11 ms·

Free stuff makes us irrational

153 points by yarapavan 4y ago

hackily 4y ago
It's interesting to note that the effect of some good being free holds its power if we know that the good is not usually free. It would be interesting if the article had more research on what the emotions of users when they come across a paywall. For example, I get irrationally upset when I see a paywall, even though I logically know that content writers deserve to be paid. The fact that less than 20% of Americans will pay for news almost certainly makes the subscriptions more expensive for the percentage of users who will actually pay. Does the price affect how upset someone gets? I know for me, I don't even look at the price, I never intended on paying since I've been conditioned to expect articles to be free.
- paskozdilar 4y ago
  I think it's because we're exposed to something that's unavailable, for the sole purpose of saying "hey, look at this cool thing, you can't have this, unless you pay me". They do similar stuff with cable. Instead of only showing me the channels I paid for, the receiver software shows all the channels, but shows a "you are not subscribed to this channel" message when I attempt to open a channel I didn't pay for. It's irritating and wastes my time.
  - saurik 4y ago
    I mean, or you could pay for it? I often pay for it, because I am happy someone is offering to solve my problem and/or give me the information I want. Like, I clearly wanted that information, and without it I am going to waste time -- time that is worth good money -- flailing around without it... this impulse to refuse to pay for things that are cheap is just weird. I know someone who made an iOS app back a decade ago (or even a bit longer... wow, time flies ;P) that was some kind of contact manager for sales that let you track follow ups... I dunno, I don't use it. But I remember he got reviews that were like "this app has changed how I do business: I use it every single day, and I recommend it to all of my friends... but $5 for an app?! come on, who are we kidding here?".
    - paskozdilar 4y ago
      > I mean, or you could pay for it? Yeah, I could pay for everything anyone asks of me on the internet. Then I'd be broke.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > It's interesting to note that the effect of some good being free holds its power if we know that the good is not usually free. I seriously doubt that. People don't take care of things they get for free, for example, compared with things that cost them significant money. For example, students who have (and need) a job to meet expenses in college are much less apt to party their way through college. For another, ever heard the phrase "what the heck, it's a rental!" when people abuse a car?
- thayne 4y ago
  Part of that, at least for me, is that it is a subscription instead of a la carte. I don't want to have to sign up for a monthly subscription to access a bunch of content, most of which I don't care about, in order to read this one article that interests me.
  - lupire 4y ago
    You are irrationally opposed to getting the other 0-marginal-cost articles for free with purchase of one article.
- andai 4y ago
  You know that experiment with the grapes and the chimpanzees? They gave chimpanzees 2 grapes a day for a long time, then gave them 3 grapes (for a week). Then they went back to 2 grapes and the chimps started throwing feces at the researchers. When I was growing up, (nearly all?) online news was free and wasn't paywalled. It's only in the last decade or so that they started paywalling it, even for content from the "before time". What was once free now costs money, and it feels like I'm getting ripped off, even though I might rationally appreciate that ad profits have gone down, or whatever the reason is.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Citation desperately needed. NYT was never free, from the day it launched https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/20/business/times-to-announce-deals-with-newsstand-an-online-publisher.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/20/business/times-to-announc...
  - paskozdilar 4y ago
    > You know that experiment with the grapes and the chimpanzees? They gave chimpanzees 2 grapes a day for a long time, then gave them 3 grapes (for a week). Then they went back to 2 grapes and the chimps started throwing feces at the researchers. Yes, humans are creatures of habit, and our mechanism of deciding whether a change is good or bad fundamentally depends on whether the change is better or worse than the current state of affairs. In other news, water is wet.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  I might want to read a WP or NYT article from time to time to see what angle the upper-middle class of America is getting fed on some issue. But I don’t intend to pay for that privilege. Those outlets by the way where mostly supported by ad revenue back in the no-Web days.
more_corn 4y ago
There’s also a downside of free. Anyone who has posted on Craigslist free knows. You almost always want to put an absurdly low price on it not free. That screens the “free tattoo at a party” people out. You don’t need that behavior in your day.
- mindslight 4y ago
  Agreed. Another way of looking at it is that people trawling craigslist free value their own time very low, and thus are unlikely to respect your time much either.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - insickness 4y ago
    Or they don't value the product because it's free. Every time I've posted something free on craigslist, the person is much more likely to no-show or keep rescheduling pick up times, so much so that I won't do it anymore.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    You'd think that someone who valued their own time less would value your time more in comparison.
    - mindslight 4y ago
      Well I'm sure if my goal was to perversely waste their time, I could repeatedly cancel, no show, and make them jump through other hoops that would take a lot of their time but much less of mine (sending the emails). And thus they would indeed be valuing my time more than theirs, as I played some kind of sadistic power game. But since my goal is simply to get rid of an item to a good home, then the more time I spend sending emails, waiting around for someone to no show etc, is pure loss.
- Blackthorn 4y ago
  Maybe I'm just lucky or maybe being rural has something to do with it but I've given away a few different items locally on FB marketplace and have only found people who showed up and were really happy to receive them. I'll probably stop doing that if I get a dreadful entitled person, but so far so good.
shrimp_emoji 4y ago
>Free physical goods in meatspace Those are made with materials, they're consumed, and they're worn/gone. >Free digital goods in cyberspace We've entered a different world. Our old model breaks down. Here, things are copied, pasted, transmitted, and stored for negligible cost. When they're consumed, they remain. For software, there's an extra dimension of totalitarianism: a burger in meatspace (for now) doesn't scan your saliva and send the data back to the restaurant or receive an OTA update and transform into a hotdog mid-chew or dictate how and when you eat it. Here, the economic dynamics and tyrannies of meatspace (scarcity, wear-and-tear, cost of materials) can only be implemented with hacks (DRM, perpetual renting, etc., none of which ultimately work to fully simulate meatspace's mechanics of "when you eat a burger, you can't eat it again"). Free digital content has downsides, sure, but good luck making it not free. In cyberspace, it's information, and information wants to be free.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  transportation and storage costs of digital goods might be very cheap (although not entirely free) but the biggest cost for digital goods is the same it often is for physical goods and services, which is human labour. Meatspace doesn't inherently differ from digital space. things in meatspace, like say land, didn't always have prices on them. That's a legal invention, the enclosure of the commons, and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate but it certainly wasn't a fact of nature. The process of transferring something to private ownership used to be as foreign to physical things as it was to early digital things. Not because physical or digital goods have some spirit and agenda of wanting to be free, but because nobody had laid claim to it and turned it into a commodity and passed laws that governed their ownership. When land was enclosed in ~1200 that wasn't because it was so scarce, but because it was 'economically wasted' and 'operated inefficiently'. That's also the reason why digital spaces are being claimed, regardless of whether they're scarce or not.
- bin_bash 4y ago
  This is Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory in a nutshell https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/
WalterBright 4y ago
> when people see something for free, they don’t see the downside Which explains why politicians are always promising a free lunch.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  And why the idiots...er, I mean voters, buy it every time.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
daenz 4y ago
I've been running a free closed beta for a product of mine for... 6 months. The users absolutely love it and claim they can't live without it. But I am having difficulty wrangling them into a price that they don't complain about. I think I'm bumping up against these "free" forces somehow. I also think the closed beta has run too long, and now they're spoiled.
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  I have a better idea for you, which has worked for several others, e.g. Dropbox. Let your early adopters earn free service by referring others. Instead of alienating your biggest fans and supporters and power users, you'll be turning them into promoters and marketers.
