I completely agree that decision fatigue is real, but we're still speculating when it comes to how it would manifest in relation to micropayments or if it would at all.

For example, does it relate more to the size or number of payments per day?

Does an automated payment cause the same amount of fatigue as a manual payment?

For example, tipping via the Basic Attention Token is a bit of a hassle if you're doing it all the time. The same goes for things like Flattr.

But if you consider something as simple as the model behind the 1998 paper on probabilistic micropayments, it would just be something that sits in your browser and you'd have a gauge as to how much money you spend and set a threshold. The only decision appear when you deposit funds and set the threshold. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/BFb0055469

There's really only three decisions per cycle in that case.

Yes, there's a potential that this will cause some friction preventing people from infinitely and thoughtlessly browsing the web.

(1) You can't seriously tell me in 2021 that's categorically a bad thing. (If you're old enough, imagine what you'd lose in the experience of going to Blockbuster if you could pick all of the videos that you wanted and watch them for as long as you wanted so long as you watched ads inbetween. Part of the fun was browsing and picking the things you wanted. The technology also had necessary stopping cues [e.g. changing tapes/dvds]... perhaps not a perfect analogy, but point being paying on a per-user basis for content has several pro-social outcomes we've almost forgotten as a society to be weighed against any amount of decision fatigue incurred).

(2) Micropayment gated content, Ad-supported content, free content and subsidized content can all live together. We're not going to instantly switch Google and Facebook Ads to micropayments overnight.