A few alternatives for micro donations that people have mentioned:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/
Any others, let me know
Flattr is closing down (2023)
141–150 of 247 posts
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#142Flattr 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…
I'd like to push back on this. It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. This is because ads proliferated not just creation of giant amounts of content but they also incentivize quantity over quality. Second thing that is holding this back is no seamless way to send a payment from your browser to the website (owner). This has to be native in the browser, user-ce…
"Is the content worth paying for?" feels like the wrong metric wrt. tipping.
I think a more accurate question is "Does the content make me want to support the creator?"
This is why tipping thrives in settings like Twitch, which is heavily geared around engendering parasocial relationships.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not seeding a torrent requires more effort than seeding, it's also basically free.
This argument does not take bandwidth into account. If the goal is to download a lot of different files, you will be effectively limiting your download with keeping (especially very popular) torrents seeded. I stand corrected if somebody could please disprove me.
Isn't bandwidth up- and download independent usually, so seeding (uploading) would not affect your downloads?
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#144I don't want to throw yet more GenAI crap at this, but could RAG be a possible innovation that unlocks microtransactions?
I'm imagining a backend database of creator-submitted content. The LLM runs RAG on it, pays the creators it relied on to synthesize answers a microtransaction. Then also sells the Q-and-A as a subscription service to the end user. Maybe payouts are conditional on positive user feedback. The solution can also flag queries it sees that don't have great answers yet.
Same moat as search, not reliant on advertising.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#145I don't see creators clamoring for micropayments. The reason is simple: It's not a good way to actually earn an income. Creators need stable and predictable support. Subscriptions work much better for them. It's a tried-and-true business model.
What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. That's the fundamental failure here, and it's a big one.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#146I don't want to throw yet more GenAI crap at this, but could RAG be a possible innovation that unlocks microtransactions? I'm imagining a backend database of creator-submitted content. The LLM runs RAG on it, pays the creators it relied on to synthesize answers a microtransaction. Then also sells the Q-and-A as a subscription service to the end user. Maybe payouts are conditional on positive user feedback. The soluti…
“We’re using AI to build the Spotify of Yahoo Answers!”
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Obviously AWS knows how much it costs to run all of AWS. But that doesn't translate to accurately knowing the marginal costs of a gigabyte of outbound traffic. They probably do know, but it isn't necessary at all to determine their profit, or to set their prices. "Just" set prices to what the market is willing to pay, and determine profit as total income minus total expenses over the whole operation.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#148I don't want to throw yet more GenAI crap at this, but could RAG be a possible innovation that unlocks microtransactions? I'm imagining a backend database of creator-submitted content. The LLM runs RAG on it, pays the creators it relied on to synthesize answers a microtransaction. Then also sells the Q-and-A as a subscription service to the end user. Maybe payouts are conditional on positive user feedback. The soluti…
> I'm imagining a backend database of creator-submitted content. The LLM runs RAG on it, pays the creators it relied on to synthesize answers a microtransaction.
That sounds like you're describing Mechanical Turk? (And also "let's train an LLM on Reddit/StackOverflow). Problem is, the humans in Mechanical Turk loop were economically motivated to outsource to AI even before LLMs.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#149Earlier 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"
A video streaming platform isn't a natural fit for a hosting service famous for charging outrageous rates for outgoing traffic. If they were neither owned by Amazon nor had a special deal with AWS (like Netflix presumably has) they wouldn't be using AWS for anything touching actual videos.
Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)
#150Flattr 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…
Ads also physically influence the world. More humans become aware of something other humans want them to be aware of, more people end up buying some things (thereby incentivizing more of them to be created) or spending their lives on the most addictive mobile gambling thing or whatever. Whereas a system that just lets people say "this thing entertained me enough for 0.00023% of my economic output for the year doesn't do anything else, and deciding typing in how much something is worth to you is work. Not a lot of work, but it's still work that might even be worth more than your micro donation, depending on how you value your time and the neurons you dedicate to thinking about it. So obviously the system that actually does something is more viable.