[meowface]

I'm not sure how good of an idea micropayments are. If every single website and app you ever used required micropayments, using the Internet would just be annoying. You would be incentivized to use as few services as possible, for one.

They work for certain kinds of things, but I don't think we'll see the day where people are regularly sending money for the right to open a blog or create an email account.

I don't really know what the answer is for large scale apps with non-paying users. Hopefully other forms of monetization become more popular.

[9HZZRfNlpR]

It wouldn't connect people across the borders anymore and would create firewalls across countries just based on money. Ironically even places like HN wouldn't work, sure for wealthy Americans, but not for poor Indian or Ukrainian hackers just about about to develop their interest in tech.

[meowface]

Exactly. Ads suck, but paywalls around every single thing on the Internet would suck more. Plus you can usually block ads, but not paywalls. Even if you couldn't ever block ads, they'd still be preferable to the universal paywall scenario.

But some kinds of companies should definitely look more into accepting donations and offering premium options in exchange for ad-free viewing plus extra features. I'm paying for YouTube Premium to avoid seeing ads (and they have like one premium show that's pretty good), and I think that's a pretty good deal.