ads. It's teaching these companies it's ok.
- zeristor 4mo ago
  Pray they don’t change the terms a second time.
- avd201 4mo ago
  If you don't pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you'd pay for the product.
  - doctorwho42 4mo ago
    Eh, and Microsoft has shown that even if you pay they will still fuck with the product and . make it worse
- komali2 4mo ago
  It seems like there's no solution, then: companies will always chase the next dollar that allows them to exceed growth expectations on the earnings call. It seems like no matter what, anti-user behavior in pursuit of profit is inevitable. Is there a solution to this?
  - apsurd 4mo ago
    well Apple is stated as an easy counter example. They charge money for premium hardware and software. everything else is downstream. So while they could squeeze at every possible opportunity, they are less incentivized to abuse the relationship because their core proposition is: you pay money for our premium hardware and software. it’s imperfect but contrasts this with the modern approach of grow at all costs, light money on fire and punt entirely on how to ever make money. it usually doesn’t end well for customers.
    - circularfoyers 4mo ago
      Which sadly appears to not even be holding for them now that they decided to start displaying ads on their App Store.
      - cocoto 4mo ago
        Do not forget the new recents ads in Apple Maps.
  - foxylad 4mo ago
    The golden age of the internet was when it was an enthusiast's space. It is now almost entirely a corporate space, where the remaining enthusiasts' content is scraped 100K times a day and sold without attribution by the corporates. The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and Meta charging may create another wave of converts there. It has a lot of growth pains to endure yet, but the ability to painlessly spin up your own instance could be very attractive to young people looking for their own non-corporate spaces on the internet. We may also see some renewal via large companies (Meta in particular) imploding, from mismanagement and disenchanted users. My experience marketing a new product is that online advertising is completely ineffective now the web is filled with slop, no matter how well targeted it is. We've recently pivoted to optimise for word-of-mouth with orders of magnitude better results. I think any adtech company without a solid alternative profit stream is in for a rough ride (and no, AI is not a solid profit stream for anyone but Nvidia).
- windexh8er 4mo ago
  This is just a copy of the YouTube model, to your point. It's not that you're going to get a premier experience. It's that you'll be spared from full enshittification. Only tech bros could possibly think making the default subscription level so bad that it would drive revenue. But here we are.
- thayne 4mo ago
  From what I can tell, that's already the case for these subscriptions. They give you some extra stuff but you're still getting ads, and they are still collecting your data
timoth3y 4mo ago
> "if the product is free, you are the product" This is not true. You are the product whether you are paying or not. If the company thinks they can make money by selling your data/attention/access, they will do so. Paying them does not stop them from monetizing you. These new paid tiers will be slowly enshitified just like most modern paid plans.
- anon35 4mo ago
  You seem to be attacking a different statement that no one says: "if the product isn't free, you aren't the product". There's no "if and only if" in the maxim. Pretty sure you agree that if the product is free, the company is definitely getting value by monetizing something else of yours. It very much is true as written.
  - the_af 4mo ago
    From a formal logic standpoint, you're correct. But the context of the parent's and grandparent's comments was (paraphrased) "if you don't pay, you're the product, therefore it makes sense to pay in this case". But given what we know of Meta and their ilk, we have good reason to believe this is absolutely NOT the case: you'll pay but you'll still be the product, and their offerings will keep on the road to enshitification. So parent comment is correct given this context. I don't believe they were making the case that free Facebook is in any way healthy or good for you.
deleted 4mo ago
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darth_avocado 4mo ago
Id pay money to not see ads. Like YouTube premium. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. Can’t believe they rolled out all these different plans and left out the one thing a lot of people would buy.
- cm11 4mo ago
  Does Youtube Premium track and build profiles and use and sell them? I assume so because Google, but does Premium remove advertising (in the broad sense of the business model and profiling) or remove just ads? YT in general seems "kinder" than others at a few things, like you can remove history and activity and even get a blank homescreen. Aside: I think it's funny how with an NYT subscription, you still get not only ads, but frequent article-covering ads for NYT subscriptions (asking to upgrade to a family account).
  - laweijfmvo 4mo ago
    “full” premium removes all advertising, and it’s quite pricey in the US. “Lite” premium removes ‘most’ ads but doesn’t allow downloads at all.
    - dymk 4mo ago
      It’s $16/month for full premium. It’s all relative, but I wouldn’t describe that as quite pricey for a platform with that large a library.