  - andai 4y ago
    GP has already gotten a lot of value out of them, so if keeping them isn't costing much, I'd say grandfather them in for free.
    - oleganza 4y ago
      Why for free? Give, like, a 50% discount. Their "free stuff" would be "50% for free".
      - hnbad 4y ago
        Or even 90%. Maybe 75% as a compromise. Heck, being grandfathered into a very low price point will make them much less likely to quit even if they no longer use the product, thanks to FOMO. So you may see long-tail income from those early adopters with little expense.
        michaelcampbell 4y ago
        Or a 5%-15% forever discount per referral that's paid for a year. After 6-20 referrals, you're on us - it's cool.
asiachick 4y ago
I think it depends on what we're talking about ..... I used to collect free stuff at conferences. I loved getting a bag at the entrance to some conference, GDC, E3, CES, Auto Show, etc. It would be full of fliers and free magazines. Then I'd go around the booths collecting free pens, free buttons, free t-shirts, free stickers, more free magazines, fliers, etc.... At some point I realized all of that was actually not something I wanted. I didn't need branded pens. I was not going to actually wear the t-shirts. I likely didn't have time or care about the magazines. It switched to collecting nothing. At most if I see something I think I'm interested in instead of taking a flier I'll take a picture and look it up later. I don't take any free swag. There might be some exception but it would have to be pretty exceptional. I might initially feel a desire for the free stuff but then I think "Am I really going to use/wear/look at this?" The answer is pretty much always "no" so I leave it.
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  My casual clothing consisted of nothing but conference shirts for years in school.
- watwut 4y ago
  > I was not going to actually wear the t-shirts. Why not? It is genuine question, I wore them till they broke basically.
  - paganel 4y ago
    Still wearing a Drupalcamp 2011 t-shirt, it has held up quite well, 10/10 would take for free again.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Some people like to look nice and/or already have too many shirts. > wore them till they broke basically. So why get a dozen more?
    - watwut 4y ago
      I don't get them for free that often. And some are too small, too big, don't fit. My size also changed over years which made some of them bad fit. The remaining make it so that I barely ever need to buy one, but don't have that much excess.
thriftwy 4y ago
Authors seem to have misconceptions about how people work: ...participants were asked to choose one of the following: A free Hershey’s Kiss A $0.13 Lindt truffle (a superior product in quality that retails for multiples more than a Hershey’s Kiss) Well obviously, I'm getting a free thing as a no-brainer, and then I also decide whether I want the paid thing or not. They seem to be oblivious to transaction costs. What if they offered free candy after the e-mail confirmation, but the paid truffle no strings attached?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vestrigi 4y ago
  Also the context is missing for the $0.01 Hershey’s Kiss. I wouldn’t stop for sweets in a supermarket sample offering if I had to pay for it but in a controlled study I would make a decision between the two chocolates.
  - SapporoChris 4y ago
    All I came away with was the suspicion that most people understand the different levels of quality in chocolate. I won't eat free Hershey's chocolate, it isn't worth the calories.
  - jostylr 4y ago
    Also paying a penny for something would be a major inconvenience at this point. I haven't carried coins in ages. If it is adding a penny onto some other bill, no problem. But a separate paying experience of just 1 penny would be quite costly to me.
- waqf 4y ago
  The journalist may suffer from misconceptions, but the version of the experiment to which these results apply was conducted so that the transaction costs were equal in either case (source: https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%20a%20Special%20Price.pdf https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%..., see Experiment 3). > Well obviously, I'm getting a free thing as a no-brainer, and then I also decide whether I want the paid thing or not. Not permitted. If you take the "free" chocolate they will not sell you the fancy one at any price. It is not obvious how people behave under that circumstance.
hericium 4y ago
People are brainwashed to use their privacy as a currency for "free" stuff.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  In my experience, the vast majority isn't even remotely aware they're paying with their personal information. They just assume some things are free because they have always* been free. * You have to remember that most people joined the internet fairly recently. Like the last decade.
- jollybean 4y ago
  It's still free, and most people really don't care that Facebook or Google is using their 'behaviour' to show them ads. It's really just not that important to most people.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > people really don't care I won't say you are wrong, as such. In fact 'they' absolutely do care, but just don't understand. I've done tons of research on this, personally and reading all the latest papers and evidence for about 9 years (back to 2013). People _really_ care. However, not to pick on you specifically but here's is a reason I am replying in order to challenge not you but the dangerous idea - the meme/mythology that "people don't care" is pernicious and naturally spread within the social networks that stand to benefit most from it. It even has it's own entire subculture of self-denigration and celebration of surrendering dignity as a badge of honour. You're not wrong, because you've been strongly influenced, and the psychological reasons we parrot the the "people don't care" line are complex and involve each of our own relations to personal boundaries.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > use their privacy as a currency for "free" stuff There are other currencies. Some of these get mixed up with privacy. Time is a common currency. Flat pack furniture is subsidised by passing the assembly costs to the end user - mostly as time. Reputation, image or likeness is a way to pay. Remember the hairdresser with a window full of free modelling service photographs of smiling clients with great hair? Endorsement is another way to pay with "freelance marketing". Cosmetic and kitchen products (tupperware) often had elaborate endorsement chains or pyramid schemes. Knowledge has long been a "hidden" currency in Free software like Linux. You need to know what you're doing. In all cases some friction arises when the customer doesn't know in advance that payment in one or more "hidden" currencies is required. The vendors mistake is to try hiding it in order to advertise a product as "free". Announcing it up front is actually better, otherwise the customer reacts by seeing the sale as a scam of some kind. Loss of privacy is a just one particularly egregious type of hidden currency scam. It's high time it should be treated by customers and regulators exactly the same as other explicit extractions.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
Absolutely free things make people behave irrationally! Given the right prompting a free t-shirt and a "50% off your next coffee" voucher would be sufficient to hire an international team of assassins.
csydas 4y ago
Just my experience, but I think it's that Free engages a senses of entitlement because in many people's minds, Free means it's rightfully theirs and that any action that inhibits their ability to get what is theirs is an offense of a high degree. While I don't work with any of our branding team/activities much, our generalist support team was moved under my purview and all issues related to giveaways or brand events come through the support team (their main duties are related to stuff like account management, issues with the public site, licensing management, etc). The absolutely awful statements and behaviors from persons who didn't get stuff like a free T-Shirt for participating in an event is astounding, and it's a truly global phenomenon, as users from probably 30+ countries have needed management level intervention to tell them basically "knock that shit off you're an adult and this is about a T-Shirt" fairly frequently. They are very openly offensive towards my generalist staff when the staff try to explain stuff like "the distributor is based in N country, moving it to Y country is still heavily delayed due to the world situation right now" (e.g., COVID, war, etc). But the common response is "I don't care, this is _MY_ t-shirt and you owe it to me", and they spam and harass multiple times a week for weeks on end. It's really difficult to deal with because I've not been clever enough to figure out how to appeal to any sense of patience and most of the times just issue an ultimatum email of "Stop spamming or I'll cancel the order entirely." This is after they're given items like tracking numbers so they themselves can see that the stuff is just caught up in the system or being told that we are waiting for the next batch of swag to be branded and shipped to us. Overwhelmingly though, the idea presented is that "It's mine, I'm _legally_ entitled to it, you are doing something illegal by not giving it to me right now", and so far I've not been able to come up with a way that shakes this mentality and stops the abhorrent behavior. (Truly, some of the things they say are absolutely outrageous and offensive towards my generalist staff) With our free product, we get a lot of the same behavior too, but at least this one I understand because it's either: 1. Company found out our free edition works great for their setup so no need to buy a paid license, but since free has no support guarantee, if