[MRD85]

I doesn't physically cost any practical amount of money to read an article, a tiny amount of processing power and data transfer. A physical meal costs orders of magnitude more.

I understand why we should pay for articles but if you enforce payment then you'll see a flood of poorly written click bait and a race to the bottom.

[factotvm]

Im not suggesting that it will work (to pay per article as we’re describing). But the idea that you should get something for free because you don’t like it isn’t how most things work. Caveat emptor.

Conversely, people said it didn’t cost any practical amount of money to listen to music, yet Spotify thrives.

[mdorazio]

FWIW, "I didn't like it" returns culture has been growing in the US for a while. If you've ever run an Amazon seller account, you'll have gotten plenty of returns from customers for no reason other than that they didn't like the thing they bought or it "didn't meet expectations". The Costco returns line is also packed with people doing this. Point is, the mindset of not paying for something because you didn't like it is quickly making its way into the physical goods world as well, so it's not as simple as shooting down this digital goods mindset entirely.

[pixl97]

Spotify thrives because it is more convenient than piracy.

[factotvm]

And what is more convenient than an ad blocker?

[xur17]

What about payment with a refund option? Obviously this could be abused (and likely would be), but I'd think most people would only use the refund option if the article was truly terrible / clickbait.

[dwohnitmok]

Or a variant, give a reader the option to deny paying the media outlet within some time window, but the reader doesn't get any of the money back.

This does mean the payment processor and the outlet have to be independent entities. That, though, nicely opens up another possibility of what to do with that money that is denied: distribute it proportionally to all other articles from all other media outlets. Proportionate to what is also a question, but I suspect proportionate to non-denied payment from the processor makes the most sense.