Heard the one about Meta? 🤡

(welcome to the clown show)  ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Hey, Big Tech thinks of itself as smart and innovative and, above all, data driven. Yet, it’s just as swayed by trends, tail-chasing, and whimsy as industries it looks down on. And it’s also capable of doing remarkably stupid things. Today we’re talking about Facebook’s plan to charge people for sharing links, if you haven't guessed already. I say plan, but it’s already rolling out to some accounts; we have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to work, even if things will probably vary a little by region and are likely to get tweaked along the way too – as they have already. There is a confusing array of different packages. Some are for individuals with personal Profiles. Others are for business Pages. And each have a variety of blandly named tiers and a random grab-bag of features. Pretty much the only thing uniting this muddled mess is the core idea. The crux is this: once the change hits your account, Facebook will only let you share two links and if you want to share more, you will have to pay. Which is crazy, of course, but the details are probably worse than you are picturing. meta one To keep things manageable here, I’ll restrict myself to talking about the Meta One packages, as those are your only option if you are running a business on Facebook – and an author Page is considered such – as the cheaper, platform-specific packages are for personal use only. Here’s how it works in the accounts it has hit so far: Caps on links and associated plans will apply to all Pages, as well as Profiles which are in Professional Mode. Personal Profiles are spared, for now. Link in comments won’t work, because of how broadly Facebook is implementing the restrictions. Commenting under someone else’s post with a link will count towards your cap, as will sharing in Groups. Sending links by DM is spared, for now at least. Linking to other Meta Properties – Facebook, Insta, WhatsApp – won’t count towards your total. Facebook appears to be testing two different ways of handling your links after you have reached your limit, I’ve seen examples of the link just being rendered non-clickable, like Instagram. But I’ve also heard from many writers who are actually blocked from posting something until they remove the link from that post (or pay for a plan – and we’ll get to the details of those in a moment). So, yes, to show you how ridiculous this is, simply recommending a couple of books or sharing two news articles will use up your monthly allowance of links. The system is so restrictive I had to check the offical information multiple times to be sure I had it right. the plans If you go for a paid plan, here’s what you get. There are four tiers: Essential: $14.99 a month Advanced: $49.99 a month Expert: $149.00 a month Max: $499.00 a month I can only assume Facebook got a monkey roaring drunk and placed him in front of a dart board to pick these prices, and determine what you get in each. At the Essential tier you get… zero extra links. Forgive me for dropping a technical term here, but in marketing we call this “ballsy.” You're stuck with your two-link allowance – which has to cover you on Facebook and Instagram by the way, and if you cross post one thing that is your entire allowance used up, even though you are giving Facebook money each month (although why you would do that is completely beyond me tbh). Things loosen up a little in the Advanced package, where you get a whopping eight links – which is about $6 each, LOL, because it’s not eight more links. (Why would you say something crazy like that?) You get four Insta links too, but you can’t use that allowance on Facebook because consistency is important in a major corporate pivot involving billions of users. I’m starting to get jealous of that monkey because Expert level, and a staggering $149 a month, where they drop the 99¢ for the sake of efficiency because they are busy delivering you a whopping 20 links. That’s $7.50 each. It's important to pause here and recognize that the price is going up at the higher tiers. An elaborate prank of some kind? You tell me. "But what about the Max $499 a month tier?" you demand, mercilessly nudging me onwards with a cattle prod of sorts. Because if you are really leaning into Facebook and Instagram and social media marketing, and are one of those go-getter types the internet insists will succeed if you have just enough ambition and/or gumption, well then it might be worth it to get unlimi-- Let me stop you there. You’re getting 12 Instagram links and no more. You can drop as many Facebook links as you like, I guess, but we throttled their organic reach years ago. Enjoy! Now, I’ve checked all the surfaces in my office for traces of LSD and I can’t find anything. But I can’t dismiss the possibility that I am actually tripping right now. beyond links In the interest of grounding all this in some kind of recognizable reality, I should point out that this is about more than links. Facebook has jammed in all sorts of stuff in the Meta One tote bag in a vain attempt to try and stop people doing the math, yet links are all anyone is talking about. The Essential tier grants you a blue tick. I’ve had one for several years, and I got it the old-fashioned way, i.e. by doing far too many media interviews that didn’t really sell very many books. Strange times, back when social media platforms wanted people to share interesting things so they could connect with each other, before our billionaire betters realized they could replace the posts with AI, the posters with AI, and the commenters with AI too. What value would I assign to it? Less than $14.99 a year, let alone a month. And that's before it inevitably gets swamped by scammers and spammers, just like X did. Before I stopped hanging out on the social platform formerly known as Twitter, I noted that the blue tick had – virtually overnight – become something to automatically avoid. This will play out the exact