Sarah Perez, reporting for TechCrunch:

Meta is doubling down on its subscription offerings. On Wednesday, the social networking giant announced it’s now rolling out its consumer subscription plans globally for its flagship apps, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and beginning tests of new subscriptions for businesses, creators, and Meta AI users.

For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things.

In an announcement, Meta’s head of product, Naomi Gleit, noted that “more fun features” will be added in the future.

My first question about this was whether Meta would be using IAP on iOS and Android. On the one hand, Zuckerberg really resents Meta’s subservient position to Apple and Google in the mobile ecosystem — that’s what drove him to make a big wrong bet on the “metaverse” as the Next Big Thing. But on the other hand, what else are they going to do? Most people only use Meta’s platforms via the phone apps, and if they’re going to allow subscriptions via the apps, they have to pay Apple and Google their commissions.

This point wasn’t addressed in Perez’s article, so I asked her on Mastodon, and she confirmed that they will be using IAP through both the App Store and Play Store. I’m curious how much they’ll try (and get away with) steering people to the web — both to avoid the store commissions and for direct control over the subscription relationship.

Daniel Jalkut, on Mastodon (cross-posted to Bluesky and Threads):

My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it.

I concur with this take completely.

(Sidenote: The different reply threads on the three networks speak loudly to the cultural and algorithmic differences between them. Good lord has Meta steered Threads into “make people argumentative” engagement.)

Fun show, good questions I thought.

dickover — a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

Paul Krugman, describing a few striking data visualizations:

YouGov’s surveys subdivide Republicans into those who do and those who don’t support MAGA — and the economic views of these two groups are very different. A remarkable 65 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say that the economy is getting worse, while only 11 percent say that it is getting better. [...]

Aside from MAGA Republicans, Americans are bunched at the upper left, with few people seeing the economy getting better and the vast majority seeing it as getting worse. Non-MAGA Republicans are much more similar in their views to independents, and even to Democrats, than they are to MAGA.

So how big is the group that believes that we have a good economy? Only 19 percent of Americans.

The MAGA/non-MAGA split amongst self-identifying Republicans is striking. Non-MAGA Republicans have views on the economy that almost exactly mirror those of independents — neither of which are that far from those of Democrats.

And let’s face it, “MAGA” is a euphemism for the Donald Trump cult of personality. These are the people who think it’s fine, just fine for him to be putting his name on buildings, his signature (and perhaps face) on currency, putting his face on “special” edition US passports, erecting gold statues of himself, holding a UFC fight on the White House lawn to celebrate his birthday — not to mention the not-even-trying-to-hide-it-or-excuse-it abject corruption.

It’s rather depressing that 20 percent of the US population is in this cult. But I take solace that it’s only 20 percent. That’s not that much higher than the 13 percent who believe “Bigfoot / Sasquatch is a real, living creature”. This whole thing is a political boil that is starting to burst. Rats leave sinking ships.