At least. The paid users will need to compensate for the free users. Not everyone will pay, so they need to ask if the user base will drop by 80%, what do we need to charge the 20% to maintain their revenue.

Add an extra 0 if reddit API stuff was any indication

Yes. I think they are padding this to make it feel more punitive. This flips the bird to the regulatory body, and discourages people from switching. Frankly I’m surprised they didn’t make it higher.

Perversely; I’m always less inclined to buy a product that I’ve seen advertised… “Why do they need to advertise it? It can’t be up to much.” And “Part of the ticket price has gone into advertising, so it’s not so valuable a thing.”, usually being my first thoughts.

The users willing to pay are the most valuable users on the platform for advertisers because they are, let me consult my notes… willing to pay for things.

The logical conclusion is you must charge more for users to not get ads than your average revenue per user from ads or you end up losing money because the quality of your non paying users has taken a nose dive.

Its not new, its just a different platform. Pub, forum, market, square, plaza, community hall, water cooler. Humans are fundamentally social animals and there have always been public forums were the community gathers to meet, chat, and share news and gossip. Those physical places have essentially all been wiped out in modern western countries now as it let’s all people in an area gather and share ideas. That’s really bad for capitalism and for our increasingly fascist governments. So they close the pubs, run roads the the forums and close the markers to build a new Walmart. Social media is there now to provide for the need but to do it in a a way that divides people instead of bringing them together, and controls what they see and hear so they stay compliant.

I expect some sods grandma (or even my own) to watch the ad on my behalf.

Do they expect everything to be built by some slaves or by volunteers?

I feel like those “I want FOSS for everything” people seriously thinks software devs are slaves who must fulfill their wishes at any time and if they happened to make money in some way or other, it’s like they are the devils themselves.

it doesn’t matter if it’s a company or one guy who purely spends his free time with a project.

FB is struggling with an interesting problem. If you have enough early adopters, the rest of the population will follow. These things behave a bit like the critical mass in nuclear fission. Once you cross over a specific threshold, that’s when things start happening. In the early days of FB, it was all about growth and providing value to the users.

Once they had enough users, they started selling user data to advertisers. At that point, most users weren’t particularly privacy aware, and you could argue that it still isn’t ja major concern for a most people who use platforms like Tweetook or Snapstgram. People here on Lemmy aren’t really a representative sample of the rest of the population.

Providing a privacy friendly option wasn’t really that necessary back in those days. Providing a paid option might also hurt the ad sales, so that would have been a risky move. If only a certain part of the uses are subjected to data harvesting and ads, you’re essentially selling an inferior product to the advertisers. Sounds like a very risky move if the subscription becomes more popular.

If that happens FB would have to cross that bridge quickly. Being in the middle is a very precarious position, because the way I see it, these options don’t really support each other.

At first I was like hell yeah finally the corrupt politicians in my country will end. Then I read your comment and saw the dry old boney finger clicking the blue button instead of the small text just to get the pop-up gone

Well, it has worked well until now! Smile

That’s the exact problem. There are Twitter and Reddit clones which are much nicer but no Facebook clone.

Same problem here, fortunately my FB feed is cleansed by uBlock Origin with custom scripts that block all the “suggestions for you” and other such bollocks as well as the ads. It’s surprising how little content my family actually post, means I can drop in once a week and not miss anything.

something something broken watch be right

I doubt the EU would look kindly upon this. Allowing people to opt out of personalised ads is done for a good reason, and punishing people who opt out like this sounds like a very hostage-like “or else” kind of tactic.

Should facebook go through with this, it will be interesting to see what happens.

It’s weird how people froth at the mouth and post “FACEBOOK DOES NOT HAVE MY PERMISSION TO SHARE PHOTOS OR MESSAGES” on their Facebook page every 3 weeks while clicking blindly on OK buttons agreeing to absolutely anything and everything that gets in the way of them seeing another banal “life hack”.

Yup, it’s just a way to force people to give up this right.

I wish them the best of luck with this tactic. (not)

I’d maybe be willing to pay $12-15 per annum for no user tracking. But that price per month is a joke. They just want to deter people from paying by offering an inflated price, so they can turn around in a few months and argue there is no demand for it.

I have a family member working at FB and they said by the end of this year they will have closed down allllll the fancy new office buildings they built in the last decade or so, and revert operations to just the main, original campus. So seems like they’re on the down-and-down for sure.

The problem is their ability to gobble up new companies that could threaten them and use any innovative patients they may hold to either enrich themselves or stifle competition or both.

It’s just that, living in that moment, it appears that these companies are so unbelievably large and powerful that they could never be unseated

It’s also that the U.S. has shown repeatedly that it’ll prop up companies with ongoing subsidies, or even bail them out as in the 2008 crisis.

Sometimes you gotta (knowingly) be a little crazy, a little delusional, juuust enough to keep going… otherwise, if it feels like a lost cause, then there’s no motivation.

As I got older, I was like damn… Some people work so hard to make things worse, I gotta work at least as hard to combat it lol

Unfortunately, due to lack of clarity (and lack of clarification), many DPAs (privacy regulators!) have explicitly declared the “pay with data or money” model OK.

Google may have been one of the very few cases where a meaningful fine was given. For almost everyone else, blatantly breaking the law paid off big time.

GDPR has turned into a joke due to lack of enforcement (partially due to Ireland serving as a “privacy violation haven”). For years saying “no” to tracking required many clicks, and I don’t know of any companies that received penalties that would exceed the extra profit they made from that. Even blatantly illegal schemes where not agreeing locked you out of the web site usually didn’t get punished.

Many sites still don’t get proper consent, and also check out what many consider under “necessary” or “legitimate interest” cookies/tracking that you get after you said no. In hindsight, breaking the law was the only smart thing for sites to do, and many did.

Then, this bullshit. GDPR and the original explanations were pretty clear that the intent was to ban this kind of “agree or pay” scheme, and here we are. Of course they’ll do it, because they win either way. Either it’s considered legal, or there are no meaningful consequences…

This is not the only thing where the EU moves at a snails pace, ignoring that industry is making a joke out of well intended regulations. Many praise the EU for making Apple adopt USB-C. What they miss is that the attempts to standardize chargers started in 2009, when most manufacturers, Apple included, promised to agree on a standard, and then the EU let Apple dance on their nose flying loopings though loopholes for 14 years. That’s right. Apple introduced Lightning after they were supposed to standardize, and the EU let them.