[dlbucci]

I think a large portion of enshittification comes from sites being advertising revenue driven. This leads to them needing more users with higher engagement, so they grow beyond their scope first and then shittify everything when they need to start making money (see reddit). A large reason sites have to be ad driven is that requiring users to sign up and pay for a site is a huge blocker for most people. So I feel like having a standard easy way for users to send money to a site they use for the utility they receive would go some ways to reduce enshittification, not increase it. But maybe I'm just an optimist.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I'm not saying there aren't good use-cases for this. There absolutely are. What I'm saying is that this tool WILL be used well beyond those cases in ways that make the internet much worse than the ad and surveillance nonsense we currently have to deal with.

As a thought experiment, consider a truly terrible group of smart and capable people. The kind of people who will exploit this new tool to extract and squeeze every cent from others to themselves without any care for what is destroyed, broken, or ruined. Imagine they do exactly this and become wildly rich. Their uncaring ruthlessness richly rewarded leading to normalization of such tactics which are then taken on by others as just the 'way things are done'. I ask you to consider just how this tool could be used for evil and then know that it will be.

This tool will allow any/all action on a website to be easily monetized. This will mean that eventually EVERY action will be monetized. Oh, and the ads and surveillance? They'll be there too.

[BlueTemplar]

I can see the risk... yet it's only a risk, and we're already starting to see the tidal wave of SPAM that ever smarter neural networks allow.

(Also, thankfully, there are still corners of the Internet that haven't been plagued by either ads or spam - because not popular enough - and are likely to remain so.)