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Comment by mishagale | Hacker News Reader

I've always felt one of the main reasons for this is that we never really got true microtransactions on the web. Pretty much all payment processors charge at least $0.20-30 per transaction.

My theory is that if there was a way to frictionlessly pay, say, $0.02 to access a piece of content ad-free, most people would be pretty okay with it. They key part is making the transaction frictionless - no more than 1-click/1000ms.

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What's the challenge in already having this? There could be an aggregator service that has all the news sites joined with it and pays out on your visits to those news sites? Is it that it would be hard to get all news sites or content providers to accept this single one universal service?

Apple tried with Apple News+ and hasn't exactly succeeded. If they can't succeed, I fail to see how anyone else could. Maybe a few media incumbents?

They'll never do this because it dispels the illusion of independent media. It's the same reason cable news buys and shows ads: they want you to think the rest of the content isn't for sale. The truth is that the news is paid for by people who want to control the narrative, whether it's Logan Paul or Uncle Sam.

Old Flattr was something along those lines. You had to click though. (Like the old embedded Facebook likes. Are they old? Haven't seen them in a while, could be because of uBlock though.)

I really liked it. A view Blogs, Podcasts and the KeePass-Homepage had it. Then they sold to Chines investors and pivoted to god knows what.

If publisher accounts can be billed by the payment processor every month instead of every transaction and processor charges based on a percentage of monthly transaction.

I feel this is a business negotiation instead of a tech issue. But then I may be just clueless.

Yeah, I'd like to see a really good microtransactions implementation.

Including some way to keep that from marginalizing people in the current very inequitable capitalist environment.

A non-technical challenge is that you'd need someone to lead this in good faith, and they'd need both principles and clout. The first 5 candidates I thought of just now seemed much better candidates in the past, than currently.

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