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.
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.
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.
Then what would be a good way describe this difference
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.
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.
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.
Got it, thanks for explaining again. Really interesting to see other countries' health system. I do find it funny that Ryanair is/was used that much for medical purposes!
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).
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.
I mean they’re probably taking about Shitfluencers and the people who’s careers she strictly online outreach based (YouTube)
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.
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.
Yeah web site cost money and developers need food. So its adds, subs or donations
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.
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.
*looks around at Lemmy*
I love y'all.
... but also pay to support your instance. Don't be a leech.
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.
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
To be fair, you always paid it... just not with money...
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.
Yeah, strong feelings of deja vue.
If that was the case I might actually pay for cable TV.
This would be for an ad free version.
But they'd still farm our data so no thanks.
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 Player2@sopuli.xyz, ads, or a "premium Lemmy subscription"/tax/due/contribution?
Some run the servers with the expectation of donations. Some run them at a loss. Some of us selfhost.
There are all a variety of ways to keep Lemmy free, where as Reddit is hosted by Reddit. They decide everything about Reddit.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I look at FB less and less. I mostly use messenger to talk to people directly. Most of the feed is ads and the rest is pet photos, kids, pics of drinks/meals, memes, etc. Youtube has become an endless stream of auto insurance and grammarly ads.
Facebook has been slowly becoming worse, I don't know if it's the algorithm just not showing me stuff I'm interested in, or all the people that posted interesting stuff left, but I'm using it less and less.
Reddit's quality has gone downhill, lemmy is okay but still small.
I only get fake prank videos on Facebook. Like the most ridiculous situations. I have no idea why. Whenever I need to go to FB for a legit reason, I just need to close it ASAP before I get the next fake prank video.
They have no idea what my interests are, which is great.
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.
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.
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.
I guess I can't really disagree with that
That’s just like, your opinion, man.
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.
Then what would be a good way describe this difference
What difference?
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.
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.
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.
Got it, thanks for explaining again. Really interesting to see other countries' health system. I do find it funny that Ryanair is/was used that much for medical purposes!
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).
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.
I mean they’re probably taking about Shitfluencers and the people who’s careers she strictly online outreach based (YouTube)
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 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.
Yeah web site cost money and developers need food. So its adds, subs or donations
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.
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.
*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
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.
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
To be fair, you always paid it... just not with money...
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.
Yeah, strong feelings of deja vue.
If that was the case I might actually pay for cable TV.
This would be for an ad free version.
But they'd still farm our data so no thanks.
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 Player2@sopuli.xyz, ads, or a "premium Lemmy subscription"/tax/due/contribution?
Some run the servers with the expectation of donations. Some run them at a loss. Some of us selfhost.
There are all a variety of ways to keep Lemmy free, where as Reddit is hosted by Reddit. They decide everything about Reddit.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Enshittification
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Enshittification
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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!
I look at FB less and less. I mostly use messenger to talk to people directly. Most of the feed is ads and the rest is pet photos, kids, pics of drinks/meals, memes, etc. Youtube has become an endless stream of auto insurance and grammarly ads.
Facebook has been slowly becoming worse, I don't know if it's the algorithm just not showing me stuff I'm interested in, or all the people that posted interesting stuff left, but I'm using it less and less.
Reddit's quality has gone downhill, lemmy is okay but still small.
I only get fake prank videos on Facebook. Like the most ridiculous situations. I have no idea why. Whenever I need to go to FB for a legit reason, I just need to close it ASAP before I get the next fake prank video.
They have no idea what my interests are, which is great.