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Flattr is closing down (2023)

flattr.com

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Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#61

Post by fkyoureadthedoc »

snapcaster wrote: post #49
jmyeet wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money. Why? Because Amazon is charging themselves for the infrastructure Twitch uses (ie AWS). It does that to justify cutting revenue splits (of subscriptions and ads) and increasing ad density. The minimum ad density now is generally 4 minutes per hour. Example: say I'm Pottery Barn and I sell furniture in the US. I sell a table for $500. It costs $1…

Can you expand on this? You're saying Twitch is only unprofitable in an accounting sense but would be a viable business if on its own? Saying their AWS costs are $0 seems like it would be even more "fake"

So Twitch is only a viable business model once you own enough data centers.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#62

Post by gaiagraphia »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #60
lnxg33k1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News should be paid for by people using it, making news dependent on government funding is bad, making news dependent on corporations is even worse, I tend to point the start of the decline of information and so democracy and plurality to the advent of blogs, free websites etc. Independent information that serves people, is funded by the people

>making news dependent on government funding is bad I wonder if having the government hand out tokens that you can spend on whatever media you want would be better.

Always been a huge fan of this as opposed to a "Tv license" type system. Being able to choose where 1% of your tax money goes each year.

IIRC, Poland does something similar: "Individual taxpayers of personal income tax have an opportunity to allocate 1% of their annual tax liability to specific Polish public welfare organizations. It is an easy way of supporting a charitable initiative and it does not require additional cost or a lot of effort."

https://www2.deloitte.com/pl/pl/pages/tax/articles/tax-news-...

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#63

Post by amadeuspagel »

TheFragenTaken wrote: post #31
amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Flattr 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…

Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it. Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, peop…

But I don't want to solve that problem. I don't want to have a parasocial relationship with the author of every blogpost that I read.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#64

Post by k__ »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #63
TheFragenTaken wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch subscriptions and Patreon has shown, that if you bind a website/project to a creator, and you get benefits for donating/subscribing, that you can have a very viable business model. Both as a creator, and as a platform to facilitate it. Most websites, and indeed open source projects are pretty faceless, and require limited interaction with it's creator. I believe, if you somehow "solve" that problem first, peop…

But I don't want to solve that problem. I don't want to have a parasocial relationship with the author of every blogpost that I read.

To quote something I literally read 5 minutes ago in "Perhaps the Stars":

"everyone has relationships with people far away, who inspire, entertain, role models, and also the people we work so hard for: fans, viewers, the next generation, kids somewhere, posterity. I think those asymmetrical relationships are part of what it means to be human, part of the teamwork. Humanity is teamwork. And the asymmetry doesn’t for a second make those relationships any less valid, or less important, or less real"

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#65

Post by geokon »

rcxdude wrote: post #43
geokon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know HN froths at the mouth on this topic.. But Cryptominers/Hashcash are also an alternative. It's only been made non-viable due to the major players who depend on ad-supremacy making sure all browsers fingerprint and block them

It's a terrible option. Cryptomining in a browser is pure banditry: it's incredibly inefficient to the point the user loses way, way more than the site gains, and it provides basically nothing to crypto.

Why is it banditry.. you can opt out of going to the website. I think you're not looking at the alternative objectively..

Ads are pure brain rot that just make society worse while providing virtually nothing useful to "the user"

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#66

Post by geokon »

scrollaway wrote: post #36
geokon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know HN froths at the mouth on this topic.. But Cryptominers/Hashcash are also an alternative. It's only been made non-viable due to the major players who depend on ad-supremacy making sure all browsers fingerprint and block them

It’s also a huge waste of energy at a time when the planet is on fire.

it's got some downsides - but so does the alternative. Have you considered the harmful effects of advertisement on society? I think people's cellphone warming up a bit is a smaller price to pay

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#67

Post by nradov »

vintermann wrote: post #40
infecto wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

You want to be nickeled and dimed? That was the whole problem Flattr was trying to solve. You decided up front how much you could afford to spend supporting artists and pursuits of creativity and public goods, and it got distributed evenly between everyone you choose to support. It was a great idea, and I was an early user. However, they had the problem that most of the people who you might want to support, were not…

Yes, I want to be nickeled and dimed for content. There's no way I'm going to sign up for any more subscriptions. But I would be happy to pay a few cents for individual articles or videos or podcasts if it was a single click process.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#68

Post by plorkyeran »

jmyeet wrote: post #45
Ygg2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Twitch very much a net loss?

Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money. Why? Because Amazon is charging themselves for the infrastructure Twitch uses (ie AWS). It does that to justify cutting revenue splits (of subscriptions and ads) and increasing ad density. The minimum ad density now is generally 4 minutes per hour. Example: say I'm Pottery Barn and I sell furniture in the US. I sell a table for $500. It costs $1…

Twitch runs its own data centers and does not use AWS for the video streaming platform. There are probably some incidental expenses which are actually Amazon profits, but they’re much smaller than you’re making them out to be.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#69

Post by steveklabnik »

onli wrote: post #7

Was Flattr big in the US? It was a "future big thing" in my part of Europe for a while, driven by discussions in Blogs and experiments with using it for bigger projects, iirc. It seemed like it never achieved much success of leaving that bubble though. After a while I never noticed it again. I thought about it recently when noticing that a gaming journalist used Steady for his incomes, and Patreon would be the other…

I signed up for it when it was announced. I don't remember any websites I used actually using it.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#70

Post by amelius »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Flattr 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…

Maybe adblockers could take the role of microdonation platforms.

I'd pay $100/yr to have ads removed from every site I visit, and have my $100 distributed among the websites that I visit most.

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