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Comment by hackily | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to note that the effect of some good being free holds its power if we know that the good is not usually free.

It would be interesting if the article had more research on what the emotions of users when they come across a paywall. For example, I get irrationally upset when I see a paywall, even though I logically know that content writers deserve to be paid.

The fact that less than 20% of Americans will pay for news almost certainly makes the subscriptions more expensive for the percentage of users who will actually pay. Does the price affect how upset someone gets? I know for me, I don't even look at the price, I never intended on paying since I've been conditioned to expect articles to be free.

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I think it's because we're exposed to something that's unavailable, for the sole purpose of saying "hey, look at this cool thing, you can't have this, unless you pay me".

They do similar stuff with cable. Instead of only showing me the channels I paid for, the receiver software shows all the channels, but shows a "you are not subscribed to this channel" message when I attempt to open a channel I didn't pay for. It's irritating and wastes my time.

I mean, or you could pay for it? I often pay for it, because I am happy someone is offering to solve my problem and/or give me the information I want. Like, I clearly wanted that information, and without it I am going to waste time -- time that is worth good money -- flailing around without it... this impulse to refuse to pay for things that are cheap is just weird.

I know someone who made an iOS app back a decade ago (or even a bit longer... wow, time flies ;P) that was some kind of contact manager for sales that let you track follow ups... I dunno, I don't use it. But I remember he got reviews that were like "this app has changed how I do business: I use it every single day, and I recommend it to all of my friends... but $5 for an app?! come on, who are we kidding here?".

> I mean, or you could pay for it?

Yeah, I could pay for everything anyone asks of me on the internet. Then I'd be broke.

Part of that, at least for me, is that it is a subscription instead of a la carte. I don't want to have to sign up for a monthly subscription to access a bunch of content, most of which I don't care about, in order to read this one article that interests me.

You are irrationally opposed to getting the other 0-marginal-cost articles for free with purchase of one article.

I might want to read a WP or NYT article from time to time to see what angle the upper-middle class of America is getting fed on some issue. But I don’t intend to pay for that privilege.

Those outlets by the way where mostly supported by ad revenue back in the no-Web days.

> It's interesting to note that the effect of some good being free holds its power if we know that the good is not usually free.

I seriously doubt that. People don't take care of things they get for free, for example, compared with things that cost them significant money.

For example, students who have (and need) a job to meet expenses in college are much less apt to party their way through college.

For another, ever heard the phrase "what the heck, it's a rental!" when people abuse a car?

You know that experiment with the grapes and the chimpanzees? They gave chimpanzees 2 grapes a day for a long time, then gave them 3 grapes (for a week). Then they went back to 2 grapes and the chimps started throwing feces at the researchers.

When I was growing up, (nearly all?) online news was free and wasn't paywalled. It's only in the last decade or so that they started paywalling it, even for content from the "before time".

What was once free now costs money, and it feels like I'm getting ripped off, even though I might rationally appreciate that ad profits have gone down, or whatever the reason is.

Citation desperately needed.

NYT was never free, from the day it launched

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/20/business/times-to-announc...

> You know that experiment with the grapes and the chimpanzees? They gave chimpanzees 2 grapes a day for a long time, then gave them 3 grapes (for a week). Then they went back to 2 grapes and the chimps started throwing feces at the researchers.

Yes, humans are creatures of habit, and our mechanism of deciding whether a change is good or bad fundamentally depends on whether the change is better or worse than the current state of affairs.

In other news, water is wet.

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