Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/27/meta-officially-launches-instagram-facebook-and-whatsapp-subscriptions-with-more-to-come-including-ai-plans/

by tambourine_man • 2 months ago

290 508 2 months ago

techcrunch.com

canyp2• 2 months 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.

DANmode4• 2 months ago

But they know who.

fullshark• 2 months ago

All I can think of is people who need those accounts for professional reasons (i.e. public relations)

suddenlybananas• 2 months ago

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

jjordan• 2 months 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-projects3• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

WarmWash3• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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

carlosjobim3• 2 months ago

The world still runs on email.

rossjudson• 2 months ago

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

YesBox4• 2 months 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.

fontain2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

lukeschlather4• 2 months ago

I actually cancelled my Discord subscription because they've gradually been adding more intrusive ads and subscriptions don't protect you from ads.

Marsymars3• 2 months 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.

airstrike• 2 months ago

tbh I mostly pay for nitro for cross-server, animated emoji

sillysaurusx2• 2 months ago

How’d you make a game with 1,000 people? It’s impressive.

YesBox4• 2 months ago

They're players, not devs.

ro_bit• 2 months ago

You can get free profile decorations these days from watching ads (discord “orbs”). It would be interesting to know how many of those users have the nitro subscription badge next to their name

YesBox4• 2 months ago

I just counted 35 online profiles with nitro. Same ~300 people online currently

micromacrofoot2• 2 months ago

Yeah this very much a "like Discord" move, and it does work

pndy2• 2 months ago

Out of the 300 people logged in, 50 of them have custom profiles.

That's why I'd count Discord subs as a specific case targeting specific kind of a terminally online user who doesn't mind paying for such customization to show own digital identity, that for the rest means nothing. Discord had a brilliant idea here while at the same time allows to use their service without all these bells and whistles. Tho, I expect they'll start limiting it for those who refuse to subscribe in the nearest future.

rldjbpin• 2 months ago

i too noticed the similarities in approach between the two. with the chat portability and other eu-linked changes they have to play along with, meta would have a complicated future ahead with subsidising chat for everyone.

if this prevents them from adding privacy-harming things to whatsapp, the more power to them. but it certainly does not guarantee this behaviour.

j45• 2 months ago

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

Animats• 2 months ago

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

ravenstine• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg

alex11384• 2 months 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)

dataflow• 2 months ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-a...

x0x0• 2 months ago

I'd bet good money this is mostly related to Europe's GDPR / DMA actions against Facebook. Ironically, I think Facebook would be in the clear to just charge everyone in Europe and dump ads altogether. :shrug:

f33d5173• 2 months ago

I didn't see it mentioned that this hid ads. I would be surprised if it did, since facebook makes way more than $4/month off many of it's users, they would be leaving a ton of money on the table if they only charged that to remove ads.

soupspaces• 2 months ago

"don't be evil"?

1970-01-012• 2 months ago

https://abcnews.com/blogs/technology/2011/09/facebook-will-a...

meta_ai_x• 2 months ago

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

alex11384• 2 months 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_mukh4• 2 months 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.

tim-projects3• 2 months ago

Pay each of your friends $50 one per month, to switch to signal. Problem solved

freedomben• 2 months 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.

fsflover11• 2 months ago

Or, better, Mastodon or Matrix, which don't rely on a single, easy-to-target server.

lukeschlather4• 2 months ago

Signal is designed with the assumption that data is sensitive and you should err on the side of destroying it.

Facebook is designed more as a shared scrapbook, with the assumption that data is precious and you want to share it with your community, and you should err on the side of oversharing so you don't lose any precious moments. Signal is in no way a replacement for Facebook.

jsrozner• 2 months ago

This is absurd. You're just asking for reasonable control over data that ostensibly belongs to you. Moreover, this minimum functionality was resolved years ago with RSS. That you'd be willing to pay so much reflects how well every tech company is doing at using tech against its own users.

pj_mukh4• 2 months ago

Ehhh, what I'm paying for is FB/Insta's ability to bring everyone onto one platform and encourage them to post regularly. RSS, AOL Messenger etc, never were able to do that with any decent success.

