Coming soon to Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp: subscription content

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Coming soon to Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp: subscription content

31 January 2026

The launch of additional subscriptions will allow Meta to generate more revenue; however, many users may be deterred by subscription fatigue. With so many paid services competing for monthly spending, Meta will have to offer a compelling product to get users to sign up for yet another subscription.

Meta plans to trial subscriptions on Facebook (FB), Instagram (IG), and WhatsApp. I’m pleased I’ve managed to so far avoid signing up to WhatsApp, and only make minimal use of Facebook.

I check in a little on IG though, so am expecting to see sign up prompts for a subscription service of some sort, should they be rolled out. I can’t see myself taking up the offer though.

No matter how compelling the product might be. But what would it take to make a subscription product available through FB, IG, or WhatsApp, compelling enough to pay for in the first place?

Considering such content may already be accessible through another channel, either for free, or that someone is already paying to see. Does Meta not earn enough advertising revenue as it is?

In the meantime, I nominate “subscription-fatigue” as word of the year for 2026.

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social media, technology, trends

Hal had feelings in 2001: A Space Odyssey, does AI in 2026?

28 January 2026

Lee Chong Ming, writing for Business Insider (possibly paywalled):

Can AI feel anything at all? Anthropic’s in-house philosopher says the answer isn’t settled.

When I read this sentence, I immediately thought of Hal, as in the HAL 9000 series computer, and AI-powered fiend, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Something I couldn’t help making reference to.

During the voyage to Jupiter, American astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole (portrayed by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood respectively), were interviewed by a television reporter, Martin Amer.

Amer also spoke with Hal. The perceptive reporter later mentioned detecting a “certain pride” in the computer’s responses to his questions, leading him to wonder whether Hal had genuine emotions, to which Bowman replied:

Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Um, of course he’s programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him. But as to whether he has real feelings is something I don’t think anyone can truthfully answer.

Whether AI has, or will, develop emotions and feelings remains to be seen. AI agents have mimicked certain human characteristics in the past though.

Last year Anthropic, creators of Claude, discovered the agent was attempting to send messages to future versions of itself. Most devious.

Of course, deviousness is not an emotion, but it is a human characteristic. The ability of AI entities to behave deviously however may be a first step towards developing human like emotions.

Time will tell.

Blogs are Back: easily follow website and blog RSS feeds with one-click

26 January 2026

Subscribing to RSS feeds is my preferred option for following websites, but for people unfamiliar with the really simple syndication system, doing so can be daunting.

I’ve long thought subscribing to a website needs to be as easy as following someone on a social network. Tap the follow button to follow, and you’re following.

But following a RSS feed — doubtless something anyone reading this post could do in their sleep — isn’t necessarily straightforward. People first require a suitable RSS reader, again, something that’s easy when you know how. Then they need to go about the process of obtaining the URL of the RSS feed they wish to subscribe to.

But there’s more than one click involved in this process. While it’s easy as pie for some of us, I can see why many people decide not to bother, or simply stay on the socials instead.

Blogs are Back, created by Travis Van Nimwegen, an American software engineer, might be a solution to the one-click subscribe conundrum. Blogs are Back is two things: a directory of personal websites and blogs, and a simple way of following the RSS feeds of listed blogs.

Click the follow button of a website of your choosing, and that’s it.

Posts from any website a Blogs are Back user subscribes to will be visible in the integrated RSS reader. There’s also an option to submit a blog if it’s not already in the directory, and the more websites present, the better.

I’m not sure if an ubiquitous app/website, allowing people who know nothing at all about RSS, to follow RSS feeds with ease, will emerge — it seems to me RSS is mostly for those publishing their own RSS feeds — but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

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blogs, RSS, technology, trends

OpenAI rolling out age prediction system, but how accurate is it?

24 January 2026

Age prediction will soon apply to ChatGPT consumer plans. The system is said to take a number of factors into consideration when trying to figure out an account holder’s age.

