Meta to charge for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Meta to charge for ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram in Europe

nytimes.com

174 pointspretext200 comments

Interesting seeing so many people here not seeming to understand this was a response to EU regulation rather than a "good business move" by Meta. i.e. EU making it harder and harder to show ads, not being able to personalize, etc.

This makes it all the more interesting whether the “submit or pay” model of GDPR compliance (already used by Le Monde, etc.) is accepted as “freely given consent” by the courts—there’s been some hubbub about that IIRC, but no definitive opinions. It doesn’t seem to have been the intent of the text as I read it, but we’ll see how it plays out. (E.g. a theorerical “submit or €1K” model probably shouldn’t pass on proportionality grounds, but then €10/mo is, I expect, already orders of magnitude more than Le Monde or even Facebook is getting from ads per visitor, so one could argue it’s also disproportionate.)

German Websites often use a similar model, and it has been ruled as illegal.

https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illega...

I do think that’s a regulatory play, but as you say — expecting few people will take it, but giving the option will shut down criticism.

Some here are worried that their data will still be used to train (ads) models: you can easily remove a large sample from your training set and still have a great predictive model. This would most likely not be hard to implement (modulo edge cases like whether you keep parameters trained on someone who has since decided to enroll in the training program).

> orders of magnitude more than Le Monde or even Facebook is getting from ads per visitor

No, Ads per visitor were roughly $18/m/u lately (quoting an anon on Twitter: check the financial reports), so modulo FX, €10 would be about 50% less. It would be a mistake to make it prohibitive. There’s a big debate on whether people picking the option would be valuable users or not. I suspect not (for reasons that rely on my experience working on the platform, so I won’t go into too much detail: explore the Ad tools to get what I mean).

> No, Ads per visitor were roughly $18/m/u lately (quoting an anon on Twitter: check the financial reports)

You're off by a factor of 3 there. That's the European ARPU per quarter, not per month.

Yeah but the use numbers are vastly inflated too. The premium users are worth significantly more than a bot out of Indonesia

> No, Ads per visitor were roughly $18/m/u lately

What the hell, really? I thought run-of-the-mill web ads averaged out to like cents per visitor usually. Is Facebook really charging advertisers such a huge premium? Are people really spending so much time on it? (The last one may sound rhetorical, but still, I’d think most people couldn’t afford to spend a lot of time there, even among those who are well off enough to be on it in the first place.)

> I thought run-of-the-mill web ads averaged out to like cents per visitor usually.

That’s because inventory is near infinite and full of fraud. Facebook has much higher quality inventory (at least for ads displayed in their own apps).

I believe it’s already being challenged in Austria[1].

[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/media/news/austria-challeng...

Thank you! The wording in that article was confusing—

> Austria’s data protection authority DSB ruled that readers can specifically say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to cookie paywalls[—]

but according to the activists maintaining GDPRhub[1], the regulator’s decision was that the model is not compliant because “allow everything” can’t be the only (other) choice, as consent has to be specific.

[1] https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=DSB_(Austria)_-_2023-0.17...

As a comparison Webedia low quality websites ask for 2€.

Would it also be possible to get the thirst traps and booty models off my feed too? Just like I get some control over my ad preferences and tags, it'd be very handy to get some feed controls in place.

My Facebook is completely useless due to all the suggested posts that appear in my feed. They're all memes that are of no interest to me and they cover up any posts from the few friends that still use Facebook.

Not being active on social media has meant a lot of old friends have drifted out of my life so I'm trying to force myself to be more active on it but sadly there are no enjoyable (or usable) platforms left.

Social media has effectively split in two directions, and the ends of the spectrum are Discord and TikTok.

TikTok is almost purely algorithmic, stranger-generated content consumption with the novelty factor cranked to 11. Discord has no algorithmic curation, voting, etc, and is just people talking that you have to curate yourself.

Facebook is trying to pivot in the TikTok direction. Problem is there are a lot of people who want to use it to connect with actual people (because that's kinda how it worked in the past), which is orthogonal to their mission of pumping the maximal possible amount of garbage into your brain.

Discord isn't social media, it's an instant messaging app and a terrible one at that. A messaging app can't fully replace early-Facebook-like social network, because it just works so much differently and is optimized for different use cases. There's strangely nothing at all to fill this particular niche, although I'm working on one fediverse project that tries.

I find it hard to believe that there are no products out there trying to fill the 'early-Facebook-like social network' niche. People are discovering that a true social network, between actual people in the physical world, is not a scalable thing...and it should not be. On top of that, these same products trying to create social networks eventually run into a monetization problem.

I love discord. It is the only social media I regularly use. There seems to be a sentiment that pops up every now and again that it’s a shame that content in discord communities is getting “walled off” and inaccessible by google and others from the rest of the internet. That is a strange sentiment to me. Discord communities are private by design. If the server owners want public discourse, there are many options for that. Are these same people upset that there aren’t microphones at every table in restaurants so that those conversations aren’t “walled off” from anyone not in the restaurant? In fact I think scraping website content by third parties for their own indexing should be opt-in, not opt-out, it’s pretty obnoxious in my opinion that you can put up a website intended only for friends and family but then large entities all over the world crawl your content and broadcast it on their own platforms without your consent.

I think most people complaining about that are talking about support discords for software projects - where the default used to be that you contributions were permanent and searchable. Walling it off makes it less useful.

