Hacker News Reader

Comment by drops | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a lot of hassle. Why shouldn't creators just keep using Patreon? None of the buzzwords in the post would convince me to switch.

View on HN

For creators: Because (assuming it gains a decent userbase) Flattr will give you money from people that not explicitly subscribe to you.

For users: because it'll spread your contribution between people who made the content you consume, without individually selecting them and managing that distribution over time. It'll automatically distribute it between sites you visit.

It doesn't handle the exact same thing as Patreon, nor are they mutual exclusive.

That's a good distillation of the issue. I have been noodling this idea for a good decade now as it's a huge problem to solve. Even micropayments are still payments that you have to decide to make. Really there should be a 'meter' on your media consumption and your $5/mo (or whatever) gets doled out to the creators of the content you consumed over that month. The problem is how do you equate a small single-authored article that takes me 5 minutes to read versus a 4K professionally-produced video that takes me 5 minutes to watch? Also, how do you handle the rise in fake content that will be even more incentivized to scream for eyeballs?

I always appreciate one-off sales/donations, but they aren't really dependable the way a subscription is. You can't plan or invest around it unless the thing you make is the kind of thing that gets a hobby/business-sustaining amount of sales or donations.

A sale/donations says "this is cool." A subscription says "I want to see more of this." For the former, there are sites that popped up and got better established while flattr was twiddling its thumbs for 7 years. If I were going to ask for donations, I'd post a ko-fi link or a bitcoin address, not ask people to install an extension.

It's automatic distribution (with the option to also trigger one explicitly if you want). I and many other of your visitors are just about as unlikely to donate to you as to subscribe (well, in my case even more unlikely, since I can't think of any comfortable one-time donation thing I use), so if we use Flattr you can choose to get a piece of our collective pool or nothing from us. Time will tell if it's worth it, but I don't think the framing as an alternative makes sense. None of the things currently in use do the same (except Brave, I haven't kept up what they are doing exactly).

It doesn't really need to be an alternative, creators could easily use both alongside one another. Since Flattr works automatically and doesn't require the creator to do anything additional:)

> Seems like a lot of hassle. Why shouldn't creators just keep using Patreon?

Speaking as someone who used flattr for years before I heard of patreon, this question sounds rather backwards to me.

That said: I’m pretty sure I dislike the changes done here, and it will definitely cause me to reconsider my usage of flattr as a whole.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com