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.

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.

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.

x402.org