With all the talk about how harmful social media can be for various groups because of the clever algorithims enticing people to keep clicking, bringing up pages that confirm their perceived prejudices. I have never heard anyone suggest charging the user a per month fee and making the site ad-free. Their would be no need for sustained attention to watch more ads, no need for algorithims collecting all kinds of personal data. The trick would be to legally require these companies to do this. What am I missing here?
Any social medium provider is free to try this model, there is no governing body telling them whether they can or can’t. So I presume that they have all concluded that this model would cost them considerable income. What advertisers are willing to pay in order to put their ads in front of you would probably surprise you, and it is always increasing with the new ways that the providers are always developing to get more information about you. And it is all more-or-less hidden from you.
What you are missing is that the site would instantly lose 98% of its users.
Again the OP said that this would have to be mandated by law to work. Which immediately raises two problems.
One is political: getting any honest legislature to actually write and pass such a law. Much less the semi-honest ones whose members receive (or would receive) a lot of donations from the website operators and advertising vendors to kill this silly onerous legislation before it gets started.
The other is that absent a hermetic government-run firewall around a country, there is no practical way for country A to demand that all websites accessible within its borders obey Law X. It’s much too easy to set up the website in Country B that doesn’t care about Law X and Country A’s residents can access it just fine from home.
The SDMB tried it. Sorta
Facebook told us years ago that “it’s free and always will be.”
The “user” isn’t the customer. They’re the product.
I’m with ya, OP. It feels like we’ve let this trainwreck go on even though there’s tons of agreement that it’s harming society.
I think subscription-based streaming sites still aim for maximum attention, so I don’t think the ad-sale motivation is solely responsible for the addictive aspect. Any site seems to wait to keep you on it as long as possible, even if it’s costing them some marginal overhead to keep feeding the user content.
One option would be a government run social media service that could actually be optimized for user satisfaction and social health. I was a fan of this until the fascists took over.
We could just ban social media sites. I’d be fine with that.
Separately, we could also just ban advertising. I think it’s long overdue.
It’s already a thing in the EU:
From what I understand, it’s nowhere as profitable as productizing you and getting money from advertisers who will bid a lot of dollars against each other.
Same reason Google Search doesn’t offer an ad-free subscription.
They don’t care about serving you or society. They want the $$$. The EU forced their hand, but we don’t have a government that cares enough. Ours is just too captured and corrupt.
If Netflix or HBOMax started out free with constant ads and then started charging a few dollars/mo ad-free, would they lose many viewers? I doubt it.
Netflix and HBOMax are not social media sites.
I feel like any such legislation – if proposed in the next 2.33 years – would exempt Truth Social 
Sounds like a severe underestimate of the complexity of designing national law.
The OP’s idea that a legal mandate would be required harks back to the early days of workplace safety legislation.
Before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 safety concerns were largely left up to the proprietors of businesses. Since it would affect the competitiveness of any single company to make their own workplace safe, it simply didn’t happen. Once it became law everyone was in the same boat.
Obvs.
As mentioned, Meta already offers subscription-based access to their social media sites/apps in some places, but they are still tracking the bejeezus out of its paid subscription users just like the free users. Under their subscription plans, they only promise they won’t serve you personalized ads; they don’t promise to stop gathering, storing, and utilizing your data however they see fit (with the exception of displaying personalized ads).
Which means they will still do everything possible to keep you doomscrolling so they can keep sucking up your data, whether that data is for AI training, selling AI services, aggregated data used to improve its business/enterprise offerings, or whatever nefarious monetization practices they come up with in the future.
So, IMHO, the ads are a symptom, not the disease. It’s all about your data and what Meta and the rest do with it. Paid subscription services don’t really change that math.
And Google said “Don’t be evil”. Stuff changes. Though I’m sure not holding out hope for this change, sigh.
This isn’t exactly correct. With a paid account in the EU, Meta still collects your usage data, but they cannot attach it to your account. They will pseudo-anonymize it and aggregate it though.
It’s not just disabling personalized ads. They can’t profile you with this data and feed it to their algorithms. They can’t squirrel the data away until you stop subscribing.
They’re just gonna skirt the rules as much as possible, target you anyway, and pay the eventual fine as a cost of doing business. The EU has more teeth than we do but not THAT much more teeth. They can fine as percentage of global revenue, but it’s probably still more profitable for Meta to skirt the rules and just pretend to behave.
The entire company is built on spying and targeting and they’re not going to give that up no matter what they tell the regulators. At their scale, the tech companies are not really beholden to any law or nation. Criminality and fines are just additional variables for their algorithms to optimize against.
I mean, at the end of the day you just really can’t really democratically regulate companies that are far richer and more powerful than most of the world’s governments, ESPECIALLY when those companies also control your communications and propaganda channels.
You can slap em on the wrist and pass some feel good cover stories, but the underlying power dynamics are entirely in their favor. Piss them off too much and they can and will turn the populace against their own governments.