What? Who the hell would pay for this?

Squuuuuueeeeeezzzeeee

Oh, so now that you're paying, you're not the product? Right.

Meta needs the money - it's burning through it building data centres, spending on Claude AI tokens and severence packages as it desperately tries to become an AI company.

It's core business of social media is stagnant, and arguably in decline - TikTok remains in the ascendency, and Meta hasn't innovated in many years (it bought Instagram and is currently desperately copying TikTok to try to keep up). Meta is a growth stock that isn't growing, so it's throwing literal billions at trying to become an AI company. After failing to become a VR company - remember the metaverse anyone?

This will not end well; subscription services are just part of enshittification as it tries to squeeze more money out of it's core products that are already squeezed dry. This is it's idea of "growth".

I'll take the "no ads" vers.... oh, wait...

Charge ppl to show them ads. Peak grift.

Subscription billionaires. Is there anything more pathetic?

How interesting their paid tier has no mention of being ad free

"subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things."

I'll pass on that.

Welp, time to do the "previously free and basic feature is now moved into paid plan" dance every few months.

Good. Kill off this shit sooner

For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things.

Ah, they're doing the Discord Nitro thing?

Pay today to get what MySpace gave for free 15 years ago.

Yes! Amazing!

The downfall is finally happening. It is one thing about scraping data from people for free, but most will never pay a cent for it.

Genuienly hilarious.

You would have to pay me to have an account on any of those apps.

Oh, man, attention/validation addicts are really something.

They monetized human insecurity. Amazing.

Ah, enshittification, my old friend. Here we go again.

Would anyone seriously pay a subscription for a messaging app? As long as I can send and receive messages that's all the functionality I need and the second they try to charge for that, everyone will jump ship anyway.

I guess Discord Nitro has existed for a while but I don't know a single person who's even considered it, never mind actually subscribe.

Facebook probably isn't the one to do it. But paid social media, if it worked like social media from 1999, would probably be worth a few bucks a month.

Honestly, if they did this instead of being the data collection, forced fed ads and manipulation machine that they are id think its great. But they're going to be just as evil and now youre paying them which is stupid.

Honey! New idiot tax just dropped!

People that still use meta

What a bunch of losers

LOLLLLLLLLL SUCK A DICK!!!!!!!!!!!!

lol

Absolute genius billionaire move

I been discovering lately that many people in my circles are using Signal. I fucking hate whatsapp and would love to switch to Signal. But this dumb fuck app is too common around here. That is such a relief that these people do have it. Baby steps.

You'd have to pay me to use that crap

And people will buy it because they're addicted, and will feel the need to get more dopamine by getting what others can't. Feeling unique or exclusive until everybody has it. Then instead of getting rid of it, it'll just have price creep like all other subscriptions until it's $30/mo. You'll only hear complaints about how expensive it got, not the fact they're paying for something retarded in the first place!

I mean, it's terrible they're offering it at all, but there are those dumb enough to pay for it, too. Companies just take advantage of it, and there's nothing to regulate it.

Is it like.. they'll offer to pay me a subscription fee to use them oooor..?

I wonder when they'll start to charge "influencers" more to use the platform with extra "tools"and "features" to lure people in.

If you're that addicted to social media..

How to migrate away from all of them:

Step 1. sign up for free to Monett or Pixelfed instead of Instagram.

Step 2. Share with all of your friends and tell them to do the same.

Step 3. No need to start using it until you have a decent amount of people on the other platform to converse with and share dinner photos.

Step 4. Then once migrated, delete all remnants of your Instagram account.

rinse and repeat with:

• X (twitter) -> Mastodon
• Linkedin -> Xing
• Snapchat -> BeReal
• YouTube -> Peertube
• Facebook -> Friendica/MeWe/Diaspora
• Hubzilla

If there were any competency in this world, THE BEST CASE SCENARIO for Meta and the rest would be fucking dividend checks to everyone that uses the platform. The amount of data harvested from an average american house with a modern car, smart appliances and every kind of surveillance tool you could ask for, should yield enough that you shouldn't have to work another day in your fucking life.

Surprised fElonia dickMusk hasn't increased the price of his dumbass blue (balls) checkmark system.

Also surprised Jay Graberbythepussy hasn't introduced this shit on BlueSky.