Can you even call it microtransactions anymore?

Here's the link to the store page.

I have never bought a cosmetic in any game, ever, but this is absolutely insane to me, especially for World of Warcraft which usually had somewhat measured pricing on their real-money cosmetics (everything has always been below €25 to my knowledge) - that it's fully cosmetic is debatable though, seeing as you now have an auction house and mailbox wherever you are. Not all that game changing to be sure, but it's definitely a small advantage over those that are not rich in money or in-game currency.

There is an argument to be made that it's a way to influence the economy in the game - another gold-sink to reduce the huge wealth gap between players (it will cost nearly two million gold to reach the Battle.net balance required). However, two million gold is not that much.

I'm not quite dusting off my pitchfork over it, mind you, but still. And I just wanted to share to maybe foster some quality discussion on tildes about microtransactions maybe?

Thanks for the tags @mycketforvirrad, didn't really know what to put.

In keeping with Tildes' general philosophy of supporting budding technologies that have the potential to reform large domains of the internet for the better, I think you should look into Flattr (www.flattr.com).
A Flattr subscriber reserves any set amount of money per month which will then get automatically distributed to content creators on the web, in proportion to an algorithmic estimate of how much the user has used that particular site or resource.

First-tier support for Tildes on Flattr would be as simple as registering an account and connecting the tildes.net domain to it. From then on, a percentage of the reserved amount would automatically get transferred to Tildes' account for every Flattr user who uses the site (I myself have generated 64 "Flattrs" on this site as of this moment, which would lead to a significant portion of my reserved $5 to be transfered to Tildes for this month).

For sites that host content creators, like Twitch and YouTube, Flattr offers a deeper support, where Flattrs go toward individual content creators as well as the host site in itself. An intuitive way to connect Tildes to this feature would be to have each upvote of a Tildes post generate a Flattr for the poster. I believe the money would then be divided between the user who was upvoted (if they have a Flattr account) and Tildes' own Flattr account, but I am unsure about the exact fraction that would get routed to the individual poster as opposed to Tildes itself. I'm sure Flattr's tech support can answer this in detail, though. Flattr is currently owned and maintained by the company behind AdBlock.

What do other users think? Is Flattr's model good? Are there other sites or providers that offer a similar service? A notable difference between for example Patreon and Flattr is that Flattr is indirectly based on a "pay what you want" model, which marks a pretty significant shift in economic control from producers to consumers. This will obviously have both advantages and drawbacks. Personally, I think the model has a lot of potential on an arena like the internet, where the sheer number of potential consumers can make microtransaction-based models like Flattr really powerful.