I love the idea of paid social media.
Theres so few people who’d pay for it that all the social media companies would, hopefully, collapse and cure us of one of the worst technoplagues of the 21st century.
I’d pay some reasonable subscription, say $1 a month to the maintainer of lemm.ee for the promise to keep my data safe. To Zuck and Elon absolutely not.
I pay like $2 or $3 a month to lemm.ee dev, its worth it to me.
Yeah web site cost money and developers need food. So its adds, subs or donations
It would just be corporations paying for it, and paying for ever more direct access to individuals.
Theres so few people who’d pay for it that all the social media companies would, hopefully, collapse and cure us of one of the worst technoplagues of the 21st century.
I would not be that sure. As long as they will offer the choice between paying with cash or with data, social media companies will survive.
Yeah or you pay with your data or you pay with your money and they still steal your data like YouTube premium and etc
Imagine paying a company, who sells your data, to see memes
Fine. But imagining it is as far as I will go.
Mandatory blood sample to register.
If you read the article, you’ll note that paid subscriptions are for ad-free services, which means your data is worthless, which means it won’t be sold.
The entire point of these models is to comply with EU rules on data harvesting.
Lol, it will still be sold. They are still tracking your attention span and clicks. I can already think of two or three correlation tests to sell to advertisers based on that information alone.
Except this change is occurring because of EU rules that don’t allow them to gather that data.
Those rules are dumb, sure, but this is the workaround - and personally it’s a workaround that I think is quite untenable. Social media succeeds because it is free.
Well, Fediverse it is. When thousand people pay for thousand servers, it’s better for everyone - no ads and no fees and the ones hosting the content don’t need the money to survive. Some people will voluntarily donate to you, most will not, but in the end everyone is happy.
It works for Wikipedia, which is probably the single most important site on the Internet.
It also works for podcasts, well enough to produce an enormous amount of high-quality content, both from independent productions and networks.
I just wish that Wikipedia didn’t donate the money that people donated to it to other charities.
They recently donated a million dollars of their donations to other charitable causes and in theory I’m fine with that but in practice I feel like sort of tricked or betrayed and I just don’t like it.
I refuse to ever donate to them again until they swear to never ever do that again.
If it makes you feel any better about not donating, Wikipedia makes money hand-over-fist and absolutely does not need your donation. Their financials are public; they’ve been in the black for YEARS. They only beg for money because it works. It’s gross and exploitative.
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Wikipedia also has to regularly beg for donations and is probably something of an outlier.
Pretty much every podcast I’ve ever heard has sponsors and built-in ads, or at least shout-outs.
I do think Patreon-style funding is a really good model, but ultimately, most people will not pay for a thing if they can get it for free and tell themselves that other people will pay for it instead. Exceptions to that exist, but they’re rare.
Wikipedia get big donations from big cooporations and wealthy people unlike most other donation based app
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*looks around at Lemmy*
I love y’all.
… but also pay to support your instance. Don’t be a leech.
Yo can you spot me for a few months?
Or self-host
Yes but Mr lemmy.world isn’t a self hoster
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You’re self hosting: no qualms with that.
The most populous server is mostly full of people freeloading. They’re the same types who torrent without seeding.
It’s usually not that big a deal as long as the server has some people chipping in for upkeep but no matter how you slice it: if your account is on a server you’re either contributing to upkeep or leeching off the donations of others.
Self hosters arent leeching: they’re participating in the decentralization.
With federation servers cache content from each other and then serve it to their users. If you have a ton of users you’re using a ton of bandwidth. Simple as.
Thanks for the reply! After I wrote that I had another look at the context in which you posted your comment and realized I had misunderstood your meaning. That was why I deleted it. I can definitely appreciate that a very large instance will have higher operating costs and that people shouldn’t be mooches. Cheers!
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I’m not just bad, I’m evil for not giving my money to something someone told me to give my money to. I also don’t donate money at the register and I don’t do volunteer work. Fucking hang me!
Ok leech whatever you say
Am I actually supposed to feel bad? Fucking hilarious.
I refuse to be both.
You want me to dodge ads and try to scrape my data from your service in order to use it? Fine.
Want me to pay for the service? Maybe…
I will not support double dipping while pushing ads in my face. Fuck right off.
I remember when cable tv first started the big promise was that since you were paying for it the cable channels would be ad free. Well that lasted about a week.
Yeah, strong feelings of deja vue.
If that was the case I might actually pay for cable TV.
This would be for an ad free version.
But they’d still farm our data so no thanks.
To be fair, you always paid it… just not with money…
Yet another reason not to use that stuff, as if we needed more
Would you be opposed to paying to use Lemmy? Someone’s gotta pay them bills. Currently it seems to be donation focused, but that might not scale. So what’s it going to be Player2@sopuli.xyz, ads, or a “premium Lemmy subscription”/tax/due/contribution?
Some run the servers with the expectation of donations. Some run them at a loss. Some of us selfhost.
There are all a variety of ways to keep Lemmy free, where as Reddit is hosted by Reddit. They decide everything about Reddit.
You can set up a Lemmy instance with just a docker file lmao it’s not exactly a large scale operation to upkeep.
If somehow every Lemmy instance went paid only, I’d host my own instance and invite my friends to use it too.This is basically just paying with your time/hardware/electricity rather than money.
