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Flattr is closing down (2023)

flattr.com

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Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#211

Post by jlarocco »

paulddraper wrote: post #133
freediver wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. That's two ways of saying the same thing. But people are (at a much greater rate) willing to pay with ads.

> But people are (at a much greater rate) willing to pay with ads.

Not really. Most people just don't know how to block them, and browsers won't block them by default because of they have a conflict of interest.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#212

Post by nicolas_17 »

plorkyeran wrote: post #68
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…

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.

Not sure what they use for video streaming, and it might even depend on where you're watching from, but VODs are definitely on plain old S3 + Cloudfront.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#213

Post by geokon »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #203
geokon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's a false dichotomy: cryptominers are not the only alternative to ads.

that was literally what the parent comment said: "This is why ads are the only viable business model". No alternative to ads has been really made viable. Fattr shutting down makes the point

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#214

Post by geokon »

teekert wrote: post #120
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

I think you're not wrong. There is the BTC Lightning network which burns A LOT less energy and the low transfer costs make it feasible to stream fractions of cents. Ie. when listening to a podcast via Podcasting 2.0 app (like Podverse). Btw, I upvoted you, all the frothing was fading out your reply. BTC Lightning is one of those babies people want to wash away with the bathwater. Or perhaps it's the only one I know s…

It's less about transfer fees. I'm not saying you should make microtransactions to visit webpages.

I'm more imagining a mining-pool made up of webpage visitors. The website allocates you certain blocks of hashes to be calculated and you calculate those. Once they're calculated and the webpage verifies it by randomly double checking a few, then the webpage is served.

A websearch tell me a webpage visit nets the owners about ~2 cents in ad revenue. So you just need to mine some equivalent amount. It'd be sort of like a mining-pool where the overwhelming majority of users don't successfully mine a block - but when someone does the website owner gets the coin.

You could get more sophisticated on top of that and have some central mining-pool coordinator and session cookies etc so that your mining credit transfers across webpages and you can "premine" certain amounts

So the currency becomes more granular at "how many hashes have you calculated" and not how many coins do you have

I could be wrong though ~ It's possible 2 cents of hashes takes hours to crunch on a phone

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#215

Post by tourmalinetaco »

WheatMillington wrote: post #195
freediver wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It is not that people are too selfish, but that there is not much content truly worth paying for. Go spend some time on /r/Youtube. If there is any content worth paying for on this internet, it's the virtually limitless reservoir of incredible content across youtube, and for a relatively low fee you can make ads disappear. But the anti-Google sentiment is so strong that the selfish freeloaders will do anything in th…

I use Invidious and take any money I’d have put into Google and put it into supporting my favorite creators, my preferred instance, and FreeTube.

I’m more than happy to “freeload” off of a multi-billion dollar ad company and support creators in a more meaningful way. And I fully support anyone who wishes to avoid the evil that is ads, even if they don’t support their creators directly otherwise. There is nothing selfish about wanting to conserve time, it’s the only currency that actually matters.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#216

Post by tourmalinetaco »

robertlagrant wrote: post #163
bawolff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes i feel like people make too much of the "parasocial" buzzword, as if its new. Entertainers have been doing the pass the hat thing for hundreds of years. It is not a new phenomenom. Historically, it has generally worked for entertainers, and i guess religion. I don't think there are historical paralells to open source really. Maybe it just doesn't work for that sort of thing.

Entertainers aren't pretending to be your friend, or lover, in exchange for money.

To the latter: prostitution has always been prevalent. Now it’s simply through a glass screen and not a peephole.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#218

Post by stonogo »

bigbluedots wrote: post #160
stonogo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If such a scheme we're to compensate content creators there'd have to be some way to determine how to slice up the revenue for them. Hits and data is one way. Your ISP probably already does that - at least re sites visited and data used.

They might try, but I tunnel all my traffic out anyway. In your proposal, my tunneling behavior would be morally equivalent to piracy. I don't think it's the world I want to live in.

Canada does something similar with cassette tapes and blank CDs; essentially pre-convicting the entire nation of copyright infringement and collecting punitive fees up front. I'm betting it didn't keep anyone from going hungry.

Re: Flattr is closing down (2023)

#219

Post by ptman »

egypturnash wrote: post #164
notatoad wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity. as an advocate for microtransactions: yes, i see this. but i think you've got it backwards. nobody is "turning creative work into a commodity". it already is, and creators and marketplaces are both happy to treat it like one when they're selling their work. Creatives don't li…

Pff, I love Patreon and I feel like that is basically "micropayments that actually work". If you look at Scott McCloud's original proposal for micropayments ([1], parts 5/6), the only thing that's really not viable is the idea that every reader paying 25¢/mo would work - in practice, transaction fees mean that about $2/mo is the minimum viable payment to actually mean something, especially when you factor in that you…

The EU is working on "digital euro", which is meant to be free of transaction fees. I would rather see a 0.1% transaction fee to cover the costs, but at least it should make micropayments viable.
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