alt Hacker NewsMeta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions
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It's very difficult to do business in Western Europe without Whatsapp. I have probably asked more than 60 people to switch to Signal and the social burden it introduces (i.e. asking a new acquaintance to install a new app) can have negative signalling effects (e.g. you don't adapt, create more work, why do you care so much about privacy, etc.)
I personally abhore Facebook (and IG,Whatsapp) and don't want to use any of them; I have uninstalled/reinstalled Whatsapp many times. Out of practical concern, I now only use Whatsapp in business settings where it would create tension and create social awkwardness not to. But I dislike the fact that I do.
Meta’s reputation has eroded so much that many will view this as an act of desperation rather than a chance to reframe social media. The idea of paying for social media to become the customer rather than the product has been both discussed and tried. There is such a deep lack of trust from years of bad deeds that I doubt anything positive will come out of this.
I would pay $49.99/mo for an unlimited plan that brings me only my friends' status updates (not their hyper-political likes and comments), just their life updates. Daily stories are great too. But JUST that, no influencers, no ads.
I realize Meta's data shows that our user revealed preferences tells them that we like all the dopamine hijacking garbage but that's like saying "Well users like drugs, so we gave them more". Let me pay you to give me just the vitamins, and none of the sugar.
Just stop using Meta products. It's really not as hard as it seems. Nobody needs FB to communicate with friends and family. Send texts or emails or use your phone.
I am a happy Instagram user. As a Ukrainian, this is the only connection left with lots of my friends now as we are scattered around the world. And I would happily pay $2.99/m for Instagram to have those better features.
Problem is, facebook WILL raise the prices on these subscriptions every few months until they could not anymore. So I will have to pay probably like $12.99/m in a couple of years.
Discord subscriptions seem to be working. People like to customize their profile (ie express themselves), even though profiles are not something frequently interacted with (that's the surprising part!)
I have a server (for my game) with about 1000 people. Out of the 300 people logged in, 50 of them have custom profiles.
So, it seems like a good idea for Meta.
> The new "Plus" plans are tailored to each individual app, with Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus focused more on social expression, while WhatsApp Plus focuses on personalization and messaging.
If only Google Plus lived long enough to see this day...
A new paid social media network with high privacy settings would defeat meta products quite easily. From what I understand, it costs around 27$ a year per user for Meta to run the business. At 5$ per month with limitations on size of your profile (like number of pictures), it would be quite easy to run a social media of this sort. This kinda of social media is what eventually everyone will move towards (and currently want). Small social circles, extremely private, and connections and discovery in very limited ways that allow you to maintain privacy and your 'inner' circle.
Social media is here to stay, unfortunately. Meta, LinkedIn, X, I wouldn't invest in the long term.
Nice little detail - WhatsApp was a $1/year subscription before they sold to Zuckerberg ... with the exact subscription cost now conspicuously missing from the app's Wikipedia page.
I think this is all theatrics to avoid EU regulation. Subscriptions for Meta products have already been a thing in the EU for several months.
It went a bit like this:
- EU mandates that users should be given the option to opt out from non-essential cookies.
- Meta responds by implementing an ad-free subscription-based model in EU, which allows them to dodge regulation.
- EU of course sees through their scheme and prepares to sanction them.
- Meta rolls-out subscriptions worldwide, so that it becomes harder for EU to claim that subscriptions were specifically created for dodging EU regulation.
And the award of most stupid company that somehow is still alive goes to Meta! There are people who will subscribe and its sad.
I would be willing to pay for IG subscription that's ad-free. It's gotten hilariously terrible right now that every 3-4 stories has a 2-page ad with a button on it. It's gotten so bad to the point where I stopped checking stories.
If these subscriptions gave you access to the relevant APIs (via something like IFTTT is fine), I'd be happy to pay.
But if you take away even read-only API access to services[0], I'm a) not going to pay and b) going to stop using your services.
[0] I really don't feel like converting my Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp accounts to the "business" variants just to get access to the APIs.
Time to delete these apps. They were novel like MySpace and live journal but now they make the wrong people rich with no value add
Reminds me of the Discord Nitro thing which is toxic and awful to deal with if you have to use it for anything serious.
The fundamental problem is - users base is flattened out so are the ad revenues.
Now we need something new to show to the shareholders and that is this.
I'm rather surprised it took Meta this long in the wake of X introducing subscription plans quite long ago now.
Do subscriptions make the ads go away? If not, it's hard to see much value proposition in them.
WhatsApp feels like one of the few products where people might actually pay. It's become critical infrastructure for communication in many countries, not just another social app.
I was paying for the ads-free subscripton for instagram and I recently I canceled as a way to reduce social media usage. And the ad version of Instagram is so annoying that it is helping a lot more.
If this new sub becomes a status signaling, it might work.
I think that subscribing to another person's life prevents you from living your own. Also, "Everything is Lies, I Guess".
Will there finally be an option to disable calls completely? If not, I ain't paying.
I already did not know what was included in my google one account. Now I can not know what included in my meta one account :)
Thanks for the generous spyware offer, I’m just gonna keep using Signal.
I do not need any of the three, so i will not pay.
True, a lot of other people i know, including family and corpo, use Whatsapp. I will not pay to stay in contact with them. They can go back to sms or email if they want to. Or pay for me.
