Make Footnotes Paywalled
Here is a deep tension at the heart of modern online writing. I am a person who likes to read, and I often click links on the internet to things that sound interesting in theory. And sometimes, after 2 lines or 20, there is a sudden and unexpected fade-out and a box that says TO CONTINUE READING GIVE US MONEY PLEASE.
And 99.9% of the time, my reaction – even if I enthusiastically clicked on the story to begin with! Even if I love the writer and/or topic! – is not disappointment but relief. The part of me that is sad not to find out about [whatever the topic is] is far outweighed by the part of me that's relieved to have one less thing to read.
I'm trying to remember the exceptions to this – the pieces where I truly felt sad not to finish, though never sad enough to pony up money – but while I'm sure they exist, their details elude me.
From the writer's side, paywalls are bad for two reasons. First, people who write just generally WANT more people to read what they've said. I hate to say we'd often pay you to read us, but we would.
Second, the value of a piece of writing generally increases in the number of people who've read it.[^1] You want to write something that Everyone's Talking About, and the more that Other People have read a given piece, the more that Other Other People can quote it and discuss it.
I think the solution is to make footnotes paywalled. Footnotes are decorative yet tantalizing. They're the perfect thing to paywall.[^2]
Fear not (or perhaps "relieve not"): I'm not planning to paywall anything on this website. But maybe as a proof of concept I'll subscription-wall my footnotes in future, so that you have to be a logged-in reader to see them.
[^1]: some forms of information, like stock-tips, are worth more the fewer people have read them, and even clever arguments can have a value from being hard to access, because then the reader can steal them and pretend they're her own. But these are values to the reader, not the writer, so honestly maybe it's still true that the writer always just wants as many people as possible to have read it.
[^2]: if this were a paid publication I'd now have to go on for 4 paragraphs saying the same thing in more words, but I think this pretty much covers it, so I'll stop.