Flattr Blog

Flattr was making good progress in this area (tipping writers), then Twitter shut them out of the network. http://blog.flattr.net/2013/04/twitter-is-forcing-us-to-drop-users-abi… "Twitter users create the favorite and just like they own their tweets they should own the result of their action. If you favorite something we argue that you should be able to decide what you want to do with the data you create. If you want to use it to give Flattr donations to other Twitter users you should be the one to make that decision."

Very interesting concept. I think it's necessary to find a way to gauge the most popular articles rather than trying to tl;dr the entire internet. For instance, you could look into some APIs for the most popular submissions on Hacker News and reddit and present them as articles that need summaries. You could also create a bookmarklet that users or authors can use to recommend an article to be summarized, which will then appear in some kind of summary queue on the main page. (Predefined) tags could also be included, so people who are only interested in summarizing certain articles, can cherry-pick these. Another thing is to suggestion is to reward productive users and upvoted summaries with a link to the writer's flattr profile. People can do this, even though the person has a flattr profile now[1][2], and I think this might increase the incentive even more. If this takes off, you could create some browser extensions similar to the Hacker News Sidebar[3], which displays a sidepanel on websites that have been submitted to Hacker News. [1]: http://blog.flattr.net/2011/04/opening-the-floodgates [2]: http://blog.flattr.net/2011/05/flattr-almost-anyone [3]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhedbplnihmkekhgma...

Flattr is making the most out of the situation :) https://blog.flattr.net/2017/12/patreon-fees/

As others have commented, Flattr itself keeps 7.5%. The detailed fees are described here: https://blog.flattr.net/2017/10/our-new-fee-structure/ Hopefully the payment cost will go down again, but unfortunately micropayments come with high transaction cost. Compared to revenue streams like App-Stores or even advertising, this is still much more efficient. Regarding keeping money in the system: In the new version, there are separate accounts for "givers" (contributors) and "receivers" (creators / publishers). So, just shuffling money around is neither the obvious nor the intended solution.

Flattr expects you to give this money back to other authors you like What does this mean? By the way, apparently the full fee is now quite higher: https://blog.flattr.net/2017/10/our-new-fee-structure/

There is [1] with a little bit about the privacy issue, but yes you have to trust them, not sending more than the urls to flatter. [1]: https://blog.flattr.net/2017/06/key-elements-of-the-new-flattr-the-all…

> makes me hopeful, that this will not turn out to be some sort of malicious or grey area project Looking at their "all-knowing, privacy-friendly algorithm", they are already there: https://blog.flattr.net/2017/06/key-elements-of-the-new-flattr-the-all… Even the title is an oxymoron, let alone the scary description.

Flattr supports flattring GitHub profiles, I believe via a browser extension. http://blog.flattr.net/2012/02/winter-update-github-tweets-extensions/

Handling money requires a stable and trusted service which is why it would have been a bad idea not having a closed beta to test it out properly before released. The problem with handling money is that there is a lot of legal issues around it. @cabalamat there is already an API that community has used to create a lot of cool stuff with: https://flattr.com/support/plugins Hoping to see many more though so if you have good ideas feel free to hack away:) Donating specific sums can already be done to other Flattr users via their profile page. We're actively working on getting Flattr more accessible and available to "flattr everything". Big changes happening in a few days! http://blog.flattr.net/2011/04/flattr-reloads-the-cannons/ /josef (@flattr_intern)