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Totally agree. Micropayments have not worked because major news outlets won't use them. Technically it's a solved problem. See Coil for example: https://coil.

• hombre_fatal 5y ago
  It's not a technical problem but a business and social one. For example, getting your users to give their money to a third party that then might come back to you isn't better than getting paid directly—it's even more friction and you're giving all the power away to a third party. The user experience isn't necessarily better either. I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with this weird Coil site instead of just this one service that I want. And then there's a chicken-egg problem of no sites using Coil, so no money in Coil, so no value for the user, thus no value for the content creator. Just like every micropayment attempt before Coil. As engineers we like to think that everything is a technical problem. But the technical implementation of a micropayment solution is 0.0001% of the work.
  • pier25 5y ago
    > I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with this weird Coil site instead of just this one service that I want. Obviously if you just want this one service you can subscribe to it. No need to use something like Coil. > And then there's a chicken-egg problem Yeah absolutely. I had a Coil subscription for a couple of months and ended up canceling it because IMGUR was the only site that had an integration with it. But what I know 100% is I won't pay a subscription to the NYT, The Economist, or any other news outlet to read 1-2 article per week at the most.