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Comment by ChadNauseam | Hacker News Reader

Because otherwise there's no incentive not to boycott. One of the nice things about capitalism is that even unpopular people can make money if they make a product people want to buy. It adds a level of realness to society, above status-games and popularity-contests.

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That makes the very silly assumption that the default is to boycott everything, which is really not the case. People at large definitely still default to purchasing things first, for all sorts of reasons from just feeling that it is moral to the service being convenient to just enjoying and wanting to support the work itself. This is self evident in the fact that boycotts essentially never actually kill anything because the majority still favors paying.

The default is to not buy something. People don't like loosing money. If you can get something without loosing money, it's super easy to rationalize why you you're skipping the loose money part. People tend to make decisions which are in their financial interest.

I've seen lots of people on this site that pay for YouTube. I've met real people that have subscriptions to porn sites. They fork out money for stuff that's pretty much always already freely available, for basically no reason except maybe convenience or slightly better service. People spend money all the time, for stuff they want and care about. If they didn't want or care about it, they wouldn't buy it or pirate it.

Homo economicus is a poor model of human behaviour. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus#Sociologists, both neurobiological and anthropological research suggest that unsolicited gift-giving is a natural human behaviour.

> The default is to not buy something.

But if this is already true by default, then we're back to square one where the important financial decision was already made. Again, if it was already decided by default that there is no sale to be made, then whatever the end user does after that is irrelevant.

But beside that, in my last response I gave you three very common reasons that people do buy things against their own financial interests, and you've ignored that part. How do you fit that into your argument?

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