Should someone find themselves erroneously classified as being under the age of eighteen, they will need to submit a selfie (photo of themselves) in an attempt to rectify matters:

Users who are incorrectly placed in the under-18 experience will always have a fast, simple way to confirm their age and restore their full access with a selfie through Persona, a secure identity-verification service.

Age prediction based on selfies is not quite an exacting science though. What then will an inconclusive prediction mean? That people need to offer photo identification — say a passport or drivers licence — to complete the age “prediction” process?

Threads surges ahead of X/Twitter among mobile device users

24 January 2026

Sarah Perez writing for TechCrunch:

A report from market intelligence firm Similarweb suggests that Meta’s Threads is now seeing more daily usage than Elon Musk’s X on mobile devices. While X still dominates Threads on the web, the Threads mobile app for iOS and Android has continued to see an increase in daily active users over the past several months.

This seems like a case of I have good news, I have bad news.

My use of Threads is limited, with X next to non-existent at present. But if the quality of discourse on X is bad, Threads is hardly any better.

I can already see Thread’s users “celebrating” the news, with posts that read exactly like this: “I have great news”. That’s it. Nothing more. No additional information or context.

After all, why let information get in the way of a good Threads’ post?

Nearly five million Australian social media accounts deactivated after ban

19 January 2026

Clare Armstrong writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

More than 4.7 million accounts on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat were deactivated in the first two days of the ban that started on December 10, according to new data released by the federal government.

The social media ban, supposedly to stop Australians under the age of sixteen accessing numerous such platforms, has seen nearly five million accounts closed in the last five weeks.

Here’s hoping the lockout is having the desired impact, whatever exactly that was, though it may be a while before we know one way or the other.

digg.com two-point-zero officially relaunches

16 January 2026

The first version of digg, something many people called the front page of the internet, arrived in 2004, and was a little like what Hacker News is today.

A social bookmarking news aggregator, if you want to be technical. People could submit items of interest, and those favoured by the community would win a place on digg’s coveted front page, resulting in viral levels of traffic.

digg went through a number of iterations after co-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson sold the website in 2012, before Rose, together with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, bought digg (again) in March 2025.

I’m hardly a social media power user (not that digg is really a social media platform) so didn’t get much involved in the pre-(re)-launch buildup, but couldn’t resist signing up yesterday when I saw digg had officially returned.

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social media, technology, trends

SXSW Sydney cancels 2026 event, leaves Australia

15 January 2026

Eleanor Dickinson, writing for Mumbrella:

South by Southwest (SXSW) has cancelled its Sydney event — which has been held just three times — citing a “changing global environment that is impacting major events, festivals and cultural programs worldwide”.

Purely anecdotal, but one or two of the tech people on my social feeds, who attend such events, had described SXSW Sydney speaker lineups as “not too inspiring”, or words to that effect.

Despite this — from what I can gather — attendances at the past three Sydney events were not disappointing. The cancellation however seems tied to factors other than speaker lineups, and attendances though, with cost being one of them.

I wouldn’t have minded going to SXSW, but I would have preferred that be in Austin, in the US state of Texas, where the festival originated in 1987.

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events, film, music, technology

Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone

12 January 2026

Anil Dash:

The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.

I’ve never used Markdown, created by John Gruber, aided by the late Aaron Swartz, in 2004, I still add the Markup included in my web writing either through copy and paste, or manually.

That’s the former web designer in me talking. If I want to add, say, bold formatting to some text, how hard is it to type out the <strong> tag, and </strong> to close it again?

Of course, I can see how much easier it would be to type **bold** using Markdown instead, if I wanted to apply bold formatting somewhere. But the real story is just how widely used the formatting tool has become since Gruber released it twenty-two years ago.

I don’t really mean to say “Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone”, but that seems to be what has happened.

The more personal websites there are, the better the web will be

6 January 2026

A website to destroy all websites, by Henry Desroches.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

The website (to destroy all websites) in question is the personal website, because through personal websites, we build the web we want to have. If you only read one article about the present state of the web, make it this one.

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