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.
someone with no social media
Doesn’t Lemmy qualify? Well, it’s definitely not paid.
Depends. Everyone claims they are on social media platforms to stay in touch with family and friends. I know no one on here and am fine with the anonymity. So it’s up to you if you count this.
I personally never counted Reddit and am not counting Lemmy as a social media. Both Reddit and Lemmy are just a really huge forum which contains many subforums.
Forums are social media though. Social interaction, community building, content sharing. All is there. Being anonymous does not have much impact on that.
True, but I think the big difference is that social media in the way of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc are tied to your identity IRL and include people that you actually know IRL, therefore are almost an extension of your life, whereas lemmy, reddit, and other iterest-specific forums have to option of decoupling from real life.
Interesting point. However, I think there are many anonymous account on Twitter, for example. Yet it is no different from others.
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By that definition Social Media was invented in the 80s with the BBS (so pre-internet, using modems).
Yep. They just did not call it like that back then.
Everything is everything if you squint enough. You have to look past the meaning of the words and look at the context - social media is usually considered to be FB, Insta, TikTok, Xitter.
Ask ChatGPT if Reddit is a social media. It will give you answer “yes”, while noting features that are different from FB. ChatGPT is a good way to judge what is “usually” considered as this or that.
In global context, maybe. In this thread, not quite. I do not consider ChatGPT to be objective or that it understands context of an external source.
You’re missing the point for pedantry. Call it what you want, lemmy is a helluva lot different than Facebook in many ways and we all know this.
This is how I see it as well. Though Reddit ws certainly trying to become social medium I feel - which was one of the reasons that helped me leave
No, Reddit was always considered social media despite how you or most people see it. Some social media managers have had Reddit in their job description for over ten years. I know because I hired some as early as 2010.
Social media did not start with Facebook like most people assume. Facebook is simply what brought social media into the mainstream. Usenet and forums are a form of social media that many of us old nerds have been using since the 90s.
forums are a form of social media
I guess I can’t really disagree with that
That’s just like, your opinion, man.
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I think a good destiction would be social network and socical media. Media is about celeberty and making money. Network is about conections
I completely disagree with your definition of “media.” There is definitely plenty of media that isn’t about celebrity, and there is also non-profit media. Media actually refers to communication to the masses. A social network is simply one form of social media.
But you are still socializing with us despite not knowing our real names, so this and Reddit would definitely qualify as social platforms. Twitter was also mostly anonymous for its 16 years prior to Elon, and it has definitely always been considered social media.
Addiction has many forms.
Matrix then?
In tbe strict sense, probably. In what most people would call social media, probably not.
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.”
That, and not only is not riding on an airplans an option for a lot of people, its their reality for a lot of people and out of reach financially. Way to be completely out of touch, Gizmodo. Couldn’t have used a worse example lol.
I think it’s referring to flights required (and paid) by your job. When a job of mine required me to be in Brussels in two days, I couldn’t tell them that I‘m hitchhiking there for the next month instead.
Depending on where you are and where you’re going, an airplane ride isn’t that expensive. Just a matter of why you need to do so, and if you’re willing to put up with budget airline issues. Oh and I guess the carbon footprint.
Dunno your financial situation, but a lot of people are having a hell of a time affording groceries, gas, rent, and utility bills, let alone a plane trip or even a vacation right now. And as for the carbon footprint, typically flying is more carbon friendly than driving somewhere at scale (a plane with ~100 people as opposed to ~50-100 cars on the road).
Here in Ireland, it’s often faster to go to the hospital emergency department by hopping on a flight to Belgium or Germany than to drive to a Dublin hospital. Before Covid, it used to be cheaper as well.
Wow, that I didn’t know. What happened to Irish healthcare?
Nothing out of the ordinary, just very long wait times in the emergency room. Earlier this year, I got hit by a car, suffered a concussion and spent 12 hours in the waiting room. I was in no condition to travel then. However, a few years ago my wife suffered a chronic condition, which sent her to A&E trice. The first time, she was in the waiting room for 16 hours. The second time, she booked the first available morning flight to the continent and went straight to the emergency room. It took her seven hours (including the three hours between booking the flight and flying out) to see a doctor. The charge in Irish A&E is €100 per visit; the cost of flight and taxis was €90. We used to say that Ryanair was the largest healthcare provider in Ireland. Not anymore, as the prices went up, but it’s still worth it, especially in the case of chronic, un- or mis-diagnosed diseases.
