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Flattr is closing down (2023)

flattr.com

101–110 of 247 posts

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#102

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…

> but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish. That's an odd definition of "selfish". Why is there an obligation to hand someone money? If you are running a business, be up front and charge money for it.

There is no obligation. That's the point.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#103
post #16

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…

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.

>so I could read a single article for $0.10 or something along those lines.

But there is "something along those lines"; it's called becoming a paid subscriber. When you amortize the expense across every article, you may even be getting a deal!

The fact that the example expense you'd be willing to incur to read content you actually enjoy is ten cents speaks to why this model won't work.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#104
post #99
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…

> Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money. This is totally untrue but keeps getting repeated. Yes, within Amazon, the non-AWS business units pay AWS to use AWS. But they pay cost plus a small percent, not retail rates. The cost to non-AWS businesses is the same as if they had to do it all on their own (actually a little less since they get to leverage AWS's economies of scale). The pro…

That seems impossible to determine. AWS retail charges for things that have an impossible relation to actual costs (think traffic) to begin with.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#105
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitch loses money because Amazon has decided to make Twitch lose money. This is totally untrue but keeps getting repeated. Yes, within Amazon, the non-AWS business units pay AWS to use AWS. But they pay cost plus a small percent, not retail rates. The cost to non-AWS businesses is the same as if they had to do it all on their own (actually a little less since they get to leverage AWS's economies of scale). The pro…

That seems impossible to determine. AWS retail charges for things that have an impossible relation to actual costs (think traffic) to begin with.

AWS knows how much it costs to deliver their own service. How do you think they determine their own profits and prices? They use those same calculations to bill internal customers.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#107

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…

Ok, hear me out: Here is how to remove all unwanted ads from the Internet. ISPs move to subscription-based billing - a flat base fee to cover their own costs and some profit, plus a 'content' fee that is divided among the sites visited and the bandwidth used. The 'content' fee goes to a global rights association that distributes it to creators.

Why is the answer to "how to remove ads" always "track the hell out of everyone at some other layer"

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#108
post #65
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Your description of ads is my description of cryptocurrency.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#109

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…

> if only they could make a small donation to every website they liked - but that doesn't work because people are fundamentally too selfish.

Hear hear, this is exactly why bittorrent trackers is just a fad that will disappear as quickly as it appeared. What, are people supposed to just share data freely without getting paid for it? Good luck I tell them, it's impossible because every single person is just too selfish.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#110
post #98

Never heard of the service before, but fun to learn the guy behind it was one of the dudes behind The Pirate Bay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sunde

Which speaking of, ran/runs a bunch of other useful services. IPredator (sadly no longer with us) was an alright VPN service and Njalla is (still with us) a really great domain name registrar for people who care about their privacy.

Seems RIAA and MPA are still trying to go after Njalla as far as I can tell, so you get some hints that it's actually working as advertised :)

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