alt Hacker NewsIt's also the incentive structure that's different. E.g. I can choose to buy cheaper LED lights to reduce my electricity costs because the interests of lightbulb companies are mostly orthogonal to the (usage-based) interests of the utility providers.
Micro-payments are more akin to a hypothetical world in which the lightbulb company gets paid via my electricity bill; now they have an incentive to sell incandescents over LEDs. Similar to how micro-payment (and advertising) based news companies have an incentive to sell click-bait, because they're getting paid based on usage rather than a flat fee.
This seems like a problem of perverse incentives independent of the medium of micropayment (cash vs. ad farming), no? I suppose the only way around that particular problem would be to decouple their revenue from the number of people actually accessing their content, which as far as I can tell precludes those people being the patrons. Instead the patron would be some larger corporate or public body auditing and funding them based on merit.
Curiously, there are still perverse incentives even in the case of lightbulbs and other consumable goods or technologies: planned obsolescence, delay of technology upgrades, and deliberate backroom deals from associated resource providers.