Thanks for explaining, I know public healthcare is always stretched but it’s amazing you can just take a plane and use another country’s healthcare and it’s faster.
Do you have to pay different prices for Belgium or Germany or do you not have to since it’s all EU?
If you have health insurance, you can get the free EHIC (European Health Insurance Card), with which you get free emergency care anywhere in the EU. Some countries may charge you (me or my family have experience with Germany, Belgium and Czechia for free admission, and Austria where a bill is later sent to you). However, over a certain income the Irish are required to pay for private insurance (if you don’t, you get taxed extra), and usually the insurance companies reimburse the costs as they are lower than they would have been in Ireland.
I think you’re misreading it. In the same way as there are people that need to ride on planes (for example for their job, or to move to where they have a job, etc), there are people that need to use social media.
For example, if you own an online store you really need to have a social media presence. Same if you are an artist, and live off of commissions. I’m sure there are plenty more examples.
Also, Facebook groups are now how most extracurriculars are handled in schools, so if you have kids and you want to be involved in their activities you don’t have much of an option.
I think the author might be referring to businesses who use social media to reach and connect with customers, however if your customers don’t see a value in paying for social media they won’t use it and it won’t be that necessary for those small and medium businesses.
Yeah that’s one of the stupidest comparisons that they could make. Transportation is a necessity, sharing what you’re doing to the entire world isn’t a necessity. I’m 37 and grew up with MySpace and I was part of Facebook back when it was still The Facebook and was only open to 4 years universities (I got in about 2 years after I was created).
I wouldn’t give two shits if every social media company was destroyed tomorrow, including Lemmy and Reddit. They’re just time killers to me.
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For example if I meet a woman I like, it’s infinitely more socially acceptable to ask for her instagram than it is for her number after meeting.
Is this really a thing now? Any idea why it’s considered more acceptable? It’s definitely not a thing in my social circles and it got me curious.
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Sounds weird to me as both can be used for the general creepiness and both allow blocking people if needed. I just don’t see the benefit of one over the other here.
EDIT: The other comment explained it to me, I understand it now.
Also depends on how you explain why you don’t have any, I originally gave up Facebook because I went through a bad breakup and figured a break would be for the best, the only time I ever logged in again was to delete it, Instagram came shortly after. I don’t think I’ve asked for anyone’s number that told me no after telling them why I’m difficult to Google, and in my experience most people treat social media the way a 20 year smoker treats cigarettes, they know they should quit and intend to at some nebulous point in the future
Any idea why it’s considered more acceptable?
Because it’s far less susceptible to abuse. The block button will deal with anyone being a creep or asshole.
If someone wanted to be abusive, they could come by the address you gave them to send letters or bombard your phone with abuse via the number you gave them for texting.
Even for phones that can block calls and texts coming from a given number, withheld numbers are a thing and they could still sign you up to all sorts of SMS services.
Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense! I didn’t consider all these other possibilities.
Yeah there absolutely have been consequences for me not using it. It’s hard to keep in touch with people and I only date weirdos who are cool with my strange lifestyle.
See, to me, all of those people are willing to trade their privacy for convenience. And the fact that others are getting rich off of sifting through and collecting all of this data also is wrong in my opinion. To each his/her/their own, but I still think it’s sad how dependent people have become on social media.
See, to me, all of those people are willing to trade their privacy for convenience
They are, in exchange for a free service.
And the fact that others are getting rich off of sifting through and collecting all of this data also is wrong in my opinion.
So how should social media companies make money?
To each his/her/their own, but I still think it’s sad how dependent people have become on social media.
Social media is an undisputed upgrade over what came before. Back in the day if you wanted to stay in contact with someone, the only methods of doing so opened floodgates for abusive pricks to make your life a living hell. If you wanted to have group discussions about a certain topic, your only real option was in person.
