I paid the $15 to renew, tried to log in a few weeks later, got the message that my membership had expired, and thought, “welp, that’s the end of that…”
Well, I’m pretty much just a lurker even when it’s free, so obviously I wouldn’t pay money just to post. But even if I did post more regularly, I’d sooner just find other websites than pay the money. There’s tons of message board communities out there. There is some prestige in the fact that it’s **The Straight Dope **- you expect it to draw a smarter, higher class of poster than the average message board. But there’s other intelligent groups out there if you know where to look.
It’s really a “nickel and dime” issue for me. A lot of the sites I visit daily offer premium versions of their sites for a small fee. $15 isn’t much for this site alone, but I have no more reason to pay it here than I do to pay it everywhere else. And if I paid all of the sites I visit, then yes, it would add up to a lot more than I could afford.
Well I’m much the same as alot of the previous posters. I was posting something in the neighborhood of once or twice a week. And that wasn’t worth the effort of paying… especially when I could still read any thread I cared to.
I thought about paying a few times over the years, but 90% of the time I wanted to make a post, someone eventually made all my points for me. So I felt my participation was more or less unnecessary.
nitpick: it’s 4.1 cents a day.
In my case, I never posted all that much in the first place. I paid the first couple of years, but then said, Wow…why? Not like I did anything more. I was a reader first anyway!
It wasn’t ever the money, or the board issues, or anything. I figured I read for free then, I could read for free after. I’m glad it’s back to the “old way” but I still won’t have much to say (oh LORD I bet my real life friends wish I were this way to them!) even now. 
For me it was mostly a principle thing, I just don’t like paying for nontangible things on the Internet. But also I don’t really think it was necessary to go to pay to post in the first place. At the time, I wondered (and still wonder) why they didn’t try ads first, but for some reason no one seemed too interested in that option. Then a few months later, guess what gets added? I admit I don’t know much about the ad market for websites, but it couldn’t be that much different today than it was four years ago.
I put it as a dollar amount, forgot the $.
less than a nickel a day… It reminds me of a Christmas carol
“If haven’t got a penny,
a hay penny will do
If you haven’t got a hey penny,
God Bless You”
Minor nitpick: It’s “Ha’penny”, pronounced something like “Haypnee.”
It’s okay dear! Maybe you can cover me next year?
Dude, we heard these same sob stories back in the day before they went paid. Truly, it is a sad case in America when you can’t even find $15 worth of spare change on sidewalks in a year. Or pick up aluminum cans. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Anyway, my subscription expired a couple of months ago, so I decided to hold out and see if it went free again.
I paid for a couple of years, and it was at half price. But household expenses have gone up more than our pay has. Our daughter now eats more food, wears more expensive clothes, and has a school fundraiser every couple of months it seems. Three guinea pigs cost more to maintain than you might expect, too. . . There are many weeks when neither my wife nor I have more than a couple of dollars in our wallets on the day before payday.
So we cut back on several magazine subscriptions and other relatively small, but optional, expenses. The last time we went to a movie was the night “Kung Fu Panda” came out. We shop at places with names like “Big Value Outlet,” “Ocean State Job Lot,” and the best Massachusetts retail chain “Building #19.”
Our family has virtually no debt right now except for another 17 or so years on our fixed-rate mortgage. Aside from a few Christmas gifts and online purchases which require credit cards, we rarely charge anything.
By itself $15 a year isn’t really all that much. But it’s lots and lots of those little “not muches” that can put people into financial messes.
You really sure you want to phrase it like that?
Sometimes, it really isn’t the amount of money that’s the problem.
As you can see, I’ve maintained my subscription through the P2P era. But every year, I almost let my subscription lapse.
It wasn’t the amount of money. There was never a point where I couldn’t spare $7.50. It wasn’t about not having a credit card or unfavorable exchange rates.
It was because I was in an abusive marriage.
