Comment by xboxnolifes
20 hours ago
I agree with everything except the last sentence. Humans are not rational agents, doubly so when it comes to money and spending. There are many communities where charging even a nominal fee for your work leads to backlash due to built up expectations of free contribution.
For the producer, a nominal (at cost) fee is worse than an exorbitant one. better to have a few high paying customers first then drop the price inviting more than the other way around of charging nothing first then going up
I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing. Today it seems like you have to pay to breathe. It's suffocating. I often go through periods where I reject every money ask compulsively, the same way as I would "disconnect".
It's quite interesting how quality of life gets inverted in non intuitive ways. If you travel to a "developing country" you notice you are no longer bombarded with ads. Watching YouTube is close to the premium experience, bc the country presents no ad revenue to Google. You then travel to a "developed" country and you can't watch a 5 minute video without watching 2 ads.
Everything is a transaction, it is too easy to transact. People used to just write, to just make music. Sure, they need to eat, but they lie. You hear people that make insane amouns of money asking for a coffee. imho, writing is a thing you to to share knowledge, to have a conversation, to learn, etc. It is a way to also get people to know you better, and maybe learn about the things you do that they would want to pay for. So unless writing is your full time job, asking money for it leaves a bad taste.
If it costs the audience something, they're demonstrating their sincerity. So one problem with giving stuff away for free is that you might doubt how much your fans really mean it. Maybe they're just taking free stuff on principle, maybe they're praising you for the pleasure of giving praise, if they don't put their money where their mouth is. Maybe I don't sincerely care about a lot of the free stuff I say I enjoy, it's hard to tell when there's no test of what it's worth to me.
Then again I suppose there's also an opposite sunk-cost effect where a fan feels obliged to insincerely say how great the thing is, because of being literally invested in it.
> I'm not sure if they're irrational. Payment/subscription fatigue is a thing.
Payment fatigue is an irrational thing, at least in the context of what a rational economic agent is. Rationally, you pay for what you value, at roughly what it is valued to you, and you don't pay for you want you don't value. Transactions are fatiguing precisely because we are not rational agents. Humans live primarily on emotion and ingrained behavior, with small bursts of applying logic.
This does not sound like an accurate description of "rational agents". A rational agent may value something less because of a perceived second-order effect (e.g. "If I accept a price hike, there will be more price hikes in the future"). There's nothing non-rational about that.
In general, the "rational agent" abstraction is so flexible it can represent almost any real-world behaviour (which is why it's a bad model, not that humans are fundamentally irrational in some way).
It's not the core idea of "fatigue of paying for value" itself but something more akin to "fatigue of keeping track of which things were actually worth paying for, which starts to take more value than you can create with the same amount of time or could get with a few well thought out larger payments". It's usually brought up around subscriptions precisely because they are a lot of work to track but easy to forget.
What if what I value is that something is not corrupted by monetary incentives?