there is an issue they're out of luck unless we happen to have spare bandwidth on the Support side, which since COVID began has been rare. (I'm 200% for don't pay if you don't need to and I'm glad the product is so good the limited free edition works for them! I don't want to sell anything cause I'm not a sales person) 2. Small MSPs/Providers get pissed when they sell the Free edition (against our EULA very explicitly) and then realize that if something happens in their client environment, we won't support it For these cases at least the motivation feels a bit stronger to me. (one is just feeling trapped without support, the latter is having to face the reality they're breaking EULA and they built their business on a not-legal premise and might have to admit to their clients they've been charging them for a free product) I absolutely get _where_ the frustration comes from and where the entitlement is based on since there's a bit more at stake. But compared to "where's my sticker collection you promised!?", I even feel sympathy towards the free-edition users because probably it is pretty stressful and scary. Ultimately Free does give a sense of entitlement; people think they should get exactly what they imagine in their mind and by that point it's not something they might get, it's their property that you're denying. It's honestly extremely depressing to deal with such issues and explain to persons with tons of accolades and technical acumen that "you can't treat people like shit just because you didn't get a T-Shirt" and that it really isn't theirs until its in their hands. Addendum edit: The less said about Twitter/reddit facilitating such complaints the better. Absolutely awful media, and while sometimes there are some voices of reason in the mob, the majority bandwagon and just exacerbate the issue, which gets the social media team in a tizzy as they also aren't equipped to explain such situations or crowd-control the threads.
mpitt 4y ago
Big "one study says" energy in most of the points here. I also think it would be more honest to write the percentage of people who chose neither of the chocolates in the same size as the other numbers.
- riidom 4y ago
  Yep, the chocolate part almost made me stop reading the whole article. I mean, I'm happy they note the number of "not interested" at all, but they don't loose a word about it, that's a bit narrow in focus. Also, a bit more context about the setup would be nice. Paying 13 or 14 cent is a (comparably) huge overhead when you are just walking along a walkway, with getting your purse out, seek card or coins etc. - or just take the one that is free for grabs. On a more general note, I don't think that free stuff makes us irrational. It's just something we don't learn to deal with. When you are used to free stuff, dealing with it is pretty rational, as in looking for hidden costs, moral obligations, is it a data grab, etc. For example, when 62% of ppl refuse to take free choc because they sense they will get stupid questions in return or asked for their name and adress.
manc_lad 4y ago
I worked for a multinational finance company. in the summer, they would give out free ice lollies. Despite being about 0.70p each, the rush and frenzy was too much. They stopped the I've lollies to the disappointment of the rational employees.
- bin_bash 4y ago
  There’s something about marginally screwing over your employer people at large companies seem to love.
donatj 4y ago
Before I lived with my then girlfriend now wife, I used to go to a pretty large number of meetups each month largely for the free food. I made decent money, was terrible at social interaction and enjoyed very few of the meetups, but free food? Come on, lol. It’s really a weirdly effective motivator, at least for me.
- systemsignal 4y ago
  Where do you find these meetups
  - ece 4y ago
    meetup.com
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Prepared foods are usually lower quality than homemade, and I would assume free prepared foods for gatherings I know are not well funded would be on the lower end. Free food would not be a motivator for me.
  - ece 4y ago
    Meetups at big companies in the bay area usually have their cafeteria made food (more made from scratch than prepared I would say). Meetups at startups will usually be from swanky delivery places too. I used to go for part technical content, part socializing, and part just to get out there. Decent food helped, but it turns out getting in late isn't as tolerable anymore.
scollet 4y ago
Can we get a venn diagram of people who write for thehustle and people who regularly snort cocaine?
pessimizer 4y ago
I should have quit when I saw they thought two examples of fistfights years apart were any evidence for their case, but I persisted. Science around rational choices often tends to be premised by bizarre theories about what is obviously rational. People take free stuff because it often costs them nothing if it turns out to be a mistake. I can throw a free piece of chocolate in the trash if I don't like it. Throwing a 13¢ piece of chocolate away is like throwing away 13¢. This fake effect would disappear if you were given the choice between a free thing with no resale value and a cheap thing with high resale value, because the cheap thing now becomes profitable to throw away (or in this case sell.) Also, the specifics about chocolate: I've never had a Lindt chocolate, I've had a Hershey's Kiss (they outsell Lindt in the US by multiple orders of magnitude.) I have no idea whether they're more expensive because they're better, or even because they're more expensive to manufacture or the chocolate is of higher quality grade - they could be more expensive because of the packaging. The fancy thing is often worse ("for a more refined palate") than the cheap thing. The Lindt is a risk that the Hershey's is not. I'm going to skip free shipping, because, again, out of context it's difficult to evaluate the current value of products one hasn't bought recently. It's far easier to evaluate shipping costs. Also, shipping costs swamp other considerations when buying small, inexpensive things, which are most people's purchases. Also, this is a dumb survey ranking public concerns, and as always being used as a proxy for importance. [edit: just looked closer at the list of concerns they ranked free shipping above. They're all objectively worth less than free shipping to someone not in a hurry.] The last (and the goal of the article) is the goofy attempt to transfer this badly argued effect to the consumption of online news. I read tons of online news that is awful, and is written by people who are bad, financed by other people who are bad. I wish I could take money away from them. I might be reading it to see what bad people are thinking, or I might even be reading it because I was suckered in by a deceptive or vague headline. While I want to know what bad people are thinking, I don't want to pay them for the privilege. Linkbait headlines steal my time and energy, and I not only don't want to pay them, I wish I could fine them.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Off topic but here in Europe your chocolate example would be reversed: Lindt is the most pleasing and neutral milk chocolate, while Hersheys is considered an acquired taste
TrackerFF 4y ago
Back in college, I used to sell niche stuff to make some extra money. Did that for some years after college too - as I had built up a pretty decent number of customers. Free shipping from larger companies started to change the mentality of many buyers. It was now expected that you too could / should offer free shipping, while maintaining low prices. Of course, small sellers like me don't have the economy of scale to offer such things, without jacking the price considerably. My second observation was that dealing with the "free" demographics was such a hassle, it is almost never worth it. People that are bargain hunters tend to be more demanding, and for some reason have higher expectations. The only disputes I EVER had, were with those kind of buyers - on extremely cheap items (think under $5). I even got into disputes with people over freebies - i.e. I sent them some free stuff, and they didn't like those. So on quitting this all together, I figured out that if you're gonna be a small-volume seller, you're better off focusing on the premium / quality segment. It's extremely difficult to compete against amazon on price and shipping.
- asddubs 4y ago
  I bought a pinephone and I've been kind of thinking about the economics of it lately. It's a niche product, you're never going to sell a lot of units, but the customer base is kind of a sweet ride. technical people who will fix their own problems, and in exchange for keeping things open, you don't even have to deal with the software side at all. you just release the hardware and let people figure it out themselves. If you're gonna do low volume, it doesn't seem like the worst market segment to target
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    It's funny you mention that. I run two businesses with very different customer bases (one selling USB oscilloscopes, the other used video games) and the differences are exactly as stark as you said. The contact I get from the oscilloscope business tend to either be genuine requests for technical support, bug reports/feature requests or just simply kind comments (usually from old, retired engineers). It's not that some of the technical-minded guys don't take up time, but at least they're interesting and pleasant to talk to. I can think of literally two Karens over the course of 6 years since I started the first crowdfunding campaign, and one of the two seemed to genuinely be going through a manic episode, so I just told him he was right (which, to be fair, he was) and moved on. Compare that to the video games business, where we'll have to deal with people who are demanding, unreasonable, manipulative or just simply wasting our time on a daily basis. Probably 30% of the messages we receive I won't even respond to as it's a bottomless pit of frustration. And my God, GP hit the nail on the head when it comes to the low-value buyers being the ones that kick up a fuss. Anything to try and get something for free/discount.
