FB is struggling with an interesting problem. If you have enough early adopters, the rest of the population will follow. These things behave a bit like the critical mass in nuclear fission. Once you cross over a specific threshold, that’s when things start happening. In the early days of FB, it was all about growth and providing value to the users.

Once they had enough users, they started selling user data to advertisers. At that point, most users weren’t particularly privacy aware, and you could argue that it still isn’t ja major concern for a most people who use platforms like Tweetook or Snapstgram. People here on Lemmy aren’t really a representative sample of the rest of the population.

Providing a privacy friendly option wasn’t really that necessary back in those days. Providing a paid option might also hurt the ad sales, so that would have been a risky move. If only a certain part of the uses are subjected to data harvesting and ads, you’re essentially selling an inferior product to the advertisers. Sounds like a very risky move if the subscription becomes more popular.

If that happens FB would have to cross that bridge quickly. Being in the middle is a very precarious position, because the way I see it, these options don’t really support each other.