I use discord mostly for keeping up with friends and am very glad those chats aren't on the open internet

I don't think anyone wants to read you and your buddies' discussion of Cities: Skylines II and Super Mario Wonder.

They're irritated by all the open-source projects replacing their mailing list, forum, or wiki with "Just ask on the Slack or Discord". It's the most god-awful mode of community support imaginable.

I don’t understand how we got here either. Like who pushed for this result? It’s objectively worse in every way.

Not every way.

I love the old bulletin boards and IRC channels where you get to know people, talk about projects, asking for help, etc.

Discord fills that role in a much more accessible way than posting on a forum or googling a stack overflow answer.

Both hae value. Apparently you much prefer a less real-time interactive approach to solving those problems.

Discord optimizes for you getting help with your problem at the expense of you being able to help yourself with your problem by searching for other people having the same problem.

Just look to the Discord channels for popular games or 3rd party modpacks to see this constantly in action. Lacking a forum with a pinned thread for FAQs or basic support, the mods/admins/regulars must rely on chatbot auto-answers keyed off of keywords to pull out rote responses to common tech support questions.

I get that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, would prefer such a socially high touch "bulletin board" model, but... some of us run away screaming from such things. I find Discord impossible to navigate in terms of finding discussions of issues that have already occurred, and having to perform my own "archeological excavation" to discover the tidbits that are actually relevant to me is orders of magnitude harder and more irritating than, say, perusing/searching a discussion forum or similar online venue.

For those of us who came of age during the "RTFM before bothering anybody, dammit!" attitude toward supporting engineers, looking for already posted answers to a problem that likely someone else has already solved is vastly superior to bothering someone about a problem they might well be tired of talking about for the 100th time.

I've never been good at "conversation" in real life or online; some of us simply aren't and have/find our strengths elsewhere, and increasingly it seems all online discussions about, say, issues around a game published by a small indie vendor are being pushed to Discord and in some cases even shutting down other online communication channels in favor of that. A vendor who keeps its online discussion forums available and supported is always going to get a lot more interest from me than what I see younger companies doing.

Maybe it's just a big cultural shift, and I am no longer relevant. Not ready to "go away" just yet...

I don’t see how that’s discord’s fault though, blame the project leaders. They must have their reasons. Maybe for projects in active development, content from years ago just isn’t relevant anymore anyway.

> Discord communities are private by design.

Are they? I'm sure there are people who use Discord like that, but I am on dozens of servers and all of them are public, i.e. anyone can join anytime. That's not private that's just hiding from Google.

> If the server owners want public discourse, there are many options for that.

Chat/video/audio as good and popular as Discord? Where? IRC? Matrix?

> Are these same people upset that there aren’t microphones at every table in restaurants so that those conversations aren’t “walled off” from anyone not in the restaurant?

Fair enough but nobody is asking direct messages or the servers for people who actually know each other and want privacy to be on the open web. Just the ones that are closer to being public squares for discussing specific topics.

> In fact I think scraping website content by third parties for their own indexing should be opt-in, not opt-out, it’s pretty obnoxious in my opinion that you can put up a website intended only for friends and family but then large entities all over the world crawl your content and broadcast it on their own platforms without your consent.

Eh, I get what you're saying but don't you think the Internet as a whole loses a lot of its value if this happens? Wasn't Google and good indexing one of the crucial things that led to the Internet revolution?

I’m sure the vast majority of sites would still opt-in to the indexing, considering the lengths people go to with SEO crap to get to the front page of google.

The good ones are actually private and you need to pay to play

You're talking about the ones behind someone's patreon? Or something else?

There are groups that hang out behind a subscription. They use payment management services that handle renewals and subscription. Not patrons. They can be really well organized like work slack level of organization. The fees often pay for people to manage the content and staff to moderate. Though moderation staff is generally younger or in poorer countries.

It's not strange to me at all. People use Discord for things that should be publicly searchable, like FAQs or issue tracking. This is usually what drives complaints.

If an open source project chose to track issues using a series of private conversations in restaurants, most of us would recognise how ephemeral and fleeting that is.

Discord sucks because it’s taking communities that SHOULD be public and walling them off. It has replaced forums for several open source communities.

Mine was like that too. I started using the "I don't want to see this" flag pretty aggressively, and outright blocked a lot of accounts I had no interest in. It has worked pretty well - aside from some ads, my feed is from people I follow. I thought they weren't posting, but it turns out the algorithm was prioritizing NBA memes and other crap.

I did that for a year or two, but it didn't work. Facebook always found new kinds of garbage to recommend. If anything, FB started showing more algorithmic content and fewer posts from my friends. I eventually stopped posting on Facebook, because it had become a wasteland almost devoid of people.

Try https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends

Annoying that that's not the default, sure. But at least it exists.

Make that https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr and you'll get your friends feed in chronological order too.

You can get to the same thing by choosing "Feeds" in the menu and then selecting "Friends". That one works in the app as well.

I randomly have the whole Feeds menu option disappear entirely, "see more" doesn't reveal it when that happens either, so I just book marked the different versions of it I found useful to use directly.

Pages I have no idea about with “follow” or “groups you’ll like” still outnumber friends posts 2:1

Sorry, it's actually https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

I thought sk=h_chr was unimportant so I trimmed it off the URL before sharing. Turns out it's necessary.

5 suggested groups and 3 sponsored in the first 10 stories.

Facebook is a ghost town. There’s just three people of the 125 “friends” who appears in the first 20 odd.

