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.
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.