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Comment by askvictor | Hacker News Reader

To enable micropayments for content such as news.

True micropayments integrated in browser would be amazing. Imagine instead of ads or subscriptions, you could pay a few pennies for an article. It would revolutionize online content, in a good way. Nobody would be willing to pay for clickbait type stuff, but I think people would be willing to pay for quality content and journalism.

There's been a debate for a while now about this. Clay Shirky, Walter Isaacson, Jakob Nielsen, Norman Hardy, Kevin Kelley and others have expressed arguments for and against(mostly for) micropayments. But there's yet to be a success story, most early implementations failed(BitPass, Ezcash, Peppercoin) but that was before cryptocurrencies. Now there's a new crop(Steemit, 21.co?, etc) that are trying again. Interesting to see how this will all pan out.

True micropayments integrated in browser would be amazing.

You might want to check out Brave, a Chromium-based browser with micropayments built-in: https://brave.com/publishers/.

I want to pay a fixed amount per month, and distribute that money over the websites I visited, weighted by the time I spent there.

A micropayment system tied in to browsing history might make this possible. Otherwise it would require essentially a syndicated subscription system, which is server side, but would need enough content producers on board to make feasible, and they probably wouldn't be able to agree.

Sounds like https://flattr.com/

I fear this too.

First they try to make HTTP impossible to use (nag pop up) to limit the websites, then they try to introduce pay-per-view model and subscription model.

Welcome back to the pre-1999 AOL/MicrosoftNetwork/Compuserve/BTX/Minitel/etc - closed networks where pay-per-page-view was prevailing - then the free open WWW won, supported by advertising.

The good thing, it only takes other websites that provide the same or comparable content for free.

Quality content costs money. How do you propose paying journalists to investigate and write? It's either ads, payments of some sort (micro or subscription) or state-sponsored media. My original comment was not out of fear, quite the opposite.

This would be perfect for me, and I suspect there are a lot of people in my situation: I would far prefer to pay for news than have intrusive and possibly dangerous advertising, and I do subscribe to a couple of news sites. I'm not going to subscribe to every paywalled news site that I might want to read, but I would be happy to pay for an occasional article.

If micropayments were ever to really take off, it would shift the balance of power on the internet in an interesting way.

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