Why Should I Pay to Read This?
I put some of my short pieces here on my personal web site, where they are free to read. Others get published in various places, in print or on the web. Some of the web publications are free to read, while others charge a subscription fee. There are also hybrid situations, where you can pay for some kind of enhanced experience or extra access.
My articles are regularly discussed on Hacker News, Slashdot, and sometimes elsewhere. If the article happens to be behind a paywall, I can count on seeing a standard comment, to the effect of, “Why should I pay to read this? There are plenty of free sources of information on the web.”
A price tag is no guarantee of quality. There’s plenty of superlative free stuff on the web, and an endless supply of garbage that costs money to wallow in. I just want to describe some of what goes in to my published articles, so you have a better idea of why it may not be utterly unreasonable to be asked to pay for them.
As we all know, free stuff is often only free on the surface. You may be paying by subjecting yourself to insidious forms of tracking and surveillance. But often you become a paying customer only to be tracked and advertised to anyway, while some free websites, such as this one, refuse to incorporate any tracking technology at all, even anonymized analytics, because we respect our readers and their privacy. The bottom line here is that whether material is free or not is not a reliable guide to privacy online.
