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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Facebook are an advertising platform. They only offer a paid tier because they now legally have to. They don't really want you to take the paid tier, they want you to explicitly opt in to the ad-supported 'free' one. - because by specifically agreeing to "I want the free Facebook with ads' option it means you're actively choosing to be served ads, which is what all the recent lawsuits have been about - users giving explicit consent to be targeted for advertising.
I really wish they and all other advertising companies would spend more time thinking about why people hate and go through so much effort to avoid ads, then innovate ways to address that problem rather than spending so many resources coming up with ways to force users to adhere to advertising they hate.
Because they just want to make money, and doing what they're doing right now is the easiest/cheapest option, or maybe the most profitable one.
I do agree with you, though.
I guess that advertising has been around for 100s of years. For the vast majority of history it's been something people accept - nobody could avoid posters on the street, adverts in store windows and later it was adverts on the radio, in the cinema, then ads on TV... It's only incredibly recently that people have had even the possibility of blocking ads, and even then it's only a small subset of online adverts that can be blocked. Most ads (TV, radio, billboards, print...) are just as unavoidable and unblockqble as before.
Which basically means advertising has been part of people's lives since the day all of us were born. Mostly folks just accept it, like we accept we have to spent 2 minutes every single morning brushing our teeth even though we wish there was a better way.
It's just one of those tradeoffs. You can avoid that 2min every day but your life would be massively inconvenienced as a result (people would avoid you and you'd be in pain every day), and you can avoid ads by not using the internet, but life is inconvenienced as a result.
It's also a question of attention percentage. We've had ads on TV for a while, but since the 80's we also had the ability to fast forward if we used a VCR. There are ads in magazines, but you can turn the page in a fraction of a second. But now with unskippable ads or full page popovers, it's worse than it used to be in other media.