[Mark_Book]

I can't see the sense in it. It's analogous to a situation where a newspaper's only paying customers would be other newspapers. The content creators send each other money and the only net beneficiaries are Flattr and the vast mass of interenet users who continue to view for free

[Scriptor]

Because the vast majority of people will not be accepting donations because they aren't content creators. If a content creator puts $10 in per month, he could quickly get much more back if a hundred non-content creators each give $1.

[akadruid]

You're dreaming. There is no pool of millions of non-creators willing to jump through hoops and sign up for a recurring monthly for your article. And there never will be an article worth doing that for, and they will never join. The only people who will ever join are the pie-in-the-sky dreamers who desperately want this to work on their blog. It's just a giant pyramid scheme. The suckers are the blog owners, and the lies to make them join are the millions on non-creators who will never exist.

[Mark_Book]

AFAIK 'donate' buttons have never proved successful. People don't like paying for stuff they can have for free

[ugh]

This is not a donate button.

Donate buttons are complicated and require you to make all those decisions. With Flattr you have to decide once how much you would like to give per month and that’s that. One decisions and you can click away. It’s hassle free.

I don’t think we know why people don’t like donate buttons and your hypothesis (“People don't like paying for stuff they can have for free.”) might be wrong. Maybe all that’s needed is making donating easier. Maybe not.

[klenwell]

I agree. Existing donate buttons are cumbersome and discourage the shift in perception that's needed. I think Flattr's on the right track but the subscription model at its base is still overly cumbersome and inflexible. They've indicated they have more flexible and radical models in mind. Hope they pursue them.

[steveklabnik]

I hope they don't. If it gets more flexible, I won't use it. When this was brought up on Reddit months ago, everyone wanted to see sliders that controlled the percentage of amount that went to different people... it's the definition of a useless power feature.

The simplicity is the entire point. "More flexible" == more complicated, and then I won't want to use it anymore.

[klenwell]

I agree sliders would be overdoing it. But what about penny, nickel, dime, quarter options. Of course, they'd have to be abstracted for an international audience, but make it analogous to coinage, spare change, something tangible that people intuitively relate to. I agree that you don't want too many options. You want just enough flexibility.

I think a really innovative approach would be a pledge/rescind model. Let people freely pledge up front up to a certain liberal limit then present them with the registration, payment, tedious paperwork all at once after the fact. Let them welsh out on as many pledges as they want. What is a pledge that is later rescinded worth? Less than a penny obviously but more than nothing at all. I think most people would willingly agree to follow through on their donations even with given the opportunity to back out, if the details weren't too burdensome at the outset.

The problem with every microcurrency scheme I've come across is that it enforces the kind of rigid transactional exchanges that fit traditional commerce models when, with a little imagination, they could do very interesting things with the networking and computational possibilities available through the internet.

[steveklabnik]

It depends on how you define 'successful.' Most people have the metric wrong, which would be conversions. The correct metric is, "Do I make enough to pay for the effort and time doing this?"

[Mark_Book]

replying to ugh and steveklabnik: I guess I'm a cynic but I can't see people just sticking a meaningful amount of dosh in this every month for no marginal gain. Museums have tried similar methods with voluntary contributions instead of entrance fees it doesn't work. Now if they were to get a mention as a valued internet patron on flattr or on the sites they give to then maybe