The saying goes if you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Now, you’re both. Every big social media app is testing subscriptions. It's a business model that comes with a perverse incentive. Just like airlines, if you make life worse, more people will pay.
Lol, it will still be sold. They are still tracking your attention span and clicks. I can already think of two or three correlation tests to sell to advertisers based on that information alone.
Except this change is occurring because of EU rules that don’t allow them to gather that data.
Those rules are dumb, sure, but this is the workaround - and personally it’s a workaround that I think is quite untenable. Social media succeeds because it is free.