I don’t know how to explain this to anyone who hasn’t been there, but the thought of spending $7.50 on something that my husband disapproved of was terrifying. And it wasn’t that he wouldn’t let me spend any money at all ever. It was that the stuff he would freak out about was extremely unpredictable. I knew a Straight Dope membership had a much higher than average chance of setting him off. He wasn’t physically violent, but he hurt me very badly nevertheless.
Each year around subscription time, I’d get really stressed out. It was a horrible feeling to know that there was a good chance that I might be punished for such a trivial expenditure. By a man who’s drawers were overflowing with Patagonia underpants and Smartwool socks.
One year, I even asked my brother to pay for my membership so my husband didn’t have to know. I asked for it as a birthday present. My brother thought it was a pretty weird request because he would normally spend a lot more than that on my birthday. But I felt I had to couch it that way so that he didn’t know why I was really asking. He would have gladly paid my $7.50 every year if he knew that it was an issue for me, but I was much to ashamed to tell him what the story was. I was too ashamed to admit it to myself, even. I dealt with the situation by starting to believe my husband’s fucked-up version of things–that I didn’t deserve such little luxuries because of my many faults and failings.
But I’m really glad I managed to keep my posting priviliges during those years. Not because I still get the discount and a Charter Member title, but because it was one of the few ways that I didn’t totally give in to my husband’s abuse.
So anyway, the point is that for a lot of people, the amount of money that it cost was a lot less important than what the act of paying that money represented.
Fortunately, for me, the $7.50 was so trivial in light of our overall budget that my husband really couldn’t use the dollar amount as the basis for an attack on me. I guess that’s why I was willing to risk it most years. After all, $7.50 was the cost of one of his socks. Not one of his pairs of socks, but one sock. Well, I see that now, but at the time, it didn’t seem like much protection at all.
But it makes me realize that for other people in different financial circumstances, the actual amount of the $7.50 really would be a basis for trouble. Yes, virtually everyone could scrape that much together, but at what cost? I know it’s hard for some people to accept it when people say that they really couldn’t afford the $7.50 financially. I hope you can accept that many people can’t afford to take the risks that paying the $7.50 would entail.
For me it was just the convenience of being able to sign up and start posting. Not sure why the “paying up” step stopped me before, but it did.
PapSett! You’re back! I sure as hell remember you; you wuz the rescue dog lady. Damn glad to see you back!
And Greenbean: {{{{{GreenBean}}}}}
I lurked duing the free years and when the board went P2P there were a few times I wanted to post, but I could never justify paying for something that is free everywhere else on the internet. This is not the only good discussion board out there and even if it was just a $0.50 cent charge for the year, I doubt I would pay it. But the weird thing I realized about myself during a conversation about this is that I would gladly pay for a couple of friends to post here if they really wanted to but couldn’t afford it, but not ever pay for myself. 
Same here, except I’ll be paying the full $15. That amount is absolutely nothing to me these days – it represents, say, a minuscule portion of one of my good bar nights – but it wasn’t always thus. There was a time when $15 was hard to come by for any purpose, so I can certainly understand someone’s reluctance to pony it up.
Yes it is, I left when they started charging basically cause the arguments they gave were bogus.
There are too many sites to express your opinion where they are free. The issue is really that so many of the really interesting people left and you were left with no return on your investment.
It’s like a bar gives free drinks to pretty girls, beacuse if pretty girls are there then the guys follow and they pay.
This is unfair to ugly girls but a bar full of ugly girls isn’t gonna bring anyone in.
Paying any amount of money for threads like “ask the gay guy,” is ridiculous. That’s not a threat it’s an ego trip.
The real thing is people read threads for entertainment. I got on the Internet in the mid 90s when Usenet was going strong. It was FUN, you could spend HOURS AND HOURS on there. It was fun but a lot of nasty stuff was said, but it was fun and entertaining.
When you take away that entertainment, it’s boring. Why pay to be bored.