Is it like.. they'll offer to pay me a subscription fee to use them oooor..?
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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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.
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.
Well, I paid 1 euro for Whatsapp back in the day because it was the only option besides SMS and so that 1 euro was way cheaper.
These days I gladly pay a couple bucks for a chat app that everybody uses so that they can pay the bills without selling my data or being funded by a corrupt government.
Which is went to Matrix, but it is hard to get people on the server I host myself.
I have a monthly dono to signal & i know a shitload of people who have nitro or at least nitro basic -- that's EXTREMELY common for all the profile customizations
WhatsApp used to not be free, I'm talking about before meta bought them, and totally worth paying the subscription for as they were the one of the kind multi-platform messenger working with all the non-smart phones that have internet connectivity and ability to install 3rd party apps.
And back when they charged for service they do not collect all your data.
I remember WhatsApp telling me I only got a year free when I first started using it but they never asked for payment after that. Maybe that fell in line with Meta buying them.
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.
They're charging for premium features, not for basic access to the service.
People on Facebook after a certain point willingly gave up their name and address to sign up for it; I kinda doubt they know or care about their data being scraped.
I was truly shocked when this happened. I read about it and was like: haha, no one is giving out their real adress and or phone number on the internet. How dumb do they think people are? Oh...
How interesting their paid tier has no mention of being ad free
ads make them up to $20 a day, they would have to charge $600 a month to equals profits
I didn't realize it was that high- im seeing that the average is around $15 a month, but I'm sure there are whales that hit that $600/mo
The problem is that only your heaviest users are going to pay to remove the ads, so it doesn't make sense to price the subscription at any sort of average user. You need to slide the price point way up the distribution just to break even.
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.
"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.
Notice almost all of this is outward facing. It doesn't improve your experience, but it gives you a thing that others see. The goal is the same thing as children bullying other children to buy iPhones. They don't know what the product is. They just built in features that tell you if other people aren't using it, so you can make fun of them.
You didn't mention a lack of ads. They remove all the ads when you subscribe, right?
I passed on it a decade ago. Got out when shit was getting bad with ads, memes, and other stuff not actually "social".
It's the opposite of social. Especially facebook. There are only companies there, no actual people left (except some boomers maybe)
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Pay today to get what MySpace gave for free 15 years ago.
Welp, time to do the "previously free and basic feature is now moved into paid plan" dance every few months.
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.
People that still use meta
What a bunch of losers
For some types of businesses, particularly smaller ones, IG is literally a critical part of marketing. SEO alone often doesn't cut it, if Google also takes into account activity on other platforms, and even then a majority of website activity comes from people seeing posts on Instagram.
No clue how the most recent enshittification affects that, but I doubt the core recommendation logic will have changed radically.
It's fucked, but the tech corps sucking off each other makes self-employment hard if you don't play their games.
Considering that's how most cities get info out kinda makes sense people still use it. Not to mention good luck getting little ol' grandma to switch to signal or Lemmy
Public institutions would be better using something like Mastodon for announcements. They'd have the option to retain full control over their instance and citizens wouldn't need an account to access it.
Definitely. The problem is the worlds run by corpo fascists and they will do everything they can to maintain their control through tech.
If the right people are in the right positions though it becomes alot simpler to make happen.
No one needs Lemmy. For Signal, just install it on her phone and text her. That's all it takes.
Getting grandma on signal isn't to hard, Lemmy might be harder
network effect is strong
Honey! New idiot tax just dropped!
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?
Does anyone actually use Discord Nitro?
I see surprisingly many on the servers I frequent. It's included in Xbox GamePass now, so I guess that has caused a massive boost to the userbase, too
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You'd have to pay me to use that crap
Fuck all the way off with all this subscriptions to finally make this AI shit profitable. It won't work and people don't need all this datacenters. I really hate this timeline and all this billionaire bullshit.
Ah, enshittification, my old friend. Here we go again.
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.
It used to be that your ISP included subscription for newsgroups, etc in the connection costs.
Still just a couple bucks if newsgroups float your boat!
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