[fizzbuzzdizz]

first video games, then phone apps, and now finally the web. the micro transactionification of everything is complete! what a wonderful world we live in. just know people will remember your role you played in this, and if you think history is going to look at you kindly you have a very very rude awakening comming

[tln]

I remember feeding arcade machines coin after coin, buying magazines and newspapers, and paying to see a movie. Those aren't all microtransactions but they are direct purchase -> consume content.

So is the rise of microtransactions mostly history repeating itself? There are nuances but web microtransactions feel a lot more like putting a quarter in to an arcade machine than the iap for phone apps.

[fizzbuzzdizz]

this isnt putting a quarter in a machine. thats what we already have today. this is making the pinball game free but now you have to pay 1 cent every time you hit paddle button.

[me-vs-cat]

> this isnt putting a quarter in a machine. thats what we already have today.

What have I missed where I can, today, feasibly pay $0.25 at a time, online, regardless of other factors such as privacy, without putting down a larger balance at a time from which $0.25 is deducted?

[throwthrowuknow]

This is an attempt to fix the currently broken payment system for the web that has caused a lot of the problems we face: clickbait, paywalls, requiring account signup, ad bloat, personal info collection, etc.

It would enable informational sites to fund themselves with small anonymous payments per article instead of squeezing ad revenue and personal data out of their customers.

Incumbents will hopefully be disrupted by this enabling more independent authors to actually make a living.

[fizzbuzzdizz]

if i made a list of the worst possible solutions the problems you just listed number one on that list is this idea. if you think for a second that this will solve even ONE of those problems i have a bridge to sell you

clickbait: the revenue per click is going to go up thus driving even more incentive to produce clickbait titles with no real content (hey they have already paid by the time they find out its not real but o well). also enter the age of AI agent clickbait designed specifically to entice them. you just made the existing problem worse and created a new one

paywalls: well yeah, it makes the paywall go away, by paying, just like you could today

not collecting personal info: yeah other than the ledger of every single article you’ve ever clicked and paid for

account signups: you think cloudflare will be the only one in the game? welcome to a world of 50 different micropayment wallets you have to maintain and keep funded or you wont be able to browse the internet