    - kalleboo 4mo ago
      I believe the ads that "lite" Premium doesn't remove are on anything that has ContentID music in it, as they have to pay higher fees to the record labels for those.
  - skillina 4mo ago
    I've been considering writing a nastygram to the NYT about their nonsense popups. Every time I open their web page I get not only the family account popup, but also a "use our app, it's better!" popup. I refuse to install your app just because you intentionally trash the web experience with popups.
jmspring 4mo ago
So, pay them to keep doing what they already do?
- ksd482 4mo ago
  Yes. The difference is now the money is coming from you rather than selling your data. Which is what you want. Of course, they could still sell your data anyway. That's why it's important to pay attention to their T&C.
  - MajorTakeaway 4mo ago
    The only real way to opt out is to not use 'the product'. I miss the days where 'the product' is only what we got, and not being the victim of an executives stalking campaign.
  - pyrale 4mo ago
    s/rather than/as well as/g
platevoltage 4mo ago
It's because you'll still be the product even if you pay.
h4kunamata 4mo ago
>How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well Well, now they will keep doing what they are doing while being paid because your data is their business model.
sensanaty 4mo ago
You paying just signals that you're someone to push more ads to and to harvest more data on, since it means you have disposable income to spend on something as useless as instagram or facebook. Meta isn't going to stop harvesting all your information just because you pay for a subscription, they'll harvest and sell your data AND take your money.
- WarmWash 4mo ago
  If I'm paying and still getting unwanted ads...then I am no longer going to be paying. I'm not sure what win Meta sees here.
  - HnUser12 4mo ago
    You may not get ads in the app, but they can still sell your data for other services who will give you ads.
    - okanat 4mo ago
      Or even if you block all ads, the statistical value of your data is still important for showing ads to people like you and people around you.
    - brianmiddleton 4mo ago
      You WILL be getting ads in the app, though. There's nothing in the article that says you won't. This is like Snapchat's subscription. You get more features, but still have the ads. This isn't replacing "if it's free, you're the product", it's "if you're willing to pay, you're an even more valuable product".
      - cpt_sobel 4mo ago
        Don't they already have some subscription to get rid of ads?
        4mo ago
angled 4mo ago
Aren't people here old enough to recall paying for WhatsApp's original subscription fee? Circa 2016: 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...
- okanat 4mo ago
  Whatsapp wasn't owned by Facebook at the time..
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- prmoustache 4mo ago
  I don't think anyone ever paid the whatsapp subscription fee. I remember they announced it, nobody accepted paying it and the app kept functionning and they dropped the idea.
  - sunaookami 4mo ago
    Friends of mine did for Android or the app stopped functioning. You also had to pay a one time fee to even download it on iOS. But yeah, most users didn't have to.
    - prmoustache 4mo ago
      Maybe they enforced it first on some regions and since it backfired other regions didn't have to pay.
pmontra 4mo ago
Are there ads in WhatsApp? I never saw one. Facebook, I remember a lot of ads. Instagram, probably but I don't have an account there.
- okanat 4mo ago
  Whatsapp metadata is one of the strongest signals about you. Your friends and family and your patterns of texting tells quite a bit information about you.
  - sometimes_all 4mo ago
    That's nice, but used to what end, especially if you are not a Instagram/Facebook user, and have a decent ad-blocker set up?
    - okanat 4mo ago
      Your signals are not only used to advertise to you but people like you and people who know you.
- pks016 4mo ago
  There are story ads now.
bmitc 4mo ago
That's ignoring that WhatsApp has been free for a long time and was end to end encrypted. Then a multi billion dollar corporation bought it and has slowly whittled away at it.
rozap 4mo ago
You're right it's a good thing, but I think they're maybe 10 years too late. The issue is that their product is hateful, non-functional, and my feelings toward the brand are probably more negative than any other brand I can think of. So why would I give them money? It's a tough sell.
Yokohiii 4mo ago
The only truth here is that meta is preparing for the AI bot apocalypse. When everything turns into AI noise, people will move on. Segmenting real (paying) users and bots is a strategy to sustain their business model, not welfare.
adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
> 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. You’re a Meta decision maker presented with 3 options. Which one do you pick? (remember, you’re not you…you’re a Meta decision maker trying to justify a trillion dollar valuation). - Possible additional ad revenues - Possible additional subscription revenues - Possible additional ad and subscription revenues
- rtpg 4mo ago
  to put a finer point on this: I pay for certain newspapers (well, digital subscriptions). Still plenty of ads in the articles!
  - xbmcuser 4mo ago
    Plus now they even have your credit information for better ad targeting