That they went past that to just kill their own golden goose is what is now reversible via a payment plan. That might be their only saving grace on this now managed decline.

bflesch• 2 months ago

Nah once they know you can be fleeced for $50 per month, they also know there is much more money to extract from you. Their advertisers would be mad if they remove this juicy cohort of moneybags from their audience.

uyzstvqs• 2 months ago

What you need is the Stories feature in Signal, then donate that $49.99/month (or however much you want) to their foundation.

canyp2• 2 months ago

Why? You are still giving up privacy. There is 0 reason to be using Meta products, let alone pay for them.

captn3m0• 2 months ago

Meta offers it in EU: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/11/facebook-and-instagram-to-...

I’ve been considering it but I am not sure if it drops just ads or suggested posts as well.

tmaly• 2 months ago

I am surprised someone hasn't made a really nice equivalent to Obsidian for Mastadon and just released it for free on the app stores. I am sure one could host a very cheap mastadon instance on a low cost VPS

apsurd6• 2 months ago

I don't believe for a second you'd pay $50 per month!

Yeah you'd do it to prove a point. 6 months later, no way in hell.

pibaker• 2 months ago

Virtue signaling is free. Paying up for my virtues? Never.

schubidubiduba• 2 months ago

I think I would pay it. The peace of mind knowing that my every move isn't tracked and being used to sell me stuff or engagement bait me is invaluable tbh

pj_mukh4• 2 months ago

I mean, I'm paying about that for Google to hold onto all my personal memories via Photos, and all that I could actually use self-hosting for.

Meanwhile, FB has all my network that I can't recreate or self-host so yes, I would pay that.

tencentshill2• 2 months ago

Meta "average revenue per person" around $50 per year. Absolutely reasonable to replace with a subscription.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680125...

kleton• 2 months 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

fooker• 2 months ago

You'd do it once and figure out that none of your friends have regular status updates any more.

Cider99863• 2 months ago

I pay $50/mo for internet, this is some nice ragebait.

You can change the feeds with extensions or modded apps for free and ads are blocked by default in any good browser.

lucaspiller• 2 months ago

we like all the dopamine hijacking garbage

I basically don't use Facebook any more because of this. Opening the app shows me the most sensationalist, fearmongering and outrage bait content they can find. It's worse than news channels (I haven't watched TV for 20 years). I have auto play turned off, and every few months the setting gets turned back on.

The first few posts I see scrolling through:

- US adds mandatory tips ahead of world cup.

- Woman dies after being hit by Audi in city center.

- There was a huge queue for women's toilets at a tech conference.

- 50% off mattresses.

- Some influencer I don't follow bought 20 rolls of 3M tape from Lidl.

Do I still have friends, do they still post stuff? I only see them in the reels/stories section at the top.

The only reason why I still have Facebook is because of groups. It's the main 'groups' tool people use in my country, so there are various local groups I am part of.

input_sh• 2 months ago

There is not a single subscription in the world I would pay more than $20/month for personal purposes, unlimited (and I do mean unlimited) LLM tokens very much included.

Traubenfuchs• 2 months ago

You can turn off political content in IG settings and additionally add hashtags/keywords to specifically filter out content that displeases you.

onel• 2 months ago

That was the premise of halloapp. I think it was $5 a month and encrypted like WhatsApp, and you had a feed only from your contacts. It was founded by a guy who worked for WhatsApp for a long time. Apparently it went under in 2024. I think messaging is just a commoditized service. People will not pay for it

documentorium• 2 months ago

Did you check this out? https://isactiv.com/ - Private social network - exactly what you describe

mgrunwald_• 2 months ago

I've seen too many of those privacy-respecting alternative social networks. Problem is that you'll post things only for yourself, which may be cool if you don't care about actually having friends there.

ghrl• 2 months ago

I believe you can get close to that with various Instagram mods for Android. They have advanced features like only show posts from followers and stuff like that. I switched to one of them after realizing the 5 second ad breaks I got were only there because I disabled personalized advertising.

