[sanswork]

They have to get almost 200 more conversions to make up for the single subscriber. Given a lot of these services offer $1 entry subscriptions and people still bounce it's unlikely you'll have a mass market excited to pay $0.10 everytime they want to read an article to make up for the person paying $20 to read a handful everyday.

Microtransactions have existed in a bunch of forms over the past 20 years and always fail to find take up because the mental load in deciding to pay or not is higher than the value receive.

Maybe ideal for agents but how many people are going to trust their agents with enough of a balance.

[thinkloop]

A $1 entry subscription where you have to type your name and credit card and submit and wait and now you have a relationship to manage, is infinitely more expensive than a 10 cent, automatic, non-recurring, one-time, no cancelation needed, pseudonomous, microtransaction.

[applfanboysbgon]

> pseudonomous

Which isn't private. Wallet ID 123 buys a 10c article from Leftist Newspaper A and one from Leftist Newspaper B. Leftist Newspaper A and B, being businesses, sell the information that Wallet ID 123 purchased an article to Data Broker A. Data Broker A correlates all purchases Wallet ID 123 has ever made and with a high degree of accuracy identifies who they are and their political affliation. Data Broker A sells this profile to anyone who asks for it, including far right governments who might be interested in throwing people out of helicopters based on their political affiliation. Unless you use Monero, this will happen, and Monero will obviously not be used.

Yes, 90% of people are careless and already give away this information right now. But you're suggesting closing the door on the rest who care to be able to protect themselves while still being able to use the internet, and cementing that nobody will ever have privacy for the rest of their lives, when we should be making an effort to make it harder to identify people, not easier.

[Sankozi]

90% of people are careless and 9.9% are ignorant thinking they are safe.

Microtransactional web is only a risk in an alternative universe which doesn't have spying/tracking/profiling funded by enormous ad industry.

In our world it is a big improvement.

[applfanboysbgon]

In what way is it even an improvement??? When has anyone ever said "yeah, actually, I love microtransactions!" Why is the final death of the free internet a good thing? Do you believe that by paying microtransactions you'll be exempt from the ads and spying, rather than simply being doubledipped?

[Sankozi]

What free internet? You always pay with your time and also usually with lots of tracking and ads.

AI can easily strip any ads for fractions of a cent. AI bots can be tracked - Open Router (or equivalent) will probably don't mind. That is the point of the article - ad and tracker infested webpages will soon be struggling, and some other forms of monetization needs to come.

[skybrian]

Perhaps some kind of mixer could be put in front of the micropayments system.

[sanswork]

Right but it means I can go read a bunch of content right away vs microtransactions where literally every click becomes a case of me deciding if it's worth 10c. That is exhausting.

Also if they are handling payments at some point you're going to be forming that relationship or they are going to get shut down for money laundering very quickly.

[Sankozi]

This is exhausting only if you don't value your time (which is the biggest cost when reading the news). People will learn how to make such decisions quickly.