Thank you so much, this is perfect!

That's Instagram for me. There is one or two posts of people I know. Then the bold and always wrong claim that I now have seen all new posts followed by stupid meme & travel content I have zero interest or engagement with.

Highly recommend the chrome extension Facebook Purity. It strips your feed of the nonsense you don't care about in a very configurable way.

Also recommend not visiting Facebook altogether. It strips your life of nonsense you don’t care about in a very pleasant way. Your true friends will still be there through messaging, phone, or in person.

But what about acquaintances that I want to keep hearing about? People really whine about FB having negative utility but I think it’s kinda awesome that there are people who I kinda know for a decade that post, and we can interact once a year or whatever.

Like recommending abstinence only education.

People say this shit all the time without considering that others might not use Facebook in the same way they do.

Yeah, I could force my friends to call me every time they want to grab dinner, but that would be annoying for everyone involved and not respectful of how they want to communicate.

Isn't that annoying for you that platform shape your relationships?

Nobody is forcing them to call you; if it’s too much effort they don’t have to include you.

Sounds like they’re “forcing” you on to a platform and aren’t prepared to be friends with you if you’re not on it.

That's absolutely not true. There are many inconveniences that I don't inflict on the people around me in order to make an obscure point which only tech nerds care about. That's not being "forced" to use Facebook, it's being considerate.

I agree that it would be possible if I cared enough. I don't agree that refusing to use a glorified messaging app with an integrated calendar, just because it comes with a feed that some people get addicted to but none of us ever look at, is a good recommendation that will make life better for me and the people around me.

> to make an obscure point which only tech nerds care about.

You’re making some huge assumptions here, as if people are on some kind of wild protest.

I don’t use Facebook just like I don’t own a boat or go to church. It’s not valuable to me, so I don’t do it.

> glorified messaging app with an integrated calendar

The disconnect here is that this is an innacurate conception of Facebook, which is a privacy-destroying, propaganda-spewing advertising platform with some addictive social features to bait the lure.

Think of it this way: I don't like the smell of cigarette smoke. No matter how much I like someone, I won't be around them if they're smoking. If they insist on smoking while I'm around, I'll find somebody else to socialize with. And to me, Facebook is just as unpalatable as smoking.

Then stop engaging with the content, and when it does show up use the "Not Interested" feature. You have control over the content you're shown.

I'd be surprised if you found anyone agreeing with your statement.

You absolutely do not have control over the content you're shown. Why would they give you that power?

> YouTube’s ‘dislike’ and ‘not interested’ buttons barely work, study finds.

> A Mozilla report found feedback buttons didn’t stop the majority of similar recommendations

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23356434/youtube-dislike-...

"TheVerge" is not what I would consider a reliable source. Perhaps you could've linked the study they referenced instead?

They have made mistakes [1], but I don't see why they are to be considered as not reliable till the end of time.

Here's a direct link to the Mozilla study: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-investigation...

[1] See the correction in https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/19/23880111/microsoft-xbox-s...

> YouTube’s ‘dislike’ and ‘not interested’ buttons barely work, study finds.

Well, they work great for skipping ads..

I got rate-limited doing this. "Try again later" every time I clicked on "Not interested".

Reporting obvious scam ads also ends up not being against policy everywhere.

This was effective for me around a decade ago. These days it feels like most algorithmic content generation sites don't care when you express negative interest in something.

That's not true. My only Instagram engagement is blocking obvious scam content should I accidently open the app and it still shoes me nothing else but that.

"my only engagement..." Of course instagram will show you the only content you engage with. Is that really surprising?

Does blocking content actually count as positive engagement? I am not sure that's a good Strategie

That would be $EXTRA. (sorry, EXTRA €)

The algorithm just gives you more of what you asked for. :)

No, it gives you what's trending for the categories you're into. I like biking. What kind of biking content does get the most likes and is therefore suggested on Instagram? Woman in tight clothes with unzipped tops. I'm into skiing, what kind of content do I get? Girls skiing in bikinis. I'm following some coaches for a sport I participate in, what kind of content do I get? Girls in yoga pants doing exercises at the gym.

For every category, there will be someone doing a sexualized version of it. Those get lots of eyeballs and likes, and hence get boosted into suggestions for that category. And it's not like I get every post like that. But often enough that I no longer scroll in public for fear of what NSFW things will show up.

But this reminded me of another thing once popping up in my feed: my own private pictures.

I first got a bit shocked. Did I accidentally post these to Facebook?? But no, it was just a suggestion from Facebook, "share these photos". But I was on the bus, I didn't expect these photos to suddenly be on my screen for those around me to see (pictures of a medical condition). And it creeped me out that Facebook was looking through my phone's gallery when I'm not explicitly doing it to upload an image.

I ended up blocking file access for Facebook. Which now makes it impossible for me to post pictures. Which in turn of course means I barely post anymore. Great thinking, PMs.

I find it obnoxious that Facebook doesn't use the default system file picker (which doesn't require filesystem access permissions to use).

With other apps I can easily select photos even if they aren't locally available on my device. With Facebook I need to manually download the files from Google Photos, paste them into a local device folder, and only then will they actually show up in Facebook's weird, poorly-designed photo picker UI. Not exactly the best user experience.

Yeah, the same with Messenger. Want to send someone a photo from last year? Good luck scrolling through their clunky interface a thousand pictures back, vs just using the jump-to-month in my native gallery app.