    - choppaface 4mo ago
      credit card itself can’t be used to ad targeting. But plenty of proxies make this point largely irrelevant.
      - ipaddr 4mo ago
        If the grocery store is selling your data (and they are) and meta has a connecting card number ads could be targeted.
      - DANmode 4mo ago
        > credit card itself can’t be used to ad targeting Incorrect. Credit card networks / issuers explicitly describe using payment, spending, and your personal data, for marketing, personalization, audience segmentation, and advertising. Mastercard’s privacy notice states that it may use personal and transaction-related information to: “Provide you with personalized services and recommendations” “Offer and support loyalty programs” “Provide content and advertising tailored to your individual interests” “Analyze spending behavior to improve the effectiveness of marketing programs and advertising.” Visa has also historically offered an opt-out specifically for using card transaction data…
deleted 4mo ago
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mrandish 4mo ago
> this is probably a positive thing for Meta products If it was a subscription that eliminated all ads AND enshittification anti-patterns, like not putting every single notification, 'share my...' and 'show me...' option on separate toggles helpfully sub-divided into a dozen or more separate pages - I would be all in. Seriously, what if Meta just said, in effect, "give us $XX a year" and you will be a "VIP Account" that's invisible to all our analytics systems, data collection, aggregation and profiling. The only metric where you will even be visible to our reporting systems is "VIP Account Revenue" as your payments hit our account. We will not care (or even know) if your usage is literally zero minutes a year. I'm sure all the reasons you're thinking of for why Meta would never do this are probably correct. Those same reasons are why the reasonable-sounding thought "this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay" is moot. I believe there is no subscription amount Meta would accept to genuinely shift their entire way of thinking about even a small subset of users. Therefore, this much smaller subscription won't actually change anything that matters. This is just the diary farm trying to collect extra money by renting plastic stall decorations to the cows their business owns and milks. By definition these features will be trivial and purely cosmetic because anything that actually changes user behavior, would impact the real business and will be decided based on that.
frail_figure 4mo ago
This is Meta. You will always be the product. This is like asking us to tip them in addition to all the horrible things they're doing either way.
blks 4mo ago
The only way for this model to work, is for governments to put high pressure on tech giants to put the breaks on the whole surveillance & data selling business. Otherwise they will take your money and sell your data at the same time. I wonder if fully forbidding personalised ads will actually make gdp of developed nations to shrink.
- wahnfrieden 4mo ago
  Govt won’t do it. They want that data too.
nxpnsv 4mo ago
But here you are the product AND you pay for it. At least I think you still get ads and tracking…
tw04 4mo ago
That’d be more relatable if they weren’t actively trying to remove encryption from their messaging to spy and serve even more ads at the same time they’re trying to charge a fee for the pleasure of giving them your data to sell.
CTDOCodebases 4mo ago
These products already do what basically everyone wants them to do. The problem is now people are conditioned to having their privacy violated so they are still the product and they will pay to be the product. The network effects with a product like WhatsApp are strong so that this opens the door to dark patterns for the non paying customers. After enough time the same level of effort will go into the now subscription app that went into it when it was free. YouTube is a good example of this phenomenon.
- emayljames 4mo ago
  The YouTube app on Android is terrible, even with the premium. Autoplay has been notoriously broken for years
  - CTDOCodebases 4mo ago
    I have premium and for over a month I couldn’t save videos to playlists in the app.
csomar 4mo ago
Except their "impersonation protection" subscription sounds more like a racket than a product. Basically, pay us or we'll spoil your brand. Now, they want to charge point addicts for getting access to very basic and limited stats about their 2 seconds videos.
nelox 4mo ago
AI is expensive and ad revenue alone won't cover it.
lelanthran 4mo ago
> 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. Maybe. Or maybe this is the final stop on the route to enshittification: bill both the advertisers and the users.
chias 4mo ago
As Cory Doctorow is fond of saying > The thing that determines whether you’re the product isn’t whether you’re paying for the product: it’s whether market power and regulatory forbearance allow the company to get away with selling you. Or more simply: > Companies don’t make you the product because you don’t pay — they make you the product because you can’t stop them. As far as feature development goes, Meta isn't looking under the couch cushions for change. If they want to invest in a feature, they will.
godelski 4mo ago
> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" Do their subscriptions give people an ad free experience? Does it give them extra privacy? To me it sounds like they no longer are making enough money, so now they are asking people to pay to be the product
- pyrale 4mo ago
  > they no longer are making enough money Have they ever made enough money according to their own desire?
  - godelski 4mo ago
    I think you already know my answer to that lol
latexr 4mo ago
> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" As of late, not many times. Because it’s become clear that for the big players you’re the product even if you pay. See for example Netflix or Hulu, where you pay a subscription and are advertised to.
oulipo2 4mo ago
[dead]
palata 4mo ago
> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" This is old school. Now we know for a fact from the "enshittification" concept that you are always the product. If they can keep abusing you AND make you pay on top of that, it's better than abusing you without making you pay. There are no good monopolies, the solution really is to fight them.
haritha-j 4mo ago
None of the packages mention anything about removing ads do they? They're some silly premium features like custom stickers and themes. I don't see anything about removing ads.
vasco 4mo ago
To me this is more like the arc of 1. Get cable TV there's no ads! 2. Everyone switches to cable 3. Cable now has ads too Than what you describe but I feel like it's maybe more positive of a change than that. But just slightly.
- vel0city 4mo ago
  In the US, cable had ads from day one. Especially considering originally it was just the OTA broadcasts bundled together. Several of the first cable-only TV channels were ad supported from the start, and several others started including ads within a few years in.
PatronBernard 4mo ago
C'mon, it's the oldest trick in MBA book: make a much-used service paid, make the free version of it terrible and you force people to get the paid service.
jccx70 4mo ago
[dead]
general_reveal 4mo ago
Sisters, a 8B local model that hallucinates is better than that 50bn in sweaty VR shit they made. It is what it is, slap a monthly fee on the 3B model and move on, I suppose.
chris_wot 4mo ago
To purchase a subscription, you need to value and trust the service. To trust the service the provider needs to show it can be trusted. It’s Facebook. Why would anyone trust them?
renegade-otter 4mo ago
I have serious doubts that Meta is aiming to improve these products. Every time I open Instagram - ironically of course - it just seems like more and more AI slop.
skeeter2020 4mo ago
>> product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising. Like no ads? that's usually the #1 you pay for and no mention of that.
otikik 4mo ago
> if the product is free, you are the product I used to think like that, but then I realized that > if you are paying for the product, nothing guarantees that you are not the product anyway Companies like money and they will have no qualms against double dipping. Even if you refuse to be their customer (and thus they lose the revenue coming from you) as long as the majority of their customers are ok with being a product, they will keep doing it.
voxleone 4mo ago
Their offer for subscribers are nothing but beads and sequins. A genuine offer [the kind i could accept] should contemplate an ad, bot and algo-free experience.
plagiarist 4mo ago
There used to be a single streaming service that had the majority of the content with zero ads. Now we are back to ad-ridden cable TV pricing with nearly zero product features. Paying these shitbirds will not cause them to invest in the product. Meta isn't even generating any of the content, at least streaming services are doing that much with the money they are given.
everdrive 4mo ago
I think given that meta has already sort of destroyed so many things, it's difficult to see this measure causing any _harm_. I'm not sure it's a panacea, as since you said meta will just take your money and track you. But the "tracking you ship" has already sailed. Maybe in a perfect world the "taking your money" bit is successful enough that they try to make that experience better? Ideally, meta would just take 100% of its intellectual assets and pay to have them subducted by the Mariana Trench, but I don't think that'll be happening for me.
Danox 4mo ago
You’re right you’re going against the the grain it isn’t positive for the end user.
ncr100 4mo ago
I disagree with that particular 'against the grain' (.. that this somehow is a positive thing for Meta products ..) for the critical reason that META corp is an established Advertising business and pivoting to non-Advertising-supported is likely infeasible. I think it is an absurd idea that introducing subs will help improve Meta's products, outside of this HN discussion .. there is no reasonable, direct connection between the two concepts. For instance, Metas own culture will sabotoge the effort. It is certainly worthwhile IMO to consider the positive things for Meta -- I believe it's truly only to capture more of the market, and improving Meta's products means something which only META defines, like a snake eating its own tail. This move is di-worsification -- Meta is fundamentally not in the subscription business. They don't provide ongoing accruing value..the subscription doesn't gain a user access to functionality. My straw-man phrase, to illustrate the preposterousness .. for lols only .. "If only they had more money to invest in features which delight users." They have enough money.