Panzer04 4y ago
I wonder how much of this effect comes down to 0 effort, rather than the actual cost - If I'm stopped to sample a chocolate, the free one doesn't require me to take out my wallet or find change. As soon as both cost money, the 13c example is such a minimal amount more expensive I'd be way more open to trying it out.
- tasuki 4y ago
  This sounds like the likely explanation. It's not the one cent, it's the hassle of taking out one's wallet and finding the right change.
- waqf 4y ago
  They controlled for this (in the version of the experiment for which the results are reported in the article): they offered it as part of a campus cafeteria meal (and integrated it into the cafeteria billing), so the subjects were already paying for something whether they bought a chocolate or not. Source: http://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%20a%20Special%20Price.pdf http://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%2... (see Experiment 3)
nonameking2026 4y ago
Didn't read the whole article - but I'll just write this anyway. For prices this low - it's not about the price - it's about the hassle of paying. I'd probably buy much more unneeded stuff if I was walking past a stand of products on the street and could just take what I wanted and it would magically get paid for by me without any need of interaction.
topher515 4y ago
So if we take for granted that humans really, actually do seem to like free stuff more than we “should”, then perhaps instead of reacting with “lol, humans irrational”, we should more thoughtfully consider why evolutionary pressures would sculpt a mind that seeks out a “free lunch” over a cheap lunch. Or, to rephrase, if free-seeking is such a powerful effect, then evolution must’ve intended our brains to work this way. Thus suggesting that, while the effect creates individual decisions that are economically irrational, over the long term it must be a survival benefit. There’s a lot of ways this could work (and I’m eager to hear HNers speculate) but one that springs to mind is thinking in terms of risk as cost. Imagine you must choose getting great fruit by climbing a slightly unsafe tree, or eating mediocre fruit on the ground in front of you. Over the long term evolution should favor the creature that eats the no-risk ground fruit over even the very low risk climb. Taking ZERO unnecessary risk would be favored, because even the tiniest risks are survival filters over evolutionary time scales.
- Jedd 4y ago
  > ... if free-seeking is such a powerful effect, then evolution must’ve intended our brains to work this way. Evolution doesn't intend anything, of course. In the same way that evolution didn't intend us to get chubby because sugar is now cheap and abundant. (Actually that one may be more explainable in evolutionary terms.) The free shipping example given in TFA doesn't reconcile easily with evolutionary pressures. Nor would it explain why two mature & well fed adults elected to risk injury over some surplus (if potentially tasty) kilojoules. Money (and agriculture) are much too recent in our history -- say 9-12k BP -- for there to be any measurable or significant genetic adjustment.
- ece 4y ago
  Temperament seems to be somewhat genetic: https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/temperament/ https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/temper... How much does this have to do with free stuff? Not sure. Socio-economic status might be playing a part too. It's probably just the lizard brain, or maybe bargaining culture.
- darkerside 4y ago
  I think we typically engage our Type 2 brains (see Daniel Pink) to make buying decisions. When something we want is perceived as free, our Type 2 brains are totally bypassed because the cost computation is perceived as complete. If something has even a small price, our Type 2 brain is engaged and detects an anomalous result.
AussieWog93 4y ago
Interesting they mentioned the stat that only 20% of people actually pay for news. I looked at newspaper circulation data from the 00s in Melbourne[1], and it seems the same was true back then. Looking at 2005, for example, The Herald Sun and The Age (which for all intents and purposes were 100% of the newspaper market) sold a combined 700k issues each weekday, out of a population of 3.5m. Perhaps the phenomenon here is more about 80% of people getting their news through friends, family, co-workers and other social connections rather than subscribing to a professionally edited news source. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Australia_by_circulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Australi...
- saltcured 4y ago
  Do you know the number of households in the same market and time? I'm not sure if you meant to include this in "through friends, family, ...", but I would think it strange for members of a household to have multiple subscriptions to the same periodicals.
andybak 4y ago
There's a nuance here about the definition of "irrational". "Rational" often describes higher-level decision making. Here it is used to in reference simply to outcomes. If my underlying emotional circuitry rewards me with more units of pleasure for doing x and "experiencing pleasure" is a core motivation then it's a rational decision to do x. Now - the outcome might be "irrational" when viewed as a whole but it doesn't make sense that way unless there's another external goal. Eating chocolates doesn't have any goal other than pleasure so the Lindt/Hersheys example is rational either way. It's quite common to use these kind of analyses to imply people are stupid or irrational or both in terms of many kinds of choices but it doesn't hold water unless you own up to the implied external goal you are covertly slipping in to the discussion.
- ece 4y ago
  The goal seems important, and in a larger picture, should drugs be regulated? I think so.
dghughes 4y ago
I worked at a small casino that was owned by the "state lottery" (it was in Canada and operated by the federal government but via partner provinces). An old lottery name was changed from Super 7 to Lottomax and old promotional supplies had to be trashed. There were piles of cheap thin pens that had big 7 as part of the pen at the top. We casually gave them out at the casino but them it happened. People freaked out and wanted a dozen. "Can I get two more for my grandchildren" and "Can we have more than one!". It was nuts. That jogged my memory I recall now we also had free pens at the player's counter where people could sign up for a loyalty card. So it wasn't like free pens were unusual. Maybe the loyalty program registered as a cost in people's minds.
sys_64738 4y ago
Try giving away free stuff on Craigslist. The litany of contacts from people is mind blowing. Some are "Can you hold it for me?" and "Can you deliver it to me for free?"
drewcoo 4y ago
This seems like a completely backward explanation to me. (But entirely in keeping with the biases of The Hustle, based on their headlines.) Markets for everything and everything for a price - those things are probably driving the irrational behavior. We just don't see that pressure because we're in that system. We're acclimated.
amelius 4y ago
Free stuff makes me suspicious.
- justin_oaks 4y ago
  As it should.
giulio 4y ago
I was an early internet evangelist 30+ years ago but now I miss the old newspapers. If you have to PAY for what you read you are far more discriminating. Concerning “free” (there’s no such thing you know) services like gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc., I’m persuaded that a small reasonable fee would eliminate 99+ percent of spambots and trolls.
guidoism 4y ago
This is exactly what I noticed when getting rid of stuff on my company’s “for-sale” mailing list. It doesn’t matter what it was, there was a HUGE difference in responses between $0.01 and free. It could have been a brand new in the box $50 item and if I asked for $0.01 for it the responses would be like: “Hmm, I don’t know. Can you throw something else in to make the deal better for me”. But say it was free? Man, I would get like a hundred responses within a minute.
mrfusion 4y ago
I tried to sell a cheap manual treadmill a few years ago. I kept lowering the price with no interest. Finally I set it to free and my Neightbor scooped it up instantly. The crazy thing is he was so excited about it and got so much use out of it, I always wondered why didn’t he just buy it for $10.
musicale 4y ago
> In 2007, he co-authored a study titled “Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products” in which participants were asked to choose one of the following: > - A free Hershey’s Kiss I would never take the Hershey's Kiss because of the foul vomity taste/smell. I can't eat regular Hershey chocolate unless it's mixed with something else to mask the smell and acidity. I would happily take 10 Lindt truffles for $1.30. Though I really just like the various bars.
- ece 4y ago
  You know what the gotchas are.
fennecfoxy 4y ago
Yup, even for Google related service. Look at people who scream bloody murder: * When Youtube charges for a premium service to remove ads * At the of having to pay for gmail * Paying for any other of Google's free services (translate, lens, etc). Even just for lens, imagine telling someone in the 90s that we'd get a free app that lets you take a picture, whooshes it off to some server and uses AI to tell you "what that thing is" along with providing instant access to Google's knowledge related to that "thing". For free! People are so self-entitled. Yes, companies sometimes make bad decisions around free products, but for many of Google's offerings (and other free service from other companies) _they're the only ones offering it, it wouldn't exist otherwise_