Android problem that doesn’t exist on iOS because Apple keeps a leash on them. Walled garden is nice like that.

This kind of content used to never show up on my Instagram feed but one day I tapped a few too many profiles deep and now I have the same issue. Pure trash

This feels a bit like saying that the opioid epidemic is due to drug users buying more. Sure, all of them made a decision at some point to start using. But that doesn't remove the responsibility of those pushing the product to at least allow users to say "please stop" and then actually stop.

It’s always funny to make a tongue-in-cheek joke about this, but asking for fewer thirst traps is still a legitimate request from people who click them.

Imagine a gambling addict or an alcoholic asking to see fewer casino and booze ads and being told stop complaining because "the algorithm just shows you what you want"

Is this true? I'm under the impression that social media platforms can't tell the difference between looking at some content because you enjoyed it versus looking at some content because you don't like it and you're confused why it's being served to you.

It doesn't matter because

> The algorithm just gives you more of what you asked for.

It doesn't matter whether you asked for more because you hate it or love it. The algorithm prioritizes identifying the content with which you will engage.

No. "What you asked for" is a bold faced lie. By your account it shows you what you engaged with, even though you literally didn't ask for it.

And even "engaged with" is bullshit. What the hell does "engage with" even mean? What you really should be saying is it gives you more of what you pause scrolling on. That is neither asking for something, nor "engaging".

I imagine after enough times clicking on content out of confusion, preference become clear

That's BS. You haven’t seen their their algorithm and neither have I. Tech companies are far too quick to refer to their little opaque boxes as having supernatural powers to "show me what I want".

not true, it gives you more of what you engaged with

if you looked for a few seconds longer = engagement

if you read the comments in disgust = engagement

if you commented in disagreement, even to reply to another comment = engagement

I wonder how it works from the business perspective. There is an adverse-selection argument against introducing ad-free versions of an ad-supported service: the people who are most likely to pay for an ad-free experience are also the same people who are most valuable to advertisers. So if that group is gone, the remaining users could either command less ad revenue, or be shown higher CPM ads (e.g. ads for prescription drugs, not available in EU; or ads for adult content, incompatible with a family-friendly platform). How would this work? Or maybe the adverse selection assumption is faulty? Or maybe this choice could help avoid an EU fine of some sort?

This is surely part of why they started with the EU - it’s (1) relatively wealthy but not US wealthy, and (2) their ad businesses are already at risk and becoming a liability.

A quick Google search says that Metas Average Revenue Per User is $11 worldwide, $60 in US/canada, and $18 in Europe. They have a 40% profit margin. So a $10/mo subscription in Europe is likely more profitable than ads. And would still be so in US market.

There is a risky balance still - they’re obviously the best customers so the statistics may dramatically shift and they likely lose a chunk of signals to train their ad models against, meaning worse performance. That’s an opportunity though, I suspect that a huge cost of theirs is the ad engineering and they can potentially cut down on all that infra - from training to serving.

And yea, if the billion dollar fines keep coming, it may also be a meaningful accounting decision.

To me your selection is reversed.

If you hate ads so much you're prepared to pay fb to get rid of it, I don't believe you're one to click on them.

Do you think Coca Cola advertises to get you to go buy a coke right now? United Airlines expects a click-through to get you to book a flight right there and then with no planning or talking to your spouse? Think Audi expects you to click their facebook ad and order a car online?

No, they want to become ingrained in your mind. So to them, just exposing you to their ad is enough. Whether you click on it or not is irrelevant.

https://www.adroll.com/blog/brand-awareness-vs-direct-respon...

United probably wants the click now cola not so much. Airlines are commodities

most ads I see on Instagram don't want my clicks. They want me think of a Rolex watch or a new BMW car by injecting themselves between the content

I keep a low effort fuzzy mental list of things that advertise themselves in ways I find unpleasant. They are the first thing I think of when I go to buy something, but the last thing I'll ever buy.

An example: The North Face edited wikipedia to change the photos of famous hikes/outdoorsy locations with people wearing North Face jackets with the logos visible.

Wow, I hadn’t heard of this before but it’s actually disgusting and despite this happening some time ago they just got added to my shit list of companies I won’t buy from.

“North Face Brazil’s CEO said in a statement. “With the ‘Top of Images’ project, we achieved our positioning and placed our products in a fully contextualised manner as items that go hand in hand with these destinations.””

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/30/north-fac...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18644158/north-face-wikip...

5/2019: The North Face, in a campaign with advertising agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made, hatched a scheme to get its products to the top of Google Images by replacing Wikipedia photos with its own product placement shots.

In the promotional video, the company notes how all trips begin with an initial Google search, and often the first image that shows up is from a Wikipedia article about the destination. ...

The video brags about how North Face cleverly hacked the results to get its products to the top of Google search, “paying absolutely nothing just by collaborating with Wikipedia.” Only, it wasn’t a collaboration at all; it was a violation of Wikipedia’s terms of service for paid advocacy. ...

> An example: The North Face edited wikipedia to change the photos of famous hikes/outdoorsy locations with people wearing North Face jackets with the logos visible.

I hadn't heard of this but it is beyond sleazy in my book. Though, to the company's credit, I cannot fault for the actions of likely one or a small group of marketing people. Though I don't know, maybe, that type of idea had visibility all the way to the top.

That speaks in favor of the value of personalized ads. Yet people will generally see it as a bad thing if asked.