by qqtt 4mo ago

qwertox 4mo 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 4mo ago

Agreed. Nothing wrong with charging for a product.

sunaookami 4mo ago
You are paying with your data already.

apsurd 4mo 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 4mo ago
> they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads Streaming services claiming prior art here.
- apsurd 4mo ago
  I just remembered there’s a black mirror episode about this. The paid subscription evolution by a “health tech” startup let’s say. I won’t give away the plot, but it’s so realistically absurd it’s sad, hilarious and terrifying all at once.
  - abound 4mo ago
    For those who might want to watch it, the episode is called "Common People", and it's a pretty brutal one.
  - moron4hire 4mo ago
    I was just watching that episode literally now and had to nope out of it halfway through because it was making me sick to my stomach.
- kps 4mo ago
  Too young to remember cable TV?
- blitzar 4mo ago
  Sounds like my Amazon Prime subscription - now with more Ads.
- vincnetas 4mo ago
  cable TV would like to have a word with you :)
micromacrofoot 4mo ago
Yeah this is the worst, never pay for something that has ads. It's teaching these companies it's ok.
zeristor 4mo ago
Pray they don’t change the terms a second time.
avd201 4mo ago
If you don't pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you'd pay for the product.
- doctorwho42 4mo ago
  Eh, and Microsoft has shown that even if you pay they will still fuck with the product and . make it worse
komali2 4mo ago
It seems like there's no solution, then: companies will always chase the next dollar that allows them to exceed growth expectations on the earnings call. It seems like no matter what, anti-user behavior in pursuit of profit is inevitable. Is there a solution to this?
- apsurd 4mo ago
  well Apple is stated as an easy counter example. They charge money for premium hardware and software. everything else is downstream. So while they could squeeze at every possible opportunity, they are less incentivized to abuse the relationship because their core proposition is: you pay money for our premium hardware and software. it’s imperfect but contrasts this with the modern approach of grow at all costs, light money on fire and punt entirely on how to ever make money. it usually doesn’t end well for customers.
  - circularfoyers 4mo ago
    Which sadly appears to not even be holding for them now that they decided to start displaying ads on their App Store.
    - cocoto 4mo ago
      Do not forget the new recents ads in Apple Maps.
- foxylad 4mo ago
  The golden age of the internet was when it was an enthusiast's space. It is now almost entirely a corporate space, where the remaining enthusiasts' content is scraped 100K times a day and sold without attribution by the corporates. The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and Meta charging may create another wave of converts there. It has a lot of growth pains to endure yet, but the ability to painlessly spin up your own instance could be very attractive to young people looking for their own non-corporate spaces on the internet. We may also see some renewal via large companies (Meta in particular) imploding, from mismanagement and disenchanted users. My experience marketing a new product is that online advertising is completely ineffective now the web is filled with slop, no matter how well targeted it is. We've recently pivoted to optimise for word-of-mouth with orders of magnitude better results. I think any adtech company without a solid alternative profit stream is in for a rough ride (and no, AI is not a solid profit stream for anyone but Nvidia).
windexh8er 4mo ago
This is just a copy of the YouTube model, to your point. It's not that you're going to get a premier experience. It's that you'll be spared from full enshittification. Only tech bros could possibly think making the default subscription level so bad that it would drive revenue. But here we are.
thayne 4mo ago
From what I can tell, that's already the case for these subscriptions. They give you some extra stuff but you're still getting ads, and they are still collecting your data

timoth3y 4mo ago

> "if the product is free, you are the product" This is not true. You are the product whether you are paying or not. If the company thinks they can make money by selling your data/attention/access, they will do so. Paying them does not stop them from monetizing you. These new paid tiers will be slowly enshitified just like most modern paid plans.

anon35 4mo ago
You seem to be attacking a different statement that no one says: "if the product isn't free, you aren't the product". There's no "if and only if" in the maxim. Pretty sure you agree that if the product is free, the company is definitely getting value by monetizing something else of yours. It very much is true as written.
- the_af 4mo ago
  From a formal logic standpoint, you're correct. But the context of the parent's and grandparent's comments was (paraphrased) "if you don't pay, you're the product, therefore it makes sense to pay in this case". But given what we know of Meta and their ilk, we have good reason to believe this is absolutely NOT the case: you'll pay but you'll still be the product, and their offerings will keep on the road to enshitification. So parent comment is correct given this context. I don't believe they were making the case that free Facebook is in any way healthy or good for you.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

darth_avocado 4mo ago

Id pay money to not see ads. Like YouTube premium. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. Can’t believe they rolled out all these different plans and left out the one thing a lot of people would buy.

