[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 What is a pledge that is later rescinded worth?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.