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.)

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.