Hassle-ism

hassle-ism is a political ideology which proposes that the solution to mitigating the rate of consumption of harmful material or substances (particularly in vulnerable populations) without using authoritarian state control is to make them a hassle to get ahold of while allowing them to still be ultimately legal and private. Examples include accessing pornography or cigarettes. Hassle-ists believe that such material should be inconvenient enough to access such that only those that really want it will put in the effort, which in theory would naturally filter out a large percentage of the population from trying things on a whim and lead to significant reduction of use, especially in people with more impulsive personality traits.

Applications of Hassle-ism:

Minecraft Modding Analogy:

Hassle-ists commonly use the "Minecraft modding" analogy which suggests that a rule of thumb target of hassle quotient (HQ) should be comparable to or slightly more difficult than learning to install Minecraft mods for the first time before the existence of mod managers and modpacks. Many of us members of gen-z during childhood tried and failed to do this and gave up, but it is not impossible, just a hassle even for those that did figure it out.

Single Cent inertia:

One of the most commonly proposed methods of increasing HQ is the single cent inertia concept. The idea is that users must insert their credit card info and pay one cent to access hassle-ized material. Such transactions would not be recorded formally by a bank (but you don't know that fact unless you do). The point would be to make people go "wait I gotta put in my credit card info? screw this." and increase the chance they give up if they didn't truly want it.

Waiting Time:

A highly straight forward way to increase HQ is to add annoying but not overly long waiting periods to the process. Having one or two periods where the user has to wait a day or half (and perhaps manually check on the process without notification given).

Digitized Inconvenience:

With material accessed via websites, these pages could be injected with deliberately annoying design and navigation. Some ideas include intentionally slow internet speed on websites that are used as intermediaries for gaining access to material, making the buttons hard to find, making pressing backspace make the website spazz out, making reload delete all progress, no copy paste allowed, lots of pop up ads (with sound) that look sketch but aren't harmful, multiple websites being needed in the process, difficult captchas (some of which just don't work), and needing to pull up inspect element in the process at least once.

(it should be noted that hassle-ism has nothing to do with fizz or music, it's just really funny)