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Comment by orange-mentor | Hacker News Reader

Paying for stuff is the endgame. Not DRM, not endless ad blocker proxy wars.

This is all really positive, and proof that these regulations are working, imo.

The pricing reminds me of when contractors quote 2-3x normal for jobs they don't want to do. I'm sure Facebook is expecting that 99.99% of people will just agree to tracking and in a few years they can shutter the paid tier as an "unsuccessful experiment".

I would say the opposite. The people who are able and willing to pay are worth the most to advertise to. So if Facebook wants to maintain revenue, it has to set the ad free price high because they are losing their most valuable product, richer people’s attention.

I am not sure they are their most valuable product to be honest. They make money with literally anybody on the planet.

That's exactly it.

It's a bit more complicated, in that creating and maintaining all the payment processing infrastructure is a huge hassle to make without recouping sufficient cost per user. There's still not really a good option for microtransactions and it's a big problem.

But... There's no way on earth Facebook is making $14/mo off me in adds. It's just not even close. I'd be happy to pay if the value were anywhere close to a match, but it's just not. I mean, that's en par with streaming services and youtube. If Facebook thinks they're even in the same order of magnitude as far as content quantity and quality as that, they're delusional.

If I had to guess an actual fair value for the average user, it'd be around $3-5/mo max. For me personally, it can't be more than $1-2/mo. But maintaining all the payment infrastructure for that when any amount deters most users is pointless. Companies always price these non-free tiers really high.

I think it's more like "in order to match my megaprofits, you need to give me this". I really believe they make a lot or money with custom ads - I don't have data though.

I generally agree, and am quite comfortable to pay for services that are important to me like email. Though I am aware that I am in a relatively privileged position where the cost of online services isn't a big deal to me. Facebook and Google have allowed millions of people of more modest means to have reliable access to email, video, search, social media, etc, at the cost of their privacy. I'm not sure how to solve that problem.

The other thing for be is the reputation of the company. I happily pay mailbox.org for email, Bitwarden for a password manager, Mullvad for a VPN, etc. But the idea of becoming a paying customer of Meta just strikes me as icky given their reputation for being anti-privacy and anti-user. It's not really a problem for me now as I don't use Facebook but when they inevitably start charging for WhatsApp I'm not sure what I will do.

I'm not a cryptobro, but I was really hoping for a while that browser based miners could maybe solve the payment issue.

I was happy to trade some cpu cycles for an ad free experience. I would win, the site would win, it seemed like a really nice idea.

People immediately balked at the concept though and while I have no faith in crypto or its proponents at all, it's nice to think of what could have been.

You'd be trading cpu cycles, which consume power, which cost money. So you're trading money for an ad-free experience. You're paying actual money to remove adds.

And doing it with a cpu that's not particularly efficient compared to asics.

You're better off just paying money.

> You're better off just paying money.

14$ is more than they make off me by showing me ads. Trading CPU cycles seems more fair because it's only when I'm actually using the service.

Because most users are on mobile devices and battery life is a limited resource. It isn't good for the user OR the business if their device dies mid-day and they stop consuming because you ran a miner in the background.

That can't be the only reason though. There are lots of things that are significantly worse/totally absent on mobile OSes already. Lots of software is made desktop-first, including apps like obsidian and (from the current HN frontpage) Arc browser. Mobile users have been 2nd class citizens in some ways for a while.

We were discussing Meta though. They absolutely depend on mobile, that is the majority of their user-base. In fact that is the majority on all ad-supported social media sites, so mining is a non-starter for them. Mobile traffic is >55% of all traffic and >80% for social media sites.

I'm not sure that the original comment was in context of meta or ad experiences in general online, but yeah I'd agree that meta needs mobile users a lot.

Agreed but sadly all too late. I have lost all faith in this company. With all the data privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica i will never trust this company again with my data. I would not put it past them to somehow sell the profiles from paying customers.

In principle though it sounds great. If the customers pays Meta might do something that will make them happier than the advertisers. I will wait though until they actually confirm this.

One thing looks fishy though. Why only europe? If you implement this, would you not want to role it out globally? Would you not want as many paying customers as possible? This tells me potentially that they know many people will stop using the service and they will lose users so the subscription might only recover some of the loss but not the full amount.

I would tend to agree, but my problem with the policy as intended here is that there is a “free” option which serves to prevent competition.

We all know how this goes, where the paying customers end up even more lucrative to advertisers too.

What's the alternative? People choose the ad-supported options because they like the product experience. I having a hard time understanding what the legislative solution to this problem is

The irony here is that paying for stuff here helps you avoid the ads only. You still don't own your data, when you agree to their ToS, which they can use internally.

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