Yeah the time for micropayments is arriving. You need to be able to pay a few cents to load a page or call an API or whatever. And the site owner needs to get most of that. And you need to do it somehow without having an account set up on every website you use.
I think it’s far more likely the internet reverts to its 1998 state: hobby sites which don’t expect payment. Will the quality of some sites go down? Sure, but there are so many people on the internet with niche interests that I think we still end up with plenty of content. Reviews, music, discussion, news, etc. If anything this change represents less centralisation. Maybe it’ll be more confusing to know where to find certain discussion or reviews on a particular product, but this is why search engines were invented. We kind of forgot that.
I don't see how being a hobby site makes it more sustainable to have crawlers making insane numbers of constant requests to your server for seemingly no good reason? If what used to be a website you could host for some small number of people who cared scaled well now it is a hundred times more expensive to run.
2026 hosting prices are less than 1/100th of 1998 hosting prices, especially if you adjust for inflation
Great, yet another way for corporations to nickle and dime us to death.