lionkor• 2 months ago

You can ditch all that and talk to your friends (text them or call them or visit them) for almost free, actually. You can keep up with people without a middleman.

qweiopqweiop• 2 months ago

Those features sound so narcissistic to me

iLoveOncall• 2 months 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.

fontain2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

They do offer a €8/month ad-free Instagram subscription in the EU. I'm subscribed, it's pretty cool.

chistev5• 2 months ago

And even then, they wouldn't remove ads since they'd want to add to their profits!

mrweasel3• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

AlienRobot2• 2 months ago

Why would they remove the ads from users who have proven that they would even pay for a Facebook subscription?

WarmWash3• 2 months ago

The hurdle is instagram makes ~$27/mo per user from ad revenue.

Would you pay $27/mo for instagram?

mrweasel3• 2 months ago

You probably couldn't even sell an Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp bundle for ~$25 per month.

This sort of looks like a subscription for influencers, organisation and "power users". Even if you turned off the ads, most of people feed, from what I've seen are basically ads they signed up for, e.g. posts from companies, so I doubt that most even care.

SilverElfin• 2 months ago

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

dreamcompiler2• 2 months ago

The last stage of Doctorow's enshittification cycle is "Then, they die."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

princevegeta892• 2 months 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-java3• 2 months 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.)

princevegeta892• 2 months 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.

CuriouslyC2• 2 months 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-java3• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

That's not happening

flufluflufluffy• 2 months 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

AlienRobot2• 2 months ago

Imagine paying for the privilege to display an animated icon.

I blame Bethesda and their horse armor for this.

drnick14• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

ryandrake2• 2 months 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.

itake• 2 months ago

My issues with Signal are two:

1/ meta products trigger organic conversations. People post on Instagram and Facebook that they’re traveling and I will reach out to them if I’m close by. People don’t use Signal that way.

2/ the Facebook groups are very useful for local communities. As a traveler, I reach out to Expat groups for feedback.

barbazoo2• 2 months ago

Right. If being on meta is what keeps the "friendship" going and leaving the platform would have negative effect on the relationship, then on my opinion it wasn't a friendship to begin with. But that might just be my outdated view of how humans work.

alex11384• 2 months ago

Actually it... is but not (just) for the reasons people give (social utility)

You delete a FB acct? It reactivates. Fun! Almost like the company is built off fraud

Iuz• 2 months ago

I'm thinking about it, but WhatsApp has a real hold on the Brazilian population. Removing it would mean losing the primary way my family and many people I know communicate. It’s ubiquitous here, sadly.

derwiki4• 2 months ago

I don’t know about other places, but in SF, everything around schools is coordinated over WhatsApp—you’d be really doing your children a disservice to opt out.

And I hate it. I had deactivated all my Meta accounts but reactivated WhatsApp because of school stuff.

Loughla2• 2 months ago

Tell your school board to use a dedicated messaging platform built for schools. Cite privacy laws. That's what I did, and it worked.

Unless you're talking about parent groups. Because then you're fucked. Every parent group everywhere uses Facebook or Whatsapp and don't care that not everybody uses it. You will be excluded.

carlosjobim3• 2 months ago

There are lots of other important uses for these platforms.

For the down voters: Such as finding local business information or events in your community, and tons of other stuff which isn't anywhere else.

Facebook + Instagram already has more current information than the rest of the web combined.

TFNA7• 2 months ago

You are years behind. It was in 2016 that, when traveling and wanting to exchange contacts with cool local people I met, I first began to get the response “My e-mail address? I don’t have email.” Already then many younger people were only on social media, and it was expected that you would exchange those contacts. And some countries never had the email moment at all, so even older people don’t use it.

Ditto for phones, if you mean the PSTN – as time goes on, fewer and fewer people have ever really used that. When people around the world are communicating via their smartphones with a phone-number-based protocol, it’s overwhelmingly WhatsApp, and guess who owns that?

apsurd6• 2 months ago

What's actually being said is that these people are not your friends/family and probably shouldn't be.

