Not parent, but I would absolutely _demand_ people to write all content for free.

I refuse to pay a single cent for anything that is even remotely accessible on the Internet and does not result in a physical tangible good being delivered to me, of which I pay $15/mo as acceptable rate-limited mobile LTE bandwidth -- my only communication related recurring cost.

There are several reasons at play here:

- Content quality is not correlated with amount an author is "compensated". In fact quality is almost universally _inversely_ correlated with profitability. Once dollars are attached, out of the woodwork comes a bunch of charlatans peddling useless shit that will not only give you no useful advantage in seeking external information but will actively degrade your life either through dubious advice that will trash your health, finances, legal status, cognitive & mental state, relationships, you name it, or through malevolent action such as selling your privacy or methodical persuasion in you undertaking self-defeating behaviors by hijacking basic human emotional reactions.

- Time has shown repeatedly that volunteers are the entire backbone of quality information sources. I come to HN to have some chance of experts congregating for an actual discussion on certain topics. QA forums, encyclopedias, topic-specific discussion forums, educational materials, news aggregation, scientific research, _all_ is higher quality in volunteer communities before it's essentially leeched for profit by journals, website owners, policy spinmasters, malvertising business, and venture capital.

- "Writing professionally" is not a useful skill in itself, no matter the fantasy colleges want to dream up by funneling the otherwise academically unfit into a program that will lead to a degree thus allowing them to join in on the unnecessary inflationary credentialization of _remedial_ skills. Linguistic mastery is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for creating useful information, you first need a deep understanding of the material you wish to cover. I'd much rather read barely comprehensible jargon from a deranged genius than an eloquent soliloquy by some shill with no idea of what he's talking about other than a general idea that permuting a dictionary in the right magical incantation will summon a paycheck at the end of the week. If you have skills that allowed you to amass wisdom in a field to the point that it would benefit someone else, there are _much_ more efficient and useful means to acquire income and instead use "writing" as a tool for social meaning and development either through reciprocity, self-selection, altruism, whatever.

- The greatest costs are borne not in writing but in deciphering meaning. The combined readership burden of filtering out the wheat from the chaff will _always_ exceed the cost of an author even doing "important" research. This is the crucial point of it all, with some smart people realizing that if information has any value besides propaganda it's due to careful curation, summarizing, and tailoring to an individual's goals and instantaneous state-of-mind, while even smarter people realizing that this will _never_ scale as a business model. Even "clever" workarounds to this problem by infiltrating an individual's web-of-trust in recommendations always end up backfiring. After decades of this scheme being retried and rehashed, I now am completely confident in ignoring whatever bullshit du jour comes out of the mouths of family and friends, and am even running up against the problem of being contrarian against my own internal thoughts.

- Even if against all the odds that you paid someone to get valuable information in the long run you'll regret it. Give an inch, they take a mile. Everyone who is dependent on a paycheck dreams of eventually retiring, and quickly to boot once the actuaries remind them of the future. Once you paid someone for content, you just anchored the negotiations of tomorrow and crystallized the form of how protection money must be paid. "Oh I know you paid back then, but life isn't getting any cheaper and I'd like to get to the beach someday without working so I'm really sorry but I _need_ to add some 'features' that will juice my revenue!" Negotiating with terrorists is not a strategy to get to a stable equilibrium in an iterated game -- the cat has been let out of the bag and it's never going back in. Wake up.