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Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don't agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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This might be unpopular, but here goes nothing:
With the correct and fitting (and fair) regulations, oversight by the government and accountabilit, this is a correct and more ethical decision.
Stuff costs money. For now. Infrastructure, wages, repairs, fixes, improvements, new features.
All these things dont come free and we only pay nothing DIRECTLY, because we pay in data, attention and privacy violations.
By fixing this issue, the access to all these things can be secured without the plattform falling appart or having to resort to invasive data harvesting. We could even make these practices illegal, because plattforms would not just die then.
And no, the price should not be so high to generate profit for the executives. Thats why regulation is so important.
In the Modern Age we live in, Social Media is at this point akin to an essential service and should therefore be regulated as such: No profit, but stable maintenance and secure access free from monetary interest for everyone equally.
Lots of people want SM to just fall off the face of the earth, but they forget that nothing close to it has ever existed in human history. It's completely new and there will be and have been mistakes, from giant to small. There's no going back, only forwards, we need to learn and regulate as needed.
We learned that keeping it "free" for the end user leads to severe privacy implications as the service needs to make money not just for profit but just to keep things running and put out new features and fixes.
At it's core, SM gives the smallest of us (For better or for worse) a voice to the level that in the past was achievable only for the rich and the noble and interconnects us all globally better than anything that has ever come before it.
If we can learn to mitigate the bad parts I think SM will end up being a boon for humanity
Its not new, its just a different platform. Pub, forum, market, square, plaza, community hall, water cooler. Humans are fundamentally social animals and there have always been public forums were the community gathers to meet, chat, and share news and gossip. Those physical places have essentially all been wiped out in modern western countries now as it let's all people in an area gather and share ideas. That's really bad for capitalism and for our increasingly fascist governments. So they close the pubs, run roads the the forums and close the markers to build a new Walmart. Social media is there now to provide for the need but to do it in a a way that divides people instead of bringing them together, and controls what they see and hear so they stay compliant.
I think the idea of social media dividing us ignores the scale of it. All those other examples you gave were very local, and in that environment a consensus can form about certain political or ideological views. Those views could be vastly different than those a similar sized community holds 100 miles away though. Social media and it's global scale exposes those differences and makes consensus on any sort of issue impossible.
At the same time it also allows for minority solidarity outside of the traditional local community. For example there may only be 1 or 2 LGBT+ people in a town, which can easily be marginalized, shamed and ignored. But if they're able to communicate across geographic boundaries they're able to create a larger stronger community that is harder to ignore. It also does the same for nazis though.
"Gathering together and sharing ideas is bad for capitalism" care to explain that point further? I'm not really following.
Not the original commenter, but I'm going to go ahead and assume he meant that the forum has no place in the traditional 'bread and circuses' used to control masses.
Free exchange of ideas and healthy debate mostly yields good philosophies or slight enlightenment of people participating (and when they get back home they bring that with them and spread the enlightenment), though one should consider whether these romanticized versions of the pub and the forum are actually in line with reality. In order to have a good debate you need the right people and the right place.
I would assume that the base example would be workers gathering in a pub and thinking 'what if none of us works tomorrow? who's going to build their stuff?'. And some might not have even thought of that before. And this leads to unionizing.
Contrast that with a platform like facebook that channels you into a place where you find what you already know and think you want via algorithm, and thus are basically shielded from knowing stuff you don't already. Knowledge is power and all that. Sure, the forums and pubs are fairly easy to poison, but it takes more effort.
This is an insightful perspective and I agree in principle I think.
I think the $14 is actually egregious. Punitive even. The cost to facebook of providing content per user per month would be less than $1. Let's not forget that they can still earn revenue from these users, it's just the data profiling that's limited so their ads may be less efficient to some degree.
Yeah, access to facebook probably is an essential service. Particularly for people who are disadvantaged or impoverished. But, I do wish it wasn't so, and mandating that facebook provide access is the wrong approach IMO. I would rather see open, free-from-advertising platforms promoted.
Imagine if every town or city had it's own lemmy & mastodon instances - not necessarily even federated. All your fb marketplace stuff, community and social groups happening there instead of facebook.
People on the internet are too used to having everything for free. But then they also want no ads and trackers. Do they expect everything to be built by some slaves or by volunteers?
I just don't get why this should be an unpopular opinion at all.
p.s. I don't use Facebook. Or any other social media really.
I expect some sods grandma (or even my own) to watch the ad on my behalf.
I feel like those "I want FOSS for everything" people seriously thinks software devs are slaves who must fulfill their wishes at any time and if they happened to make money in some way or other, it's like they are the devils themselves.
it doesn't matter if it's a company or one guy who purely spends his free time with a project.
Would have been nice if they decided to give that option during the early days when they made the decision to start mining data and selling it off. I totally would have been up for a reasonable fee to keep my data felt bad for Julian from being sold.
FB is struggling with an interesting problem. If you have enough early adopters, the rest of the population will follow. These things behave a bit like the critical mass in nuclear fission. Once you cross over a specific threshold, that’s when things start happening. In the early days of FB, it was all about growth and providing value to the users.
Once they had enough users, they started selling user data to advertisers. At that point, most users weren’t particularly privacy aware, and you could argue that it still isn’t ja major concern for a most people who use platforms like Tweetook or Snapstgram. People here on Lemmy aren’t really a representative sample of the rest of the population.
Providing a privacy friendly option wasn’t really that necessary back in those days. Providing a paid option might also hurt the ad sales, so that would have been a risky move. If only a certain part of the uses are subjected to data harvesting and ads, you’re essentially selling an inferior product to the advertisers. Sounds like a very risky move if the subscription becomes more popular.
If that happens FB would have to cross that bridge quickly. Being in the middle is a very precarious position, because the way I see it, these options don’t really support each other.
zuck's ego fueled endeavors cost money, actual services upkeep and development is a small fraction of it.
this lizard already has insanely profitable business at hand, but it's hard to combine steady performance for shareholders and shit like metaverse at the same time, so he needs to milk users for even more money.
It really is kind of crazy how angry people get now at the thought of paying for something they use daily.