cm11 4mo ago
Does Youtube Premium track and build profiles and use and sell them? I assume so because Google, but does Premium remove advertising (in the broad sense of the business model and profiling) or remove just ads? YT in general seems "kinder" than others at a few things, like you can remove history and activity and even get a blank homescreen. Aside: I think it's funny how with an NYT subscription, you still get not only ads, but frequent article-covering ads for NYT subscriptions (asking to upgrade to a family account).
- laweijfmvo 4mo ago
  “full” premium removes all advertising, and it’s quite pricey in the US. “Lite” premium removes ‘most’ ads but doesn’t allow downloads at all.
  - dymk 4mo ago
    It’s $16/month for full premium. It’s all relative, but I wouldn’t describe that as quite pricey for a platform with that large a library.
  - kalleboo 4mo ago
    I believe the ads that "lite" Premium doesn't remove are on anything that has ContentID music in it, as they have to pay higher fees to the record labels for those.
- skillina 4mo ago
  I've been considering writing a nastygram to the NYT about their nonsense popups. Every time I open their web page I get not only the family account popup, but also a "use our app, it's better!" popup. I refuse to install your app just because you intentionally trash the web experience with popups.

jmspring 4mo ago

So, pay them to keep doing what they already do?

ksd482 4mo ago
Yes. The difference is now the money is coming from you rather than selling your data. Which is what you want. Of course, they could still sell your data anyway. That's why it's important to pay attention to their T&C.
- MajorTakeaway 4mo ago
  The only real way to opt out is to not use 'the product'. I miss the days where 'the product' is only what we got, and not being the victim of an executives stalking campaign.
- pyrale 4mo ago
  s/rather than/as well as/g

platevoltage 4mo ago

It's because you'll still be the product even if you pay.

h4kunamata 4mo ago

>How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well Well, now they will keep doing what they are doing while being paid because your data is their business model.

sensanaty 4mo ago

You paying just signals that you're someone to push more ads to and to harvest more data on, since it means you have disposable income to spend on something as useless as instagram or facebook. Meta isn't going to stop harvesting all your information just because you pay for a subscription, they'll harvest and sell your data AND take your money.

WarmWash 4mo ago
If I'm paying and still getting unwanted ads...then I am no longer going to be paying. I'm not sure what win Meta sees here.
- HnUser12 4mo ago
  You may not get ads in the app, but they can still sell your data for other services who will give you ads.
  - okanat 4mo ago
    Or even if you block all ads, the statistical value of your data is still important for showing ads to people like you and people around you.
  - brianmiddleton 4mo ago
    You WILL be getting ads in the app, though. There's nothing in the article that says you won't. This is like Snapchat's subscription. You get more features, but still have the ads. This isn't replacing "if it's free, you're the product", it's "if you're willing to pay, you're an even more valuable product".
    - cpt_sobel 4mo ago
      Don't they already have some subscription to get rid of ads?
      - 4mo ago

angled 4mo ago

Aren't people here old enough to recall paying for WhatsApp's original subscription fee? Circa 2016: 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...

okanat 4mo ago
Whatsapp wasn't owned by Facebook at the time..
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
prmoustache 4mo ago
I don't think anyone ever paid the whatsapp subscription fee. I remember they announced it, nobody accepted paying it and the app kept functionning and they dropped the idea.
- sunaookami 4mo ago
  Friends of mine did for Android or the app stopped functioning. You also had to pay a one time fee to even download it on iOS. But yeah, most users didn't have to.
  - prmoustache 4mo ago
    Maybe they enforced it first on some regions and since it backfired other regions didn't have to pay.

pmontra 4mo ago

Are there ads in WhatsApp? I never saw one. Facebook, I remember a lot of ads. Instagram, probably but I don't have an account there.

okanat 4mo ago
Whatsapp metadata is one of the strongest signals about you. Your friends and family and your patterns of texting tells quite a bit information about you.
- sometimes_all 4mo ago
  That's nice, but used to what end, especially if you are not a Instagram/Facebook user, and have a decent ad-blocker set up?
  - okanat 4mo ago
    Your signals are not only used to advertise to you but people like you and people who know you.
pks016 4mo ago
There are story ads now.

bmitc 4mo ago

That's ignoring that WhatsApp has been free for a long time and was end to end encrypted. Then a multi billion dollar corporation bought it and has slowly whittled away at it.

rozap 4mo ago

You're right it's a good thing, but I think they're maybe 10 years too late. The issue is that their product is hateful, non-functional, and my feelings toward the brand are probably more negative than any other brand I can think of. So why would I give them money? It's a tough sell.