That definitely sounds harsher than intended. It's a meditation really. Nobody needs FB and Instagram. (please read as a meditation)

kingstoned• 2 months ago

How do they not have email when it's required to sign up for various sites, plus having android phones requires gmail, plus official documents, bank accounts, job applications etc. tend to ask for email; email is used for work as well...?

ValentineC• 2 months ago

Good luck trying to not use Meta products (specifically WhatsApp) as a (non-tech) professional outside the US needing to communicate with their counterparts.

The best compromise for such people, I guess, would be a work phone number that's solely for business WhatsApp communication.

drnick14• 2 months ago

I don't think it would be difficult to explain, especially in a professional capacity, that you don't use Whatsapp or Facebook because it does not meet your privacy requirements of your business.

outime• 2 months ago

It's really not as hard as it seems

Only on HN could someone post a take like this without getting laughed at. Outside our very geeky HN bubble, hardly anyone (let's say in Europe, but all my friends in the US use it as well) uses anything other than WhatsApp. There's literally zero reason for the average user to switch.

wyclif2• 2 months ago

WhatsApp as the only contact point is a pretty strong signal that the user is from a developing world country. I'm not from that part of the world, so I don't use WhatsApp.

isolatedsystem2• 2 months ago

I'm in Europe, with a bunch of non-geeky friends, coming from all walks of life who have Signal installed.

As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.

I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.

NamlchakKhandro2• 2 months ago

I'm not on what's app. So you need to switch to something else if you want to chat with me.

AnthonyR• 2 months ago

Haha I love the super out of touch takes on here sometimes. Not using WhatsApp or Facebook where I live absolutely introduces major difficulty to communication and even every day interactions where almost 100% of communication in various social groups is happening on these platforms. Should I ask them to move?

Marsymars3• 2 months ago

The sticky bit I have is facebook marketplace - it's wiped out the other classified marketplaces in my area.

I'm not making any serious money off the old stuff I sell, but the alternative to selling it (or even giving away low-value stuff that's still functional) on facebook is basically just throwing it out / destructively recycling it.

skillina3• 2 months ago

I maintain Meta accounts for two purposes. Facebook Marketplace, and following local businesses on Instagram because it's become the de facto platform for many artists/bars/restaurants/popups to distribute information. I don't add friends, I don't "like" posts, and I don't doomscroll the garbage they put in my feed.

I'm willing to give Meta the information that I enjoy old cars, bar trivia, and breakfast sandwich pop-ups.

the_af9• 2 months 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.

I'm in WhatsApp groups with friends who live abroad, SMS is not an option. We could use another chat app, but then I'd have to convince every friend from every group to use something else. WhatsApp is what every friend I have agrees on.

I belong to several hobby groups that exist only on Facebook or Reddit (or Discord, but I dislike it for several reasons). I'd like to ditch both Facebook and Reddit, but that would mean leaving those hobby groups, and given the joy they bring me, I'm not willing to pull the plug yet.

So you see, it's really not that easy.

pmontra4• 2 months ago

All it would take is WhatsApp going paid plans only. All of Europe will switch to Telegram as primary messaging platform in a couple of days. Hence a paid only WhatsApp will never happen until every plausible alternative will be made impossible either by acquisition or by law.

laweijfmvo2• 2 months ago

i missed a flight once (it was a small private cessna while on vacation). turns out they had tried calling me on WhatsApp, which i don’t use.

komali25• 2 months ago

The only way to know the correct meshtastic configs for Taiwan is to join the meshtastic Taiwan Facebook group.

Or attend an event in person. They advertise their in person events on the meshtastic Facebook group.

rootusrootus• 2 months ago

Ha, I fell for that the first time, not getting me twice. That was my wake up call for how insular the HN bubble is and how utterly convinced people here are that they represent or understand normies.

jjulius9• 2 months ago

The FOMO everyone here is responding with is wild.

deflator• 2 months ago

It must not be that difficult since I have never used a Meta product in my life. I had a Livejournal, lol.

