Meta Introduces Subscriptions: Is This The End of Social Media As We Know It?

Subscriptions, AI slop, ads, and metrics are symptoms of a deeper cultural withdrawal from performative social media systems.

When I opened Instagram on Monday, I was met with a message from Meta reading: “Want to subscribe or continue using our Products for free with ads?” Then followed two tick boxes, 1. Subscribe to use without ads from £3.99 a month, or 2. use for free with ads – and an delightful disclaimer: “your info will be used for ads.”

I was confused, but not surprised. Subscriptions now dominate modern life, pushing us towards a rent-based economy where access replaces ownership. Social media, however, changes the trade-off; instead of paying for a feature, we’re being charged for relief from constant tracking, behavioural profiling, and the extraction of personal data that free platforms quietly depend on.

Social media began as a connection tool to network amongst communities. Relying on frictionless entry, endless continuation and soft boundaries, it was framed as a social space. By introducing a paywall, it decimates the illusion – shifting users from passive addiction to active decision. 

Subscriptions introduce thresholds, contracts and exit points, forcing people to think differently. We’re comfortable paying for a Netflix subscription because the function is clear and the exchange is explicit; you pay for access to high quality content. Social media doesn’t play by the same rules, it subsidises itself on users being a participant – not a product. The moment a user has to pay to avoid being tracked, the exchange becomes transactional, begging users the question: is it worth it? 

AI Slop

Mass produced, low-grade, synthetic AI-generated content, described by Simon Willison in May 2024, has created epistemic instability. Social media implicitly promises connection with other people – AI content, however, breaks the social contract and assumption of trust. We’re no longer engaging with another human, but a faceless, nameless robot. 

When the creator feels fake, engagement is synthetic, and virality is engineered, platforms move from authentic to performative – making social media feel like theatre. When users can no longer decipher if the speaker is human and the interactions are genuine, they enter a state of perpetual uncertainty and scepticism becomes baseline.

Moving from a shared reality, to probabilistic noise, AI slop erodes the social system. Infused with fake news that disrupts information and a synthetic audience, the existence of social media is undermined, accelerating creator burnout and audience apathy simultaneously. 

Infinite, cheap and highly optimisable, platforms unintentionally incentivise slop with algorithms that reward frequency, familiarity and engagement signals. When everything looks staged, nothing feels worth responding to or interacting with. How many times have you watched an animal video to realise it was all AI? Feeling conned, you roll your eyes and swipe off the app.

Intrinsically human, we want meaning, not magnitude. We value reciprocity, shared moments and agency. AI slop makes us question reality, inadvertently making us less active online. Eventually participation dwindles, and one day, we may even forfeit the space entirely – then it’s simply robots creating content for robots and perpetually fuelling a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Attention Farming

Originally anchored in people, advertising sat quietly in the background – occasionally an interruption, they didn’t dominate the feed. Scroll now, and it's a coalescence crowded with suggested posts, paid placements, affiliate links, branded “creators” and algorithmic noise. We’re no longer browsing a social space – we’re wading through a marketplace engineered to keep us receptive, reactive, exposed, and farmed for attention.

Volume replaced subtlety. Ads are louder, brighter, more emotionally manipulative, designed for rage, shock, fear, or instant desire. No longer adjacent to content, ads have evolved from persuasive to exhausting, quietly shifting from selling products to engineering behaviour.

Serving to monitor, predict, nudge, and auction attention in real time, what once felt like a disturbance now feels like an invasion that forces an uncomfortable reckoning: Is my privacy really worth £3.99? Is my attention something I should have to defend? Why am I paying to escape something I never explicitly agreed to in the first place?

By pricing attention, platforms break their own spell. When the transaction is visible, users become hyper-aware of the platform's purpose: no longer a solution to connect people, instead, another tech product monetising our time. Once awareness sets in, emotional passivity disappears and resentment takes place.

Metric Fatigue 

Once signalling social value, follower counts and likes now feel hollow. Tired of metrics and posting for performance, about 32% of users report social-media fatigue where posting feels more like a chore than connection. 

The obsession with visibility and quantification has reached breaking point; when numbers no longer reflect real human attention, followers are paid for, likes are generated by bots, and views are ambiguous, attention no longer feels like a reward.

Failing to indicate status, the incentive to perform for metrics collapses and behaviour changes; posting shifts to lurking, scrolling becomes passive and users disengage. Perfectly depicted by Tam in Episode 5, Season 5 of Younger, where the intern tells Millennial Lauren that they will not be taking a selfie as it’s “humiliating”: “No picture. You’re making a spectacle. Everything can’t be in all-caps. It’s not cool. Nobody posts anymore. It’s all word of mouth.” 

Basically, social media is.. no longer cool? Users feel their posts are not seen by their IRL friends, leaving them to feel as if they are "screaming into the void." 

Post-social-media withdrawal

People are actively seeking real-world connection as a counterbalance to fatigue with screens and feeds. Trends have shown an increase in community and connection-focused events. Younger adults (18-35) are showing demand for in-person engagement, with 73% reporting plans to attend live events in the near term, and 84% citing friendship or belonging as a key outcome of attendance.

Smaller, more intimate gatherings and conferences are rising. “Micro-events” – local, highly focused gatherings with fewer than 50 attendees – and “unconferencing” are gaining popularity for fostering deeper connections and genuine interaction compared with large, digitised forums.

Like your last break-up, emotional disengagement precedes practical: withdrawal begins psychologically – you care less about likes, reach and how you’re perceived, then posting starts to feel exposing rather than expressive and silence feels safer than participation. 

Users are now reflecting on platform purpose and exercising shorter sessions. They’re posting less, lurking more – but not yet ready to go cold-turkey. Akin to the TV being played as “background noise,” platforms are evolving from social to instrumental – a bulletin board for information and logistics – but only if the information can be trusted – which is hard to achieve with users plagued with perpetual scepticism. 

Relief – not loss

Acting as the catalyst, Meta has forced users to question their privacy and purpose online. Mistakes are now public. Love once private, is now broadcast, and opinions remembered for life. When our right to privacy is revoked, it forces reevaluation: just how beneficial is this tool for me? 

I’ve gone 2 weeks without social media to write this article, and I’ll be candid: anxiety is reduced, concentration improved and comparison no longer exists. Constantly caught in a whirlwind of stimulation, I now feel relieved. 

I no longer take pictures to show others, but to remind myself of the memory. I communicate because I miss the person, not just because I saw them pop up. Conversations have purpose. Plans are genuine. Life is no longer a performance.

So, thanks Meta. I think I’ll keep my £3.99 this month – and my privacy.