Like most of the "I wish I could be paid money for things without people paying money for things" ideas, this has some fundamental issues with it, and Not Quite A Classic Pyramid Scheme is only one of them.
The biggest issue is that customer acquisition for Flattr largely requires somebody worth paying money for to "sell" their audience on signing up for Flattr, and that this is an objectively stupid thing for them to do. If you're going to "sell" anyone on Flattr, you should be selling - no scare quotes - a subscription to your own site, where you would collect substantially all of $N a month rather than a fraction of 90% of $6 a month.
Flattr only makes sense for freeloaders on the system - and they'll squabble over < $5 apiece in revenue until the Pirate Bay founders move on.
I'd rather see flattr as a +1/Like economy where content can be anything from an NYT article to a Disqus comment. This way, the social buttons also actually make sense for people to use. On HN, I usually forget to upvote shared stories, and I basically only do it nowadays to save it as a HN bookmark. The HN upvote is very ambiguous that way.
Readability's subscription feels a little like buying absolution for blocking banner ads - and perhaps circumventing paywalls. Still, many people find it attractive.
I don't think having to find people worth donating to is the main problem; the problem is documenting that flattr can be an income model worth spending your time on. Success stories in other words. It's a little similar to YouTube partnerships that way - as I understand, some, maybe few, people earn a decent chunk of change, but Google seem to strong arm its partners into keeping their experiences to themselves. I'm sure this keeps a lot of people away from trying the model.
EDIT: I also look forward to seeing HNers use this for their weekend projects. HN is not always an interesting way to gauge appreciation.
EDIT2: It's also the perfect tool to counter slacktivism as seen on reddit where people think they contribute to ending world suffering by upvoting a story detailing it. Now, it's possible to, say, create a subreddit where all the submissions have a flattr profile for a cause specific cause.
Clicking a button is so damn easy, and if they same can be applied to charitable donations, it might revolutionize online donations. You can even make a poster with a QR code!
A Flattr intern and I were discussing a Pay by Facebook button and we made a point that in order for Flattr to scale, it would need better integration into popular services. Before putting a Flattr button for comments, just integrate it into Disqus so that anyone with Disqus on their blog can now receive Flattr donations. http://ericelias.posterous.com/facebooks-credits-will-trump-...
People on Disqus need to have a flattr account first, though. Preferable, people without an account would receive a message that people wanted to send them money for their comments, when people tried to flattr them.
It's easily doable - the only thing holding it back is Disqus's desire to innovate. So let's do our best to make sure it lands in Daniel Ha's desk.
It could also be interested to see it on some forums - but I'd worry that people might get an incentive to game the system. The same might apply to Disqus to some extent - go for the low-hanging fruit in a very partisan-lenient political discussion for instance. It might work on forums if it was only possible to flattr the opening posts and the work that went into making them. Gated forums where people are admitted at the admins' discretion might also make this work.
Huh, that went down quick :) Here's the text of the email they sent me:
Important service announcement
Hello!
Flattr’s first year has been great. And not just for us but for tens of thousands of bloggers, podcasters, developers, designers and other creators out there. Just ask Tim. We’re now making an important change to the service, one which should open the floodgates of Flattr, if you will.
From May 1st we no longer require users to flattr others before they can be flattrd. Or in other words, it’s not mandatory to add money to your account to have an active Flattr button.
How does this affect you?
If you’re mainly using Flattr to make payments you will soon have much more content to flattr.
If you’re using Flattr both to make and receive payments then you no longer need to check your balance at the end of each month to see whether your Flattr button is still active or not. It is and always will be.
If your Flattr button was once deactivated because balance dropped to zero, it is now active again. Forever.
This makes Flattr simpler
We have good reasons for making this change and we’ve just added a post about it on our blog. In a nutshell, we just didn’t need to force the give before you get principle onto people. During the the last year we’ve learned that people want to flattr the content they like and therefore we decided to drop any rules that made the service restrictive or outright complicated.
We hope you’ll like the simpler more straightforward Flattr. If you have any comments, questions or feedback please get in touch via our blog or support page.
I'll seriously consider a Flattr button in my Android apps.
Just a quick piece of feedback about the blog: make it easier for people that land on your blog to find out what Flattr is about! The most promising link (in the "About" in the bottom) is broken. Maybe some quick words in the side would help.
Yeah, Flattr has never been very good at communication. The blog doesn't even have a link to the company home page! And even once you navigate to http://flattr.com the best explanation of how Flattr works is this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zrMlEEWBgY
You had to give money before you were able to receive money... Sorry, that seems like a classic pyramid scheme.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a single B2B company that isn't a pyramid scheme, by that definition. Pretty much everyone spends money in order to make money. Easy example: before I can build and sell my widgets, I need to buy the parts for them.
Well, sure, but you can make almost any statement sound ridiculous when you abuse word meaning to pull it that far out of the original context.
Being required to put money into Flattr before other people could give you money sounds a bit shady. It would be like the postal service refusing to deliver your mail unless you send a few letters every month.
There isn't anything wrong with asking people to use it themselves, but then it also isn't quite the "online tip jar" that many people want to see it as.
Maybe that's the point, but I honestly have been confused as to why the process with Flattr is so complicated. What I want is a "great blog post, kid, here's a quarter" button. Flattr feels like it's mostly there except I have to keep track of who I've Flattr'd each month to make sure I'm handing out the amounts I wanted to. It could be that in the end this is "the better way", but for the need I feel this mechanism is kind of off-putting.
> What I want is a "great blog post, kid, here's a quarter" button.
A conventional tipjar, by the sounds of it. These have been tried and they generally don't work. My theory is that this is because they violate Krug's 1st Law.
The amounts don't have to be equal. You just had to show that you were participating (with about $5/mo.) before they would send you strangers' money :)
More than 175.000 things have been flattred almost half a million times
This implies that every item has been flattred, on average, just under 3 times. Does this seem a little low to anyone else? I suppose the real question is how many things the average user flattrs, and hopefully that's one of the numbers they have up their sleeve.
Not so much, really. A fair number of people make a new button for, e.g., every blog post.
I think the main reason for that is that it's not possible to re-flattr someone. One click per month, and that's it. So, to allow multiple donations, you must run multiple buttons :/
Indeed, and it goes in the same direction as the linked article, which does look like flattr lowering the barrier to entry because they're not getting enough traction. This kind of trend never ends well.
On an only-slightly-related note, have they realized that their metadata is pretty screwy?
Googling Flattr turns up the following result:
Flattr - Social micropayments
Flattr works well with. Learn about our APIs andintegrating Flattr with your website. " Flattr has developed a small but thriving network of users " ...
The biggest issue is that customer acquisition for Flattr largely requires somebody worth paying money for to "sell" their audience on signing up for Flattr, and that this is an objectively stupid thing for them to do. If you're going to "sell" anyone on Flattr, you should be selling - no scare quotes - a subscription to your own site, where you would collect substantially all of $N a month rather than a fraction of 90% of $6 a month.
Flattr only makes sense for freeloaders on the system - and they'll squabble over < $5 apiece in revenue until the Pirate Bay founders move on.