[commandar]

A decade ago, I was really interested in the idea of using a crypto like what Doge was at the time for this specific use case. Back then, a dogecoin was a fraction of a cent so it was a better fit than its current valuations.

Any individual page impression is only worth a few cents to the publisher anyway. I still think there's a lot of potential value in something similar as infrastructure for facilitating ultra-microtransactions on that scale that don't get completely consumed by credit card processors, etc.

I'm not going to maintain subscriptions to every news source out there, but I'd be more than happy to toss something in the tip jar from a fund I could top-up on a regular basis.

[sonofaragorn]

That's what the Basic Attention Token (BAT) from the Brave team tried (is still trying?) to do: https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

[commandar]

Kinda?

The fact that they chose to tie it to and advertise it as "get paid to see ads" is a significant turn-off in my mind even if the rest of the ecosystem theoretically works in functionally the same way.

In my mind, the entire point is to get away from advertising as a revenue stream entirely. I want to pay for the things I consume. If the advertising market has decided that my page impression is worth less than pocket change, I'd far rather just give that money to the publisher directly and avoid ads being part of the equation.

The core idea behind BAT isn't bad, but the marketing is pretty terrible if you're targeting people like me.

[bb88]

> The core idea behind BAT isn't bad

I think it is bad because it legitimizes bad practices of the marketing industry. "How bad could grabbing as much data from the population really be? We're sharing our profits!"

[jhaile]

I like that idea. If you opened an article you wanted to read, you could be prompted to pay a few cents. You click "yes", funds are transferred, and you read the article.

[jennyholzer]

this creates massive incentives for clickbait

[mrkramer]

No....because you would get to see preview of the article and if you trust the news outlet and the author, you would do it.