Or micropayments :) I understand the aversion to ads but content creators(journalist, musicians, artists, programmers creating oss, etc) and the web as a whole produces useful stuff, it would be good to find a business model which supports them.
You are on Hacker News, so presumably you click some of the links. Some clickbait of course does end up here but linked articles are mostly not clickbait.
Similarly, you should pay attention to youtube links in comments (here and elsewhere) to start building a catalog of creators of content that you enjoy.
Also, incidentally, the apparent deluge of "haters" and "conspiracy theorists" you have noticed and pointed out here relates to a topic of frequent discussion in this forum (regulation of social media networks) and it is worth thinking about how it impacts us in these seemingly unrelated ways.
I'm happy to read a programming story written by a professional full time programmer just for fun.
I'm not sure I would equally enjoy a programming story written by someone who cannot find a programming job to pay the bills.
In the beginning, the internet was only people sharing things just for fun in their free time, without any commercial intent. I would like to go back there as the base model of how content websites operate.
Disclosure: I have previously pursued a business not dissimilar to the one under discussion.
Buyer's remorse doesn't make this more ethical.
So then, the question here is: How many websites are there that are worth my time to read, but not worth purchasing a $5 monthly subscription for?
So I'm not sure that there is a use for micropayments here. Either it's good quality, then they charge $5+ anyway, or it's "ad level quality" and then I'm better off not wasting my time.