> For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.

A straw man. That's not the only way to do it. Asking this instead is helpful: "what might make this work?" and explore that in depth and try some experiments.* It might be a collective action problem or a first-mover problem or a culture problem. Such classes of problems are hard, sometimes even insanely hard for anyone lacking massive influence, but not categorically unworkable or impossible.

> I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work

I don't buy this generalization. Maybe micropayments don't "work" yet according to some (unstated, unfortunately) ideas of scope or degree. But smallish payments have worked (to some degree, for some periods of time) for music downloads and political contributions, just to mention a few things. There is something to smaller-than-usual payments, this seems pretty clear. (Yes, there is a sort of lower quantum based on the slice a payment processor takes, so creative bundling is often needed.)

Maybe micropayments according to some particular definition are unlikely to work for online content under current constraints. Still, the world is a big place, and the future (hopefully) leaves a lot of room for experimentation.

Aside: maybe a bigger problem is the status-quo idea of "news". Most of the "news" I real feels almost like junk food.

* I prefer to ask "what would make something work?" or "what is blocking something from working?" rather than claiming "X can (or can't) work". This is not because I'm naive or an optimist. I'm neither. But I'm genuinely curious about how and why things work, and the way one frames the question has a big effect on where your brain leads you.

P.S. WRT exaggeration or overconfidence: just say no. Let's make nuance the norm. It can start here, one comment at a time.

P.P.S. I'll say this again, and it _should_ make people uncomfortable: I'm getting more value out of interacting with a high quality LLM with a solid prompt than a typical comment on HN, and this does not bode well. I still hope that people can step it up, but we're not there yet, for various reasons.