This is a classic market failure / coordination problem. Most of us understand the articles don't write themselves (AI summaries and fake news bots notwithstand

This is a classic market failure / coordination problem. Most of us understand the articles don't write themselves (AI summaries and fake news bots notwithstanding), first party research and fact-checking is time-consuming and expensive, and newspapers are merely responding to cutthroat market pressures. There's zero Slack [0] in the online news business. I think it's more a problem of convenience than refusal to pay. I continue to find it surprising that browsers haven't made a more aggressive push into business models for micro-payments, or Netflix-style clustered content subscriptions, where each article incurs zero marginal cost, and some fixed recurring stream is divvied up based on what is read. I get why Google doesn't do this, so as to not cannibalize the bread and butter of their ad revenue, but it seems to align with Mozilla's and Apple's interests, and a differentiator against the current market leader. Brave [1] is at least a good start. If we really wanted to disincentivize clickbait fluff (not to mention abysmal reading experiences), maybe even give sites/articles a little extra share in response to browser-integrated micro-surveys. Readers usually know when they're being bullshitted, and when they've consumed something of substance, and I suspect would be eager to reward/punish accordingly. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/ [1] https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/