It's not because I want something that I actually need something. I've wanted to build a UPS with lithium batteries for a while, my ads are all BMS, lithium cells, etc... This is definitely good for advertiser, but as one of the "people", all I see are hard-to-resist ads.

AliExpress is especially good at this for maker gear, I'll look at a reflow station and they will spend the next 6 months showing me reflow station ads until I cave and buy it, even though it is a purely frivolous purchase.

Personalized ads are extremely effective when your profile is good, but that does not mean that I don't see it as a bad thing.

I think personalized ads are way worse, because they entice you to buy products you actually want. Buying things is usually a bad idea, so personalized ads make this problem worse.

It connects you with products and services that are relevant to you. If you're buying things that you shouldn't, that's on you.

Value to whom? Certainly not to me.

It offers value to you if it improved your ability to discover products or services that you need.

If offers value especially to small local advertisers because it allows them to target a local audience on a very limited ads budget.

There is a type of advertising called "brand advertising" where the goal is more about brand awareness (e.g. think of a Coca-Cola superbowl ad) than "direct response advertising". Such advertisers don't really care if you click on ads, but they still want to reach high-value users.

I’m pretty sure most meta-originated ads are direct response. At least most of the ones I’ve seen. Most brand advertising shows up in places where engagement is hard (eg TV, billboards) while direct response is perfect for absentmindedly scrolling (you don’t feel bad clicking away).

They presumably set the price at a threshold where on average it still works out even though they lose on the highest end customers.

Pivoting to a subscription model is going to be incredibly difficult, but long term is critical if Meta wants to offer a platform that makes massive profit, and doesn't make a bunch kids want to kill themselves etc.

The core issues are kind of related.

1. The value of a channel/platform to advertisers has an exponential relationship to that platforms reach. This is why Meta is bathing in money, and Snap struggles to make a dollar.

2. The people advertisers most want to reach (rich people) are the first to pay to remove ads.

I suspect Meta will want to focus on getting minors into the subscription platform initially since they low(er) value to advertisers, and highest risk for regulation etc. and then over team letting these young people stick with the sub model as they grow up. By the end of the decade they would more aggressively be able to move away from an ad-supported model then...

At that price point it is not a serious attempt at gathering subscribers.

It’s to show law makers that there is an alternative to ads and probably that “users aren’t interested”.

Possibly, but it wouldn't really make sense to offer it at a lower price considering their current monthly ARPU in Europe is ~$6-$7.

If they offered a lower price subscription and a lot of people jumped onto it it would be disastrous for the business.

People here moaned that they despise ads and gladly will pay not to see them. Well, this is the opportunity to do so

I'd gladly pay not to see ads on a site that has content worth seeing. Facebook and Instagram are not one of those.

Does it mean you won't go on them at all?

No facebook, no instagram accounts after years not posting on both.

About 5 years too late I’m afraid - none of my friends post on Facebook any more.

Instagram is still quite popular so the effect it has will be interesting

It is annoying that they will still collect and sell all your advertising data.

Along with the fact that you have at least €X in disposable income every month.

Can I pay to opt out of their internet (real world?) wide tracking too?

Or better, can I just not pay for that and have them not do that?

You can disable third-party cookies and install a good ad blocker in your browsers to make tracking not 100% impossible, but much harder.

Facebook recommended my sister to a friend soon after visiting my friend that I hadn't visited in years.

Is there any way to get them to not do that kind of shit too?

You can with uBlock Origin and Fanboy's Anti-Facebook Filters: https://www.fanboy.co.nz/

About a decade ago I wouldn’ve jumped at the opportunity of paying for an ad-less Facebook. Now that it’s deserted by actual posts by people I know and care about and has become a desolate expanse of ‘pages’ and manufactured content, the only reason I check it out at all is to lead through my memories of happier times. This is too little too late. Facebook isn’t resurrecting itself from its inexplicable enshittified suicide.

It is not ads that people are against when it comes to Facebook.

The common concerns are about its algorithmic feed, recommendations, research experiments etc that allow subtle manipulation for commercial and political gains. You can still be subjected to the rampant invasion of privacy.

If someone is planning on paying to remove ads and avoid all of the above, I'm certain that they will be disappointed.

Those two things are incredibly related.

The reason algorithmic feeds are they way they are etc. is so that they can optimise ad load and make more money. They want you be sucked into anything they possibly can to get you to scroll more, and see more ads.

If they move to a subscription model the incentives change significantly.

From the horse's mouth: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-...

Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38068635

This should go over like a lead balloon. Removing ads isn't going to also magically spawn content worth consuming. Optimize the user experience enough, and the user will finally realize they are looking at nothing.

> will cost between 9.99 euros and 12.99 euros per month

This is surprisingly expensive

Facebook's ARPU in Europe over the trailing 12 months was $69.72 or $5.81 per month.

Considering only the most dedicated users are going to pay for this, Meta is most likely losing money with Ad-Free version

Source: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_earnings/2023/q3/p...

Nit: they don't actually lose money by offering a subscription, they just make less money than if they didn't offer one.

Same thing.

It would be same thing if their business was losing money, which it isn’t.

The legal concept of "lost wages" is the money you would have earned if you had not missed work. This is no different. There is an opportunity cost to everything.

“Starting on March 1, 2024, an additional fee of 6 euros a month for the web version and 8 euros a month for mobile access will apply for additional accounts.”

