I would do this with one caveat: sometimes people link really garbage articles. There was one here yesterday written so poorly I feel less informed for having read it. I would like the option to take my money back for reading such a bad article.

I do want to pay for news, but I can’t subscribe to everyone, or even just “the good ones”, because I do use aggregator sites.

I also wonder if that would lead to a model of paying every website for content because if Reddit is good enough to train AI on and good enough that many people include it in their Google searches, who is to say the comments aren’t “articles”?

or reading time or whatever

Could result in badly written, overly long articles and poor UI to force people to take longer. I know you’re just spitballing, but thought I’d point out how easy it is to induce unintended consequences.