revamp homepage (inc. community pages)

[chadwhitacre]

There's something about the way we present Gittip on the homepage that's off. It has to do with the fact that talking about money can lead to resentment. Here's where I think this first cropped up: #64.

Things:

• replace "top givers" with "patrons" (only includes explicit patrons, not just anyone)
• replace "top receivers" with "user spotlight"--random profile
• replace "new receivers" with "recent activity"--includes sign-ups but also other events (tip, toot, etc.)
• add "communities"--show active + in formation

Sketch:

[tshepang]

If you replace top receivers list, will it be available elsewhere visible?

[chadwhitacre]

@tshepang We could maybe keep it around somewhere. You think it's valuable to have?

[lyndsysimon]

I believe it's valuable to have - it shows that Gittip is an active service, and that users are currently getting substantial support from their respective communities.

It's also very nice to see people you know up there if you happen to share the same network.

[tshepang]

It's valuable to see who the top users are (hall of fame). I wonder how the issue of tired-of-seeing-the-same-faces can be fixed though.

One request: If you decide to replace top-user list with random users, please ensure that they are active users (tippers/tippees).

[cattsmall]

@tshepang, why not have a section for recent givers instead of/in addition top patrons? Then it's more likely there won't be the same faces all the time.

[tshepang]

@cattsmall what does recent givers mean? New givers?

[cattsmall]

@tshepang more along the line of people who recently gave money. If many people donate money in lower double-digit amounts, that might help to make the high amounts some people donate less scary to newcomers.

[tshepang]

@cattsmall I am a little lost... gittip is a weekly give-money thing, so people who recently gave money isn't clear to me. Maybe you are interested in people who give money for the first time?

[sigmavirus24]

I think @cattsmall means people who just started tipping someone else and what that tip amount is.

[cattsmall]

@sigmavirus24 yes, that's what I meant. That way, the listed people are more likely to be different from the top givers/patrons AND have definitely gifted someone money.

[tshepang]

kool idea

[cakey]

We need to make sure that everything on the home page has a purpose, and in some way leads to the new visitor becoming more involved in the website. For me, this means that home page needs a combination of the following elements:

• Success stories - popular/top receivers/communities. Show that the site is active, and actually has an impact. A good example of this is Patreon
• The purpose of the website, what the point of it is and how it might apply to you.
• Where do I start? Show me people I might know from other social media that use the site. This is an obvious place to either explore a bit further, or give me an idea about who and why I might want to tip.

I don't see the benefit of random information. I have no interest in a profile chosen at random or the people that have signed up recently, and don't see what purpose it serves in increasing engagement.

[tshepang]

@cakey I also think it's not so useful showing people who recently joined.

[chadwhitacre]

Recently joined is helpful to me, because it shows me how active the site is right now. That's how I noticed that Korea was happening, e.g. In general, I don't really count, though. :) I like @cakey's analysis.

[chadwhitacre]

New users are one audience for the homepage. Two other audiences are current users, and people building Gittip (us). No-one visits the YouTube homepage. They land on video pages. For Gittip the parallel page is the user profile page. (Communities are basically mini-homepages.)

@cattsmall's idea of "recent givers" is part of what I was going for with the "Recent Activity" section. IIRC, I picked up that idea from the extensive conversation on #634. Reviewing that ticket now ...

[chadwhitacre]

Here's the "Happening Right Now" section on Avaaz:

If you go check it out you'll see that it's constantly updating. A section like this has value for us in a couple ways:

• shows liveliness - valuable for new users and also for me, gives a quick "pulse" as mentioned above
• shows the kinds of things that can be done on the site - sign up, tip, toot, join/leave communities

[chadwhitacre]

Yeah, okay, #634 is required reading for this ticket. @MikeFair's comment is especially helpful.

[chadwhitacre]

In baldest terms, here's the initial funnel:

• join Gittip
• set up a tip to someone
• back the tip with a credit card

Overall the goal is to incentivize people to live a life of generosity and gratitude.

