The saying goes if you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Now, you’re both. Every big social media app is testing subscriptions. It's a business model that comes with a perverse incentive. Just like airlines, if you make life worse, more people will pay.
Exactly. I’d honestly rather have paid social media than engagement algo and ad-driven social media. When your algorithms chase engagement over all else, it leads to real harms, like the youtube alt-right pipeline. Fediverse ain’t perfect, but I like that there’s no engagement-chasing algorithm, no ads, just donations.
Here’s the thing though. You realize that they’re not going to stop with this right?
It’s going to be paid, they’re still going to track you, they are going to offer tiers of service and the higher tier you belong to the more serotonin and dopamine you get out of participating on the platform.
You’re still going to be seeing ads, maybe not at first, you know to get you into the system but once you’re locked in they’re going to start showing you ads again or they’re going to charge you much much more money.
I am well aware that at a certain level all of the computer hardware and compute time and electricity and network costs a significant amount of money.
But the amount of money they are charging people will never be enough. They could get $1,000 a month from every human being on the planet and they would still want more money because it’s not about providing a service it’s about making money and there is no amount of money that is enough money, and the only thing stopping these companies from stooping lower and lower in the pursuit of more money is the fact that they have to court the people that have the money to get the money.
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