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Comment by whatever_dude | Hacker News Reader

I'd like a plan where I pay any amount of money I want a month and it donates to websites I visit proportionally to the time I spend on them. I do something similar with Patreon, donating $1/mo to several creators I support. The point is that while it's not much, it's great as a principle, and would work very well at scale.

The Brave browser has something similar. I found it a bit subpar, but it's a good start.

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This was/is the idea behind Flattr, I think.

You have 10 € in your account at the beginning of the month which were automatically invoiced from your debit card. You now visit sites or articles or whatever and they have the Flattr button integrated. You like something? You click the Flattr button!

In the end your balance will be split evenly among all Flattr buttons you clicked that month. If you visit NYT regularly and click their buttons often, they will get more money from you than others.

I think you could also set that a single click was worth x cent and they invoiced you the total amount at the end of the month, but I'm not sure about that.

All in all Flattr was/is a great idea, it just somehow did not take off.

How do avoid the incentive of sites who pad their content in ways to make you spend longer on the site? Ideally the market would take care of this, where people would be more likely to visit articles which were more concise because they were more useful, but longer content also is generally a positive metric for search results and I feel like we often fall into this local sub-optimum.

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