[karl42]

I do not want to support anything that optimizes for "engagement". It penalized all the really useful offerings that I use for a minute to solve my problem and then don't touch again in a long time and instead encourages addictiveness.

[BlueTemplar]

There is no addictiveness here, because the person whose behavior is measured and the one being rewarded for it are two different people.

EDIT : I think what you missed is how this is an issue mostly with advertising-funded websites, especially platforms. More views = more money for the website. (It even goes for Hacker News, somewhat !) But for Flattr 2.0, more/longer browsing doesn't (directly) equal more money (even for the creators, in aggregate) ! Even Patreon has an issue like this - GP is talking about the bundling issue, but Patreon still has an artificial moat that exacerbates this : not only it's annoying to reduce the funding for many other creators at once when you add a new one, you can't even reduce your funding for a specific artist to less than $1/month - regardless of how much you might be paying per month to Patreon in total !

Or are you against free markets ?? They tend to promote what people want and manufacturing wants too, you know ?

Flattr 2.0 of course still has some issues : why a very short music video should be rewarded much less than a long form blog post ? (OtoH the music video is much more likely to be much more popular across a wider variety of people, so I guess that issue is self-fixing ? EDIT: not so much for a poem ?)

[karl42]

The creators are encouraged to create engaging/addicting/long content if that is what causes higher payments. Therefore, I much preferred the original Flattr where I defined which creator was beneficial to me.

I don't think that Flattr2 is more true to a free markets vision than Flattr1. Neither do I believe that a free market is necessarily better than a regulated market. Markets are a highly useful tool, not a goal themselves.