The saying goes if you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Now, you’re both. Every big social media app is testing subscriptions. It's a business model that comes with a perverse incentive. Just like airlines, if you make life worse, more people will pay.
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Exactly. I’d honestly rather have paid social media than engagement algo and ad-driven social media. When your algorithms chase engagement over all else, it leads to real harms, like the youtube alt-right pipeline. Fediverse ain’t perfect, but I like that there’s no engagement-chasing algorithm, no ads, just donations.
Here’s the thing though. You realize that they’re not going to stop with this right?
It’s going to be paid, they’re still going to track you, they are going to offer tiers of service and the higher tier you belong to the more serotonin and dopamine you get out of participating on the platform.
You’re still going to be seeing ads, maybe not at first, you know to get you into the system but once you’re locked in they’re going to start showing you ads again or they’re going to charge you much much more money.
I am well aware that at a certain level all of the computer hardware and compute time and electricity and network costs a significant amount of money.
But the amount of money they are charging people will never be enough. They could get $1,000 a month from every human being on the planet and they would still want more money because it’s not about providing a service it’s about making money and there is no amount of money that is enough money, and the only thing stopping these companies from stooping lower and lower in the pursuit of more money is the fact that they have to court the people that have the money to get the money.
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There’s this tendency in more leftist and anti-authoritarian circles to imagine that the big corporations and the billionaires have a literally infinite pie of money and therefore they can fund all things for free.
And while they do have a lot of money, when you’re scaling things to a general population, things get very very expensive. Facebook has to pay for a ton of infrastructure and bandwidth and hire a lot of very expensive employees. That has to be paid for somehow, and even Zuck himself wouldn’t be able to cover it all for very long. In music, Spotify has never turned a profit. Movies cost massive amounts of money to produce and very often fail to make the budget back.
While it is true that one individual person blocking ads or pirating doesn’t make a material difference, if everyone did that, we simply wouldn’t have any of this stuff at all.
Tl;dr people need to read more Kant.
Except you can’t just pretend like every single business’ expenses are legit, nor can you ignore the fact that the thing they’re selling is our content.
Meta wants $17 bucks. For what? They’re not making shit. My friends posts the content, for free.
So what’s the $17 bucks for? How much of that is going toward executive bloat and other garbage? How much is going towards their PR team, their marketing, their fucking lobbyists??
When I donate a few bucks a month to the open source apps I use, I know that money is going to the people that created and maintain the thing.
This shit is about keeping these companies and their investors rich. It has fuck all to do with keeping the lights on, it’s soley about keeping the line going up.
And again, all of this, and they’re not even making the damn content.
If you think that the only thing required to run services like Facebook and Instagram is a supply of content, by all means, make your own platform. But you’ll pretty quickly discover that developing the infrastructure required to handle hundreds of millions of people uploading hundreds of gigabytes of data every minute isn’t actually a trivial problem, and that there’s a reason Facebook pays hundreds of engineers a lot of money. Meta’s labor costs, excluding sales, marketing, and admin, were 15 billion dollars in 2022. Just keeping the lights on for service as that scale is not a simple task at all, let alone actually building anything new.
If you want to get content from your friends, the postal service is perfectly well-equipped to deliver that, or you can of course simply meet up with them in person. But if you want a platform with essentially everyone you’ll ever meet on it that’s capable of hosting and sending almost any content you can imagine instantly for free, that does actually take money to build. Undoubtedly, there is some money that’s siphoned back towards investors as well, but their products also wouldn’t exist at the scale they do now without the 26 billion dollars of debt that they also have right now, which obviously needs to be re-paid.
I get that you’re probably not actually looking for answers to those questions, but my point is that they do have answers if you actually cared. Again, if you don’t think they’re actually providing any value, then do the obvious thing and don’t use them. After all, by your own position, they’re not actually providing anything, right?
Honestly, in many cases, good riddance
I don’t completely disagree, but for better or for worse, it’s obvious that people do want it.
No business that has investors has any right to claim any of this is about operating expenses.
It was not always like this. When this “everything is free” craze started, in some cases the idea was to offer something free to attract customer to the paid services. In other cases the idea was to show how powerfull was something (Altavista for example was a demo to show how powerfull the Alpha processors were at the time) and were seen as another way to have some visibility. Other cases were investments from entities to offer a public service or something similar.
It is only when companies were born with only the free service to offer that what you say become true.
True, but the costs are way lower and are also distribuited. I can host my instance for a reasonable low price and if I want I can share the price with some friend for example.
See Lemmy as the old BBS, of course there is a price but it is the price of a passion/interest.