Long back I was wondering if a tip jar type service that'll get me access to what I actually want to see would be a better solution in place of subscribing to every website that produces an interesting article once in a while. There were a couple of such services but they never got popular.
Perhaps this model alone is not sustainable but it could be paired with ads (as in ads or fee off a tip jar pay). Even then, it surely won't lead to infinite growth, which is the only goal nowadays.
Sounds a bit like what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr tried to do, but unfortunately failed.
I'd love to see some kind of cross-publication subscription service where I pay 20 bucks a month, and I can read, say, 100 articles from the 40 largest publications.
I'd rather see something involving micropayments, likely using the Lightning network, to make viewing a single article for the cost of one viable.
And in fairness this does exist on Nostr (I think in multiple forms). It's just not widely used. Not least because most on Nostr don't really believe in the idea that information can be owned in the first place.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/2156 for discussion around the NIP.
Apple News is the one I know of there.
Micro payments should be integrated into our browsers and agents; we can just conveniently pay up for what we want to read, rather than subscribing for a whole bunch of stuff we have no interest in.
This is the way to go
x402.org
Or better, L402.tech