It’s quite clear they want it to be as expensive as possible. But it’s a double edged sword: a point can be argued that this is how much our data is worth to them, which opens them to a whole new kind of issues stemming from rising awareness.

I think the intent is less to have people actually pay for it, and more to use it as justification for their tracking on the users who won't pay for it.

Yet, the GDPR states that private information should only be requested to provide a service that requires it and with “No strings attached”. My understanding (IANAL) was that the GDPR explicitly forbids asking for private information to pay for a service.

Sure, and Facebook's last two attempts were equally not particularly GDPR compliant. It's clear that "Questionably GDPR compliant" is not enough to stop Facebook attempting a scheme.

Not if the intention is to keep as many people as possible on the ad-ridden free side.

It should be literally $1 a month, max $2

Why would they offer it at a rate that certainly loses money compared to existing ad options?

Why?

I'd pay it if they also didn't track my browsing data. Anyone know if that's the case?

That's the beauty of it, it actually allows them to double dip. People have started to buy into the "advertising is bad" concept, but without understanding that it's bad because of all the data collection, so they think that if they are paying to stop seeing ads, they're somehow safer. Meanwhile Meta can continue to make money off of their profile and data, and their subscription fee, while also getting access to a valuable feature for targeting.

The argument that "if you don't pay for the product, you are the product" does not work in the inverse. If you are paying, you might still be the product. See also: your ISP, Spotify, your bank, etc. It is impossible for the free market to regulate itself with so much money on the table.

"People are buying into" is a mis-statement, IMO.

I hate advertisements. I loathe them with every fibre of my being. I'll do almost anything to get rid of them. Multiple browser addons, a pi-hole, using a browser instead of an app, modem and router tweaks, whatever it takes.

But the data collection? I don't care at this point. It's absolutely everywhere and totally unavoidable, short of living off-grid in the middle of nowhere. It's in the software, the hardware, the services, the organizations. You cannot escape it.

Yes, it sucks. But it's just part of living in a modern digital society now. It could be better but you can't avoid it.

Hell, I use an app on my phone to track my driving so I get an insurance discount. It's one drop in an entire ocean of data collection that I can't see or hear or taste, but the money saved is very real in my pocket.

Glad I'm not the only one, I dropped Paramount Plus because they started showing ads on their ad-free plan. Getting ads blasted in your face just ruins the mood for whatever you were going to watch, I'll gladly pay more for a better experience.

> Meanwhile Meta can continue to make money off of their profile and data, and their subscription fee, while also getting access to a valuable feature for targeting.

How would facebook monetize non-ad-enabled customers?

A non-ad subscriber won't get shown ads, but that definitely doesn't mean Meta can't profile and collect data to sell to other ad companies so you would still get targeted ads on other websites. They just won't get shown ads on Facebook.

Facebook doesn't sell data. They sell access to data. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but it's important because it's meaningfully different.

Facebook doesn't sell data to other ad companies because that'd be giving away the very thing that makes it the most valuable advertising company in the world. Hell, we spend a huge amount on facebook, and it's impossible for us to get reports on basic things like "Spend per placement per hour".

The only area that I could see them _maybe_ still monetizing an opt'ed out user is with Meta Audience Network, but I bet they would still opt them out of seeing ads on 3rd party sites that have MAN ads in their stack because that business segment is likely small compared to potential PR and fines in the EU.

That is an important distinction to make, though what it might look like (even if MAN is also opted out) could be that the users don't see ads, but they are still possibly contributing data to the overall ad profile business. The data would be used for less targeted stuff like demographics or similar wide brushes, since the individual user it came from isn't part of the feedback loop by seeing targeted ads anymore.

I guess I'm saying even if they aren't targeting an individual with that individuals data, they can use it to target other individuals who do see the ads.

Microsoft Windows has been doing g this for a while. You pay for a license and they also collect telemetry data.

Can you elaborate on how users are the product for Spotify?

There are a tiny number of major labels that control music rights. Presumably they are interested in listening data. Also Spotify free tier has ads so it's the same as any other social network in terms of fingerprinting.

I'd wager that the best fingerprinters/profilers work at Meta and/or the NSA.

I see a company like Palantir also being active in that space.

Related to this, I seem to remember that there were talks about some start-ups doing this kind of stuff on millions of people’s profiles, this was before Cambridge Analytica, I wonder what happened to them. A former colleague of mine (very smart guy) ended up working for one those start-ups back in the day (2013-2014), that’s how I first learned about their existence and about their business model.

Many of them were acquired by larger commercial entities that service the defense/intelligence community. It's also possible to license and process much of this commercial data from brokers.

So this is basically in response to EU regulations. Will they accept this solution from Meta as being within the sprit of the law?

They are basically charging an exorbitant amount to get a legally compatible experience, but now Meta will say "we offer people the chance to use the site untracked, but they've all chosen to let us collect their data to use the site for free".

Will be interesting to see how the EU responds to this.

There are already major EU-based news sites that make people choose between paying a monthly subscription and allowing their data to be used for ad targetting. It's hard to see how the EU could get Meta for this without either hurting those companies or abandoning the pretense that this is actually based on the rule of law and not just arbitrarily punishing non-EU companies.

https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-tech-news-site-heisede-illega...

Honestly how does the EU expect companies to make money? Are websites supposed to be a charity?

I guess it's no surprise they have 0 competitive tech companies if these are the smooth brain laws they have to operate under.