So how should social media companies make money?
I guess my real problem with this is how underhanded they seem to be with the information they collect. I know they need to pay the bills, but they could definitely be more upfront and open about what they gather on people.
To your point, there is nothing wrong with making a social media account to serve a specific purpose. Just having the account doesn’t mean you have to install the app and post everything about yourself. If you have one for family, set it all private and only share things you would post publicly. Same for dating, work, etc. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing. I did give up all the major social media, but there was a time I needed to make a Facebook account to coordinate with student clubs that I was an advisor for. Once I no longer did the advising, I deleted the account. Yeah, they have the data I shared. Dates and times of student meetings and recommendations on how students organize events. Nothing to clutch pearls about.
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I never scroll my facebook wall, but in my country people use fb messenger instead of whatsapp to communicate with each other, so I’m stuck with it as a communication tool. Also, most of birthday/event invites come with a facebook event, so I would also miss those.
It’s just so integrated in to a lot of people’s lives, that it would be hard to remove individually.
I am going to say this, and it’s because this is such a cliche’ response to me at this point, but I call bullshit. People making these excuses are laughable to me now with this. You aren’t talking about scaling Mt. Everest levels of effort here. Everyone you are communicating with has a phone number, and you could take the time to call them if you wanted to communicate with them, use text messaging, or email. As for the birthdays and events, go to the dollar store, or an equivalent and buy a calendar. They sell them with cute pics, or funny quotes, or whatever. Then mark the dates down. It’s fucking comical to me now how people act about getting rid of facebook. If facebook was waking up every morning and driving you to work, then yeah, it might be hard, but come on people… I feel like I am watching a b movie where everyone has been put in a trance and is just walking around mindlessly all saying the same mantra. “It’s too hard. Can’t break free.” And none of this has even touched on privacy, of which there is none on facebook. People spouting this are just willing to give up any shred of privacy for some minor convenience and it’s frustrating to watch.
I mean they’re probably taking about Shitfluencers and the people who’s careers she strictly online outreach based (YouTube)
If that’s how you connect with a certain community it’s not a serious option to stop using that kind of social media without solving the collective action problem of getting that whole community to switch.
I’m over here on lemmy giving it a go, but it is a real challenge.
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.
I’d pay some reasonable subscription, say $1 a month to the maintainer of lemm.ee for the promise to keep my data safe. To Zuck and Elon absolutely not.
I pay like $2 or $3 a month to lemm.ee dev, its worth it to me.
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.
I would not be that sure. As long as they will offer the choice between paying with cash or with data, social media companies will survive.
Yeah or you pay with your data or you pay with your money and they still steal your data like YouTube premium and etc
It would just be corporations paying for it, and paying for ever more direct access to individuals.
Yeah web site cost money and developers need food. So its adds, subs or donations
Imagine paying a company, who sells your data, to see memes
Fine. But imagining it is as far as I will go.
Mandatory blood sample to register.
If you read the article, you’ll note that paid subscriptions are for ad-free services, which means your data is worthless, which means it won’t be sold.
The entire point of these models is to comply with EU rules on data harvesting.
Lol, it will still be sold. They are still tracking your attention span and clicks. I can already think of two or three correlation tests to sell to advertisers based on that information alone.
Except this change is occurring because of EU rules that don’t allow them to gather that data.
Those rules are dumb, sure, but this is the workaround - and personally it’s a workaround that I think is quite untenable. Social media succeeds because it is free.
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.
It works for Wikipedia, which is probably the single most important site on the Internet.
It also works for podcasts, well enough to produce an enormous amount of high-quality content, both from independent productions and networks.
I just wish that Wikipedia didn’t donate the money that people donated to it to other charities.
They recently donated a million dollars of their donations to other charitable causes and in theory I’m fine with that but in practice I feel like sort of tricked or betrayed and I just don’t like it.
I refuse to ever donate to them again until they swear to never ever do that again.
If it makes you feel any better about not donating, Wikipedia makes money hand-over-fist and absolutely does not need your donation. Their financials are public; they’ve been in the black for YEARS. They only beg for money because it works. It’s gross and exploitative.
