alt Hacker NewsWe should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers.
It didn’t catch on back then. But time are changing.
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Paywalling with extremely easy, one-click payment of very small amount might work. Paywalling does still incentivize things like misleading, sensationalized click-bait titles, but that's pretty much the norm everywhere.
Alternatively, if there was a subscription that covered a massive amount of blogs/news bundled into one low-cost subscription, that might also work. What I heavily doubt is if donation-based micropayments will ever find enough users to remain profitable.
I don't remember that, though I only started with early Netscape. Do you have more detail?
It has never worked and will never work. What has been proven to work is syndication, ie putting a giant amount of content behind a single paywall. Like Spotify, Netflix, Cable TV, other streamers do. Text publishers could easily do that if they wanted to. But it needs to be extremely broad, and not decided by ideological leanings or snobbery and such.
> We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers.
I don't think this was ever a thing. I know there's HTTP 402 and before 2000 there were some standards around payment being pursued but AFAIK nothing ever made it into browsers. Or am I missing something?