[overgard]

Everyone I've talked to (and my personal feeling) is that people are kind of sick of the number of subscriptions they have and have to maintain. I think the microtransaction thing never took off not because it's a bad idea, but because it never was built-in and legit feeling and widespread. If I just had a general crypto wallet where I could add some spending money every once in a while, and I could use that to unpaywall things by clicking a button, I would totally use that.

[pavlov]

Why should it be crypto though? If e.g. Stripe offered this and you could fill it up with your credit card (which you've probably given to them already), they could reach a much larger group of users and it would be easier to use than the private-keys-and-wallets hassle of crypto.

[overgard]

It doesn't have to be crypto, but having a central corporation in charge of it no doubt creates some tensions. If Stripe or PayPal or something did offer this and it was wide enough spread to be useful I'd probably use it.

[yunohn]

While subscription fatigue is very real, I’m not sure micro transactions solves anything either. In fact, a great example is IAPs - most revenue is dominated by whales, with the rest barely transacting significantly at all.

[overgard]

IAP's basically are micro transactions though. After all, you're paying through Apple/Google and it's usually small enough amounts ($1-$10) that you can justify it to yourself. The problem with IAPs is the App part. I don't want to have to get the New York Times App to get rid of a NTY paywall.

[yunohn]

> IAP's basically are micro transactions though

That’s exactly why I used it as a good example. And I didn’t mean that NYT has to use IAPs, they could easily integrate Apple/Google Pay for frictionless micro-payments if they wanted to. It’s just that consumers wouldn’t use it.