Not Such a Bad Idea?

Once again one of the usual Facebook misinformation posts has begun making the rounds. This one suggests that on a certain date, Facebook will begin charging a subscription fee for its services. As usual, such a post has the immediate effect of driving up Snopes traffic, as well-meaning people post links that help counter the misinformation and ease tension. But what if...

What if Facebook had a subscription fee for something like a premium level, on which it would guarantee you would see none of its clickbait spammer fraud ads? What if it offered a couple of tiers, and on one you could set your own keyword instructions, so that posts with certain words, such as, oh, I don't know, let's pick two at random, "Trump" and "Biden" wouldn't appear on your feed? Most of us have friends who we think might be a little too into politics who also post great stuff about what is going on in their lives and we would appreciate the chance to curate what we see from them. What if we could set the instructions for our news feed to show us things in chronological order rather than the choices the company's algorithm makes, and leave it there?

Would Facebook do this? Almost certainly not. A long explanation can be found in this Ted Gioia Substack piece, "YouTube May Force You to Watch 10 (or More) Unskippable Ads in a Row." Another version of it can be found in several chapters of the Johann Hari book Stolen Focus. The upshot is that by being free, the main social media platforms have eliminated competitors and now have sole domain. They can, therefore, insert those 10 ads because they have little competition and because we have become unaccustomed to considering lost time on a screen as a cost. I'm an old Gen Xer, so I remember having ads you couldn't skip in the middle of your program called "commercials," but many folks today grew up with DVR fast-forwards and premium cable or streams that had none of those. They may get a little rattled.

Hari's contribution is to highlight how social media companies only make money when we are watching them. A chronology-based scroll comes to an end when we reach items we know we have seen before. An algorithm-based scroll can go on as long as we click what looks interesting to us and give the company more data about how to show us what we like to look at.

So despite the panic button posts that crop up when the rumor gets started, I would love to pay a nominal fee for a premium level of Facebook that I could configure a little closer to what I liked. But it'll never happen.

Because the company can't afford to start charging -- if Facebook isn't free, it doesn't make as much money.