To be clear: I prefer to pay for things instead of having to see ads but 13€ / month!? For a meta product that has inherently user-hostile design patterns even without ads?
They don’t want you to pay. They set the price artificially high to discourage you so they continue business as usual while complying to the laws. The price is a PITA charge to make it worth their while and to still profit from the ads they would have shown you.
I’ve never used IG but I feel like it would be a $3.99/month type of service. This price just tells us they are making way more than that serving ads or that your ad data alone is worth a decent bit of cash.
It’s weird in that most users would value it at $3.99 a month, but the average user also scrolls for several hours a month, with each one of those hours packed with ads.
This equates to way more than $4 in revenue a month.
Actually… it’s likely only slightly higher than what they get from ads per user, and still lower than what they get from compiling and selling all the information you agree to give them.
Users tend to severely underestimate how much their cumulative data can be sold for.
I've just taken the app off my phone and use adblock when I'm on the desktop browser version. I still need social media to post my work out there (I get clients that way), but I don't need to look at it 100 times a day.
It's honestly been a big quality of life improvement to take all my social media off my phone. Been a month or two now and I really miss it a lot less than I thought I would and who knows how much time I'm saving.
At least home wifi isn’t as insane as cellular here I guess. We get American ads on the break room TV at work, their cellular plans are pennies compared to what we have to pay north of the border
Well to be fair I’m still enjoying Mastodon a lot and Pixelfed too (which is the better Instagram replacement) but pretty much everyone I follow is somebody I don’t know in real life. Instagram is great to see what your extended circle of friends is doing.
I have seen SO many acounts praising youtube premium its bonkers, I refuse to believe that many people are paying for it. ItS gOt GrEaT mUsIC AnD I cAn SuPpOrT mY fAvOuRiTe CrEaTorS. same script every time.
I’ve had it for years and one of the biggest features that I find worthwhile is being able to easily download videos to watch on the plane or play like podcasts when I’m driving. When I first got it, I had a really long commute, so being able to download stuff and play it with my phone screen off is helpful.
ya thats true. I’ve been screen mirroring on my laptop for that but I get it if its a convenience thing. I used to pay for a bunch of streaming services until they jacked the price, I dropped almost everything after the last round of price hikes. again, mostly a convenience thing.
I self-host a ton of stuff, and have sailed the high seas for decades to grow my personal collection.
BUT
I pay for YT premium, netflix, and steam, so that my nephews can be on my family plans. Their life can be pretty shitty a lot of the time, and good music, games, and simple distractions help.
You can believe whatever you want. Google Music sent me a free Nest Mini back in the day, and paying for YouTube Pro is right now the cheapest way of having voice activated ad-free playlists on it.
But feel free to give me an alternative “script” that gets similar functionality for cheaper.
I've been off of all social media for about a decade, but just yesterday i got a dm from someone from my past so i went and checked it out and then I checked a bunch of other stuff there too and my mental state instantly spiraled into a terrible place. Man that shit is toxic like nuclear waste.
It’s not talking to people that’s damaging. Being able to socialize and discuss via media is healthy.
The damaging component is when an algorithm pushes unhealthy content because it drives engagement.
No one set out to create a rage/depression/anxiety algorithm, but those emotions tend to drive engagement better than more positive experiences. So if engagement is the goal, you get destructive systems.
Removing the algorithm does a lot for helping people engage with their peers and society at large in a more constructive context.
Most definitions of social media are some form of “sharing content for the purpose of socializing in a public manner”. I wouldn’t think having a real life identity linked to your account would be a requirement for a social network. Why wouldn’t reddit, lemmy, or even an old school forum be considered social media? You’re sharing and discussing content on a community platform. I dunno, just something I’ve been thinking about recently as I’m using lemmy more.
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of social media arise due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:
Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.
Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user’s profile with those of other individuals or groups.
Lemmy fits those criteria very well, and there’s nothing regarding anonymous profiles vs identified profiles. It may not be the only definition of social media, but it’s comprehensive and sensible.
Then email is also social media, Google docs is social media, phpBB is social media, Amazon review sections are social media, even Pornhub comment sections are social media, and so on…
If Lemmy fits the criteria, then so does 95% of the internet. Not a very useful definition, in that case.
Yeah, I guess under that definition any web-based application that allows for a person to create an account/profile and generate and post content is a form of social media. That makes sense when you consider that they’re media that allow for social interaction.
What’s your definition of social media? Genuinely interested because I’m not sure that there even is a single definition that can be agreed upon.
I think the whole public vs anonymous profiles thing doesn’t really stack up, as I can create profiles on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok etc and provide no identifying information about myself, much as I do on Lemmy. I can also choose to add a profile picture and info about myself to identify myself on Lemmy if I choose, much as people do on other social media.
If your definition only includes those platforms that force you fully identify yourself in order to maintain a profile, that list will be pretty small and exclude a lot of sites that the vast majority would consider to be social media, including the ones I’ve named above.
You might be able to create profiles anonymously, but you can’t use those services anonymously. They only work if you have other people added as friends or whatever, unlike content aggregators like lemmy or reddit, where you can be as anonymous as you want and still interact with all features of the site.
I think that narrows it down enough. If you can use all features of the platform without personally knowing anyone on it, it’s not social media.
I did too and, while the benefit are higher than the loss, I usually feel really left out from one kind of partecipation to society and it’s a bit sad.
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