That means:

• freely doing awesome stuff
• telling that story
• giving and receiving money as a side-effect of gratitude

Generosity is a side-effect of gratitude.

[chadwhitacre]

That makes me think that toots are important. Or story-telling, somehow. Toots is the current feature intended to enable story-telling.

[cakey]

+1 Everyone go read @MikeFair's comment

I feel that our main focus should be community growth. Toots help people find new people, but we are no where near maximising giving within relationships that are already established. Social media integration is a priority. When I log in, I want to see the status of the people I follow on twitter, the channels I subscribe on youtube, the projects and contributors I've starred on github and the streamers I have favourited on twitch. We then use @MikeFair's metrics to use these connections to boost community growth - "number of people you were the first tipper for", using 25c as essentially an invite mechanism to all the people they already care about.

Imagine you could give a smaller amount (e.g 5c/wk) ONLY if you are the first person to tip that person. That would make it feasible to invite ALL the people you follow on a given social media. It's a powerful pull to see that SOMEONE wants to donate to you, even if it is so little. We can set the minimum for withdrawal if transaction fees are an issue.

[cakey]

Forgive the awful mockup. Here's the idea: The homepage needs to fulfil two parts of the funnel, selling the user on the gittip vision, and then finding them actual people they want to tip. The gittip page outlines concrete use cases, and a demonstration of how the site works. There is then a solid next step action which leads the user to the 'discover' page. This is the default homepage for users that are logged in. The discover page includes your communities, friends from social networks, and metrics and leaderboards for all of gittip. This acts as your dashboard and way of discovering new people in gittip. The search bar would be moved to the top bar, to allow you to access it from anywhere on the site, and emphasising the community feel, similar to facebook or twitter.

[heidigardner]

If we do go with a landing page, can the logo be prominent? i.e:

[chadwhitacre]

https://cottonbureau.com/

[chadwhitacre]

https://coderwall.com/welcome

[chadwhitacre]

I've assigned this ticket to myself.

• The above two sites are my exemplars.
• The sentence I want to use is "Give money every week to inspiring people & teams."
• I paid for Typekit so we can use real typography.
• I've started sketching out a banner image on the new-banner branch (no PR yet).
• We need to land #1245 so I can use the dynamic gittip.css.spt.
• We should address #1296 to clarify where we're sending people from the homepage.

[chadwhitacre]

Current direction:

[chadwhitacre]

cc: @ceboudreaux @heidigardner @cakey @hurlothrumbo

[cakey]

I really like it! I think it's important to get the main concepts on the front page too somehow: No strings attached, anonymous giving, public aggregates.

It's also nice how the search box in the title bar with its "Who inspires you?" prompt will match the copy.

[mvdkleijn]

Earlier in the discussion, @tshepang made a comment, which I wanted to reply to:

If you replace top receivers list, will it be available elsewhere visible?

Gittip is open. Gittip has a hefty focus on developers. (not only, but much more so than say Patreon) I believe the stats page / section of the site is ideal to place all of those nice statistics that we (already) made for the homepage but no longer want there. Personally I love looking at a site's stats. :smile:

On a side note: The design looks nice, even though I'm wondering if "inspiring" is the right word (do people get inspired by a developer for example or are they more, let's say grateful?).

[tshepang]

I agree with @mvdkleijn... inspiring does not feel right. I just wonder if there's a better word though, a word that will encompass different kinds of achievers/achievements.

[tshepang]

@mvdkleijn s/inspiring/awesome?

[heidigardner]

@whit537 This direction makes me really happy!

I especially like the "giving" "receiving" self choosing funnel. lol

I have less issues with the word "inspire"-- which is weird since I am usually the first to react in a discussion of semantics. Maybe it's because I want people to be less grateful and more inspired. As in, less passive and more active. Dunno. Have we had other options tossed into the ring?

[mvdkleijn]

@tshepang - sounds good :smile:

[ceboudreaux]

@whit537 So what questions are still on the table here? What decisions are still up in the air?