Anyone here remember the early days of WhatsApp, pre-Facebook, when it required an annual subscription fee of $1?
Facebook is so doomed. I recently logged in (after close to 10 years), and whooah the feed was wild.
90% was these weird pages having very sexual teasing shorts, or bikini girls / latex pants etc. None of the pages were something is had ever seen before, or even followed.
The rest 9% was AI gen low qulity shorts, and the remaining 1% was actually from someone i did was friends with, but even thise seemes like some tool had generated them, as in "follow my new business page" etc.
The facebook that once was seem to be totally gone by now, and im not even sure what it is anymore.
I never got an instgram account, but i guess its the same low quality shit over there.
I paid for a while, but they kept showing me crap in the feed rather than posts I wanted to see. Stupid videos etc. So I cancelled.
Tell ya what. Give me an absolute guarantee - legally-enforced - that you'll never share any of my data ever again (unless subpoenaed or warranted) and will stop using my news feed as an ad feed, and I might consider it.
Fire Mark Zuckerberg into the stratosphere and I'll will you my worldly possessions.
Guess you can't pay to get end-to-end encryption back in Instagram DMs? They dropped it a couple weeks ago.
> There are also other features like Super Heart animated reactions for Stories, custom app icons, customizable fonts for profile bios, and access to additional pins for your profile.
Ahh, remember the days of livejournal/myspace, where we got all of those “features” for free because your profile is literally a fucking webpage
This seems smart of them in the sense that many creator/website owners have lost significant traffic that Google used to send their way and so are reluctantly pivoting back to paying more attention to social - for discovery.
But speaking as someone who deleted a high following FB page that I probably shouldn't have because the back end of it was so infuriating, I don't understand this offering. It seems like a lot of bling and clutter. Most people who need to use Meta for biz reasons want the same thing - live support that is not a bot or a human that may as well be a bot.
And not to get too granular but if you've used IG lately, for example, you notice that trying to do anything on the back end (eg: set up up some boosted posts or schedule things) takes the user through a maze and sometimes you end up in the old legacy Facebook pages, which has links that don't relate to any of the contemporary features. It sounds minor but it essentially barely functions and each click to confirm something sends you to another section to confirm something else. You also need a FB page to do anything on an IG page and a tonne of other petty thwartings. The fact that their brand new subscriptions/Meta platform seems just as confusing is alarming. I don't know how a company with this much money can not design an un-hellish back end or offer reasonable customer support.
Their A.I. monitoring is also completely off the chain, closing accounts and locking profiles for opaque reasons that cannot be questioned.
Seems absolutely unhinged. I don't know who'd pay to doomscroll AI-generated slop and fake news. $49.99 for the top plan, lol.
I've so far been unable to find these options in any of the apps in the USA. Anyone spotted them?
I cant see many paying for whatsapp or facebook/instagram. These are now taken for granted as being "free". Im pretty sure users would just migrate to signal/telegram/other if it ever became a paid service.
I use WhatsApp for almost all my communication with family and friends. I'm also happy to pay for things that improve my experience.
...but it's unclear what this subscription would give me. The announcement has no real details, the article is light on detail, and the WhatsApp website has no mention of this subscription.
I get that it's hard. What I want is a good text and call app, and that's hard to charge for at scale. But every feature that Meta has added to justify charging (AI, stories, profiles, etc), makes the product worse for me and makes me less likely to pay for it.
They're in a hard place.
You know what feature I'd love for WhatsApp? Out-of-office.
"Hi there, I am no longer using WhatsApp. To contact me, please..."
It's insane that those subscriptions don't remove ads. That's the only thing I would even remotely consider paying for on any meta product.
In the current state those subscriptions will just show your friends that you're a huge loser who's willing to pay for custom backgrounds.
It's a real shame private messaging has ended up being almost exclusively closed-source without any kind of open API.
Before Meta aquisition, I paid 1 dollar per year for WhatsApp. Now it iwl be 35.88.
A lot of posters here are missing the part where people use Meta products to market their art, performance artists, visual artists, musician, digital entertainment artists, craftsmen, etc all rely on the network effect to be discovered. Until you can replace that then people wont just use email, txt their audience, etc.
And just to say it is actually sad there is no alternative because most of those artists dont really gain a valuable network effect from posting there. But it is how younger unestablished peoples establish themselves as existing. There are entire comedy/music scenes that essentially require you to have an Instagram account.
So now you can pay $3.99/mo for the privilege of custom profile fonts and animated reactions while still getting served ads between Reels. Truly the premium doomscrolling experience.
for insta and Facebook ok but for whatsapp they just wanna suck any kind of money they can. Soon whatsapp will be bloated with ads all over
I’d genuinely pay for Instagram if it didn’t show me reels and slop content, and instead showed only content from people I follow
It sounds a lot like Discord Nitro
I'm going to go against the grain here and say this is probably a positive thing for Meta products, and honestly every other "free" service to provide these kinds of revenue avenues.
How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers.
By having material subscription revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.
Yes, in many ways Meta gets to have their cake and eat it too, because the ads are still there even with the plans, but this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay that they can invest in other ways outside of strictly advertising.