Companies can advertise all they want, just not collect personal information without their consent.

An over 700 billion dollar company with 30% or so profit margin is about as far from charity you can get.

> Companies can advertise all they want, just not collect personal information without their consent.

Honest question, what's an acceptable way to get consent?

Companies need the user to accept their terms before using their services but I presume that's not sufficient/acceptable way since its arguably too long/complicated for a user etc. App specific permissions on your phone can be restricted e.g. turn off location data access for an app, but users generally create accounts and provide more detailed information, so that's likely not sufficient? A prompt on every bit of data collected seems like a bad user experience e.g. notifying the user on every http request that the ip is collected/sent to the server which can provide their rough geo location.

What's an acceptable way to do this?

You show a small banner on the page, with 3 options: accept, reject optional and configure. Configure explains each thing and lets the user opt in to specific things. It is quite simple really.

And if you only track necessary information, you do not need a banner at all

The GDPR way (in spirit) is quite good IMHO. The user needs to know at least roughly who, how and why their personal information is used. If it's obviously needed to provide the service the user wants, no explicit consent is usually needed. E.g. asking for an address without explicit consent is fine if you are sending them a package they have ordered. Asking for the address to sell it to someone sending mail ads is not.

It's not about the data itself, it's about how it's used.

Of course very few actually want their information to be used like e.g. ad companies use it, so the "consent" is tricked with dark patterns. And this trickery (and lack of enforcement) makes the law look bad.

This is not at all exorbitant. Less than $1 per hour for many regular social media users

> Less than $1 per hour for many regular social media users

Paying $1 per hour solely to remove ads is pretty high. Netflix, Hulu, et al are offering content they created for about $1 per hour. A lot of video games are less than $1 per hour to get content to enjoy.

It's not that the absolute price is too high, it's that the goods being offered are terrible and not worth more than a nominal price.

I'm not saying I'd do it, but it's certainly not exorbitant.

Streaming subscriptions is a great comparison point. For many people, Facebook and Instagram together occupy a bigger role in their lives than Netflix does. This subscription cost is less than Netflix"s

Will it completely stop tracking (really stalking) me if I pay? Or is it a joke like YouTube premium, no ads but with all the tracking still on?

It's Facebook. What do you expect?

I mean, if it's made to be compatible with the GDPR it needs to stop such tracking to be allowed.

Then it would have to stop it for all users, not just those who pay. But Facebook doesn't seem to be concerned with GDPR compliance.

So now YouTube/Twitter/Facebook all enters this subscription or ads era.

Maybe by raising the entrance fee, could boost the quality.

I don't think that raising the entrance fee will boost quality. I would say, if you find someone that is making content you think is quality find a way to directly support them. A monthly payment goes a long way to supporting a creator.

* Having an ads option means being a content producer can be free. There is no minimum fee for posts to act as a basic spam filter.

* The economies of who gets paid to generate content is mostly based on who generates the most views. This is only loosely associated with quality. If you look deeply, this is more complicated than what I stated is essentially true.

* There is currently enough money being sent to content creators to sustain quality content. I don't see why increasing the money will increase quality, as sufficient funds for quality are already present.

https://archive.md/ucz0t

I choose to imagine a world where this leads to a revitalisation of the internet where “free” services are de-normalised and people start to favour paid services (preferably usage-based rather than subscription-based).

Fuck you - I’ll dream whatever I want to.

I dream of a world where our download and upload bandwidth are the same. Problem solved.

You get and feed on my data and then you ask to pay for it. Good luck on my aunt paying for this service that she don’t understand and use it as memory lane

Why the $9.99 start price? To me the value of a Meta service would be $4/month max. That's just me though.

I doubt this is a business decision.

Ads on Instagram and FB are not very annoying. Almost nobody will pay to get rid of them.

I think it is a way to cope with the GDPR. The GDPR says you can't offer a service in return for user data. Aka it is not allowed to say "You can't use our service unless you let us also store data unrelated to the service about you.".

But so far, there seems to be no court decision about the approach Meta is taking here. "You can't use our service unless you let us also store data unrelated to the service about your OR you pay us money".

A lot of media companies have tried the same move in the last year, so it will be interesting to see if Meta adopting it helps or hurts that strategy for them too.

> Ads on Instagram and FB are not very annoying. Almost nobody will pay to get rid of them.

I am not sure what people think is annoying but 90% of my Instagram is ads and weird suggestions. There is barely any legitimate use case other than promoting my own bullshit to other bots.

There are a handful of court decisions. One in Austria for a newspaper that said accept ads/data collection or buy a subscription which was, at least initially, ruled acceptable per gdpr. And I think there's been some challenges; I haven't paid attention over the last 6 months.

Honestly the ads on Instagram are kind of nice. They’re definitely the best ads I see by a wide margin - mostly likely to actually be stuff I’m interested in.

I tried to sign up for Instagram and got banned within minutes of signing up and couldn’t get signed up. Eventually since I came to ‘need’ it as my social circle have moved on from Twitter I bought an account on the grey market. The main ads I got were for forged EU identification documents.

It really shows where Meta spend their money. This is probably an excellent ad for someone in a position where they want to make money by creating and selling Instagram accounts. This is also a very easy genre of ad to spot for a company on the bleeding edge of NLP. The advertisers don’t even use euphemisms, their feed is just pictures of dozens of passports and visas. It’s still up weeks later.