[chadwhitacre]

Night before last, @workergnome, @amcoder, and I had a conversation, in which @workergnome suggested (iirc, among other things) that we:

1. Differentiate a bit more between individuals and companies.
2. Show the dollar amounts that companies are giving, but not individuals. By showing the dollar amounts that individuals are giving we're rewarding people for being rich, which is non-ideal.
3. Show "who gave to whom in the last six months," but without dollar amounts. The idea would be to make Gittip more social (cf.#236) while largely preserving "no-strings-attached."

This echoes themes from @MikeFair's super-comment about what behavior we value and want to encourage as a community. @lukejones and @daneden made similar points on Twitter today:

I see [Gittip] as a taking platform, not a generosity platform.

https://twitter.com/lukejones/status/372752906006441984

[E]ven removing the $ amounts would make [Gittip] seem less money-driven. It’s a nice idea, but puts across the wrong attitude.

https://twitter.com/_dte/status/372761871323258880

To answer your question, @ceboudreaux, these are the sorts of issues that are still on the table. @workergnome was asking me for a product roadmap. I didn't have one for him. Maybe I should write one. :-)

[workergnome]

If you want company whilst writing a product roadmap, I'd be happy to sit down and talk it over with you.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks @workergnome! I'd love that. :-)

Anything we come up with will end up on the "Building Gittip" collection on Medium:

https://medium.com/building-gittip/

If you haven't browsed that before, here are some good starting-points:

• "The future of Gittip" by @cakey
• "Reaching Sustainability: Winning Gittip’s Second Year" by @seibert
• "Gittip, Year One: Half-way to Sustainability" by yours truly

[tshepang]

In that super-comment, I find "total number of non-members tipped" very attractive. Would be nice to display such people somewhere, even if not on the front-page.

[ceboudreaux]

+1 product map!

[dcwalk]

+1 on the product map, would love to have a snapshot of priorities and a better sense of how issues fit together (EG what needs to happen before the /about/ pages go live -- though this was addressed in the newsletter I'd be keen to have it in one handy reference guide).

Something similar to @cakey's mockup section "no strings attached 2.9% +0.30" would be a clean way to foreground information currently buried on the site. Highlighting payment structure & lack of fees on the revamped /about/giving-money/ would be great! Mentioning the current minimum card charge should be considered as well.

Another thought is to have an auto-generated 'actively fund-raising' community for participants with a set fund-raising goal that hasn't been achieved. Providing new users and potential givers a way to browse fleshed out profiles easily could serve as a quick start from /about/giving-money/ . It could also be linked from the front page as a more inclusive milestone a la the super-comment (IE xx/XXX have met their funding goals -- you can help!).

From a quick poke around at how gittip stores funding goals I don't think this would be too onerous to implement. However I fully admit to not understanding all of the code .

Finally, the idea of having auto-generated communities might be something to explore further -- it makes sense for gittip account info to be used (EG patrons, companies -- covered by singular/plural distinction?) but could communities also be created based on information scraped from connected accounts? Is that too scary? Suggested by who you donate to? Or by others visiting your page?

[mvdkleijn]

I think if Gittip wants to keep the idea of self-organizing communities, then we should definitely not auto-generate communities. Besides... communities are people connected together for some reason. A "community" without members would be pointless... or is @dcwalk suggesting we automatically make people a member of a community based on some scraped information?

(that kind of behaviour, for me, would trigger an automatic request to delete my account by the way)

@whit537 - I appreciate Gittip's openness and transparentness, but we should always show our users respect by respecting their thoughts and ideas on privacy. The open and transparent nature of Gittip itself should not be force fed to its users.

[dcwalk]

@mvdkleijn Those are all really good points. I just want to be clear that I'm not a gittip contributor, so all points made were my own and not based on any prior conversations, I was just throwing out ideas after reading through issues here.

RE: auto-generating communities. It hadn't occurred to me how much that could clash with the notion of self-organizing until you pointed it out (duh! Sometimes I don't think through ramifications).

