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Comment by PurpleRamen | Hacker News Reader

IMHO their main problems were: they delivered too early, and failed in what they offered. When they started, there was no donation-economy like we have today on Twitch, Ko-fi, and others, nor was there an established support-hivemind like we have with Patreon, Github and others. So people did not know what they should do with it. And on the other side was Flattr a bit annoying to use in the beginning, and had percentage-based donations, instead of fixed values IIRC. People are selfish, but also willing to share, if you give them enough reason.

But thinking about, maybe the lack of a social component and some virtual rewards would have been beneficial. But I guess, after the first fail, nobody cared anymore for it, and they somehow failed to find their market.

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Having experience with donation only stuff, I can tell you something with the straightest face: Almost nobody who uses a service, even if they use it a lot, actually goes on to donate.

It's a real hockey stick graph where 90% of your donations come from 5% of users.

Trust me, everyone says they prefer paying/donating over ads, but when you look at the numbers, just about everyone prefers no compensation (and no ads) and chooses that if given the option.

I believe that in the last couple of years the line between donation and begging has been blurred.

You have things on the extreme side like people begging on tiktok live doing shoutouts to every viewer that donates a significant gift.On the IRL side you also have people donating to the craziest streamers doing the most outrageous stuff outside. Then you also have super donations on Youtube on live podcasts.

When donations are incorporated on a social app it fosters an environment that makes donating acceptable and fun. Hardly anyone is going to trust their debit card/credit card details to a random site, but the masses will trust buying credits/donations/subscriptions through tiktok,youtube, twitch, patreon etc.

I think the one trick is using subscriptions that people opt into one time and just forget about. Using the dodgy psychology tricks of gym memberships to actually help people.

If that's the case, not sure if that's better than ads. I'd rather workout in an ads filled gym for free than paying for la fitness gym membership

I would 100% rather pay a fee. Also for those ads to make economic sense, the gym would be packed wall to wall.

Personally, I think ads can be quite predatory, which is why I dislike them (if ads themselves had better ethics and curation, I might think otherwise -- I have less issues with sponsorships elected by creators). That most people choose not to pay is a problem I think, but I think even ideally not everyone would pay (and that's fine): they may not have the means (although I guess they could just pay a smaller amount instead), or have too many other subscriptions (that they find need more money). I personally donate to a lot of services knowing that many won't pay (and many aren't able to), and I'm happy to contribute (although I think it would be better for everyone if they considered donating more!)

Also Patreon. The real failure was adopting a panhandling model of giving "each time" you consume content. Not only is this high friction, but people don't like doing it.

They should have aggressively pushed a subscription model ($2 a month or less) that reoccured so creators actually could have reliable income.

Flattr had subscriptions: if you clicked the Flattr button once, they get part of that month's donation; if you clicked it twice they got added to your recurring list, to get a donation every month.

That sounds too abstract. A subscription model for specific content has proven to work.

Lol, that model had certainly not "proven to work" when Flattr launched in 2010. Sure you can point to Patreon (launched in 2013), OnlyFans (launched in 2016), etc., but that would just be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

PS: I find Flattrs model much simpler: paying a fixed amount, and choosing how many/few people I want to give it to.

I don't understand your comment at all. Subscription models have been successful for decades for the major online newspapers. Flattr could have adapted after Patreon, Substack, etc. proved it successful, they chose not to.

Also it's fine that you like Flattr's model more, but no one else did. They don't exist anymore.

Even something like Patreon is a hard sell. I donated for a couple of years to an author I liked because he had a proven track record of delivery, so helping him concentrate on writing rather than a day job let him create more works. But him aside, I mostly see Patreon used to fund authors that are stringing along patrons with promises of "You'll be a few chapters ahead of free readers" vs "This can make the difference that will let me finish." To that end, at least for me, I just go between a few so there's usually something new to read, and if not, oh well.

If I were to publish in that space, I'd stream chapters slowly but regularly for free and the top donation tier would yield the completed work, but priced at the median payment I'd expect to get stringing people along for a few months. That's probably not a good business model, but I think it would prove less frustrating.

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