Not content with printing money by selling your data and targeting you with ads – Meta now expects you to pay for the privilege.

Yes, Snapchat and X/Twitter have had paid tiers for a while, but this is different. Not content with having businesses and pages pay for reach, Meta is shifting from a “forever free” model for regular users, where they monetize your data and attention, to charging you for you’re ability to express yourself.

They’re moving from being the “town square” to Time Square advertising where you have to pay for space. You have to pay to be heard. You have to pay for expression, reach, and credibility.

Want more reach? Pay for it. Want for credibility? Pay for it. Want to be a real business? Pay for it.

Clearly Meta’s net profit of $26.8 Billion (on $56.3 billion revenue) was not enough to stave off the corporate greed or the “number must go” up mentality of investors.

It’s a fucking odd decision to start charging users for tiered service given that Meta recently faced it’s first major user loss – a drop of 20,000,000 users in the last quarter. One would think the focus would be on improving the service to attract more users and profit from those ads and juicy user data?

But no, instead they appear to think that driving more people away from the ecosystem is the way to go.

Stupid.

I feel like this shift is the beginning of a similar story arc to that of video streaming services and piracy.

Much like social media consolidated bloggers and forum users from all over the web, making it easy to consume content, and beginning the decline of the open web, the emergence of Netflix drastically reduced piracy levels by consolidating previously difficult to obtain content and making it easy to access.

But then corporate greed stepped in. Every other media company launched a Netflix competitor. The result? Costs to operate streaming companies went up, and margins became thinner as users fragmented across platforms and became increasingly irritated at being nickel and dimed in exchange for less and less choice. Pay more, get less.

The result? Piracy is back, baby! Yeah!

I hope that the same will happen with social media now that all of the big players are on tiered levels of pay-to-play, and this will result in people going back to controlling their own spaces online.

That people will go back to having their own websites where you control the message and you call the shots.

For those who didn’t grow up with it, it’s hard to imagine the massive communities that we had, and how everyone knew each other, back when all we had were blogs, email, and an RSS reader.

That was the open web. That was the what made it great. Ownership of your content, ownership of your message, and ownership of your community.

It takes a little more work to get started than just vomiting whatever you’re currently thinking into a text box, but, at the rates Meta is charging, it may actually be cheaper, and vastly more rewarding to break away and have your own space.