TIL. Never donated, but I felt bad for blocking their begging for money-popups. Now I don’t feel so bad anymore
Wikipedia also has to regularly beg for donations and is probably something of an outlier.
Pretty much every podcast I’ve ever heard has sponsors and built-in ads, or at least shout-outs.
I do think Patreon-style funding is a really good model, but ultimately, most people will not pay for a thing if they can get it for free and tell themselves that other people will pay for it instead. Exceptions to that exist, but they’re rare.
Wikipedia get big donations from big cooporations and wealthy people unlike most other donation based app
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*looks around at Lemmy*
I love y’all.
… but also pay to support your instance. Don’t be a leech.
Yo can you spot me for a few months?
Or self-host
Yes but Mr lemmy.world isn’t a self hoster
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You’re self hosting: no qualms with that.
The most populous server is mostly full of people freeloading. They’re the same types who torrent without seeding.
It’s usually not that big a deal as long as the server has some people chipping in for upkeep but no matter how you slice it: if your account is on a server you’re either contributing to upkeep or leeching off the donations of others.
Self hosters arent leeching: they’re participating in the decentralization.
With federation servers cache content from each other and then serve it to their users. If you have a ton of users you’re using a ton of bandwidth. Simple as.
Thanks for the reply! After I wrote that I had another look at the context in which you posted your comment and realized I had misunderstood your meaning. That was why I deleted it. I can definitely appreciate that a very large instance will have higher operating costs and that people shouldn’t be mooches. Cheers!
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I’m not just bad, I’m evil for not giving my money to something someone told me to give my money to. I also don’t donate money at the register and I don’t do volunteer work. Fucking hang me!
Ok leech whatever you say
Am I actually supposed to feel bad? Fucking hilarious.
To be fair, you always paid it… just not with money…
Yet another reason not to use that stuff, as if we needed more
Would you be opposed to paying to use Lemmy? Someone’s gotta pay them bills. Currently it seems to be donation focused, but that might not scale. So what’s it going to be [email protected], ads, or a “premium Lemmy subscription”/tax/due/contribution?
You can set up a Lemmy instance with just a docker file lmao it’s not exactly a large scale operation to upkeep.
If somehow every Lemmy instance went paid only, I’d host my own instance and invite my friends to use it too.This is basically just paying with your time/hardware/electricity rather than money.
Okay? And currently people pay with donations. The suggestion from SkyNTP was, in the most condescending what, what would you do if it became a paid-subscription. Paying with your time or on donation are acceptable. Paying as a part of a subscription is not for me, and I imagine many in the FOSS-oriented fediverse.
I worry that donations may not be enough and people say that it’s not expensive to run. Regardless, I don’t think they’re forcing me to identify myself and building profiles on me to sell to the highest bidder. I’ll pay Lemmy for that.
If I pay Facebook and Reddit they’ll do both even if they say otherwise because I believe they lack ethics.
If this was the only path forward I wouldn’t even be here. Thankfully it isn’t because I can run my own server/community and just connect it to the feddiverse.
I would argue that there is a fundamental difference to this forum style system consisting mostly of text and links, and a traditional ‘social media’ that is entirely photography and short form video. Correct me if I’m wrong, but TikTok, Facebook, etc. store all of the multimedia content on their services themselves, right? The costs cannot be comparable.
Storage is a negligible cost for companies of this caliber. Infinite growth with infinite profit is the root cause of these problems.
No way. Spinning rust isn’t getting any cheaper these days and these companies are expected to not only serve all their existing content, but allow for free uploading and storing in perpetuity. Google is a great example of one of these massive companies trying desperately to reduce the amount they have to store. They recently ended the free Google photos backups and they are more aggressive with deleting inactive YouTube accounts.
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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.
I remember when cable tv first started the big promise was that since you were paying for it the cable channels would be ad free. Well that lasted about a week.
If that was the case I might actually pay for cable TV.
Yeah, strong feelings of deja vue.
This would be for an ad free version.
But they’d still farm our data so no thanks.
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.
Agreed! Join me in the real world, it’s free.