CuriouslyC2• 2 months 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.

derwiki4• 2 months ago

WhatsApp: all school stuff seems to be coordinated over WhatsApp

mrweasel3• 2 months 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.

lolive3• 2 months ago

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

chistev5• 2 months ago

With the constant Enshittification. It's only a matter of time.

lolive3• 2 months ago

Will usenet resurrect from there? As usual the BIG issue is the search engine.

TZubiri• 2 months ago

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

pioyi• 2 months ago

Just use email...

cryo32• 2 months 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• 2 months 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_af9• 2 months 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.

jjulius9• 2 months 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.

aspectop2• 2 months 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

chistev5• 2 months ago

Soon? They have ads already.

the_af9• 2 months 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.

qqtt• 2 months 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.

pertymcpert• 2 months ago

Agreed. Nothing wrong with charging for a product.

sunaookami2• 2 months ago

You are paying with your data already.

apsurd6• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads

Streaming services claiming prior art here.

micromacrofoot2• 2 months ago

Yeah this is the worst, never pay for something that has ads. It's teaching these companies it's ok.

zeristor• 2 months ago

Pray they don’t change the terms a second time.

avd201• 2 months ago

If you don't pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you'd pay for the product.

komali25• 2 months 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?

windexh8er• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

darth_avocado• 2 months 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• 2 months 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).

phyrex• 2 months ago

Those plans exist in Europe. Not sure if they're available elsewhere or how popular they are there

sethops1• 2 months ago

I paid for YouTube Premium until they started showing me ads for YouTube TV (and maybe YouTube Red at the time?). Cancelled and got into DNS adblocking.

prmoustache5• 2 months ago

Are there ads on whatsapp? I've never seen one.

brianmiddleton4• 2 months ago

Someone willing and able to pay for something as frivolous as Instagram or Snapchat makes them priceless to an advertiser. They want to make it easier to identify those people.

But yeah, when Snapchat rolled out their subscription program, I was all set to buy it to get rid of the annoying ads and AI in my chat list, then I realized I could do none of that. So now I just use it a lot less, which is probably better for them anyway.

jmspring• 2 months ago

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

ksd482• 2 months 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.

platevoltage• 2 months ago

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

h4kunamata• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

WarmWash3• 2 months 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.

tgma5• 2 months ago

People who spew I'd rather pay, I'd rather pay often majorly underestimate how expensive Google and Facebook would have to be in the western world to offset the ad revenue per person. The irony is this is especially true for you if money is no object to you, as you'd be disproportionately valuable to the ad machine. It's not going to be ten bucks folks.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 2 months ago

"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." (Meta sells access not data)

Google has been doing this for a while with YouTube

The data collection and surveillance will of course be used to support online advertising services. The ads can be delivered outside YouTube by other Alphabet business units or partners

There seems to be a myth that paying so-called "tech" companies solves the problem of data collection, surveillance and online advertising. As if for every subscriber the company will voluntarily collect less data, perform less surveillance and sell less ad services, leaving that money on the table

The truth is that these subscribers, by paying the companies that perform data collection, surveillance and advertising services, are actually subsidising the practice

thaumasiotes• 2 months ago

You paying just signals that you're someone to push more ads to and to harvest more data on

No, qqtt is correct that if you're paying, you get a vote. It may not be all that much of a vote, but it's more than you'd have if you weren't paying, and Meta will pay attention to it.

For a recent example of how this works, consider that with the post-October-7th wave of pro-Palestinian activism on US college campuses, a lot of rich Jews moved to squelch it as best they could -- not by offering new donations conditional on universities adopting their favored political positions, but by threatening to suspend their existing, habitual, "unconditional" donations.

seanclayton2• 2 months ago

If it's a tech company it's not "if it's free you're the product" it's just "you're the product" nowadays. I am so happy kids these days no longer trust tech because I'd hate to see how exploited they'd be otherwise.

bko6• 2 months ago

Isn't that the whole point of social media like Instagram? To convince the world you have disposable income and are living a lavish lifestyle?

