[shakesbeard]

I loved Flattr ~10 years ago. You said "I have $40/month" and then these funds were allocated based on which things you flattr'd during the month (there were little buttons on the websites/blogs). Of course you could also say "include this content creator every month".

It was so simple and elegant. As a consumer I had cost control, too. Plus there were no micro-transactions, only one charge to me.

[sebzim4500]

I think any Patreon competitor really needs to have a way for people to get access to bonus content when they pay. Even if the content isn't really worth the money, people are more likely to overpay for something they like than make a donation.

[BlueTemplar]

Did you miss Flattr 2.0 - a browser extension looking at your engagement ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15557954

[karl42]

I do not want to support anything that optimizes for "engagement". It penalized all the really useful offerings that I use for a minute to solve my problem and then don't touch again in a long time and instead encourages addictiveness.

[BlueTemplar]

There is no addictiveness here, because the person whose behavior is measured and the one being rewarded for it are two different people.

EDIT : I think what you missed is how this is an issue mostly with advertising-funded websites, especially platforms. More views = more money for the website. (It even goes for Hacker News, somewhat !) But for Flattr 2.0, more/longer browsing doesn't (directly) equal more money (even for the creators, in aggregate) ! Even Patreon has an issue like this - GP is talking about the bundling issue, but Patreon still has an artificial moat that exacerbates this : not only it's annoying to reduce the funding for many other creators at once when you add a new one, you can't even reduce your funding for a specific artist to less than $1/month - regardless of how much you might be paying per month to Patreon in total !

Or are you against free markets ?? They tend to promote what people want and manufacturing wants too, you know ?

Flattr 2.0 of course still has some issues : why a very short music video should be rewarded much less than a long form blog post ? (OtoH the music video is much more likely to be much more popular across a wider variety of people, so I guess that issue is self-fixing ? EDIT: not so much for a poem ?)

[karl42]

The creators are encouraged to create engaging/addicting/long content if that is what causes higher payments. Therefore, I much preferred the original Flattr where I defined which creator was beneficial to me.

I don't think that Flattr2 is more true to a free markets vision than Flattr1. Neither do I believe that a free market is necessarily better than a regulated market. Markets are a highly useful tool, not a goal themselves.

[BlueTemplar]

Hmm, good point, but since the extension is open source you could always have decided to disable that part, or even more importantly - reprogram it yourself to whatever definition and weights of engagement that you would like ?

https://github.com/search?q=flattr&type=repositories

(It's also out of control of the creators trying to artificially increase engagement by doing tricks with the Flattr 1.0 buttons on their websites.)

Apologies for linking to GitHub, but that's where the official repository is, so...

[kzrdude]

I used the original flattr and apparently missed the reboot too. Flattr 1 was dead for too long to carry me over anyway.

[BlueTemplar]

There's a 3rd-ish version that stopped promoting the extension and is closer to Patreon but with a set overall rate.