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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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There’s this tendency in more leftist and anti-authoritarian circles to imagine that the big corporations and the billionaires have a literally infinite pie of money and therefore they can fund all things for free.
And while they do have a lot of money, when you’re scaling things to a general population, things get very very expensive. Facebook has to pay for a ton of infrastructure and bandwidth and hire a lot of very expensive employees. That has to be paid for somehow, and even Zuck himself wouldn’t be able to cover it all for very long. In music, Spotify has never turned a profit. Movies cost massive amounts of money to produce and very often fail to make the budget back.
While it is true that one individual person blocking ads or pirating doesn’t make a material difference, if everyone did that, we simply wouldn’t have any of this stuff at all.
Tl;dr people need to read more Kant.
Except you can’t just pretend like every single business’ expenses are legit, nor can you ignore the fact that the thing they’re selling is our content.
Meta wants $17 bucks. For what? They’re not making shit. My friends posts the content, for free.
So what’s the $17 bucks for? How much of that is going toward executive bloat and other garbage? How much is going towards their PR team, their marketing, their fucking lobbyists??
When I donate a few bucks a month to the open source apps I use, I know that money is going to the people that created and maintain the thing.
This shit is about keeping these companies and their investors rich. It has fuck all to do with keeping the lights on, it’s soley about keeping the line going up.
And again, all of this, and they’re not even making the damn content.
If you think that the only thing required to run services like Facebook and Instagram is a supply of content, by all means, make your own platform. But you’ll pretty quickly discover that developing the infrastructure required to handle hundreds of millions of people uploading hundreds of gigabytes of data every minute isn’t actually a trivial problem, and that there’s a reason Facebook pays hundreds of engineers a lot of money. Meta’s labor costs, excluding sales, marketing, and admin, were 15 billion dollars in 2022. Just keeping the lights on for service as that scale is not a simple task at all, let alone actually building anything new.
If you want to get content from your friends, the postal service is perfectly well-equipped to deliver that, or you can of course simply meet up with them in person. But if you want a platform with essentially everyone you’ll ever meet on it that’s capable of hosting and sending almost any content you can imagine instantly for free, that does actually take money to build. Undoubtedly, there is some money that’s siphoned back towards investors as well, but their products also wouldn’t exist at the scale they do now without the 26 billion dollars of debt that they also have right now, which obviously needs to be re-paid.
I get that you’re probably not actually looking for answers to those questions, but my point is that they do have answers if you actually cared. Again, if you don’t think they’re actually providing any value, then do the obvious thing and don’t use them. After all, by your own position, they’re not actually providing anything, right?
if everyone did that, we simply wouldn’t have any of this stuff at all.
Honestly, in many cases, good riddance
I don’t completely disagree, but for better or for worse, it’s obvious that people do want it.
No business that has investors has any right to claim any of this is about operating expenses.
The money for it has to come from somewhere. If you want to protect your privacy (which you should) then you’d be better off paying for services like that than not. It’s been circlejerked to death but: If it’s free, you’re the product.
It was not always like this. When this “everything is free” craze started, in some cases the idea was to offer something free to attract customer to the paid services. In other cases the idea was to show how powerfull was something (Altavista for example was a demo to show how powerfull the Alpha processors were at the time) and were seen as another way to have some visibility. Other cases were investments from entities to offer a public service or something similar.
It is only when companies were born with only the free service to offer that what you say become true.
Even Lemmy is not immune. Sure it’s FOSS, but it’s not free to host. Someone has to pay for servers, data, web domains and more.
True, but the costs are way lower and are also distribuited. I can host my instance for a reasonable low price and if I want I can share the price with some friend for example.
See Lemmy as the old BBS, of course there is a price but it is the price of a passion/interest.
Not exactly. It’s the age of stockholders, and doing what’s best for them is the law. They expect unlimited growth
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?
Airline seats could be fixed if the gov had any backbone but social media isn’t some essential service so good luck with it.
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.
That lack of organization on the user side is really the killer. The best you can hope for is some organic movement like the abandonment of myspace.
Maybe this will finally get people to fuck off social media. It’s toxic and good for nothing. I wish we had forums back and people would start using them again.
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.
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