This may or may not have to do with the fact that I am not paid by the hour. My stipend depends on grading papers and doing adequately in school, but if I can accomplish that in ten hours a week, I don’t get paid any less than if I accomplish it in forty. Time I spend on Less Wrong isn’t time I could be spending earning money, because I have enough on my plate that getting an outside job would be foolish of me.
Also, one cent is not just one cent here. If my computer had a coin slot, I’d probably drop in a penny for lifetime access to Less Wrong. But spending time (not happily) wrestling with the transaction itself, and running the risk that something will go wrong and the access to the site won’t come immediately after the penny has departed from my end, and wasting brainpower trying to decide whether the site is worth a penny when for all I know it could be gone next week or deteriorate tremendously in quality—that would be too big an intrusion, and that’s what it looks like when you have to pay for website access.
Additionally, coughing up any amount of money just to access a site sets up an incentive structure I don’t care for. If people tolerate a pricetag for the main contents of websites—not just extra things like bonus or premium content, or physical objects from Cafépress, or donations as gratitude or charity—then there is less reason not to attach a pricetag. I visit more than enough different websites (thanks to Stumbleupon) to make a difference in my budget over the course of a month if I had to pay a penny each to see them all.
In a nutshell: I can’t trade time alone directly for money; I can’t trade cash alone directly for website access; and I do not wish to universalize the maxim that paying for website access would endorse.
This may or may not have to do with the fact that I am not paid by the hour. My stipend depends on grading papers and doing adequately in school, but if I can accomplish that in ten hours a week, I don’t get paid any less than if I accomplish it in forty. Time I spend on Less Wrong isn’t time I could be spending earning money, because I have enough on my plate that getting an outside job would be foolish of me.
Also, one cent is not just one cent here. If my computer had a coin slot, I’d probably drop in a penny for lifetime access to Less Wrong. But spending time (not happily) wrestling with the transaction itself, and running the risk that something will go wrong and the access to the site won’t come immediately after the penny has departed from my end, and wasting brainpower trying to decide whether the site is worth a penny when for all I know it could be gone next week or deteriorate tremendously in quality—that would be too big an intrusion, and that’s what it looks like when you have to pay for website access.
Additionally, coughing up any amount of money just to access a site sets up an incentive structure I don’t care for. If people tolerate a pricetag for the main contents of websites—not just extra things like bonus or premium content, or physical objects from Cafépress, or donations as gratitude or charity—then there is less reason not to attach a pricetag. I visit more than enough different websites (thanks to Stumbleupon) to make a difference in my budget over the course of a month if I had to pay a penny each to see them all.
In a nutshell: I can’t trade time alone directly for money; I can’t trade cash alone directly for website access; and I do not wish to universalize the maxim that paying for website access would endorse.