[roughly]

> no micropayment system has ever really taken off

This is true, but it's not really the same thing as "we don't need micropayments" and "there's no configuration that would work for micropayments." Hell, ad networks are basically micropayment networks, just not for consumers, and the current economic configuration of "everything is free, we just sell all your personal data" is pretty new, so it's not like we haven't already invented new economics for the internet.

> All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.

Well, yes, but that's every kind of payment in the world - in just about every transaction in the economy, it's the people producing the thing that want money for the thing, not the consumers who want to pay them.

Less glibly, the current economic arrangement of the internet is eight shades of fucked. Nobody's getting paid for their work, content on the internet has sprinted to the lowest, shittiest, clickbaitiest denominator, social networks are incentivized to tear society apart so people spend more time hate-scrolling, and GenAI is coming to hoover up any of the remaining scraps individuals could've possibly been getting for their content. The fuckup of the last 50-odd years of economic policy is the monomaniacal focus on the individual as a consumer and the absolute exclusion of the individual as a producer from policy. If you want a good economy, you need to pay people for things.

The good news is there's a revitalization of just fucking paying people for things - Patreon's a good example, there's a whole lot of new writer-owned sites making good enough money to be sustainable (defector, autopian, 404media, etc), and generally there seems to be a much larger appetite for paying for things than the last 20 years of the internet would have lead one to believe.

I genuinely believe that a system in which users could easily pay small amounts of money for content they're enjoying and producers could easily get compensated for their work on reasonable terms without the friction of building a durable (subscription) relationship and without the machinery in the middle taking 30% from both sides would be transformative. We're nowhere near it, but man, we sure have tried the other ways, and they're all pretty crap.

[JohnFen]

I agree that micropayments would be incredibly desirable. If an acceptable system came around to accomplish that, I'd use it pretty heavily (as a customer).

But if it involves cryptocurrency, I'm out.

[Animats]

> Well, yes, but that's every kind of payment in the world - in just about every transaction in the economy, it's the people producing the thing that want money for the thing, not the consumers who want to pay them.

Nope. Credit cards, in the form of Diner's Club, were invented by Frank McNamara, a millionaire who went to a restaurant for dinner and forgot to bring enough cash. ATMs were conceived by Walter Wriston, CEO of Citibank, because he saw too many people waiting in line at his teller windows for cash. The big push behind FedNow today is from the parts of the U.S. Government that pay out money for tax refunds, medicare, and pensions.