Stole the screenshot from molly0xfff@hachyderm.io as it reminds me of a mystery that I was never able to fully understand.

All these nag screens just beg for a quick, easy micropayment scheme. But none exist.

There were a number of proof-of-concept systems, which I have carefully tested,[^1] such as BAT or Web Monetization API, both offering an on-demand tip/subscription payment and time-based payments. From my perspective, that was brilliant - by means of a single click, you can tip or subscribe to the website’s premium content. But none of them were really picked up neither by the large publishers nor even by decentralised web, including Fediverse. One of the attempted ecosystems joining publishers and readers - Coil - has just shut down in February.[^2]

So, we’re back to the idiotic “register with your email and pay for subscription by typing your payment card details”, repeated hundreds of times on all websites you want to support 🤷‍♂️

Why? 🤔

[^1]: https://krvtz.net/posts/state-of-web-micropayments.html [^2]: https://www.coil.com/