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Kaj_Sotala comments on Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's a bit of a truism that you can't do micropayments to cover the true marginal cost of serving a webpage, adding a user to your service, or other Internet activities, because the gap between free and epsilon is psychologically larger than the gap between epsilon and a dollar. It occurs to me that this curious psychology seems to map onto a logarithmic utility in money: Clearly the difference between lim(x to zero)[log(x)] and log(epsilon) is larger than the difference between log(epsilon) and log(1) for any finite value of epsilon. I'm not sure if this actually explains anything, but I thought it was kind of neat.
Incidentally, I'm confused over the fact that so few sites or people seem to use Flattr, despite it basically solving this problem. (Well, it's microdonations rather than micropayments, so you can't really require your users to pay anything, but still.)
Which came first, the massive user base or the many clients? Looks like a classic chicken-egg problem to me.
Edit to add: Which being said, I just signed up for it as a creator. :)
I've not noticed websites I like using flattr, so I have no reason to sign up for it.
Very few people use it, so it's not worth it for sites to sign up for it.
Can you tell where the microdonation comes from? It seems to me that you could pull a kickstarter-like business model and promise goods/services in exchange for a donation up front.
People can choose to donate either anonymously or non-anonymously, so I guess that it could work.