> But how would you know if a site is useless or not unless you visit it and read its content?

Noscript identifies all the useless sites for me when nothing renders and I see that they're pulling in scripts from 20+ trackers, CDNs, and ad networks. I avoid violating any social contract by never having seen their dreck.

Which isn't really all that different from the paper magazine model.

Yeah, you might risk your five bucks on that first purchase of Time, but you'll know soon enough if you ever want to spend it again.

I don't want to pay money to read a website that I have never seen before.

under this scheme any smart website owner would allow certain amounts of usage to be for free, and optimize discoverability for things that are of high value, a win for both them and the viewer.