Comment by Nextgrid

I would say the biggest problem is advertising. It would be much less harmful if commercial content was upfront about asking for your wallet, and the transaction ended there (the publisher's incentives are directly aligned with the end-customer's). Instead, we have stuff that's technically "free" but actually comes with plenty of strings attached such as mismatched incentives - the content is only there as bait and the actual objective is to get you to look at an ad or think a certain way for commercial gain. Worse, this "free" stuff being out there means there's not enough pressure to build a good, universal micropayments system to displace advertising, so the problem remains.