>I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are there? I would like to see us move to dire

>I am part of this "we", and yet I ask myself, what am I willing to give as indirect payment? What other options are there? I would like to see us move to direct payments. If direct payments were the norm, the web would be less polluted with UX anti-patterns and other crap. There's nothing particularly extreme about this idea. We pay for all our products and services in the physical world. We pay for streaming music and video. Heck, even in social networking, people pay/paid to use WhatsApp, iMessage and BBM, which are/were two of the largest messaging platforms (BBM and WhatsApp had monthly fees and iMessage is paid for with device purchases). If your social media platform cannot convince people to pay, say, $1.99/month, perhaps it just isn't enriching the lives of your end users, and thus shouldn't exist. A lot of people (particularly those focused on growth hacking) would say this is a flaw of direct payments, but I view it as a feature.