153 points by yarapavan 4y ago

It's interesting to note that the effect of some good being free holds its power if we know that the good is not usually free. It would be interesting if the article had more research on what the emotions of users when they come across a paywall. For example, I get irrationally upset when I see a paywall, even though I logically know that content writers deserve to be paid. The fact that less than 20% of Americans will pay for news almost certainly makes the subscriptions more expensive for the percentage of users who will actually pay. Does the price affect how upset someone gets? I know for me, I don't even look at the price, I never intended on paying since I've been conditioned to expect articles to be free.

paskozdilar 4y ago
I think it's because we're exposed to something that's unavailable, for the sole purpose of saying "hey, look at this cool thing, you can't have this, unless you pay me". They do similar stuff with cable. Instead of only showing me the channels I paid for, the receiver software shows all the channels, but shows a "you are not subscribed to this channel" message when I attempt to open a channel I didn't pay for. It's irritating and wastes my time.
- saurik 4y ago
  I mean, or you could pay for it? I often pay for it, because I am happy someone is offering to solve my problem and/or give me the information I want. Like, I clearly wanted that information, and without it I am going to waste time -- time that is worth good money -- flailing around without it... this impulse to refuse to pay for things that are cheap is just weird. I know someone who made an iOS app back a decade ago (or even a bit longer... wow, time flies ;P) that was some kind of contact manager for sales that let you track follow ups... I dunno, I don't use it. But I remember he got reviews that were like "this app has changed how I do business: I use it every single day, and I recommend it to all of my friends... but $5 for an app?! come on, who are we kidding here?".
  - paskozdilar 4y ago
    > I mean, or you could pay for it? Yeah, I could pay for everything anyone asks of me on the internet. Then I'd be broke.
WalterBright 4y ago
> It's interesting to note that the effect of some good being free holds its power if we know that the good is not usually free. I seriously doubt that. People don't take care of things they get for free, for example, compared with things that cost them significant money. For example, students who have (and need) a job to meet expenses in college are much less apt to party their way through college. For another, ever heard the phrase "what the heck, it's a rental!" when people abuse a car?
thayne 4y ago
Part of that, at least for me, is that it is a subscription instead of a la carte. I don't want to have to sign up for a monthly subscription to access a bunch of content, most of which I don't care about, in order to read this one article that interests me.
- lupire 4y ago
  You are irrationally opposed to getting the other 0-marginal-cost articles for free with purchase of one article.
andai 4y ago
You know that experiment with the grapes and the chimpanzees? They gave chimpanzees 2 grapes a day for a long time, then gave them 3 grapes (for a week). Then they went back to 2 grapes and the chimps started throwing feces at the researchers. When I was growing up, (nearly all?) online news was free and wasn't paywalled. It's only in the last decade or so that they started paywalling it, even for content from the "before time". What was once free now costs money, and it feels like I'm getting ripped off, even though I might rationally appreciate that ad profits have gone down, or whatever the reason is.
- lupire 4y ago
  Citation desperately needed. NYT was never free, from the day it launched https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/20/business/times-to-announce-deals-with-newsstand-an-online-publisher.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/20/business/times-to-announc...
- paskozdilar 4y ago
  > You know that experiment with the grapes and the chimpanzees? They gave chimpanzees 2 grapes a day for a long time, then gave them 3 grapes (for a week). Then they went back to 2 grapes and the chimps started throwing feces at the researchers. Yes, humans are creatures of habit, and our mechanism of deciding whether a change is good or bad fundamentally depends on whether the change is better or worse than the current state of affairs. In other news, water is wet.
avgcorrection 4y ago
I might want to read a WP or NYT article from time to time to see what angle the upper-middle class of America is getting fed on some issue. But I don’t intend to pay for that privilege. Those outlets by the way where mostly supported by ad revenue back in the no-Web days.

more_corn 4y ago

There’s also a downside of free. Anyone who has posted on Craigslist free knows. You almost always want to put an absurdly low price on it not free. That screens the “free tattoo at a party” people out. You don’t need that behavior in your day.

mindslight 4y ago
Agreed. Another way of looking at it is that people trawling craigslist free value their own time very low, and thus are unlikely to respect your time much either.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- insickness 4y ago
  Or they don't value the product because it's free. Every time I've posted something free on craigslist, the person is much more likely to no-show or keep rescheduling pick up times, so much so that I won't do it anymore.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  You'd think that someone who valued their own time less would value your time more in comparison.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    Well I'm sure if my goal was to perversely waste their time, I could repeatedly cancel, no show, and make them jump through other hoops that would take a lot of their time but much less of mine (sending the emails). And thus they would indeed be valuing my time more than theirs, as I played some kind of sadistic power game. But since my goal is simply to get rid of an item to a good home, then the more time I spend sending emails, waiting around for someone to no show etc, is pure loss.
Blackthorn 4y ago
Maybe I'm just lucky or maybe being rural has something to do with it but I've given away a few different items locally on FB marketplace and have only found people who showed up and were really happy to receive them. I'll probably stop doing that if I get a dreadful entitled person, but so far so good.

shrimp_emoji 4y ago

>Free physical goods in meatspace Those are made with materials, they're consumed, and they're worn/gone. >Free digital goods in cyberspace We've entered a different world. Our old model breaks down. Here, things are copied, pasted, transmitted, and stored for negligible cost. When they're consumed, they remain. For software, there's an extra dimension of totalitarianism: a burger in meatspace (for now) doesn't scan your saliva and send the data back to the restaurant or receive an OTA update and transform into a hotdog mid-chew or dictate how and when you eat it. Here, the economic dynamics and tyrannies of meatspace (scarcity, wear-and-tear, cost of materials) can only be implemented with hacks (DRM, perpetual renting, etc., none of which ultimately work to fully simulate meatspace's mechanics of "when you eat a burger, you can't eat it again"). Free digital content has downsides, sure, but good luck making it not free. In cyberspace, it's information, and information wants to be free.

Barrin92 4y ago
transportation and storage costs of digital goods might be very cheap (although not entirely free) but the biggest cost for digital goods is the same it often is for physical goods and services, which is human labour. Meatspace doesn't inherently differ from digital space. things in meatspace, like say land, didn't always have prices on them. That's a legal invention, the enclosure of the commons, and whether that was a good thing or a bad thing is up for debate but it certainly wasn't a fact of nature. The process of transferring something to private ownership used to be as foreign to physical things as it was to early digital things. Not because physical or digital goods have some spirit and agenda of wanting to be free, but because nobody had laid claim to it and turned it into a commodity and passed laws that governed their ownership. When land was enclosed in ~1200 that wasn't because it was so scarce, but because it was 'economically wasted' and 'operated inefficiently'. That's also the reason why digital spaces are being claimed, regardless of whether they're scarce or not.
bin_bash 4y ago
This is Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory in a nutshell https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/ https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/

WalterBright 4y ago

> when people see something for free, they don’t see the downside Which explains why politicians are always promising a free lunch.

bell-cot 4y ago
And why the idiots...er, I mean voters, buy it every time.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

daenz 4y ago

I've been running a free closed beta for a product of mine for... 6 months. The users absolutely love it and claim they can't live without it. But I am having difficulty wrangling them into a price that they don't complain about. I think I'm bumping up against these "free" forces somehow. I also think the closed beta has run too long, and now they're spoiled.

forgotmypw17 4y ago
I have a better idea for you, which has worked for several others, e.g. Dropbox. Let your early adopters earn free service by referring others. Instead of alienating your biggest fans and supporters and power users, you'll be turning them into promoters and marketers.
- andai 4y ago
  GP has already gotten a lot of value out of them, so if keeping them isn't costing much, I'd say grandfather them in for free.
  - oleganza 4y ago
    Why for free? Give, like, a 50% discount. Their "free stuff" would be "50% for free".
    - hnbad 4y ago
      Or even 90%. Maybe 75% as a compromise. Heck, being grandfathered into a very low price point will make them much less likely to quit even if they no longer use the product, thanks to FOMO. So you may see long-tail income from those early adopters with little expense.
      - michaelcampbell 4y ago
        Or a 5%-15% forever discount per referral that's paid for a year. After 6-20 referrals, you're on us - it's cool.