Okay? And currently people pay with donations. The suggestion from SkyNTP was, in the most condescending what, what would you do if it became a paid-subscription. Paying with your time or on donation are acceptable. Paying as a part of a subscription is not for me, and I imagine many in the FOSS-oriented fediverse.
I worry that donations may not be enough and people say that it’s not expensive to run. Regardless, I don’t think they’re forcing me to identify myself and building profiles on me to sell to the highest bidder. I’ll pay Lemmy for that.
If I pay Facebook and Reddit they’ll do both even if they say otherwise because I believe they lack ethics.
If this was the only path forward I wouldn’t even be here. Thankfully it isn’t because I can run my own server/community and just connect it to the feddiverse.
I would argue that there is a fundamental difference to this forum style system consisting mostly of text and links, and a traditional ‘social media’ that is entirely photography and short form video. Correct me if I’m wrong, but TikTok, Facebook, etc. store all of the multimedia content on their services themselves, right? The costs cannot be comparable.
Storage is a negligible cost for companies of this caliber. Infinite growth with infinite profit is the root cause of these problems.
No way. Spinning rust isn’t getting any cheaper these days and these companies are expected to not only serve all their existing content, but allow for free uploading and storing in perpetuity. Google is a great example of one of these massive companies trying desperately to reduce the amount they have to store. They recently ended the free Google photos backups and they are more aggressive with deleting inactive YouTube accounts.
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As in “they pay me to use their garbage?”
If else: “No.”
Know what? “Still no.” I already don’t use it for free, they’re gonna have to pay me substantially before I use it.
Agreed! Join me in the real world, it’s free.
If they didn’t farm data and charged for it right in the beginning, maybe it would have lasted longer before turning to shit. But demanding payment while farming data is just insane.
Not to mention that they chose the absolute worst time to do this. They are just absolutely despised right now. They are either in the midst of scandal or scandal is just in their rearview. Why would anyone pay for this right now?
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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.
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I don’t completely disagree, but for better or for worse, it’s obvious that people do want it.
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?
The money for it has to come from somewhere. If you want to protect your privacy (which you should) then you’d be better off paying for services like that than not. It’s been circlejerked to death but: If it’s free, you’re the product.
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.
Even Lemmy is not immune. Sure it’s FOSS, but it’s not free to host. Someone has to pay for servers, data, web domains and more.
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.No business that has investors has any right to claim any of this is about operating expenses.
Not exactly. It’s the age of stockholders, and doing what’s best for them is the law. They expect unlimited growth
Airline seats could be fixed if the gov had any backbone but social media isn’t some essential service so good luck with it.
Social media has a natural moat because what matters it what users are there. As long as social media sites don’t federate with each other, there will be an evolutionary pressure to start exploiting and get progressively worse as your users are locked-in and you can exploit them for the profit of your shareholders.
Paying improves the situation because the users are customers and not eyeballs to sell, but still – they’re there for their friends and follows. If they can’t get those same friends and follows on another site, you can screw them as hard as you like.
Maybe this will finally get people to fuck off social media. It’s toxic and good for nothing. I wish we had forums back and people would start using them again.
That lack of organization on the user side is really the killer. The best you can hope for is some organic movement like the abandonment of myspace.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta plans to charge European users $17 a month for an ad-free version of Instagram and Facebook.
Meta joins TikTok, which confirmed it’s testing its own ad-free subscription plan Monday after Android Authority found a prompt for a $4.99 service buried in the app’s code.
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has its famous $8-a-month blue check mark (which also comes with fewer ads and other dubious features), and anyone who isn’t already paying YouTube is familiar with its promotions for the $13.99 ad-free experience.
There’s no word from TikTok about its fledgling subscription tests, but the comments sections on videos about the app’s premium plan are full of users who say they’d love to sign up.
This is a radical departure from the business model that ran social media for the past few decades, where you offer your eyeballs to the advertising gods in exchange for free connections to friends and content creators.
Over the last twenty years, airlines have found ways to charge customers for options that used to be free, including checked bags, seat selection, and priority boarding.
The original article contains 815 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Facebook has been slowly becoming worse, I don’t know if it’s the algorithm just not showing me stuff I’m interested in, or all the people that posted interesting stuff left, but I’m using it less and less.
Reddit’s quality has gone downhill, lemmy is okay but still small.
The algorithm is really trash. I interact with a posts once then the algorithm think i want to see more for days or even weeks. One of my passion is to listen to unpopular hip hop artists yet the algorithm only shows mainstream artists and not even posts about their music but about their personal life instead. I’m glad they added a chronological feed. There’s a couple of facebook groups that are interesting like a group about my neighbourhood group or the running group of my city ,it’s also great to find local events
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https://youtu.be/HsU7Yi6qxe4?si=6MfoAnF_4G9hX0mB
Give a listen to this my man 🎧🎶
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/HsU7Yi6qxe4?si=6MfoAnF_4G9hX0mB
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I only get fake prank videos on Facebook. Like the most ridiculous situations. I have no idea why. Whenever I need to go to FB for a legit reason, I just need to close it ASAP before I get the next fake prank video.
They have no idea what my interests are, which is great.
