Last line of the article: "Just like choosing not to ride on airplanes isn’t really an option, for many, using social media isn’t much of a choice either."

Holy crap. We have reached that point. As someone with no social media, it just amazes me how people have let these apps become ingrained in their lives. Sad in my opinion.

I love the idea of paid social media.

Theres so few people who'd pay for it that all the social media companies would, hopefully, collapse and cure us of one of the worst technoplagues of the 21st century.

Imagine paying a company, who sells your data, to see memes

Well, Fediverse it is. When thousand people pay for thousand servers, it's better for everyone - no ads and no fees and the ones hosting the content don't need the money to survive. Some people will voluntarily donate to you, most will not, but in the end everyone is happy.

*looks around at Lemmy*

I love y'all.

To be fair, you always paid it... just not with money...

Yet another reason not to use that stuff, as if we needed more

I refuse to be both.

You want me to dodge ads and try to scrape my data from your service in order to use it? Fine.

Want me to pay for the service? Maybe…

I will not support double dipping while pushing ads in my face. Fuck right off.

As in "they pay me to use their garbage?"

If else: "No."

Know what? "Still no." I already don't use it for free, they're gonna have to pay me substantially before I use it.

If they didn’t farm data and charged for it right in the beginning, maybe it would have lasted longer before turning to shit. But demanding payment while farming data is just insane.

Not to mention that they chose the absolute worst time to do this. They are just absolutely despised right now. They are either in the midst of scandal or scandal is just in their rearview. Why would anyone pay for this right now?

Not exactly. It's the age of stockholders, and doing what's best for them is the law. They expect unlimited growth

Airline seats could be fixed if the gov had any backbone but social media isn't some essential service so good luck with it.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta plans to charge European users $17 a month for an ad-free version of Instagram and Facebook.

Meta joins TikTok, which confirmed it’s testing its own ad-free subscription plan Monday after Android Authority found a prompt for a $4.99 service buried in the app’s code.

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has its famous $8-a-month blue check mark (which also comes with fewer ads and other dubious features), and anyone who isn’t already paying YouTube is familiar with its promotions for the $13.99 ad-free experience.

There’s no word from TikTok about its fledgling subscription tests, but the comments sections on videos about the app’s premium plan are full of users who say they’d love to sign up.

This is a radical departure from the business model that ran social media for the past few decades, where you offer your eyeballs to the advertising gods in exchange for free connections to friends and content creators.

Over the last twenty years, airlines have found ways to charge customers for options that used to be free, including checked bags, seat selection, and priority boarding.

The original article contains 815 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Social media has a natural moat because what matters it what users are there. As long as social media sites don't federate with each other, there will be an evolutionary pressure to start exploiting and get progressively worse as your users are locked-in and you can exploit them for the profit of your shareholders.

Paying improves the situation because the users are customers and not eyeballs to sell, but still -- they're there for their friends and follows. If they can't get those same friends and follows on another site, you can screw them as hard as you like.