I'm going to go against the grain here and say this is probably a positive thing for Meta products, and honestly every other "free" service to provide these kinds of revenue avenues.
How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers.
By having material subscription revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.
Yes, in many ways Meta gets to have their cake and eat it too, because the ads are still there even with the plans, but this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay that they can invest in other ways outside of strictly advertising.
I would argue the problem is multi-faceted, and screens are a convenient boogeyman which is a relatively easy thing to point to.
The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less time. Children are given devices to play with because the parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully engage with young children that are full of energy.
Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply left behind as an afterthought in public budgets.
So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality education time with their parents being funneled into underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40 kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty training in grade school.
As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is something worth investing in and we need to spend the time, money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better.
Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.
As someone who was super interested in the 538-style of election coverage in 2008, I've kind of fallen "out of love" so to speak with election models and forecasting in general. I'm not really convinced about what it adds to the conversation around elections. We can all look at various polls and get an assessment of who is generally ahead. Weighted polling aggregators and forecasting models just collect all these polls and spit out some data. It's easy to hand wave and think some new information is being revealed, but ultimately it is just a "garbage in garbage out" situation - you are entering polls as input, some hand waving is going on, and you get some forecast as a result.
I think part of my cynicism comes in the wake of the 2016 election, in which the forecast rightfully counted some scenarios in which either candidate could win, upon which conclusion of the model was basically "the result fits in with the forecast, because either candidate could have won according to the model" - in which case I personally concluded, if no matter what the result, we can always just say "the candidate who won could always have won given the forecast" - what are we really adding to the conversation here? We can simply look at polls and understand who is generally ahead, and not be any better or worse off.
If you want to live a nomadic disconnected lifestyle (with limited access to "technocratic" things like health care and education), you can do that almost anywhere, including Western countries.
Again, the central aspect of this topic is agency. Do people choose to live that way, where they live it? And how many would choose a different lifestyle if given the same opportunities as everybody else?
Yes, you can live a happy life as a nomad without any access to technology. That isn't the topic of this conversation.
"Bubbles of comfort" are not unique to Western countries, that is true. Every country on the planet offers a subset of their population a great life style, the only variable is how much of the country actually gets
a) to partake in that lifestyle
b) has the tools to reach that lifestyle when starting outside of it
Doesn't matter if you are talking about North Korea or the United States. And yes, you can find abject generational poverty in the United States as well.
The fact you could post your comment puts you in the top 40% of the world (roughly 60% don't have internet access).
If you have internet from a mobile phone, you are roughly in the top 50%.
Are you really looking outside your bubble of comfort?
> The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically about it.
On the flip side, if you step outside the bubble of comfort that Western society generally affords people, you'll find that life is "nasty, brutish & short" as Hobbes put it.
We've come a very very long way in a short time towards raising our standard of living and our expectations for what our lives can be - especially for regular folk from humble beginnings who aren't born into huge advantages.
Not to say that we can't improve things further for Western society, but just to say that the script we are generally given is pretty damn good compared to historical averages.
How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers.
By having material subscription revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.
Yes, in many ways Meta gets to have their cake and eat it too, because the ads are still there even with the plans, but this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay that they can invest in other ways outside of strictly advertising.