On January 26, Meta announced that it was going to test premium subscriptions across its apps. The subscriptions will offer exclusive features and expanded AI tools, while ad-supported versions remain free.
Under the test, users are presented with a clear choice between two paths. People can subscribe to use Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp without ads, or continue using the services for free while agreeing to ongoing data use for advertising purposes.
Meta claims the subscriptions will “unlock productivity, creativity, and AI-powered features,” with each app receiving its own set of paid tools rather than a single bundled plan. The company isn’t committing to one configuration and plans in order to experiment with different feature sets and pricing models over time.
Do people still use Meta’s products?
Instagram and WhatsApp… So hard to get people to stop. Particularly where smaller countries and people who travel are, where WhatsApp is the default phone.
So shitty.
If anyone wants to talk to me, they’ll have to use one of the myriad ways to keep in touch that don’t involve Meta. I refuse to continue to be their product and help them keep the idea alive that they should somehow be unavoidable. Meta relies entirely on the relational networks of people, so I removed my node from their system and made their product a little worse for anybody interested in engaging with me. Life is better without Meta dopamin/rage addiction anyway.
Keep it up asshole, keep pissing people off.
These bastards got market place on lock. Luckily with graphene I sand box the tracking apps in another profile(for now). Fucken sucks though. Work/family use what’s app as well. We need alternatives, but most people just dont care or think about it.
My family still uses WhatsApp all of them, except my kids (I never allowed them and I have very tight control of their devices). After a few months of not being able to send me memes and shit, they started installing Signal one after the other. Long story short, the family group is now on signal.
A premium tier for WhatsApp? The app I want to get rid of but can’t because employers can’t be assed to send emails or make phone calls first?
What kind of shitass employer would require the use of WhatsApp? Do they make you use TikTok to clock in?
A huge portion of Europe runs on WhatsApp. And many places use it as there primary communication for customers.
Well I blame them for making a terrible decision there. Europe does a lot of things right, this is not one of them.
Agreed.
It’s everywhere. Been looking at moving to Latin America (Uruguay or Panama specifically) and many businesses there don’t even have/publish regular phone numbers. The tour companies I traveled with said you can’t get anything done without whatsapp.
Man, that would be a showstopper for me. I wish they would wake up
Honestly, if this reduces user-hostile UI changes for paid accounts, and I can get a chronological feed of just friend activity with original content, I’d pay it at this point.
(I know there is supposed to be a friends-only feed now, but it’s not even close to being friends-only still.)
It’s a big if, and I don’t think it will be what I want, but I’m just putting it out there that I would pay if the experience is valuable enough.
Seriously? You’re gonna pay money to this guy?
I mean, do I want to give money to a billionaire? Not exactly.
On the other hand, if we don’t start supporting premium software services and open source projects, the enshtiffication trend will get worse.
(I know Facebook isn’t open source, but I’ve seen enough open source projects abandoned or enshittified due to lack of support from users.)
I have to choose among my principles, and I’m strongly against user-hostile UI/UX paradigms, enshittification, and other downward quality trends in software/services.
(I pay to support my Lemmy instance - do you?)
How long until the premium version also has ads? It’s the clear trend at this point.
Yup, its predictable. “No ads for money,” then “no ads for money and light ads for free” then “no ads for lots of money, light ads for money, unbearbale ads for free” is literally always the model these fuckwits push too now.
users are presented with a clear choice between two paths
There is a third path. Just stop being a user. Maybe that choice isn’t clear enough. Push notifications are fucking evil. I removed the app and use FB as a PWA about once every six months. I might use it more if it had content from my friends or anyone I gave a fuck about, but instead it’s all promotions and suggestions.
Without the little red number creating FOMO on my phone, I have no impulse to check it. Yet I check Lemmy several times a day. I check Bluesky every couple of days. Because every time I open them, someone I want to hear from is posting something I want to see. You should try that, Zuck.
I haven’t touched a facebook product in almost 15 years and my life has been nothing but better for it.
Shit yeah that’s about how long for me. Gods, I remember talking about how cool and futuristic Facebook was back in like 08, but in my defense I was a middle schooler. I rapidly saw it morph into a hub of unpleasantness and bailed.
There are a few things facebook is better at than anything in my life - checking up on distant friends that I wouldn’t call normally but I want to know the big events in their life; ensuring my parent see pictures of my kids (we don’t live in the same state). However those things only need a couple minutes of my time per day, and that isn’t enough to make them a big company and so they keep shoving garbage that doesn’t make my life better in my face. That garbage takes up hours per day of many people’s time and is worth a lot to facebook.
For most of our history, we couldn’t check on how distant friends were doing. Except through gossip I guess. Today we can be connected for decades with people we never interact with irl. I wonder if it takes a toll mentally to be attached to so many people for so long.
Man, you have no idea how old their user base is.
Probably 4-6 months ago I finally reached my breaking point. Facebook used to be centered around friends. Sure, most of them are now dormant on the platform, but for those that were still active, they were still buried amongst piles of far-right bullshit that I never asked for and that wouldn’t go away no matter how much I clicked “see less like this.” I deleted the Android app and logged in via mobile browser. I still occasionally check the happenings in my industry’s Facebook groups and my HOA, but Facebook is otherwise dead to me.
Meta claims the subscriptions will "unlock productivity
Productivity… on Facebook? God they are desperately need to sell you something here.
It was literally Zuck’s whole pitch for VR.
Meetings! Now in 3D.
Man, that was so tone-deaf. The dickhead workaholic thought everyone was just like him and only wanted to use it for work.
he is an android, robots dont need any sleep.
Or fun.
I worked there during the whole VR pitch and they tried to encourage those of us with headsets to join meetings with them.
Nobody had legs. It was a huge selling point of the Quest Pro that you could have legs.
facebook is about 90-99% bots, cant get any more productive than that.
If they show me the pictures of my friends, while hiding all the garbage (outrage politics, “you won’t believe this”…) so I spend about 2 minutes a day there and get off it would greatly increase productivity. Well it would lower mine because I almost never check facebook anymore - but my life would be enhanced if they limited themselves to the useful things they do and let me go in 2 minutes: a trade off that would be worth it.
So, all the bots are supposed to pay or watch add’s? That’s insane!
I hit this today when I went to check a local restaurant’s Instagram for the menu (like many I’ve come across, they treat Instagram as their website)
Nope. I guess that information is now all gone to me
Between this and Twitter I’m pretty annoyed at how much harder it is to get local information without just physically going to a place compared to 5 years ago. I’m not gonna pretend it used to be perfect, but this is getting spectacularly shitty
This drives me crazy. Hopefully it’s the start of the end for FB.
Pays us to spy on you!
Is this image in the article AI generated or a meta replicant?
Not sure, but who needs a Voigt-Kampff test with replicants looking that bad?
Who in the fuck would do this?
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Guarantee that your data still gets used to feed you ads with the “premium” subscription.