I’m obviously used to online platforms being careless about who they run ads for, but official ads brazenly selling identity documents was certainly a new one!

related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37248748 "Most of My Instagram Ads Are for Drugs, Stolen Credit Cards, Hacked Accounts, Counterfeit Money, and Weapons"

I used to agree with this but it seems in the last few years especially that they have increased greatly in number and decreased in quality substantially. Somehow it remains the most relevant regardless, which really says something about most ads on most other platforms.

Out of curiosity, did you opt out of ad tracking?

Apparently I did; I'd forgotten all about that. That may well have had a big hand in it.

I admit too that Facebook's ads are the most relevant and most tasteful from any site I've used. For example, from a Facebook ad I found out about battery-backed generators that are capable of charging an electric vehicle. Facebook's ads, in my opinion, also tend to be non-annoying. I haven't had to deal with video ads, ads that interfere with the user experience, and grotesque ads featuring toenail fungus and creepy-looking images.

My complaint with Facebook, though, has more to do with the live feed algorithm recommendations, where I have to sift through memes and other viral posts I'm not interested in as well as viral political posts that often post misinformation. I miss the old days of Facebook where my feed was strictly limited to posts from my friends, plus the occasional ad.

Really? Facebook, while not the worst or most tasteless ads, are overwhelmingly scammy in my feed.*

"Going out of business" sales for fast fashion websites only a month old. Crowdfunding projects which obviously are just clones other products. Items with a slick video which if you buy them from any other place, they cost half to a third the price.

*last I used Facebook for any significant amount of time, which has been a while.

Do you run a pi-hole or other ad blocking on your network? Or do you have personalized ads turned off in your facebook settings?

This could be why you see less targeted ads. Scams, high-ctr and broad appeal ads thrive in places where targeting doesn't exist because their margins can support it. Watch a show on cable or broadcast these days for an example of this.

Chrome with adblock is all.

That’s just the default feed, there’s also one just for your friends

That was the best punch in the face I've had in a long time. Deeply relevant to our conversation, and I kind of deserved it.

Advertising has eaten the world, spit out a nearly incomprehensible version of it, and now those same companies want to charge for the left overs. Nothx.

I don't care about the ads. I'd maybe consider paying for a Facebook without "suggested for you".

Does this affect the messenger? For me it's the only non-zero worth thing out of whole facebook portfolio.

Would love to pay for no ads on IG, the amount of ads there is insane, only reason I don't use it as much.

If you tap the Instagram logo in the top left and select Following, your feed won't have any ads.

It’s like old school instagram! No ads, no suggested crap, no stories… thank you for mentioning this, I had no idea it was there.

Seems like a true consent based "Reject all" button is a critical danger to Facebook's business model. Other articles [1] report they are currently in violation of GDPR rights in Europe.

> The move follows years of privacy litigation, enforcements and court rulings in the EU — which have culminated in a situation where Meta can no longer claim a contractual right (nor legitimate interest) to track and profile users for ad targeting. (Although, at the time of writing, it is still doing the latter — meaning it is technically operating without a proper legal basis. But this summer Meta announced an intention to switch to consent.)

> [...]

> As we reported earlier this month, Meta is relying on a line in a ruling handed down by the bloc’s top court, the CJEU, earlier this year — where the judges allowed the possibility — caveated with “if necessary” — of an (another caveat) “appropriate fee” being charged for an equivalent alternative service (i.e. that lacks tracking and profiling). So the legal fight against Meta’s continued tracking and profiling of users will hinge on what’s necessary and appropriate in this context.

Typical shady Facebook behavior trying to force everyone to press "Accept all" since otherwise their business model is broken. Hopefully the EU will move quickly to close the legal loophole they are trying to exploit.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/30/meta-ad-free-sub-eu/

Do people still use Facebook?

Can't speak for many other countries, but here in Norway FB still reigns supreme as far as one-stop-shop social media platforms go.

I think that is due to how many aspects of society here completely ditched their own channels some 10-12 years ago, and started using FB for everything. I mainly use FB for the following:

- Hobby groups and pages. These have pretty much replaced the traditional forums.

- Practical info and stuff related to where I live: Buy/sell groups, apartment and housing groups, news and updates, cultural events, and what have you.

- Historical groups, and similar niche stuff

A ton of practical stuff is just too ingrained into the FB platform.

Not to mention messenger. I know lots of people that are never active on FB, and only use it for messenger - simply because WhatsApp, Signal, etc. never got the same hold here.

If you have a family that talks to you it's the defacto website to share photos and plan gatherings.

Do people still use Apple products?

I have a few senior citizen friends posting(re-sharing) this untrue rumor for years ..making me roll my eyes each time. I'm sure they'll be happy the misinformation they've spread for years/years is coming true....no longer misinformation.

Will liking and sharing their posts mean Facebook have to give us the premium plan for free?

Will these seniors who for whatever reason when older become more gullible and scared by the fake fear pumping media (don't go to nyc it's unsafe which my parents now think.. uggh) get free access to the no ads Facebook?

Also Darn for me There was no eye roll button so I just moved /scrolled along.

Personally the ads for me lately have became useful.

The most surprising thing, to me, was for once I got the timing spot on! Usually when I predict things like this I am way off on the timing but this is right on pace. In that sense it is like an economist predicting a crash, one of the twenty will be right.

The question is now, how many years until they start moving features behind the paywall like limits on how many people in a message chat? Or view limits (aka twitter/x) I suspect 3-5 years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com