Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@serapath Flattr failed due to a combination of low interest (it wasn't worth it for people for tiny amounts), and the operation of the service itself not being sustainable with the low revenue.

And yes, supporting people's work is a good thing, but that is crucially something *very* different from "attaching monetary value to social interactions", and you don't need tiny microtransactions for that. Entirely different problem space.

While donation systems as they exist today certainly are not perfect, the funding issues people have broadly aren't technical in nature. They're a mix of political, cultural, and most of all "if a bunch of capitalists are hoarding all the money, there's simply not a lot of money to go around". Those are the real problems that need to be addressed, and you can't do that with an app.

(A big part of the cultural issue is actually that people think of donations as a special case of payments, in terms of "you need to distribute donations across everyone whose work you enjoy"; in reality that model doesn't make sense for donations at all, it just needs to work out on the whole and it doesn't actually matter who sends money to who.)

@serapath No, literally, it's just a terrible idea. Attaching monetary value to social interactions makes things worse for everybody. It shouldn't be done.

(Flattr did try something similar in the past and it was a failure)

@serapath Anywhere within SEPA, bank transfers are typically free, including internationally; and stuff like Wise is also very low-cost and, crucially, much simpler and faster to use than cryptocurrencies.

Like, that's the whole thing with cryptocurrencies and so many things like it that are hyped - sure, they do something that could be useful, but they don't actually do it *better* than the things that already exist.

(Also, I'm extremely not a fan of trying to 'monetize' social interactions. It creates toxic dynamics. I'd consider that an anti-feature.)

@serapath Oh, sure, but "Bitcoiners" is a very very very small group, and that group alone would have never caused Bitcoin to catch on.

The mass "adoption" of Bitcoin happened in roughly two stages; first, a bunch of actual shops and companies accepting it as a payment method, while it was being marketed as a fast and low-fees money transfer method, and then a ton of 'traders' (ie. capitalists, including commercial miners) trying to extract profit from it.

The traders then went on to spawn a lot of other cryptocurrencies, with a fig leaf of functionality that never actually became reality, because they fundamentally didn't offer much over Bitcoin anyway.

It's that first group that I'm thinking of here - in the US the existing payment infrastructure is generally nightmarish, both for consumers and vendors, and this functioned as a selling point for that group to adopt Bitcoin. Which then made it interesting to traders, which eventually sustained the hype themselves.

Had that first group not been there, the second group likely also would not have been, and it would likely have forever remained a weird nerd thing.

@hvangalen I mean, I don't actually have a *problem* with media being made that way, just... as long as it's not all of it, and it should really be labelled as such!

@serapath (Also, "unbanked" is a bit of a misnomer because these metrics often include people who *do* have access to eg. mobile payment systems that functionally act as a bank for them, but just aren't recognized as such by eg. the ECB or Federal Reserve)

@serapath My question is very specifically about it 'catching on', though. Sure, it would have probably *existed*, but the early broad adoption was primarily driven by frustrations with the US banking system, and the then-promises of lower transaction fees.

I'm not sure it would have ever reached that point of mass interest if it weren't for the terrible banking structures in the US inviting people to look for alternatives. Only very few people ever cared about the *philosophical* underpinnings really.

@cy @Ember I feel like you're making a lot of assumptions here that aren't quite right. What I'm talking about is cohesive communities; interactions don't center *around* individuals, but that doesn't mean that people are not known on a personal level within a community (like how communities have worked for thousands of years already).