asiachick 4y ago

I think it depends on what we're talking about ..... I used to collect free stuff at conferences. I loved getting a bag at the entrance to some conference, GDC, E3, CES, Auto Show, etc. It would be full of fliers and free magazines. Then I'd go around the booths collecting free pens, free buttons, free t-shirts, free stickers, more free magazines, fliers, etc.... At some point I realized all of that was actually not something I wanted. I didn't need branded pens. I was not going to actually wear the t-shirts. I likely didn't have time or care about the magazines. It switched to collecting nothing. At most if I see something I think I'm interested in instead of taking a flier I'll take a picture and look it up later. I don't take any free swag. There might be some exception but it would have to be pretty exceptional. I might initially feel a desire for the free stuff but then I think "Am I really going to use/wear/look at this?" The answer is pretty much always "no" so I leave it.

mechanical_bear 4y ago
My casual clothing consisted of nothing but conference shirts for years in school.
watwut 4y ago
> I was not going to actually wear the t-shirts. Why not? It is genuine question, I wore them till they broke basically.
- paganel 4y ago
  Still wearing a Drupalcamp 2011 t-shirt, it has held up quite well, 10/10 would take for free again.
- lupire 4y ago
  Some people like to look nice and/or already have too many shirts. > wore them till they broke basically. So why get a dozen more?
  - watwut 4y ago
    I don't get them for free that often. And some are too small, too big, don't fit. My size also changed over years which made some of them bad fit. The remaining make it so that I barely ever need to buy one, but don't have that much excess.

thriftwy 4y ago

Authors seem to have misconceptions about how people work: ...participants were asked to choose one of the following: A free Hershey’s Kiss A $0.13 Lindt truffle (a superior product in quality that retails for multiples more than a Hershey’s Kiss) Well obviously, I'm getting a free thing as a no-brainer, and then I also decide whether I want the paid thing or not. They seem to be oblivious to transaction costs. What if they offered free candy after the e-mail confirmation, but the paid truffle no strings attached?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vestrigi 4y ago
Also the context is missing for the $0.01 Hershey’s Kiss. I wouldn’t stop for sweets in a supermarket sample offering if I had to pay for it but in a controlled study I would make a decision between the two chocolates.
- SapporoChris 4y ago
  All I came away with was the suspicion that most people understand the different levels of quality in chocolate. I won't eat free Hershey's chocolate, it isn't worth the calories.
- jostylr 4y ago
  Also paying a penny for something would be a major inconvenience at this point. I haven't carried coins in ages. If it is adding a penny onto some other bill, no problem. But a separate paying experience of just 1 penny would be quite costly to me.
waqf 4y ago
The journalist may suffer from misconceptions, but the version of the experiment to which these results apply was conducted so that the transaction costs were equal in either case (source: https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%20a%20Special%20Price.pdf https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%..., see Experiment 3). > Well obviously, I'm getting a free thing as a no-brainer, and then I also decide whether I want the paid thing or not. Not permitted. If you take the "free" chocolate they will not sell you the fancy one at any price. It is not obvious how people behave under that circumstance.

hericium 4y ago

People are brainwashed to use their privacy as a currency for "free" stuff.

beebeepka 4y ago
In my experience, the vast majority isn't even remotely aware they're paying with their personal information. They just assume some things are free because they have always* been free. * You have to remember that most people joined the internet fairly recently. Like the last decade.
jollybean 4y ago
It's still free, and most people really don't care that Facebook or Google is using their 'behaviour' to show them ads. It's really just not that important to most people.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > people really don't care I won't say you are wrong, as such. In fact 'they' absolutely do care, but just don't understand. I've done tons of research on this, personally and reading all the latest papers and evidence for about 9 years (back to 2013). People _really_ care. However, not to pick on you specifically but here's is a reason I am replying in order to challenge not you but the dangerous idea - the meme/mythology that "people don't care" is pernicious and naturally spread within the social networks that stand to benefit most from it. It even has it's own entire subculture of self-denigration and celebration of surrendering dignity as a badge of honour. You're not wrong, because you've been strongly influenced, and the psychological reasons we parrot the the "people don't care" line are complex and involve each of our own relations to personal boundaries.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> use their privacy as a currency for "free" stuff There are other currencies. Some of these get mixed up with privacy. Time is a common currency. Flat pack furniture is subsidised by passing the assembly costs to the end user - mostly as time. Reputation, image or likeness is a way to pay. Remember the hairdresser with a window full of free modelling service photographs of smiling clients with great hair? Endorsement is another way to pay with "freelance marketing". Cosmetic and kitchen products (tupperware) often had elaborate endorsement chains or pyramid schemes. Knowledge has long been a "hidden" currency in Free software like Linux. You need to know what you're doing. In all cases some friction arises when the customer doesn't know in advance that payment in one or more "hidden" currencies is required. The vendors mistake is to try hiding it in order to advertise a product as "free". Announcing it up front is actually better, otherwise the customer reacts by seeing the sale as a scam of some kind. Loss of privacy is a just one particularly egregious type of hidden currency scam. It's high time it should be treated by customers and regulators exactly the same as other explicit extractions.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

Absolutely free things make people behave irrationally! Given the right prompting a free t-shirt and a "50% off your next coffee" voucher would be sufficient to hire an international team of assassins.

csydas 4y ago

Just my experience, but I think it's that Free engages a senses of entitlement because in many people's minds, Free means it's rightfully theirs and that any action that inhibits their ability to get what is theirs is an offense of a high degree. While I don't work with any of our branding team/activities much, our generalist support team was moved under my purview and all issues related to giveaways or brand events come through the support team (their main duties are related to stuff like account management, issues with the public site, licensing management, etc). The absolutely awful statements and behaviors from persons who didn't get stuff like a free T-Shirt for participating in an event is astounding, and it's a truly global phenomenon, as users from probably 30+ countries have needed management level intervention to tell them basically "knock that shit off you're an adult and this is about a T-Shirt" fairly frequently. They are very openly offensive towards my generalist staff when the staff try to explain stuff like "the distributor is based in N country, moving it to Y country is still heavily delayed due to the world situation right now" (e.g., COVID, war, etc). But the common response is "I don't care, this is _MY_ t-shirt and you owe it to me", and they spam and harass multiple times a week for weeks on end. It's really difficult to deal with because I've not been clever enough to figure out how to appeal to any sense of patience and most of the times just issue an ultimatum email of "Stop spamming or I'll cancel the order entirely." This is after they're given items like tracking numbers so they themselves can see that the stuff is just caught up in the system or being told that we are waiting for the next batch of swag to be branded and shipped to us. Overwhelmingly though, the idea presented is that "It's mine, I'm _legally_ entitled to it, you are doing something illegal by not giving it to me right now", and so far I've not been able to come up with a way that shakes this mentality and stops the abhorrent behavior. (Truly, some of the things they say are absolutely outrageous and offensive towards my generalist staff) With our free product, we get a lot of the same behavior too, but at least this one I understand because it's either: 1. Company found out our free edition works great for their setup so no need to buy a paid license, but since free has no support guarantee, if there is an issue they're out of luck unless we happen to have spare bandwidth on the Support side, which since COVID began has been rare. (I'm 200% for don't pay if you don't need to and I'm glad the product is so good the limited free edition works for them! I don't want to sell anything cause I'm not a sales person) 2. Small MSPs/Providers get pissed when they sell the Free edition (against our EULA very explicitly) and then realize that if something happens in their client environment, we won't support it For these cases at least the motivation feels a bit stronger to me. (one is just feeling trapped without support, the latter is having to face the reality they're breaking EULA and they built their business on a not-legal premise and might have to admit to their clients they've been charging them for a free product) I absolutely get _where_ the frustration comes from and where the entitlement is based on since there's a bit more at stake. But compared to "where's my sticker collection you promised!?", I even feel sympathy towards the free-edition users because probably it is pretty stressful and scary. Ultimately Free does give a sense of entitlement; people think they should get exactly what they imagine in their mind and by that point it's not something they might get, it's their property that you're denying. It's honestly extremely depressing to deal with such issues and explain to persons with tons of accolades and technical acumen that "you can't treat people like shit just because you didn't get a T-Shirt" and that it really isn't theirs until its in their hands. Addendum edit: The less said about Twitter/reddit facilitating such complaints the better. Absolutely awful media, and while sometimes there are some voices of reason in the mob, the majority bandwagon and just exacerbate the issue, which gets the social media team in a tizzy as they also aren't equipped to explain such situations or crowd-control the threads.

