Joachim Breitner's Homepage

A while ago I registered with flattr. I found the idea of encouraging people to give kudos to people who do something on the web easily and meaningfully, by attaching a little bit of money to it. I had planned to use my flattr account only as a kudos-forwarder: All funds that I get by being flattred would be spend on flattering things that I like.

At that time, flattr did not allow me registering my “things” without first uploading money, so I did not use my account. But recently, they changed this policy, so I added a few of my projects to the list of things people can now flattr:

• This blog (flattr it)
• My LaTeX wiki engine latexki (flattr it)
• The German lecture script wiki „Mitschriebwiki“ that it runs (flattr it)
• The web-version of screen-message (flattr it)
• The pornyness calculator (flattr it)

I almost always use the less intrusive text links. I fear that this means that people have to do an extra click before the have flattred the thing, but I still prefer it this way. Also, I do not use the automatic addition of “things” for each blog post, on the one hand because that does not seem to work with text links, and on the other hand because I don’t think that each post is worth to be flattred.

Generally, I avoid such closed-source walled-garden online services. I guess I make an exception this time because it is not a service that I run the risk of becoming dependent on. Flattr makes money per things flattered. It would be nicer if they only charged when people actually withdraw cash from their account, this way, many more people could do forward-only flattering for free, making many other people happy and appreciated, while still eventually making money.