Personally I like signaling that I have money. Why would you want people to think you're poor or cheap, except maybe when you're shopping for a car.

heathrow83829• 2 months ago

fb doesn't actually "sell your data", they use for ad targetting and even then, the ad targetting is waaayyy off, in my experience. they're hardly getting any use out of it for targetting me.

damnesian• 2 months ago

you have disposable income to spend on something as useless as instagram or facebook

Useless in the big picture, but I know people who are cobbling together various income streams to maintain basic quality of life- including sponsored posts on social media. Which gives the platforms a very real value. I'm not saying they aren't exploitative, and overall they don't contribute to the advancement of society- but there a a LOT of big employment holes in the west and like these platforms or not, these platforms are plugging a lot of holes, if only mostly timidly except for the usual stars.

angled2• 2 months 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-a...

okanat5• 2 months ago

Whatsapp wasn't owned by Facebook at the time..

prmoustache5• 2 months 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.

pmontra4• 2 months 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.

okanat5• 2 months 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.

pks016• 2 months ago

There are story ads now.

bmitc2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

to put a finer point on this: I pay for certain newspapers (well, digital subscriptions).

Still plenty of ads in the articles!

gmueckl• 2 months ago

Insufficient information. Each option will address a different part of the market with a different size. Unless the potential revenue is estimated for each option, an informed decision is not possible.

mrandish• 2 months 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.

blks2• 2 months 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.

wahnfrieden2• 2 months ago

Govt won’t do it. They want that data too.

nxpnsv• 2 months ago

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

frail_figure• 2 months 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.

tw04• 2 months 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.

CTDOCodebases2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

The YouTube app on Android is terrible, even with the premium. Autoplay has been notoriously broken for years

csomar• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

lelanthran• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

godelski2• 2 months 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

pyrale3• 2 months ago

they no longer are making enough money

Have they ever made enough money according to their own desire?

latexr• 2 months 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.

palata• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

qwertox• 2 months 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.

vasco• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

general_reveal• 2 months 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• 2 months 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-otter4• 2 months 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.

skeeter20205• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

ncr100• 2 months 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.

torben-friis• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

Painsawman123• 2 months ago

after they introduced Community notes, it isn't far fetched to say that they're simply copying Twitter...

chistev5• 2 months ago

Zuckerberg copying? Who would have thought.

brcmthrowaway• 2 months ago

Paying FU money to folks creating dashboards takes a toll.

righthand• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

embedding-shape2• 2 months 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.

angled2• 2 months 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-a...

alex11384• 2 months ago

20 billion dollars to steal people's phone numbers

Anything Zuckerberg needs antitrust immediately

mjamesaustin• 2 months ago

A small annual subscription is a great way to add friction to bots. I truly wish every platform I used had one.

qingcharles• 2 months ago

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

danpalmer• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

ablation• 2 months ago

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

chistev5• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

How about Costco?

tgrowazay• 2 months ago

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

boredatoms• 2 months ago

Does the subscription turn off ads?

bastawhiz• 2 months 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.

Cider99863• 2 months ago

Shameful reporting that this isn't mentioned.

odo1242• 2 months ago

It sounds a lot like Discord Nitro

notsydonia• 2 months 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.

NamlchakKhandro2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

So who will buy their cursed campus when they collapse?

abixb• 2 months 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• 2 months 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_it2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

What exactly are privacy expectations of a social media app/network? Has that been quantified?

compounding_it2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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-• 2 months ago

Do you really believe that, given all the failed social media competitors? The network effects seem too strong.

przm• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

unnouinceput• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

brianmiddleton4• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

rhubarbtree• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

karel-3d• 2 months 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.

rupatiwari252• 2 months 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• 2 months 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?

rupatiwari252• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Well people _used_ to pay for it, in fact. Except it was 3 EUR/year rather than 3 EUR/month...

dabedee• 2 months 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.

dgellow2• 2 months ago

Telegram is fairly common in Western Europe

thejackgoode• 2 months ago

.. which is a worse option for different reasons than WhatsApp

TrackerFF• 2 months ago

I think it is interesting to see how fractured things are even in western Europe.

