@manton And you still get ads? Boo

@linnefaulk Yep. Ads was one of the reasons I eventually cancelled my New York Times subscription. I know print newspapers and magazines have ads, but it feels wrong on paid web sites.

Shoot, at $ 5 a month I thought you and @jean must really like beans and rice.

@manton as someone who needed support when my Instagram username was stolen, I think by “priority support” they mean “any support at all.”

@palousegeo Ha! My goal is to make $5 an incredibly good value.

@manton selling cosmetics in games have been a hugely successful business (for example, skins for your guns in CS: GO that do not change game mechanics at all). This is what all this verified nonsense is reminding me of.

Elon has given them courage to take away something and charge for it. And Facebook doesn't even provide much for that cost. Sigh! If this succeeds, I will lose trust on people making sane choices.

I had to check the calendar to make sure it's not an April fools' day. I would understand if it was a one-off fee for getting verified, but a monthly subscription service, really? I also wonder if this affects engagement/ reach for those who don't subscribe 🤯

@manton I dunno, destroying democracy comes at a cost, Meta just trying to recover some of that.

They say, “Freedom isn’t free. It comes at the highest of costs.”

Well fascism ain’t free either, bub!

And it’s on sale now! Get yours today for the low low introductory price of only $11.95 per month. But act fast, supplies are limited. All major credit cards and Bored Ape NFT’s accepted.

Just say, “Meta, I want to be Verified,” out loud. It’s that easy!

Our agents are standing by, ready to take your order, and are already listening to you now.

I'm all for achievable goals, but you kinda overshot on this one ;-)

Reminds me of the Dutch proverb:

Even if a monkey wears a golden ring, it is and remains an ugly thing.

Where $12 stands for gold. Meta is just monkeying around with their users, selling 💩 for 🤑

Honestly, most of my attitude in that regard has been “I could run WP on my server for less and just write my own (X).”

That’s not a you problem.

@oddevan Yeah, I hope that our pricing is in a nice spot where even some folks who could host it themselves prefer to let us handle it. But mostly we need to be competitive with WordPress.com, Ghost, etc. and I think we are.

I'm in the prefer to let you all host it camp. I used to self host a ghost instance on Digital Ocean.

My priors are that there must be some equilibrium wherein these pricing models work. I would gladly pay $8/mo to get an add free Twitter and the use of Tweetbot, eg. And maybe even at a lower cost if it were offset by higher monthly fees for businesses. (Why shouldn't Meta or Twitter charge a multinational something like $5k-10k/mo since they want to reach users and have marketing budgets for those kinds of things anyway.)

But you're right that 12/mo for such paltry offerings seems distorted. I wonder if they know there just aren't many folks who would pay for it, so they need a higher price to offset the costs.

Nor would it surprise me if some of it has to do with needing the illusion of value. Years ago (two decades), I used to work at Best Buy. We raised the price of home theater installs. I thought we'd sell less but we sold more. Customers thought the quality couldn't be that good at the previous price we were selling it.

this seems like something that really should be a one-time charge. There is some cost to verifying and it's probably in both a company's and Meta's best interest to have company pages (or whatever they call them - I'm that one person who never had a FB account) verified so you know they are a legitimate source of info for the company. A monthly fee does seem inappropriate to align with actual cost.