Meta Is Considering Charging Business Pages To Post Links (socialmediatoday.com) 33
Meta is informing some users that they will soon be restricted in how many link posts they can share each month, unless they pay for its Meta Verified subscription service. As per the notification message: "Starting December 16, certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified, including yours, will be limited to sharing links in 2 organic posts per month. Subscribe to Meta Verified to share more links on Facebook, plus get a verified badge and additional benefits to help protect your brand."
To be clear, right now this is a limited test, so relatively few Pages are impacted. But understandably, a lot of users are also seeking more information on the change, and whether it could be expanded to all Pages. So, Meta's seeking to boost take-up of Meta Verified, in order to make more money out of its subscription option, which, for business users, costs between $14.99 and $499 per month, depending on which package you choose.
To be clear, right now this is a limited test, so relatively few Pages are impacted. But understandably, a lot of users are also seeking more information on the change, and whether it could be expanded to all Pages. So, Meta's seeking to boost take-up of Meta Verified, in order to make more money out of its subscription option, which, for business users, costs between $14.99 and $499 per month, depending on which package you choose.
Great! (Score:2)
Not Having An Account (Score:2)
Does this mean that we have to create an account so that we can drop them?
Seems like a pain in the ass.
Re:Great! (Score:4, Informative)
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That actually happened to me.
My business (and me personally) have never had a Facebook account.
Imagine my surprise about ten years ago when I discovered a Facebook account for my business that had apparently been automatically created by them. I looked into this a bit and discovered that if enough people say they are at your business (somehow, they note their presence through their own Facebook account?) then Facebook creates an account for your business automatically.
I just ignore this thing that they cre
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Fleecing their last customers? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Somebody has to pay for all the AI investments!
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Or the money Meta has burned off trying to be something that they aren't, the ashes of failed products needing to be brushed under the rug with fresh revenues.
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The timing of this seems super weird, as Facebook is now basically irrelevant for anyone under the age of 40.
They might have been actually able to get away this 12 years ago when Facebook was still new and cool, but now it's really only used by boomers who share fake news with each other and complain that their grand kids don't visit them often. Businesses will just stop posting and leave a link to their website instead.
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From 2004-2006 or so, Facebook was pretty much for college students and others with a college email address. This meant most early users were born between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s.
Facebook is now basically irrelevant for anyone under the age of 40.
That tracks.
Level up! (Score:3)
Re:Level up! (Score:5, Informative)
"Enshitification complete, sir!"
Sweet summer child. You think this is complete? They won't be happy until people have force-installed tech gadgets at birth that pipe ads directly into our brains while we sleep. We're aiming to enshitify the entire human experience, not just online interaction.
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I do recall reading a book with a plotline sort of like that. Ads beamed directly to your visual cortex...
https://www.goodreads.com/book... [goodreads.com]
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"Enshitification complete, sir!"
That's a contemptible lie - Facebook was a piece of shit from the get-go.
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"Enshitification ..."
Paying for stuff is not "enshittification". In fact, it's everybody not paying that caused the current cesspool of adverts and data theft. I'll admit, demanding US$15 per month to hold a few photos on one web-site is price-gouging: It's not sustainable. A good alternative is for-profit businesses pay, thus subsidizing their future customers' visits to their web-page or shop-front.
pointless (Score:1)
what a joke (Score:2)
Cash flow must be down (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone...? (Score:2)
Does anyone ever use Meta the cesspile for anything other than scams?
Final stage of enshittification is when the site abuses both the users and the advertisers. I think we are there.
In other words ... (Score:2)
Buy an ad.
There was once a time when... (Score:3)
...FB was the place where glassworkers showed their work and there were a lot of glassworkers on the site.
I make machines for glasswork, and FB was a great way to show the glass community what I was making.
Over time, I noticed more and more glassworkers leaving FB. It's now mostly ads, AI slop, promoted posts, pop culture and other assorted crap.
It's barely worth the time to look at, and I have slowed my posting dramatically.
I wish that glassworkers had a good place to share our work
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Just create a fake coup video (Score:2)
After all, if our fake video isn't being taken down, why bother checking for verification when a bribe will do?
Just another web host now... (Score:4, Informative)
Hey "businesses", remember how you were too cheap to get a simple website hosted, so you just set up Facebook because it's "free"? Well, it would be a shame of something happened to all those links you post on Facebook...
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An advertising platform gave them years of free advertising: That was never going to last. The real surprise should be every information service choosing to monetize people's private lives, first.
Enshittification Stage 2 (Score:2, Insightful)
Stage 1: Fuck your users
Stage 2: Fuck your customers
Stage 3: Got forgotten as both groups flock to a new platform.
I guess stage 3 is long overdue
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Meta has a knack for building/buying the replacement for the "thing" that becomes cool after their original service starts to die.
Facebook started becoming uncool, so they bought and expanded Instagram.
Then TikTok became cooler than Instagram, so they added Instagram Reels for a similar bite sized mindless video experience.
People got mad at Twitter after Musk turned it into X, so then they built Threads and started migrating Instagram users to it.
Then Open AI released Sora, so they created Meta AI "Vibes" t
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I am not surprise about the users jumping to the next Meta service. But why do companies fall again and again for the "Pay so your 'followers' see your content" scam? If the company limits what my followers see, the service is crap both for me and for my followers. No wonder companies try to get users to sign up for newsletters and if they were clever they would push to revive RSS.
At this rate everyone will pay for each post. (Score:2)
Just give me an excuse (Score:2)
I've already moved my community to reddit/discord with only minimum activities on my facebook group.
If they do this, it will be the final nail.