I'm in Scandinavia, and at least here, Messenger is by far the most dominant messaging app.

Meta in general has a really tight grip here.

bondarchuk• 2 months ago

Whatsapp is also from Meta.

jraby3• 2 months ago

Same in Israel. Doctors, schools, etc all use WhatsApp. You can't live without it here.

rcMgD2BwE72F2• 2 months ago

All my close family now use Signal after me and a sibling pushed for this. That's 30+ persons. The network is growing too, since all children and new partners join in 1:1 and groups.

rcMgD2BwE72F2• 2 months ago

All my close family now use Signal after me and a sibling pushed for this. That's 30+ persons. The network is growing too, since all children and new partners join in 1:1 and groups.

We like having two apps: WA for friends, Signal for family. There are only few reasons to mix the two.

timbaboon• 2 months ago

Yep, same in South Africa. I still haven't accepted those T's & C's from a few years ago so can't chat with most businesses. In some cases there is no other option, so I just... don't use that company.

On the other hand, I've convinced a lot of my friends to get Signal. I'm the only person that they speak to on Signal, but that's fine ;)

pbiggar• 2 months ago

We work on helping people move to Signal from WhatsApp. It'll be easier once they have a Communities feature, as WhatsApp is very far ahead there.

The main advice we got is that although you need to migrate individuals, the main focus should be on migrating channels. If you have a family group chat, that's the target. Tell people about how Meta spies on them, etc, and then support everyone in the channel to individually set up Signal if necessary.

jwr• 2 months ago

In Central Europe (Poland), too.

Nobody, and I do mean nobody, realizes that using Whatsapp by default (which everyone accepts) synchronizes their entire contacts list to Meta. It's a golden trove of valuable data for an ad targeting company.

People don't realize that there is so much that can be inferred about you from your contacts. Whether you have kids, which schools they go to, and similar personal information.

All of this is not even on the radar and people reduce privacy to "whether someone listens in on my calls or conversations" and tend to brush it off, because they honestly don't care about that part.

Signal doesn't make it easier by refusing to allow encrypted iCloud backups for so many years (which means people lose data when they lose their phones!) and recently introducing a subscription backup service instead of allowing me to do an encrypted iCloud backup. It's hard to explain to people that they should use an inferior product just because of "privacy".

pndy2• 2 months ago

I've seen more interest in Telegram among my contacts in recent years and less of it in Signal. I managed to grab my partner, sister and my friend to use Signal but they all three still use facebook along with whatsapp and doesn't seem they want to leave it.

The recent yet another revival of Gadu Gadu pass by without much fanfare. For those unfamiliar: GG was created by single guy upon ICQ idea of UIN's and quickly become the default messenger in Poland some 20 years ago - even gov't used it at some point. But it lost its position to Skype, Whatsapp and Viber. I admire somewhat the dedication this new company has in restoring our "homemade" network. But it's way too late: new generation of people who's mainly familiar with big corporations services have grown up and GG has nothing that'd made it replace these.

olyjohn3• 2 months ago

What's the problem with SMS? Why are people hesitant to just use that? It works on every phone...

a1371• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

lblock• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

m000• 2 months 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.

egorfine2• 2 months 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.

fsflover11• 2 months 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.

egorfine2• 2 months 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.

joenot443• 2 months ago

Have you had much success migrating entire friend groups over to platforms they’ve never heard of?

I think insisting on using weird products nobody in the real world knows about is a “bad way to keep contact with friends”

abcd_f• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

skeeter20205• 2 months 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.

hmokiguess• 2 months 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• 2 months 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_• 2 months 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.

phplovesong2• 2 months 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.

phplovesong2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

it's possible in europe: 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• 2 months ago

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

sim04ful• 2 months ago

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

hbn• 2 months ago

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

insane_dreamer• 2 months 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.)

1970-01-012• 2 months ago

"It is free and always will be"

...

"social media is over"

...

"Facebook Plus $4/month"

What a joke.

mnls• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

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