No explanation at all. Something seems kind of "fishy", some aspect of it being hidden...
Flattr is closing down (2023)
21–30 of 247 posts
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#22I hate to be this guy, but 410 seems a more appropriate code: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/410
Someone could buy the flattr.com domain and then the site would be live again.
IMO, "410 Gone" is only appropriate for URLs that contain unique identifiers because those are guaranteed to never be recycled.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#23Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere el…
Sadly agree. I still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.
Since we have to assume that they assessed it, I suspect that they concluded the math would not work out.
A possible explanation: News websites are cross financing their content. You spending a dollar on the paper, that only interests you in parts, is part of a model that makes it work (and probably also part of a model, where papers still feel wiggle room to editorialize for stuff they think is important, even though it might not click)
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly agree. I still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.
> still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines. Same. I'm shocked that the NYT didn't use Flattr on their articles for this. To access the full version of the NYT currently costs $0.50 a week so it would have been possible the NYT could charge $0.50 per article, or $5 for the year (one time no subscription) through Flat…
I come across paywalled articles at least a couple of times a week. I’d gladly pay $0.50 for most of them to access the single article.
It just needs to be easy, don’t make me create an account a subscription and shit like that. Things like cryptocurrencies could work great for these kinds of transactions. Shame it became what it is now.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#25I hate to be this guy, but 410 seems a more appropriate code: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/410
I thought the same thing. You aren't the only one.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly agree. I still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.
> still wish when it came to news sites there was a micropayment option so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines. Same. I'm shocked that the NYT didn't use Flattr on their articles for this. To access the full version of the NYT currently costs $0.50 a week so it would have been possible the NYT could charge $0.50 per article, or $5 for the year (one time no subscription) through Flat…
We have to assume they have considered this in the past and come to the conclusion it just doesn't work.
I suspect tying a purchasing decision to every page visit just leads to people automatically backing out of the page with a very low conversion rate because it's just too annoying to decide whether to pay for something you're not sure the value of.
Despite all the gnashing of teeth, nothing competes with ads on the web.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#27Flattr is the kind of idea that sounds great, that people love talking about - if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. This is why ads are the only viable business model for a kind of "ephemeral website" - something you visit only briefly, derive some short knowledge or pleasure from until you follow a link somewhere el…
Sadly disagree, I've put some BTC on my Podcasting 2.0 player (Podverse) and stream it to every creator that wants them (via the Bitcoin Lightning network).
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#28This is very unfortunate and surprising, goes to show that even after 14 years Flattr didn't find any market. I was hoping for bitcoin and crypto to show low usage after around 15 years of no legitimate use cases other than speculation, ransomware and other scammy things, but Flattr's shutdown was a surprise. Flattr billed itself as the RSS of donations to really get rid of those ugly PayPal buttons on blogs, website…
Maybe one thing that held them back was that one of the founders was also founder of The Pirate Bay. Maybe potential big clients didn't want the association.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#29This is very unfortunate and surprising, goes to show that even after 14 years Flattr didn't find any market. I was hoping for bitcoin and crypto to show low usage after around 15 years of no legitimate use cases other than speculation, ransomware and other scammy things, but Flattr's shutdown was a surprise. Flattr billed itself as the RSS of donations to really get rid of those ugly PayPal buttons on blogs, website…
Flattr was trying to bootstrap a sort of two-sided market from scratch. They needed to get both hosts/"content providers" and clients/"users" to sign up.
This is just a very, very hard problem, and if we're being honest about it, most of the success stories that come to mind got there through burning venture capital, which perhaps Flattr didn't have enough of?
I don't think the idea is fundamentally flawed, it's just very difficult to do this kind of thing.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#30I hate to be this guy, but 410 seems a more appropriate code: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/410
first thing I noticed also. I would suggest is a 417 Expectation failed. https://http.dog/417
No, that would not be appropriate, since there is no “Expect” header you could send in the request to get a successful response.
From RFC 9110, HTTP Semantics:
The 417 (Expectation Failed) status code indicates that the expectation given in the request's Expect header field (Section 10.1.1) could not be met by at least one of the inbound servers.
— https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#name-417-expectation-...>