At some point we have to trust some online service to keep our data safe, and that service could theoretically provide an anonymous payment proxy.
Ignoring whether one believes that Apple is a good custodian of one's privacy, they already have the email anonymization feature. They could do the same for anonymous payments. That would really only work for small payments which could not be refunded, because the refund process would likely need to expose some personal information.
For me, the concern is not anonymity. It's purely a matter of how much extra noise and email crap I have to suffer if I sign up for "free" access. The user experience once signed in is often just as bad, but differently so.
As for paying for an article, the issue is that most of these sites hide so much of the article that you really don't know what you're paying for. And frankly speaking, most "articles" nowdays are just fluff to raise the visibility of some developer or the company they work for. In some cases, I think that university students from certain parts of the world are being required to generate a certain number of posts per period (as part of their training?). So the signal to noise ratio is continuously getting worse.
At some point we have to trust some online service to keep our data safe, and that service could theoretically provide an anonymous payment proxy.
Ignoring whether one believes that Apple is a good custodian of one's privacy, they already have the email anonymization feature. They could do the same for anonymous payments. That would really only work for small payments which could not be refunded, because the refund process would likely need to expose some personal information.
For me, the concern is not anonymity. It's purely a matter of how much extra noise and email crap I have to suffer if I sign up for "free" access. The user experience once signed in is often just as bad, but differently so.
As for paying for an article, the issue is that most of these sites hide so much of the article that you really don't know what you're paying for. And frankly speaking, most "articles" nowdays are just fluff to raise the visibility of some developer or the company they work for. In some cases, I think that university students from certain parts of the world are being required to generate a certain number of posts per period (as part of their training?). So the signal to noise ratio is continuously getting worse.