Flattr: new micropayments system from Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde | Hacker News Reader

Flattr: new micropayments system from Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde

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41 pointsviraptor16 comments

I really like this idea.

What if site like the Wall Street Journal adopted it instead of their current paywalls? You had to "flattr" to access the content but the price you are paying is then determined by how much big your monthly flattr allocation is and how many other sites you've flattr'd.

It's like digg/reddit/hackernews but with cash instead of karma.

What if site like the Wall Street Journal adopted it instead of their current paywalls?

Well, one obvious consequence they'd make less money than they're charging currently. That dooms the ability of this service to get any marquee publishers (the ones who can independently charge for content) on board, and will probably kill it just like it kiled Contenture.

I think I'd actually signup for this. I'd be happy to donate, say, $20 a month to bloggers that I like, and I like that this gets me past the hump of having to make many independent decisions of how much to give.

I like the concept; the transaction cost of micropayments is reduced by separating the decision of how much to pay from the act of making the payment.

Can you choose how much to pay monthly? Do you always have to pay? What happens if one month you don't "flattr" anything? What if you want to "flattr" one thing more than other things?

I don't think it's very clear at all. Also, I'm not sure I'd want to pay for something every month.

Why will this suceed where tipjoy didn't?

You don't have to think about the amount... just pay monthly and click when you like something. You know you can click whatever you want and will never run over your spending limit, because you're paying flat rate. At least that's the main reason I like this idea over all the other micro-payments, or paypal.

Why would someone start to voluntarily pay for content that had previously been free, especially when they can continue getting it for free (by not signing up for flattr in the first place)?

I can see some people using this, but I know high school me would be saving up my money for a new computer, not paying pennies to content providers. Even now, I might throw $20 in to try the service but there are other things I'd rather spend that money on (like a monthly iPad 3G plan or drinks with my friends).

Do they cap the amount that you can give per month? If not this sounds great for money laundering.

What if some blackhatter cracks the link algorithm and then uses blackhat affiliate marketing techniques to get people to click the links? He gets very wealthy, and many people find their accounts drained slightly.

In before obvious, mundane OfficeSpace/Superman 3 joke that I don't want some reddit commenter getting karma for.

It seems like there are many situations that will require a good monitoring solution on their end. Also if they want to make the payments available via a simple page-embedded button - it just invites cross-site request exploits and js auto-voters embedded on the same site. But monitoring / fraud protection applies to any (micro)payment service, so it's not something new or unknown...

If, as is likely, you pay with a credit card, any applicability to money laundering seems far-fetched.

Actually - I just noticed from the comments that people are not sure how will this work. Monthly payments or per-click payments. I'd be happy to mark some pages for monthly support, but the whole idea is not that clear yet...

I actually think it's fairly simple.

You pay ex 20USD a month.

If you click on one page that entire month the owner of the page will get 20USD

If you click on 10 different blogs then the 20$ is split between those 10 blogs

"Many _small_ streams will form a river." Många bäckar små... :) Not large streams. That doesn't make sense.

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