Yokohiii 4mo ago

The only truth here is that meta is preparing for the AI bot apocalypse. When everything turns into AI noise, people will move on. Segmenting real (paying) users and bots is a strategy to sustain their business model, not welfare.

adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago

> 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. You’re a Meta decision maker presented with 3 options. Which one do you pick? (remember, you’re not you…you’re a Meta decision maker trying to justify a trillion dollar valuation). - Possible additional ad revenues - Possible additional subscription revenues - Possible additional ad and subscription revenues

rtpg 4mo ago
to put a finer point on this: I pay for certain newspapers (well, digital subscriptions). Still plenty of ads in the articles!
- xbmcuser 4mo ago
  Plus now they even have your credit information for better ad targeting
  - choppaface 4mo ago
    credit card itself can’t be used to ad targeting. But plenty of proxies make this point largely irrelevant.
    - ipaddr 4mo ago
      If the grocery store is selling your data (and they are) and meta has a connecting card number ads could be targeted.
    - DANmode 4mo ago
      > credit card itself can’t be used to ad targeting Incorrect. Credit card networks / issuers explicitly describe using payment, spending, and your personal data, for marketing, personalization, audience segmentation, and advertising. Mastercard’s privacy notice states that it may use personal and transaction-related information to: “Provide you with personalized services and recommendations” “Offer and support loyalty programs” “Provide content and advertising tailored to your individual interests” “Analyze spending behavior to improve the effectiveness of marketing programs and advertising.” Visa has also historically offered an opt-out specifically for using card transaction data…

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

mrandish 4mo ago

> this is probably a positive thing for Meta products If it was a subscription that eliminated all ads AND enshittification anti-patterns, like not putting every single notification, 'share my...' and 'show me...' option on separate toggles helpfully sub-divided into a dozen or more separate pages - I would be all in. Seriously, what if Meta just said, in effect, "give us $XX a year" and you will be a "VIP Account" that's invisible to all our analytics systems, data collection, aggregation and profiling. The only metric where you will even be visible to our reporting systems is "VIP Account Revenue" as your payments hit our account. We will not care (or even know) if your usage is literally zero minutes a year. I'm sure all the reasons you're thinking of for why Meta would never do this are probably correct. Those same reasons are why the reasonable-sounding thought "this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay" is moot. I believe there is no subscription amount Meta would accept to genuinely shift their entire way of thinking about even a small subset of users. Therefore, this much smaller subscription won't actually change anything that matters. This is just the diary farm trying to collect extra money by renting plastic stall decorations to the cows their business owns and milks. By definition these features will be trivial and purely cosmetic because anything that actually changes user behavior, would impact the real business and will be decided based on that.

frail_figure 4mo ago

This is Meta. You will always be the product. This is like asking us to tip them in addition to all the horrible things they're doing either way.

blks 4mo ago

The only way for this model to work, is for governments to put high pressure on tech giants to put the breaks on the whole surveillance & data selling business. Otherwise they will take your money and sell your data at the same time. I wonder if fully forbidding personalised ads will actually make gdp of developed nations to shrink.

wahnfrieden 4mo ago
Govt won’t do it. They want that data too.

nxpnsv 4mo ago

But here you are the product AND you pay for it. At least I think you still get ads and tracking…

tw04 4mo ago

That’d be more relatable if they weren’t actively trying to remove encryption from their messaging to spy and serve even more ads at the same time they’re trying to charge a fee for the pleasure of giving them your data to sell.

CTDOCodebases 4mo ago

These products already do what basically everyone wants them to do. The problem is now people are conditioned to having their privacy violated so they are still the product and they will pay to be the product. The network effects with a product like WhatsApp are strong so that this opens the door to dark patterns for the non paying customers. After enough time the same level of effort will go into the now subscription app that went into it when it was free. YouTube is a good example of this phenomenon.

emayljames 4mo ago
The YouTube app on Android is terrible, even with the premium. Autoplay has been notoriously broken for years
- CTDOCodebases 4mo ago
  I have premium and for over a month I couldn’t save videos to playlists in the app.

csomar 4mo ago

Except their "impersonation protection" subscription sounds more like a racket than a product. Basically, pay us or we'll spoil your brand. Now, they want to charge point addicts for getting access to very basic and limited stats about their 2 seconds videos.

nelox 4mo ago

AI is expensive and ad revenue alone won't cover it.

lelanthran 4mo ago

> 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. Maybe. Or maybe this is the final stop on the route to enshittification: bill both the advertisers and the users.

chias 4mo ago

As Cory Doctorow is fond of saying > The thing that determines whether you’re the product isn’t whether you’re paying for the product: it’s whether market power and regulatory forbearance allow the company to get away with selling you. Or more simply: > Companies don’t make you the product because you don’t pay — they make you the product because you can’t stop them. As far as feature development goes, Meta isn't looking under the couch cushions for change. If they want to invest in a feature, they will.

