I did not know about the SomethingAwful pay-to-change-someone-else’s-title thing. I’m in awe.
Bundling is a way to make a money-moderatred forum like this work with normal payment processors, and I agree that it mostly sucks. I might want one recipe from NYTimes Cooking, but to get it, I have to pay for a month-long subscription and that’s just stupid. It seems to me that pay per action is much better…however, there is friction.
There’s a pretty good article about this from 1999 (Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs) that comes to the same conclusion as you: it’s too annoying to bother with really tiny payments.
But, most people don’t seem to mind tapping a like button or retweet button, and on this money-moderated forum, the upvote button is just as easy to tap, it just automatically withdraws a set amount from the users wallet. I think good UX could get the friction down to a pretty low level that would not be cumbersome to users.
In the case of something like Flattr, I suspect most users stop using it because it’s donation-based. If people don’t have to pay, they often won’t. In the concept I outline above, users are required to pay to send any signal (whether it’s a reply or an upvote or a post). If they want to do the action, they must pay (keeping in mind that the money any user does pay mostly goes to other users).
I don’t deny that it’s a weird system. And I’ve appreciated the feedback from people here.