I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users.

Since me and the other 99% of people contribute most of the value to Facebook for you, would you be willing to subsidize the other 99% of people and pay $1700/year?

> neither would 99% of users.

That sort of statement requires data to back it up.

> would you be willing to subsidize the other 99%

That would just mean that facebook is an unwanted and unprofitable service which then wouldn't exist.

Which is not a problem at all.

> That sort of statement requires data to back it up.

On other social media websites that offer "pay to remove ads" versus "get personalized ads", like Reddit or Twitch, about 1% of users pay. Wikipedia asks for donations and very few people donate, percentage-wise. So I think if you want to show a substantially higher number, say even 10%, you'll need to provided evidence. Even if 10% of users paid, would they be willing to be $170/year?

> That would just mean that facebook is an unwanted and unprofitable service which then wouldn't exist. Which is not a problem at all.

I don't see how you jumped to that conclusion, that it's unwanted. I want Facebook, and I want it for free with personalized ads. Same with Gmail, Yelp, Reddit, Google Maps, Instagram, Youtube, and a bunch of other web services. Not sure how that's so hard to understand, that this is the business model I prefer.

Same with newspapers. I don't want to pay the full cost of making a newspaper (probably $10 or so), but rather I'd purchase a very cheap subsidized newspaper with ads for $1. Or free apps with in-app purchases. Doesn't mean it's unwanted if people aren't willing to pay the cost price for it.

> I want Facebook, and I want it for free with personalized ads. Same with Gmail, Yelp, Reddit, Google Maps, Instagram, Youtube, and a bunch of other web services.

Exactly! I don't know why it's so hard for people to realize that there are people that 100% ok with the offerings from these companies and would rather not have legislation interfere with such transactions

I think mostly people argue that people who are OK with it don't know any better, don't know how much they're being tracked, etc. I don't think that's true today, everyone knows these companies know everything, even if they're not very tech savvy, and still they don't care as much as privacy advocates wish.

> On other social media websites

That sort of statement requires data to back it up.

> I don't see how you jumped to that conclusion, that it's unwanted. I want Facebook, and I want it for free

If no one wants to pay for it, it's unwanted. I'm sure you'd also want a mansion, butlers, a private jet, etc. for free. That you want something for free means nothing, and is entirely irrelevant.

Facebook in its current form also doesn't care about what you want. They care about how they can please their paying customers, with you being one of their many products they can sell.

> If no one wants to pay for it, it's unwanted. I'm sure you'd also want a mansion, butlers, a private jet, etc. for free. That you want something for free means nothing, and is entirely irrelevant.

The person you're replying to spoke directly to this by saying they want those services not merely for free, but for free with personalized ads. That is, by just saying "for free", you are removing an important part of the context. I suspect they would also sign up for a service that offered a mansion, butlers, a private jet, etc. for free with personalized ads, if anybody were offering such a thing.

I'm personally in the boat of preferring to pay for things that are important to me and hope to see more movement over time to subscription business models that work, but it does not make sense to write off people who want the opposite, who prefer to get things for free with personalized ads. The revealed preference in society seems to be that there are a lot more people who feel that way than people who prefer to pay for subscriptions. These people aren't just being duped, everybody knows how free services work because it is a very frequent and well publicized topic of conversation, it's just that they are ok or even happy with it.

I think what happens a lot, because I think it's what I experience personally very often, is that when we find ourselves with a minority opinion that we really think is right, that we conclude the majority with a different opinion from ours is just ignorant or being manipulated. But in reality, they are often just as knowledgeable as we are, but have simply drawn different conclusions. Speaking personally, this is always a bitter pill to swallow.

It's all well and good to survey people and have them answer "no" to the question "Do you want to be tracked?"

But if Facebook threw up two buttons, one saying I agree to allow targeted ads, and one saying "$17/year" and requires you to give your credit card information, it's naive to think a substantial percentage will hit the $17/year button for a product they've already been using for free.

This is, after all, how the internet got to be where it is. Not through the use of 'walled gardens' and paywalls. But by providing ad supported content.

> When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers.

> I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users.

I will never understand the mind of a typical social media user(s), as I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health as well as leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon.

Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good, what can you say really is worth it that you can't do with text/email? The digital life that was sold to us as an amazing replacement is actually proving to be really sad as COVID has shown and is perhaps one of the reasons I can comprehend why people are out there violating it as its proven to be an incredibly undesirable and lonely experience.

> I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health

Scientific evidence on that is inconclusive and mixed. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11126-017-953...

> Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good

Then maybe it's not for you? I like to share things with my friends, see things they share, it's mildly entertaining and somewhat informative. If you don't enjoy those things, then you don't have to participate.

> leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon

In a practical sense, I have never encountered any downsides with supposed data leaking / personalized ads / strangers selling information about me. I have not lost money because of it, or lost friendships, or manipulated to do something I later regret.

But I have lost time and money because of wrong information shared by the credit bureaus, lost friends and messages because of a broken phone, misleading salesmen who convinced me to buy bad products at bad prices, insurance companies that didn't pay up, and landlords who scammed me. So after I finish dealing with and worrying about actual bad actors that harm me in direct ways, maybe I'll start worrying about the ghosts.

It doesn't have to be either/or. An individual could pay and opt out of data mining.

Anyway, personalized ads is just the tip of the iceberg, the real problem with that data doesn't exist on a small scale. The problem is that mountain of data could be abused, for example to manipulate public opinion, elections, the stock market, etc, and blackmail.

Even if you aren't vulnerable to these things directly, the abuse potential of such data is so high that IMO it's only a matter of time before you're indirectly negatively affected by it.

Opting out would then require trusting an organization who is incentivized to collect data to not collect it. That can't be the solution.

If you don't trust them, don't give them your data or your money.

Of course all this would be predicated on trust and a government that would actually use teeth if fraud was committed.

Hah.

> If you don't trust them, don't give them your data or your money.

I already don't, but they still build a shadow profile of me with the data my friends and friends of friends leak.

Many of the features users find useful (let's ignore for the moment whether these are good things) like content recommendations and search result recommendations rely on the same understanding of user interests that allow these companies to target advertisements.

So they need to understand your interests anyway to provide the services that people find useful. So they still need forms of tracking to do the things that people find useful on the sites.

So what do we do?

They could just collect your data and not monetize it. If a paid user can decide whether or not they want those features. Facebook could easily monetize it anyway, but they could also monetize a paid user and day they aren't. Everything we are discussing is hypothetical anyway.

That doesn't sound so bad on the surface, but it would mean that most of my friends aren't on facebook, or any other social network, which would mean that it is close to pointless.

Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix. The motivation for Netflix is to give you just enough quality to keep you paying every month.

For a free service like Facebook you the user have no expectation of quality because you're paying nothing. So Facebook's motivation is not to provide quality but to keep you engaged and clicking. They've discovered that best way to do that is to infuriate you and to radicalize you. This keeps you the user engaged which is what advertisers require, so that's what Facebook delivers.

This is great except that this is not a healthy arrangement for a democracy. To constantly have users given whatever amount of negativity and disinformation is necessary to keep them enraged and glued to their phones. That's what Yang is all about trying to fix.

So paying for Facebook changes the dynamic. Users will now demand quality. Facebook will have to change. If users discover that Facebook only delivers them misery, then they'll stop paying and Facebook loses revenue on both ends. The users collectively will have power to demand improvements. Facebook's algorithm will have to change in response to that new dynamic. Problem solved. (That's the hope.)

>Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix.

Nope. Few people I know have a Netflix subscription. The subscription model doesn't work for news media for example.

I've never used Facebook, but there have been times where I've thought of signing up. If Facebook had cost money then that would've been a non-starter from the get go. The same goes for most other services.

I don't know why, but the value proposition of something that costs money online has to be very large for me to consider it.

The majority would, I guess. Not enough for it to matter.

$17 is the global average. If you live in a country like the US, you probably generate way more revenue per year, since you have more spending power (and thus are more valuable to advertise to).

I think the general problem is that those who can afford to pay for Facebook are those who are the most valuable to advertisers. So if you gave users the choice to pay or not, the users who draw the advertising revenue would pay, leaving the users who the advertisers don't really want to advertise to.

For reference it's approximately $143 per year for the US market, per user ($11.92 per month).

~220-230 million monthly active US users, $31.4 billion in sales (projected 2020 figure) for that market.

That's of course not adjusting for hours of use for a given user, data contribution, and so on.

Do you know the numbers for daily active users or weekly active users?

And do those numbers include messenger?

It would be fascinating to see some histograms of users and usage. Especially one that compares ad buyers, page managers, and personal only users.

You wouldn't, because other people wouldn't pay for it. The value proposition of Facebook comes from other people. If there aren't enough other people then you wouldn't want to use it.

Arguably without the ranking and recommendation, FB is quite boring.

The feed is such an integral part of FB.