I did continue to pay, but I can understand why people didn’t. There are lots of good message boards and sites out there, and most of them are free. I did feel slightly suckerish handing over money just to be a “charter member” of some message board, whatever charter member is supposed to mean. It was more out of a sense of moral obligation and charity than because I actually thought it was a good deal.
Most of us would agree that $15 is a piffling amount but, in the final analysis, it was simply paying a fee to express your simple minded opinion which would be forgotten in no time.
Maybe it felt a bit like paying for sex, for those who could easily afford it but decided not to fork up.
Typo corrected. 
Three things really (for me);
As mentioned, the principle of paying for something widely available for free, and in particular the board service of the SD was rather weak. the board itself is rather featureless (not even [img] tags) and basic functions like search were dicey at best.
Also mentioned, foreign exchange made it all even more unreasonable.
And then I’m hardly a prolific poster… so no great loss to anyone.
$15 is well under the impulse purchase threshold, it was not a matter of money.
And to all those for whom $15 is a lot of money, there were always plenty of people willing to sponsor even unknown noobs.
I just thought that P2P was making the SDMB a poorer place. This should be a place for answers, where people who know pop in to answer the questions of those who don’t. Putting a velvet rope at the door is contrary to that idea. And no, exclusivity did not mean better quality of either questions or answers. Just less answers.
Plus the principle of putting good money in bad pockets.
I am back here on the hope that this is not too little too late, we will see.
You always pay for sex, be it with time, effort, emotion or money. 
I don’t understand it but some partners have gotten upset or left when I reached for the mouse to scroll a page on the SMBD and they thought I should have been reaching elsewhere. Women, whatcha gonna do? :smack:
My posting frequency had waned for a variety of reasons. So when it went to pay-to-post, it just didn’t seem worth the effort.
Now that it’s free again, I just happen to be in a position (and with an attitude) to post here more frequently. I wasn’t lurking constantly waiting for the time when I’d be able to spew again. I just happen to run across it – or rather someone pointed it to me – and so … here I am.
And, yes, why would I pay for something if I can get it for free? That’s a perfectly reasonable position it seems to me.
I paid a fee to get all the bells and whistles on Live Journal too, but since I stopped posting there every single day, I just go with their free version as well.
It just seems to me that taking the time to set it all up and spend the money for something I may decide to ignore (or circumstances dictate or whatever) in the next couple of months just isn’t that high on my priority list.
If it was a one time fee I could have and would have paid, but I couldn’t justify paying re-sub fees year and year when the board was still slow as shit.
Besides that I post at another forum that has 118,000 users, offers a lot more content and better fits my humor, all for a one time fee of :10bux:.
I don’t even understand that “principle”. The internet is expensive. Servers cost money, electricity costs money, IT support costs money. Who would stand on “principle” their right to sponge off of other people’s efforts, especially when the cost ($15/year) is so little?
For me it was the principle of the matter. 15 is not a whole lot of money but I knew that the day I paid it would be the day they changed to free. Plus I just had a baby and the could be used for better things.
I paid to post once but didn’t post enough to make it seem worth renewing. I don’t live in the U.S. and don’t have a U.S.-size income, and while $15 isn’t a huge amount, it’s also not trivial.
There’s a lot of good and interesting content here for the most part. On the other hand, there was a period where every other thread was about gay marriage and how you were a simply awful person if you didn’t think it was the best idea EVER. I didn’t, and still don’t, feel like helping to pay for the bandwidth to promote that.
I’m in a better place now financially, but for a while there, $15 represented 2 weeks of dog food for my babies or a couple days meals for me. Yeah… I could have PROBABLY scraped it together, but it always seemed there was something else to use the money on. I was reading, didn’t figure anyone missed me here anyway, so I just waited till it went free,
There are plenty of other free boards; so I can understand why someone wouldn’t pay.
When I signed up I guess I figured the board provided enough entertainment to justify a measly 7.50$.
I’ve gotten much more than my $7.50 worth of entertainment out of the boards over the years, and I will continue to pay that (of course, now I’ll be paying it to get rid of ads and stick it to the man! )
Really?
Sometimes people are in dire straits financially either temporarily or through no fault of their own (student, illness, unemployed, disabled, etc).
I fail to see how not posting on the SDMB would improve their situation.
I can’t afford fifteen dollars a year to pay to post on a message board. I already post on several free boards (Somehow they manage to survive! Imagine that!). This is my favorite board, but it’s not worth the money to post and it’s sure not worth the money to avoid ads.
Fifteen dollars buys a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise have money to pay for, like the fingerpaints and paper I just bought for my little girl. I don’t always have an extra twenty laying around, and when I do it’s probably going for something for her or her big sister. Fifteen dollars bought my winter shoes last year. Fifteen dollars is how much gas it takes to get my daughter to her twice a week OT and speech therapy appointments.
Let me also point out that I don’t waste money on beer, CDs, DVDs or just about anything else. I don’t have cable and if my daughter wasn’t paying for it I wouldn’t have the internet. And maybe since I’m that poor I shouldn’t be wasting my time online, but I stay at home caring for my little girl for now so I have a little free time. I’m where I need to be right now.
It just didn’t seem worth the cash, frankly. The only thing I might have considered paying for was “search”. And “search” is worthless if it is perpetually malfunctioning.
That’s why I ended up spending my cash on another forum instead.
Well, those in dire straits could have had their membership paid for them by others as someone else has pointed out above. I’m sorry but for most of the people who post on this board, most of the time, $15 is a trivial amount. I don’t work full-time and it’s still peanuts to me. I know there are those who have very little disposable income but as also posted above this $15 a year amounts to 365 days of access. It’s not the same as other forms of entertainment.
That’s great but this site cost way, way, way, less than a regular beer, CDs, DVDs etc. Anyway I don’t mean to come across harsh or intolerant in this thread. I’m lucky that I am in a situation where I am financially comfortable, I just find it hard to fathom that many people who have access to the Internet and who post on SDMB would not be able to find $15 a year.
I can afford it financially, but I don’t have a credit card. In this country (South Africa) you can’t get a credit card if you don’t have a regular income, and I’m a student. So I would have to ask my parents, and really, how do you explain that to your parents? “I need to use your credit card so that I can… uhh… post on a message board on the Internet.” It really isn’t going to happen.
The banks have wised up recently, though, and they’re giving cards that are valid MasterCards without extending credit. So I may soon be paying for a subscription.
I allow myself a budget for non essentials and at the time my paid subscription lapsed there were other things to spend my “allowance” on. Now that the board is free to post I have no reason to pay because the only benefits seem to be a title and the ads being blocked. I’m not much chuffed about either one of those things.