Would you stop donating to a free service if it started putting up paywalls?

Yes. By replacing your voluntary charity with a payment scheme, they’ve deprived you of the value of giving.

They changed the deal. It’s perfectly rational to want to stop consuming their content.

Whether you do is up to you, but you’re not crazy or anything for feeling deprived.

Journalism isn't free. For a different type of service, I would reconsider if I wanted to continue supporting them. But good journalism is disappearing, so I think if you're in a position to help keep it going, you should.

The industries supporting journalism have basically collapsed over the past few decades. If you have the means to support decent research and writing, please do so.

But recently, they’ve started putting some of their articles behind a paywall. Since I was already donating, I automatically have access.

In that case I don't see a problem. In a lot of ways your donation became a subscription, but then again, news cost money to make. This was true during the print days, and is no less true during the digital age.

I do not think I blame any services or sites for paywalls especially if its part of their financial model to continue operations and providing services.

There are many free services I have the privilege of being able to pay for to support: Proton, StoryGraph, Wikipedia. I used to donate to Pocket but no longer. I want these services to continue and am privileged enough to be able to donate

I would only consider donating in the first place if it were not only free to access, but also licensed under a free license. I have donated to freely licensed projects before, but not to merely freely accessible websites.

Vox half-assed their paywall - the full articles are still in the free RSS feed

I’m annoyed by paywalls but I understand and accept them. I never view my payment as a donation, it’s just a way to get access to content. What troubles me is when important information is hidden to the public that might guide you in your understanding of the world and therefore (political) decision making.

I would stop. At that point it's not really a donation, but a payment. I don't know how much of that donation to consider a "payment".

Similarly I didn't get the Tor Project stickers. I don't know how much the stickers, envelope and postage cost them, thus I couldn't determine the amount that is "donation". As such, I opted not to take them. Just the same with Fediverse Canvas 2024 stickers. Some amount of that has went for Canvas development, but how much I don't know. Once again I opted for donation only.
I'd like them in both cases. Perhaps $3 (excl. shipping) per sticker is still OK to consider a purchase, but $25 for a few stickers, meh.

Anyway, my point is, if for the donation I am provided exclusive products or services and I either don't know their cost (to subtract from donation amount) or don't have the choice to opt out from being provided the services/products, I won't donate at all.

But even outside of that, it wouldn't pass. For me, one requirement for donating is that whatever group I am donating to provides everyone the same service no matter if you pay them or not. Otherwise I can't really consider it a donation, and I don't have the money to pay.

I have mixed feelings. “ Back in my day,”…. Before the internet (cough cough) the only free news was the TV. We paid a quarter each day for the newspaper, or $3-4 for a magazine. I’m sure spent $50 a month across a variety of sources. And that was in the 90’s. I feel guilty pasting link after link into archive myself because of the paywalls.

I grew up on an internet that was made by and for people who wanted you to visit their site.

If you offer something for free, become popular, then turn it into a paid service, I will no longer use it.

If i had enough money that i didn't notice everything that is behind a pay wall would care a lot less. But I've never been in that position from the day i was born and it looks like ill die without ever knowing what that is like so I'm certainly biased.

That being said i think paywalls can be redone so that everyone wins.

If you have a paywall that only blocks new content until x minutes/hours/days etc have elapsed then I think that's a good way to monetize something when costs endanger the existence of the thing

Ask yourself why you're donating in the first place. Is it so that good journalism can continue to exist regardless of who gets to see it? Is it to give everyone access to good journalism regardless of their ability to pay? Is it so that the journalists can continue producing content for you to consume yourself? Maybe it's something else?

If the company is no longer providing what you expect from them, then that's a good reason to stop donating.

If they're charging for access, they're now a business. I'd consider if I want to be a customer and if not, no further donations.

Yes.

I think the details matter a lot. If I'm an active contributor to a site and I get a bait and switch, then I'm probably going to leave the site permanently. I try to keep track of what's happening to make that less likely.

If you're setting up a service and you realize it doesn't scale up well, I think you should try to state your roadmap on your site somewhere, so the users can expect changes that might happen. If people go in expecting that you might need to monetize in certain ways, they won't be disappointed when you do. Or rather, they might be slightly disappointed but they'll understand.

IMO, if you like a service/subscription and it's your choice to support them and thier content I wouldn't think twice.

My only paid subscription is MS office, because I've used Xcel almost my entire career (almost 30+ years use?) and have never paid for it until a couple years ago.

So I like the content, I use the service and pricer per annum is good for me (only a few more years and I'm done, so it still works out for me).

I love how the top 4 comments in this pretty active post represent a substantially different approaches to the question.

This seems backward to me.

Since your example is media. Them relying less on ads means they would cater and align more with their patron. In my anecdotal experience creators with sustainable patron also tend to produce higher quality products.

As an aside I also follow Vox, or at least a few of their talent pool juggernauts like Johnny Harris, Phil Edwards, How Town (Adam Cole & Joss Fong), and Cleo Abram. Most also have Patreon I think.

It depends. If Wikimedia does introduce a paywall they are SOL. I would absolutely fork them privately (I do copy the content for my language once in a while and the most important media)and never pay another penny.

If a news outlet changes, it's different,at least for me.

Yeah. I donate to Bitwarden and Wikipedia. I would be disgusted and find something else.