The Guardian in particular is funded by a trust fund, by donations, by advertising, and maybe by other sources of revenue as well.
Not the effective kind.
not really
But instead, they're all hellbent on doing some form of personalization (via tracking) and attribution, and act as if the world would end if all technical means to do that, like third-party cookies, would cease to exist.
You've got to pay somehow.
Edit: OK the wording was "Sign up. It's free (and always will be)" so I guess that remains true.
I think we know the answer to that one.
If you're on the website (not app):
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
If you just want to see friends and not groups:
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
(I am "Meta Verified", but they still locked my account over my name even though I sent them my ID. They have been "reviewing" my ID for the past two months. If anyone can help, my email is in my HN profile. Thank you.)
I discovered FB purity [1] recently, which does cut down on the algorithm's spam in your feed. But it turns out people have already moved on.
£2/month would have been a tempting proposition 7-8 years ago. But £4/month in 2025 makes no sense. It is only offered to make the regulators happy.
You don’t want to see those, oh but you need to! /s
i have no friends and have never posted or liked anything, so my feed is almost exclusively algorithmically-pushed content. and there are a couple of thoughts about it:
- even though i haven't explicitly told you anything about myself except for looking at a couple local business, it's amazing how much it has been able to fine-tuning the feed to me. it has figured out my politics (not typical in my area), my favorite sports team (not local to my area), and my taste in standup comedy. all from watching me passively scroll.
- that being said, even though they've clearly learned some things about me, >90% of the feed is absolute clickbait shite. reposted reddit AITA threads meant to get rage-induced engagement, lots of cartoons/memes where the punchline is cropped out of the bottom of the image so you need to click to see it, lots of videos that implore you 'watch til the end!' so they can get over whatever view-time threshold is needed.
- for some reason, there are lots of people that are more than willing to actually engage with and comment on these threads. i know that i'm a bit of an outlier on the social media spectrum, but I cannot wrap my head around the logic that would lead to me seeing some engagement-farm meme roundup and then wanting to add in a comment like "LOL, so true! Very funny!". this isn't your friend where you want to tell them you liked their joke. why are you talking to the spam robot?!
> Here’s why I believe you will not escape ads by paying for your content: people who can afford to pay for content are people with money, or people with buying power, in other words, the exact same people advertisers look to target. The more buying power you demonstrate, the more advertisers will target you. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in. With the way the world currently works, selling ads, it seems, will always be more profitable than selling content.
[1] https://hliyan.github.io/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escap...
i'm not optimistic that'll happen.
I'd been prepared to have to upload a DL to prove I was me, but never got that chance.
Anyway, I think this is fine. A lot of rhetoric about social networks is swayed by teenagers and young adults with either zero ability to make online purchases or limited means.
But many of the harms around social media are things like being served beauty ads when you have body dysmorphia -- dastardly stuff preying on people's weaknesses to serve ads.
Remove that perverse incentive, and maybe Mark will make better decisions. Some of remember the early Facebook, with robust granular privacy controls.
Then the wall came and it all came tumbling down... that could change.
evertedsphere•4mo ago
I wonder how much information this provides about the relative value of mobile users vs web users. It's complicated by the fact that part of the pricing strategy here is likely not maximizing revenue as much as it is…making it just too expensive for many people to want to pay, thus shaping public opinion in the right direction.
> If the accounts are linked, users only need to pay one monthly fee.
Is this because they manage to get some value from that edge existing in the graph even if they can't turn that into ad revenue?
jsheard•4mo ago