same way, just with ten times more scammers because the scale is bigger. You also get “protection from impersonators” – which you might think is something Facebook should be doing anyway, as its duty of care towards users, but that’s why you don’t own a yacht, quite frankly. Advanced lets you “post content at the best times” and gives you “extended insights” into your content and audience, two things I was confident we could do already, but I haven’t checked since this was announced. Maybe they ghosted those features to make all this sound worth it? This entire thing feels like it was decided yesterday and cobbled together today, a placeholder that Dr. Frankenstein accidentally set live. Maybe he's the real monster? Safeguard are important, is what I'm saying. But what’s this, “brand protection?” Yes, if you give Facebook fifty dollars a month it will grant you the ability to report stolen content. Twice. You can do it two times. That’s it. Then you can’t report stolen content anymore. Moving up to Expert gives you all the aforementioned stuff and – sorry one second, I couldn’t hear you with the sound of a barrel being scraped – lets you “see how your content performs compared to profiles similar to yours.” And if you think that’s something you could do anyway by, you know, going to a comp author’s page and simply counting the likes on their posts, well, that’s just silly. Why would you do that when you could pay someone $149 a month to do it for you, probably in some kind of indecipherable table? You can report stolen content six times though, which presumably makes this worth it all on its own. Max, we need something big here, whaddaya got? “Get dedicated support.” Uh… anything else? “Strategy calls.” GODDAMMIT Facebook this is all stuff we had already. You’ve just taken it off us and then put it behind a series of increasingly expensive gates. *takes deep breath* This isn’t breaking something and selling people the solution. This is breaking something and selling people a bag of broken pieces. loopholes Obviously, this is all a giant pile of nonsense, no one should pay for it, and we should all collectively hope that Facebook takes this behind the woodshed. I’ve seen some suggest that one of the lower tiers might be worth it if you are making a lot of money, Facebook is critical to your business, and you want higher-level support. I get the logic, but as someone who has had access to higher level support for quite some time, let me just say this: don’t get your hopes up. Support levels at Facebook have degraded hugely in recent years and that “higher level support” was quite useful but is no longer up to much, even if you are spending six figures on ads every year. So, color me skeptical that this will be any different. Which means most people are probably looking at loopholes. During beta testing, everyone quickly defaulted to the Insta trick of putting the link in the comments, as Facebook users have been doing for years to get around the throttling of link posts in their last attempt at keeping people in the platform instead of, you know, making the platform somewhere you might want to hang around, like you did before? I’m no Big Tech CEO, but if people are leaving the Public Square because it’s covered in broken glass and needles and stinks of piss, maybe the answer isn’t to build walls around it, and then when people start climbing over the walls to escape, install sniper towers too? Just an idea. Anyway, link in comments was nixed after beta testing. Other changes from the beta are the link allowances, which were even more ridiculous before (if you can believe that). I’ve seen screenshots where the $49.99 tier only allowed a total of four links and the $149 tier only permitted eight. That’s eighteen dollars a link. I dunno about you but I cannot wait for this era of abundance, it's gonna be lit. What other loopholes do you have? Commenting under someone else’s post with a link counts towards your total, so that’s out. Cross-posting counts as two links rather than one, so that’s no good either. And then posting in a group will count towards your total also. The only thing I can think of is maybe getting around this by having an admin or an intern in your group who posts links for you from a personal profile – which don’t have these links restrictions… yet. There’s also a slightly more generous allowance for links in Reels, if you could be bothered going in that direction and shooting video to get some pretty shallow engagement (you have been warned). what about ads? Some are taking the cynical view that all this is designed to push people towards the ad platform. But I take the even more cynical view that the big push to ads happened years ago, and all of this is just designed to milk anyone who is not interested in advertising. Because it’s waaaaaaay cheaper to get traffic via ads then with any of these dumb plans. The ad platform still works very well for me. I know many have struggled with the changes in recent years, with some swearing off the platform altogether, understandably. I don’t particularly like Facebook, the way it is run, or the people running it for that matter, but there aren’t many alternatives in the world of book advertising, so I continue to use it with a pinched nose. Every single year, though, I watch what is happening to the broader social network which displays those ads and I wonder, “Is this the year? Is this when the ads stop working?” I really do wonder if this will be the final nail in the coffin for Facebook – which seems determined to fully embrace Dead Internet Theory. But every year I’m surprised that the ads keep trucking on, delivering sales at scale for a pretty reasonable cost. I’m genuinely surprised the bottom hasn’t fallen out of that yet, and I guess I’ll keep on truckin’ until it does – or until something better comes along. Until then, Dave P.S. Writing music this week is The Primitives with Crash. Interesting Paths, Apartado 108, Loja CTT, Lagos, Faro 8601-902 ​Unsubscribe | Update your profile​