The internet is killing itself with a thousand micro-subscriptions

Once upon a time, the internet was a place of community. I grew up on various message boards, where friendships would grow around a shared interest, like my favourite bands, TV shows, and the 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. I’m still in contact with people I met back in those days.

I loved those message boards in the early 2000s because they were an intentional community of people who would never have met otherwise.

Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film Pride and Prejudice.Credit: ACCUSOFT INC

It didn’t cost anything to bond with English women in their 60s about the finer details of Mr Darcy’s hand twitches at key romantic moments, or to make friends with cool interstate teenagers as a timid 12-year-old, bonding over angsty lyrics in pop rock songs.

It was different to what we expect from social media now. Back then you wouldn’t mix your fandom friends with real-life colleagues, and you wouldn’t get your news and your memes from the same place. But now social media has been consolidated into Twitter and Facebook, with some fringe stuff staying on Tumblr and Reddit.

Unfortunately, with great reach comes great urges to profit off your vast userbase, consequences be damned.

That’s why the relatively recent trend of attempting to monetise almost every online interaction has me worried. Not only will it be harder for chill communities to grow in the future, with isolated communities priced out of making friends online, but other unintended consequences will ruin the fun for everyone.

The recent trend of attempting to monetise almost every online interaction has me worried.Credit: Getty Images

And it’s only going to get worse while social media is our main way of communicating with loved ones in lockdown and overseas.

To be clear, Twitter and Facebook still mostly make their money by selling your data, so they’ll never go paid subscription-only. But Facebook’s monetisation has made it much harder for smaller pages (as opposed to personal profiles) to be seen on newsfeeds without spending significant money, and Twitter’s subscription services threaten to make second-class-netizens out of those who can’t or won’t pay.

The broader adoption of Facebook around 2007 sounded the death knell for forums, because it was easier to do everything in one place. But while it was a disaster for privacy, democracy and, most inconveniently now, the rapid spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories, it did allow people to remember their friends’ birthdays and have a common meeting place for friends and businesses.

Until, of course, Facebook – not content with just profiting off the sale of our data – ensured that pages (including businesses and famous people you wouldn’t be “friends” with) would have to pay a lot of money to promote their posts to make them visible to their followers.

The broader adoption of Facebook around 2007 sounded the death knell for forums.Credit: iStockphoto

Last week, Twitter launched ‘Super Follows’, allowing some Twitter account holders to charge a subscription fee for extra content, such as tweets, art, pictures or videos. This was inspired by the success of subscriptions on services like streaming juggernaut Twitch (largely focused on video games) and OnlyFans (a subscription service favoured by sex workers).

Twitter’s Super Follows completely ignores why subscriptions make sense for those other platforms. It goes against the foundation of Twitter, where you go to scream into the void and make dumb jokes. Twitter makes a lot of money off ads and user data, but not as much as investors would expect, given its massive userbase, hence the desperate subscription move.

Another social media site to recently launch a paid subscriber model for individual users is Tumblr. Yes, Tumblr, the youth-oriented blogging site known to most only through screenshots on Buzzfeed.

Tumblr has recently launched Post Plus, which allows users to lock some or all of their content behind a subscriber paywall. In the announcement post they identified this feature as a way for followers to reward fan artists and fanfiction authors, who take existing copyrighted works and give them their own spin under fair use.

The only issue is that charging money for fanfiction and fan art is illegal and makes Twitter and Tumblr users vulnerable to being sued.

That’s the problem with suddenly turning anyone with a computer into a media personality with no checks or balances, just terms and conditions designed to protect the platform (but not users) from being sued. Creators will suffer and corporations won’t care; they will have made their money.

Musicians on Twitch have already discovered this during a recent crackdown by record companies on the use of licensed music. Creators learnt that Twitch hadn’t negotiated licences on behalf of the people who made them their money nor told the creators. Suddenly their past performances were deleted and they were warned that they might be banned from the platform, which for many was their primary source of income.

I’m happy to subscribe to newspapers, suitably stocked streaming services and other things that take a lot of work and give good value for money. But with every random site and user putting itself behind a monthly subscription, the social internet as we know it will die while bleeding users dry (still selling their data).

World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, envisioned the internet as an “open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries”. Putting each individual user behind a paywall for corporate gain is the antithesis of this.

It’s going to take a while to get back to those roots, but it’s possible. The best we can do in the meantime is not participate in Twitter and Tumblr’s egregious attempts to extract more money from us.

Alice Clarke is an award-winning freelance journalist, producer and presenter.