mpitt 4y ago

Big "one study says" energy in most of the points here. I also think it would be more honest to write the percentage of people who chose neither of the chocolates in the same size as the other numbers.

riidom 4y ago
Yep, the chocolate part almost made me stop reading the whole article. I mean, I'm happy they note the number of "not interested" at all, but they don't loose a word about it, that's a bit narrow in focus. Also, a bit more context about the setup would be nice. Paying 13 or 14 cent is a (comparably) huge overhead when you are just walking along a walkway, with getting your purse out, seek card or coins etc. - or just take the one that is free for grabs. On a more general note, I don't think that free stuff makes us irrational. It's just something we don't learn to deal with. When you are used to free stuff, dealing with it is pretty rational, as in looking for hidden costs, moral obligations, is it a data grab, etc. For example, when 62% of ppl refuse to take free choc because they sense they will get stupid questions in return or asked for their name and adress.

manc_lad 4y ago

I worked for a multinational finance company. in the summer, they would give out free ice lollies. Despite being about 0.70p each, the rush and frenzy was too much. They stopped the I've lollies to the disappointment of the rational employees.

bin_bash 4y ago
There’s something about marginally screwing over your employer people at large companies seem to love.

donatj 4y ago

Before I lived with my then girlfriend now wife, I used to go to a pretty large number of meetups each month largely for the free food. I made decent money, was terrible at social interaction and enjoyed very few of the meetups, but free food? Come on, lol. It’s really a weirdly effective motivator, at least for me.

systemsignal 4y ago
Where do you find these meetups
- ece 4y ago
  meetup.com
lotsofpulp 4y ago
Prepared foods are usually lower quality than homemade, and I would assume free prepared foods for gatherings I know are not well funded would be on the lower end. Free food would not be a motivator for me.
- ece 4y ago
  Meetups at big companies in the bay area usually have their cafeteria made food (more made from scratch than prepared I would say). Meetups at startups will usually be from swanky delivery places too. I used to go for part technical content, part socializing, and part just to get out there. Decent food helped, but it turns out getting in late isn't as tolerable anymore.

scollet 4y ago

Can we get a venn diagram of people who write for thehustle and people who regularly snort cocaine?

pessimizer 4y ago

I should have quit when I saw they thought two examples of fistfights years apart were any evidence for their case, but I persisted. Science around rational choices often tends to be premised by bizarre theories about what is obviously rational. People take free stuff because it often costs them nothing if it turns out to be a mistake. I can throw a free piece of chocolate in the trash if I don't like it. Throwing a 13¢ piece of chocolate away is like throwing away 13¢. This fake effect would disappear if you were given the choice between a free thing with no resale value and a cheap thing with high resale value, because the cheap thing now becomes profitable to throw away (or in this case sell.) Also, the specifics about chocolate: I've never had a Lindt chocolate, I've had a Hershey's Kiss (they outsell Lindt in the US by multiple orders of magnitude.) I have no idea whether they're more expensive because they're better, or even because they're more expensive to manufacture or the chocolate is of higher quality grade - they could be more expensive because of the packaging. The fancy thing is often worse ("for a more refined palate") than the cheap thing. The Lindt is a risk that the Hershey's is not. I'm going to skip free shipping, because, again, out of context it's difficult to evaluate the current value of products one hasn't bought recently. It's far easier to evaluate shipping costs. Also, shipping costs swamp other considerations when buying small, inexpensive things, which are most people's purchases. Also, this is a dumb survey ranking public concerns, and as always being used as a proxy for importance. [edit: just looked closer at the list of concerns they ranked free shipping above. They're all objectively worth less than free shipping to someone not in a hurry.] The last (and the goal of the article) is the goofy attempt to transfer this badly argued effect to the consumption of online news. I read tons of online news that is awful, and is written by people who are bad, financed by other people who are bad. I wish I could take money away from them. I might be reading it to see what bad people are thinking, or I might even be reading it because I was suckered in by a deceptive or vague headline. While I want to know what bad people are thinking, I don't want to pay them for the privilege. Linkbait headlines steal my time and energy, and I not only don't want to pay them, I wish I could fine them.

bowsamic 4y ago
Off topic but here in Europe your chocolate example would be reversed: Lindt is the most pleasing and neutral milk chocolate, while Hersheys is considered an acquired taste

TrackerFF 4y ago

Back in college, I used to sell niche stuff to make some extra money. Did that for some years after college too - as I had built up a pretty decent number of customers. Free shipping from larger companies started to change the mentality of many buyers. It was now expected that you too could / should offer free shipping, while maintaining low prices. Of course, small sellers like me don't have the economy of scale to offer such things, without jacking the price considerably. My second observation was that dealing with the "free" demographics was such a hassle, it is almost never worth it. People that are bargain hunters tend to be more demanding, and for some reason have higher expectations. The only disputes I EVER had, were with those kind of buyers - on extremely cheap items (think under $5). I even got into disputes with people over freebies - i.e. I sent them some free stuff, and they didn't like those. So on quitting this all together, I figured out that if you're gonna be a small-volume seller, you're better off focusing on the premium / quality segment. It's extremely difficult to compete against amazon on price and shipping.

asddubs 4y ago
I bought a pinephone and I've been kind of thinking about the economics of it lately. It's a niche product, you're never going to sell a lot of units, but the customer base is kind of a sweet ride. technical people who will fix their own problems, and in exchange for keeping things open, you don't even have to deal with the software side at all. you just release the hardware and let people figure it out themselves. If you're gonna do low volume, it doesn't seem like the worst market segment to target
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  It's funny you mention that. I run two businesses with very different customer bases (one selling USB oscilloscopes, the other used video games) and the differences are exactly as stark as you said. The contact I get from the oscilloscope business tend to either be genuine requests for technical support, bug reports/feature requests or just simply kind comments (usually from old, retired engineers). It's not that some of the technical-minded guys don't take up time, but at least they're interesting and pleasant to talk to. I can think of literally two Karens over the course of 6 years since I started the first crowdfunding campaign, and one of the two seemed to genuinely be going through a manic episode, so I just told him he was right (which, to be fair, he was) and moved on. Compare that to the video games business, where we'll have to deal with people who are demanding, unreasonable, manipulative or just simply wasting our time on a daily basis. Probably 30% of the messages we receive I won't even respond to as it's a bottomless pit of frustration. And my God, GP hit the nail on the head when it comes to the low-value buyers being the ones that kick up a fuss. Anything to try and get something for free/discount.