My suggestion was meant as a way to solve the problem of providing meaning for new people visiting the site: Right now it doesn't feel very accessible or community-like when I'm on gittip. Auto-generating a community seemed like a way to piggy-back off the current structure of gittip (communities) and provide more inlets to users than currently exist. At the core the idea is simply -- have a landing page for users that have unmet funding goals, perhaps for companies on the site as well. If I had framed it better I don't think it would have seemed so far reaching/invasive, but perhaps I'm wrong.

Right now it seems the most effective way to give money to someone to is to know about them specifically before coming to gittip. I don't think that is the right approach long term, I think discovery on the site is important.

I mentioned scraping (poor choice of words again, I didn't really know the right term..) more to wonder about what kind of information is accessible once OAuth authorization has happened or available through a public API. I believe Github's API has a call to list languages, followers, etc... information that may make it easier to connect to things you are already interested in.

Is there a term for collecting that type of info? I'm quite new to this stuff.

RE: privacy/transparency. It definitely wasn't my intent to suggest increased interaction at the cost of privacy. I think there are really deft ways to make things more open but always respect user's opinions however.

Having a suggestion model that requires an opt in (once a funding goal is set a prompt shows up asking if you'd like to be visible on a fund-raising page), but could be permanently disabled from the same prompt ("Don't show me these suggestions again") is a relatively common approach. I think it'd be possible to further refine that, or have it be less obtrusive. One example off the top of my head is how Google+ handles things -- the auto-tagging of posts is done similar to my example above and works okay; the friend suggestions is a little more aggressive and not something that can be disabled.

Would something like that come across as respectful or is there a better way to gauge a user's privacy 'wants'?

[mvdkleijn]

I'm personally always a little sensitive to applications and sites trying to automagically connect all kinds of information about "me". One of the reasons I never joined Facebook and am very hesitant to join other sites like Google+. I also know I'm not alone in this, in fact, there's a growing movement of people actively killing accounts and destroying personal information online. (at least in my neck of the woods)

Any form of automatic information gathering would have to be opt-in as far as I'm concerned. The exact "best" way to achieve this respect for the user is something I'm not sure of (yet).

As for the site needing more interaction with regards to community, I wholly agree. In fact there's already several issues for that I believe. One is issue #1316

[chadwhitacre]

+2 https://twitter.com/ShelleyDelayne/status/391041635292700673

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @dhh.

"The perils of mixing open source and money"

Re: Gittip specifically:

I think that's exactly the shit I find devaluing and dangerous about mixing market and social. [Twitter]

Yuck. [Twitter]

[carols10cents]

Regarding There are two gifts on Gittip, and the first gift is my free labor., I would love to see more emphasis on the first gift on the homepage. Especially the top receivers-- what does this money enable them to do that would be harder without it?

There's not much room in the current layout (where the top receivers' pictures and dollar amounts are) for something like someone's statement or funding goal, which is where something like the "user spotlight" idea mentioned earlier in this thread could be useful.

[lyndsysimon]

@whit537 I read the blog post you linked when it was on HN. I respect the man's opinion, but I disagree.

Further, I don't think it matters. My understanding of the world is based upon my concept of markets and I fundamentally disagree that "mixing money and open source" adds any new dynamic at all.

Money is nothing more than an indicator and store of value. When you receive money in compensation for an action, it increases that action's value to you - but money is not the only type of value that exists.

I don't know about you, but I gain personal fulfillment from helping people solve problems. The act of creation - bringing forth a beautiful abstraction into the world using only the resources of the mind - is immensely satisfying. That experience is valuable, and something that no amount of money can replace.

The way I see it, the motivations of those who are a part of Open Source is irrelevant; their creations are what matter. If someone is paid and produces shoddy work as a result, then their work will be superseded and built upon by those who are primarily driven by the need to create.

[hephail]

I feel the focus needs to be on receivers, and givers should be made anonymous, because most of the time, we focus too much on who the donor is, when the work done by the receiver is so much more important.

[ahdinosaur]

it should be possible to browse all members of a community, not just those who are being highlighted.

[seanlinsley]

@ahdinosaur that's currently ticketed as #970