Michal Čihař - More on Flattr

More on Flattr

My last post about Flattr has received much more attention than I would expect from short rant, but the feedback forced me to think a bit more about the issue.

I guess that most of Flattr early adopters jumped in for getting some money for things they produce (regardless it is music, text, software or anything else). The initial setup required users to also give money to others and this limitation was later removed and now you can only receive money without giving anything out. In the beginning every now and they I've discovered some interesting thing to flattr, so I usually had to postpone it to next month to give at least some reasonable value. This way initial money people have put there circulated between users and on each transaction they were reduced by 10% fee, what could lead to natural reduction of money available in the system.

Flattr is of course trying to introduce new features to attract new users. Flattr-a-Twitter is probably nice thing, however I somehow did not really get on Twitter train and I think I never will. The new catalog looks nice, still I don't think I will spend time browsing it and looking for content there. So basically this adds nothing useful for me.

Another recent feature - thanking to people who have flattered your thing in last month is IMHO bad idea. I've always seen Flattr as simple way to give little money to lot of various things. In case everybody would send thank you email, it would become every month spam, which I would simply ignore.