Panzer04 4y ago

I wonder how much of this effect comes down to 0 effort, rather than the actual cost - If I'm stopped to sample a chocolate, the free one doesn't require me to take out my wallet or find change. As soon as both cost money, the 13c example is such a minimal amount more expensive I'd be way more open to trying it out.

tasuki 4y ago
This sounds like the likely explanation. It's not the one cent, it's the hassle of taking out one's wallet and finding the right change.
waqf 4y ago
They controlled for this (in the version of the experiment for which the results are reported in the article): they offered it as part of a campus cafeteria meal (and integrated it into the cafeteria billing), so the subjects were already paying for something whether they bought a chocolate or not. Source: http://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%20a%20Special%20Price.pdf http://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%2... (see Experiment 3)

nonameking2026 4y ago

Didn't read the whole article - but I'll just write this anyway. For prices this low - it's not about the price - it's about the hassle of paying. I'd probably buy much more unneeded stuff if I was walking past a stand of products on the street and could just take what I wanted and it would magically get paid for by me without any need of interaction.

topher515 4y ago

So if we take for granted that humans really, actually do seem to like free stuff more than we “should”, then perhaps instead of reacting with “lol, humans irrational”, we should more thoughtfully consider why evolutionary pressures would sculpt a mind that seeks out a “free lunch” over a cheap lunch. Or, to rephrase, if free-seeking is such a powerful effect, then evolution must’ve intended our brains to work this way. Thus suggesting that, while the effect creates individual decisions that are economically irrational, over the long term it must be a survival benefit. There’s a lot of ways this could work (and I’m eager to hear HNers speculate) but one that springs to mind is thinking in terms of risk as cost. Imagine you must choose getting great fruit by climbing a slightly unsafe tree, or eating mediocre fruit on the ground in front of you. Over the long term evolution should favor the creature that eats the no-risk ground fruit over even the very low risk climb. Taking ZERO unnecessary risk would be favored, because even the tiniest risks are survival filters over evolutionary time scales.

Jedd 4y ago
> ... if free-seeking is such a powerful effect, then evolution must’ve intended our brains to work this way. Evolution doesn't intend anything, of course. In the same way that evolution didn't intend us to get chubby because sugar is now cheap and abundant. (Actually that one may be more explainable in evolutionary terms.) The free shipping example given in TFA doesn't reconcile easily with evolutionary pressures. Nor would it explain why two mature & well fed adults elected to risk injury over some surplus (if potentially tasty) kilojoules. Money (and agriculture) are much too recent in our history -- say 9-12k BP -- for there to be any measurable or significant genetic adjustment.
ece 4y ago
Temperament seems to be somewhat genetic: https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/temperament/ https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/temper... How much does this have to do with free stuff? Not sure. Socio-economic status might be playing a part too. It's probably just the lizard brain, or maybe bargaining culture.
darkerside 4y ago
I think we typically engage our Type 2 brains (see Daniel Pink) to make buying decisions. When something we want is perceived as free, our Type 2 brains are totally bypassed because the cost computation is perceived as complete. If something has even a small price, our Type 2 brain is engaged and detects an anomalous result.

AussieWog93 4y ago

Interesting they mentioned the stat that only 20% of people actually pay for news. I looked at newspaper circulation data from the 00s in Melbourne[1], and it seems the same was true back then. Looking at 2005, for example, The Herald Sun and The Age (which for all intents and purposes were 100% of the newspaper market) sold a combined 700k issues each weekday, out of a population of 3.5m. Perhaps the phenomenon here is more about 80% of people getting their news through friends, family, co-workers and other social connections rather than subscribing to a professionally edited news source. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Australia_by_circulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Australi...

saltcured 4y ago
Do you know the number of households in the same market and time? I'm not sure if you meant to include this in "through friends, family, ...", but I would think it strange for members of a household to have multiple subscriptions to the same periodicals.

andybak 4y ago

There's a nuance here about the definition of "irrational". "Rational" often describes higher-level decision making. Here it is used to in reference simply to outcomes. If my underlying emotional circuitry rewards me with more units of pleasure for doing x and "experiencing pleasure" is a core motivation then it's a rational decision to do x. Now - the outcome might be "irrational" when viewed as a whole but it doesn't make sense that way unless there's another external goal. Eating chocolates doesn't have any goal other than pleasure so the Lindt/Hersheys example is rational either way. It's quite common to use these kind of analyses to imply people are stupid or irrational or both in terms of many kinds of choices but it doesn't hold water unless you own up to the implied external goal you are covertly slipping in to the discussion.

ece 4y ago
The goal seems important, and in a larger picture, should drugs be regulated? I think so.

dghughes 4y ago

I worked at a small casino that was owned by the "state lottery" (it was in Canada and operated by the federal government but via partner provinces). An old lottery name was changed from Super 7 to Lottomax and old promotional supplies had to be trashed. There were piles of cheap thin pens that had big 7 as part of the pen at the top. We casually gave them out at the casino but them it happened. People freaked out and wanted a dozen. "Can I get two more for my grandchildren" and "Can we have more than one!". It was nuts. That jogged my memory I recall now we also had free pens at the player's counter where people could sign up for a loyalty card. So it wasn't like free pens were unusual. Maybe the loyalty program registered as a cost in people's minds.

sys_64738 4y ago

Try giving away free stuff on Craigslist. The litany of contacts from people is mind blowing. Some are "Can you hold it for me?" and "Can you deliver it to me for free?"

drewcoo 4y ago

This seems like a completely backward explanation to me. (But entirely in keeping with the biases of The Hustle, based on their headlines.) Markets for everything and everything for a price - those things are probably driving the irrational behavior. We just don't see that pressure because we're in that system. We're acclimated.

amelius 4y ago

Free stuff makes me suspicious.

justin_oaks 4y ago
As it should.

giulio 4y ago

I was an early internet evangelist 30+ years ago but now I miss the old newspapers. If you have to PAY for what you read you are far more discriminating. Concerning “free” (there’s no such thing you know) services like gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc., I’m persuaded that a small reasonable fee would eliminate 99+ percent of spambots and trolls.

guidoism 4y ago

This is exactly what I noticed when getting rid of stuff on my company’s “for-sale” mailing list. It doesn’t matter what it was, there was a HUGE difference in responses between $0.01 and free. It could have been a brand new in the box $50 item and if I asked for $0.01 for it the responses would be like: “Hmm, I don’t know. Can you throw something else in to make the deal better for me”. But say it was free? Man, I would get like a hundred responses within a minute.

mrfusion 4y ago

I tried to sell a cheap manual treadmill a few years ago. I kept lowering the price with no interest. Finally I set it to free and my Neightbor scooped it up instantly. The crazy thing is he was so excited about it and got so much use out of it, I always wondered why didn’t he just buy it for $10.

musicale 4y ago

> In 2007, he co-authored a study titled “Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products” in which participants were asked to choose one of the following: > - A free Hershey’s Kiss I would never take the Hershey's Kiss because of the foul vomity taste/smell. I can't eat regular Hershey chocolate unless it's mixed with something else to mask the smell and acidity. I would happily take 10 Lindt truffles for $1.30. Though I really just like the various bars.

ece 4y ago
You know what the gotchas are.

fennecfoxy 4y ago

Yup, even for Google related service. Look at people who scream bloody murder: * When Youtube charges for a premium service to remove ads * At the of having to pay for gmail * Paying for any other of Google's free services (translate, lens, etc). Even just for lens, imagine telling someone in the 90s that we'd get a free app that lets you take a picture, whooshes it off to some server and uses AI to tell you "what that thing is" along with providing instant access to Google's knowledge related to that "thing". For free! People are so self-entitled. Yes, companies sometimes make bad decisions around free products, but for many of Google's offerings (and other free service from other companies) _they're the only ones offering it, it wouldn't exist otherwise_