I dont think facebook today is free. You do pay by providing facebook with your personal information. Allot of things on the internet are like this. ie not free. I can say though that once facebook starts trying to ask for money, I, like allot of facebook users will drop fb quickly.

was going to say... now people will have to pay to provide facebook with their personal data?

Yeah the minute Facebook asks me to pay I am out.

Free-access orthodoxy will continue as startups come to disrupt the big players who must produce infinite growth until they too suffer the same fate of shareholder demands and investor-backed startups who replace them. The cycle of capitalism in big tech continues.

Very few people would use Facebook as a paid service. Corporations and self-promoters would pay to have a little symbol beside their name and to have their posts algorithmically boosted. But I doubt Meta would ever try to make the general public pay, because it would accelerate the collapse of their user base.

Sounds like it is a partnership

if you use their services then you are willingly participating

and I’m not gonna do the whole argument about social media value but I can confidently say millions have found massive profound joy from it but yes extreme bullshit happens there too

Yes and this is good for the world. By moving back to a paid subscriber model, websites and forums will closely resemble the magazines they were generated from. This will give smaller ones the ability to exist independent of Facebook, as they can just charge a lower price than Facebook and finance content moderation/curation.

Facebook and the like can attempt such things because they have an essential monopoly. They've fully wormed their way into everything so that many people feel like it's an essential service.

Most services have to offer far better to get payment. And if payment is the only way to access the service, it's gonna be niche.

Too much pushing of payment on services like Facebook will disrupt it and just make it easier for a competitor to step in and take over.

I wouldn't be so sure. Most people already have credit cards on file with Facebook or have a Facebook wallet (or equivalent). So long as Zuck only bills them under $1/mo, few will argue about a 79¢ charge on their monthly statement. This would closely mirror pre-internet newspaper subscriptions, which Facebook basically is for most of the population anyway.

I would bet my life savings that "most" people have never provided Facebook with a credit card number.

Shit, I'm barely in anyway. I haven't been on board with this shit since the days when myspace was the thing.

Wtf would I or anyone need a credit card on file with FaceBook??

The only users I could see that being a thing is business accounts for advertising.

Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users. Of which, 0.6% have more than 1 million followers (https://mention.com/en/reports/instagram/followers/)

That’s 6 million accounts right there, and they’re the ones who are more likely to pay for a verified badge + extra features.

For these big accounts, IG is a big part of their business/livelihood, and $12/mo is a rounding error to then. It’s simply a cost of business to these accounts. Just like paying for their domain/website.

Then remember this is just IG, I didn’t even add the users from FB.

So there’s likely tens of millions of people who are willing to pay for this subscription for a very long time.

They aren’t targeting every day users like me and you. It’s the same with Twitter. They’re targeting the power users with big audiences.

It wasn't free to begin with, these platforms are not worth it to the common person.

I think at least in america the facebook marketplace is quite popular place to sell your second hand stuff. And that probably needs your payment details

I’m in Canada and it’s free to list things on Facebook marketplace. In USA it costs money? Just use Craigslist, Kijiji or VarageSale.. they are all free.

Oh, im in EU and dont use facebook in any form so was just guessing that to be the most likely link to normal peoples money use on the platform. And didnt mean it costing them to sell but maybe facebook could have handled the exchange of money, but I guess its easier to just use cash app or equivalent instead between the buyer and seller so idk.

pay me half as much as you pay these social media execs and i guarantee you i can run things way better

Can we have an open source gov't controlled social space?

Government agencies and representatives shouldn't be favoring private platforms, anyway, should they?

Then any data collected would be publicly available.

Facebook also allows you to send money through messenger. I have no idea how often people use that, but it's a feature that exists. Come to think of it, I haven't seen it ask me if I meant to send money the last couple times I typed $ and then an amt, but I swear I've seen it do that a few times.

No because they’re never giving up their private data and ad revenue. This is just triple dipping on consumers.

I’m about to unsub if I keep seeing posts like this.

More like it signals the end of their products.

There are no actual demands for infinite growth. I don’t know why Reddit made this its new strawman that it can’t stop parroting.

If FB shares become priced at the same PE ratio as your local utilities company, nobody will expect the company to grow. The only “issue”, if you can even call it that, is that they’re significantly more expensive because growth is still expected.

When FB’s growth expectations drop to zero, nobody will pay the current share price or expect any growth. If this sounds too fanciful for you, your boring-ass local utilities company was hot shit too at one point, assuming it is old enough.

Hopefully it signals the end of common carrier protections for big tech

The platform is nothing without content, people with many subs are the ones making the platform profitable. So let's extort some money from them to "protect" their accounts... perfectly rational if you're convinced there's nowhere else to go.

They should be paying us to use Facebook. The day they ask for a fee is the day I deactivate

Keep dreaming

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No, it’s free in the US too

Somehow it seems that Instagram continues to grow its user base. They keep expanding into new markets. I hope their crash comes soon though because the services are pretty much garbage at this point.

You know what sucks about this? They’re going to end the “free” but keep the fucking ads….