Facebook and Instagram to offer ad-free service in UK for up to £3.99 a month
theguardian.comThe problem with Facebook, beyond just ads, is that its algorithm pushes so many posts from groups that I'm not in and don't want to see. I want an option to only see posts from people I'm friends with and groups that I'm in.
> only see posts from people I'm friends with and groups that I'm in.
If you're on the website (not app):
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
If you just want to see friends and not groups:
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
(I am "Meta Verified", but they still locked my account over my name even though I sent them my ID. They have been "reviewing" my ID for the past two months. If anyone can help, my email is in my HN profile. Thank you.)
Thanks for those links (really). However, having now used them, it turns out I still don't like Facebook. It's basically the same 3-4 users posting things I utterly do not care about. I guess the people I do care about are not on FB (or don't post there).
Basically, people stopped posting as the algorithm started taking control of your feed.
I discovered FB purity [1] recently, which does cut down on the algorithm's spam in your feed. But it turns out people have already moved on.
£2/month would have been a tempting proposition 7-8 years ago. But £4/month in 2025 makes no sense. It is only offered to make the regulators happy.
It's under "feeds" on the menu. The URL is https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr on desktop.
Use fbpurity
i only have a burner FB account that i can use to check some local businesses and follow a local lost-pets group.
i have no friends and have never posted or liked anything, so my feed is almost exclusively algorithmically-pushed content. and there are a couple of thoughts about it:
- even though i haven't explicitly told you anything about myself except for looking at a couple local business, it's amazing how much it has been able to fine-tuning the feed to me. it has figured out my politics (not typical in my area), my favorite sports team (not local to my area), and my taste in standup comedy. all from watching me passively scroll.
- that being said, even though they've clearly learned some things about me, >90% of the feed is absolute clickbait shite. reposted reddit AITA threads meant to get rage-induced engagement, lots of cartoons/memes where the punchline is cropped out of the bottom of the image so you need to click to see it, lots of videos that implore you 'watch til the end!' so they can get over whatever view-time threshold is needed.
- for some reason, there are lots of people that are more than willing to actually engage with and comment on these threads. i know that i'm a bit of an outlier on the social media spectrum, but I cannot wrap my head around the logic that would lead to me seeing some engagement-farm meme roundup and then wanting to add in a comment like "LOL, so true! Very funny!". this isn't your friend where you want to tell them you liked their joke. why are you talking to the spam robot?!
> groups that I'm not in and don't want to see
You don’t want to see those, oh but you need to! /s
These paid offerings should include not only an ad-free experience, but also getting rid of all the dark patterns and other manipulative crap Meta loves doing in their apps and services. You know, preferences that actually stick forever, notifications that only notify you of things that actually happened, feeds that only contain content from accounts you follow and don't force-feed you recommendations, all that.
Ironically, this is why I stopped using meta social offerings as much as I used to and why I turned off notifications for those apps. I’m sure many people can say the same.
in theory switch to a user-pays model should align the incentives of the company with user satisfaction rather than the ads-pay model where the incentives is aligned to maximize engagement.
i'm not optimistic that'll happen.
It depends on how you define satisfaction. If company measures it as usage, that aligns with algorithms that encourage doom scrolling.
I wonder how would the world would have been if these services were paid by their users only, so algorithms optimized for user satisfaction instead of engagement.
Ten years ago, I wrote something [1] arguing that it is impossible to escape ads by paying, as long as the product is content:
> Here’s why I believe you will not escape ads by paying for your content: people who can afford to pay for content are people with money, or people with buying power, in other words, the exact same people advertisers look to target. The more buying power you demonstrate, the more advertisers will target you. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in. With the way the world currently works, selling ads, it seems, will always be more profitable than selling content.
[1] https://hliyan.github.io/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escap...
Everything on these platforms feels like an ad. On Facebook, I hardly see posts from my friends anymore, just a relentless stream of ads and algorithm-driven 'recommendations' (which are just ads in disguise). Who in their right mind would pay for that?
Facebook's logged out landing page used to say "Free forever". Guess there was a corner of the ToS that said "unless we decide otherwise". :)
Edit: OK the wording was "Sign up. It's free (and always will be)" so I guess that remains true.
Wouldn’t Free forever also still be true? If I understood correctly this is just taking the existing experience and removing ads? Lots to complain about with Meta but this is not one of the reasons.
The cost of blocking ads has been equal to zero for nearly two decades now. I see no reason to suddenly start paying for this kind of stuff.
a lot of people use apps to access these platforms
Any preferred ones?
I'm a caveman, I'm just trying to explain why it might be useful for some people
Their suffering is their own choice.