godelski 4mo ago

> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" Do their subscriptions give people an ad free experience? Does it give them extra privacy? To me it sounds like they no longer are making enough money, so now they are asking people to pay to be the product

pyrale 4mo ago
> they no longer are making enough money Have they ever made enough money according to their own desire?
- godelski 4mo ago
  I think you already know my answer to that lol

latexr 4mo ago

> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" As of late, not many times. Because it’s become clear that for the big players you’re the product even if you pay. See for example Netflix or Hulu, where you pay a subscription and are advertised to.

oulipo2 4mo ago

[dead]

palata 4mo ago

> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" This is old school. Now we know for a fact from the "enshittification" concept that you are always the product. If they can keep abusing you AND make you pay on top of that, it's better than abusing you without making you pay. There are no good monopolies, the solution really is to fight them.

haritha-j 4mo ago

None of the packages mention anything about removing ads do they? They're some silly premium features like custom stickers and themes. I don't see anything about removing ads.

vasco 4mo ago

To me this is more like the arc of 1. Get cable TV there's no ads! 2. Everyone switches to cable 3. Cable now has ads too Than what you describe but I feel like it's maybe more positive of a change than that. But just slightly.

vel0city 4mo ago
In the US, cable had ads from day one. Especially considering originally it was just the OTA broadcasts bundled together. Several of the first cable-only TV channels were ad supported from the start, and several others started including ads within a few years in.

PatronBernard 4mo ago

C'mon, it's the oldest trick in MBA book: make a much-used service paid, make the free version of it terrible and you force people to get the paid service.

jccx70 4mo ago

[dead]

general_reveal 4mo ago

Sisters, a 8B local model that hallucinates is better than that 50bn in sweaty VR shit they made. It is what it is, slap a monthly fee on the 3B model and move on, I suppose.

chris_wot 4mo ago

To purchase a subscription, you need to value and trust the service. To trust the service the provider needs to show it can be trusted. It’s Facebook. Why would anyone trust them?

renegade-otter 4mo ago

I have serious doubts that Meta is aiming to improve these products. Every time I open Instagram - ironically of course - it just seems like more and more AI slop.

skeeter2020 4mo ago

>> product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising. Like no ads? that's usually the #1 you pay for and no mention of that.

otikik 4mo ago

> if the product is free, you are the product I used to think like that, but then I realized that > if you are paying for the product, nothing guarantees that you are not the product anyway Companies like money and they will have no qualms against double dipping. Even if you refuse to be their customer (and thus they lose the revenue coming from you) as long as the majority of their customers are ok with being a product, they will keep doing it.

voxleone 4mo ago

Their offer for subscribers are nothing but beads and sequins. A genuine offer [the kind i could accept] should contemplate an ad, bot and algo-free experience.

plagiarist 4mo ago

There used to be a single streaming service that had the majority of the content with zero ads. Now we are back to ad-ridden cable TV pricing with nearly zero product features. Paying these shitbirds will not cause them to invest in the product. Meta isn't even generating any of the content, at least streaming services are doing that much with the money they are given.

everdrive 4mo ago

I think given that meta has already sort of destroyed so many things, it's difficult to see this measure causing any _harm_. I'm not sure it's a panacea, as since you said meta will just take your money and track you. But the "tracking you ship" has already sailed. Maybe in a perfect world the "taking your money" bit is successful enough that they try to make that experience better? Ideally, meta would just take 100% of its intellectual assets and pay to have them subducted by the Mariana Trench, but I don't think that'll be happening for me.

Danox 4mo ago

You’re right you’re going against the the grain it isn’t positive for the end user.

ncr100 4mo ago

I disagree with that particular 'against the grain' (.. that this somehow is a positive thing for Meta products ..) for the critical reason that META corp is an established Advertising business and pivoting to non-Advertising-supported is likely infeasible. I think it is an absurd idea that introducing subs will help improve Meta's products, outside of this HN discussion .. there is no reasonable, direct connection between the two concepts. For instance, Metas own culture will sabotoge the effort. It is certainly worthwhile IMO to consider the positive things for Meta -- I believe it's truly only to capture more of the market, and improving Meta's products means something which only META defines, like a snake eating its own tail. This move is di-worsification -- Meta is fundamentally not in the subscription business. They don't provide ongoing accruing value..the subscription doesn't gain a user access to functionality. My straw-man phrase, to illustrate the preposterousness .. for lols only .. "If only they had more money to invest in features which delight users." They have enough money.