It's quite annoying to use Instagram on a mobile with adblock, and it also has quite a lot of ads (one every two posts!), not to mention the "organic" ads. I wonder if those are counted as well.
I went ad-free on IG by no longer using it. FB ruined that product.
Took me ages to realise I never get ads on IG. I'm in some sort of permanent control group.
Most non-ads content also is ads but more or less subtle.
I am not a Facenbook fan -- I deleted my account in 2016 and when I tried to come back recently and give Zuck a second chance, my account was summarily banned for being "inauthentic" (completely with a link to the policy, which 404'd).
I'd been prepared to have to upload a DL to prove I was me, but never got that chance.
Anyway, I think this is fine. A lot of rhetoric about social networks is swayed by teenagers and young adults with either zero ability to make online purchases or limited means.
But many of the harms around social media are things like being served beauty ads when you have body dysmorphia -- dastardly stuff preying on people's weaknesses to serve ads.
Remove that perverse incentive, and maybe Mark will make better decisions. Some of remember the early Facebook, with robust granular privacy controls.
Then the wall came and it all came tumbling down... that could change.
> Web users will be charged £2.99 a month and mobile phone users £3.99 a month to scroll through Facebook and Instagram without targeted ads.
I wonder how much information this provides about the relative value of mobile users vs web users. It's complicated by the fact that part of the pricing strategy here is likely not maximizing revenue as much as it is…making it just too expensive for many people to want to pay, thus shaping public opinion in the right direction.
> If the accounts are linked, users only need to pay one monthly fee.
Is this because they manage to get some value from that edge existing in the graph even if they can't turn that into ad revenue?
I think the price discrepancy is due to Google and Apple taking a cut of in-app purchases. Meta should get roughly the same amount of money either way.
I know two people who have been scammed by ads pushed on Instagram. One for a fake sell of clothes and another for fake reselling of concert ticket. In both instances, price of that scam was worth multiple years of subscription.
Ad-free, but is it tracking free?
I think we know the answer to that one.
The algorithmic feeds in these are by definition tracking
The people who are willing and capable of affording such subscription prices are likely also the same people who have the purchasing power to click on ads and buy things. So I don't understand the logic behind this.
The day instagram "proposed" me this deal is the day I uninstalled the app from my phone, it's been a few months now, 0 regret. I can take ads, but for some reason this was the final straw
I would happily pay 10x this money to have all Meta products, websites and trackers excluded entirely from my life. Here's a revenue stream for you, Luck!
£3.99/mo to not display ads anyway. How much to not have all my usage and content collected, tracked, and sold regardless?
With a substantial amount of creators relying on paid promotions tu survive, I doubt ad-free is the correct term to be used.
Enshittification at it's best.
This article is on theguardian.com , and it has started to require a paid subscription for all readers who don't want to share their data with 131 third parties. There is no privacy-respecting free option. The paid subscription is £5 per month, and it doesn't eliminate all ads. (This requirement may depend on which country you're in.)
Use Ad Nauseum and Ad Guard on your network. Block the ads and stop worrying about this.
"doesn't eliminate all ads"... ug.
Kind of the opposite of Facebook then who will charge you to hide ads, but still use your data.
You've got to pay somehow.
Why would there be a privacy-respecting free option? The content is not free to produce.
There are many ways to monetize free online websites. The most obvious way is advertising. Advertising can be privacy-respecting.
The Guardian in particular is funded by a trust fund, by donations, by advertising, and maybe by other sources of revenue as well.
>Advertising can be privacy-respecting
Not the effective kind.
The entire previous history of humanity we only had non-targeted ads in newspapers, on billboards, and on TV and radio, and everyone was ok with that. But suddenly, on the internet, it's somehow "not possible" to have advertising that isn't personalized or even dynamic at all. How so?
Whilst I broadly agree, ads have been targeted to location for a long time. Newspapers and TV would have geographical editions so you don't advertise say your theatre production to people who are too far away to care. With billboards or earlier fliers, you did the same.
Of course. Also TV ads would usually be shown during programs that the advertiser's target audience is most likely to be watching. Like ads for toys between cartoons. That's all fine, you can do the same on the internet without harming anyone's privacy. As an advertising network, you can receive the topic information from the websites themselves as part of them signing up, and users' approximate location can be derived from the IP address.
But instead, they're all hellbent on doing some form of personalization (via tracking) and attribution, and act as if the world would end if all technical means to do that, like third-party cookies, would cease to exist.
Even personalised advertising can be done without sharing personal data with 100+ third parties. For example, ask the user to fill out a survey about their interests, and then serve them more personalised ads based on their survey answers, all without sharing personal data with third parties.
I don't think that's true - I'm certain that the advertising has always done everything it can to maximise return on investment.
> and everyone was ok with that
not really