Add option to hide total receiving from others

[juliepagano]

Is it possible to add the option to hide the total you receive from others, similar to the option for hiding what you give?

This came up with some folks I was trying to encourage to sign up for gittip today and they voiced some valid concerns around it. For some, there can can be negative consequences from having that information being so public.

It would be nice to add this option to encourage more people to feel safe using gittip. :)

The $15 bounty on this issue has been claimed at Bountysource.

[seanlinsley]

I may just be oblivious, but when wouldn't it be safe to share that information?

[chadwhitacre]

@seanlinsley Presumably when you're an outspoken woman in tech, and a steady stream of trolling and abuse has led you to guard your privacy.

@juliepagano Good call. I can't promise how soon it will happen but I'm +1.

[juliepagano]

Woops. I just accidentally clicked the wrong button. Good job, me. :(

[chadwhitacre]

:-)

[juliepagano]

@seanlinsley In this case, these folks are women bloggers who are often harassed about asking for support for their work. They've been discussing some issues related to harassment around getting too much/little, being accused of "begging", privacy issues, people policing their spending, etc.

I think adding this as a feature would make gittip much more appealing to them and others like them.

[timothyfcook]

+1, in general there's a lot of potential for Gittip to be customized based on the context and interest of whoever is being supported.

However, there may be some extreme cases that test this allowance in terms of the "Open Company" model. If Gittip gets really big, certain people could start earning some really serious money. In those cases, it might be truer to the Gittip model to allow the community to see just how much people are earning so they aren't over-compensated. Obviously, this isn't an issue yet.

Though, certain people might also want their total receiving amount hidden just for reasons of humility, etc. if they aren't interested in broadcasting a "I earn more than you" message.

Just want to note this in case, in two years from now, someone's earning $20,000/week and hiding it from the public. Potentially their supporters wouldn't support as much if they knew they were earning so much? It loses that valuable social control that is so valued in the "Teams" function.

Maybe some sort of system could be implemented where Receivers could switch visibility on/off, but a critical mass of their supporters could force-switch it back on? Or maybe, if they switch it off, their total receiving could only be visible by supporters who have contributed a certain amount of $? Maybe all supporters who have contributed 10 consecutive Gittips and have totaled >$50 in support.

Seems like trollers/haters wouldn't donate $50 over ten weeks just to find out someone's total receiving...

[heidigardner]

+1

[timothyfcook]

Been meaning to play around with BountySource, here goes nothin': https://www.bountysource.com/issues/1329420-add-option-to-hide-total-receiving-from-others

[seanlinsley]

Though, certain people might also want their total receiving amount hidden just for reasons of humility, etc. if they aren't interested in broadcasting a "I earn more than you" message.

I'm interested to see this topic discussed on Chad's call with DHH on December 3rd :cat:

On the subject of implementing a system to manage visibility, I think the if we're going to support income hiding then we should respect that person's wishes 100% of the time. That's both to garner a sense of trust, and because no one is forcing you to give to someone who hides their income. Subbable does just fine while hiding the amount raised.

[timothyfcook]

Yeah, it might not cause any issues. Just wanted to raise the possibility. Part of the goal of Gittip (at least the "Open Companies" aspect) seems to be about increasing transparency and working against corporate anonymity. Hiding tips possibly works against this.

It seems reasonable to implement income-hiding for everyone except committed supporters. Maybe there is a better possibility.

[seanlinsley]

This feature could be quite a deep rabbit hole to jump into :-)

[MikeFair]

Users can/should absolutely be able to keep private the amount they are receiving from the network if they'd like. I don't see it as an open company dilemma at all. There's a distinction between the project's data/actions and the users data/actions.

An open company can absolutely keep their client's data private.

Something that can help here is recognizing/deciding who exactly owns what "data" in the database? I say the users themselves each own their own data.

Basically most of the data kept in the database can be classified as "personal" information about a user. Tip allocations, giving history, and how much they are receiving.

Until there's something more formal, an easy way to get started could be something like "it can be kept private as long as the total within the year is below the US Federal annual exclusion limits for the gifts (currently $14,000/year)". There's really no technical or legal reason for dong it that way, but it seemed like a number that was kind of related in the given context.

Another number might be whatever the US considers it's poverty threshold. It's a US specific answer, so other countries might have different rules; but anything happening below the poverty thresholds is really not worth hassling over in my opinion. We can keep the aggregated statistics public, and perhaps the flag saying whether or not you're receiving you're target and the end user can control the rest.

It's about giving the people doing the giving the information they need to select whether or not they individually wish to support that recipient. And just like jumping off bridges; personally selecting to support someone isn't something that needs to be predicated on whether or not other people are supporting that person too.

The system can take care of handling redirecting any over allocations to a particular individual because of mass giving to the same person. That's not something that the users are going to need to control.

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Sean Linsley notifications@github.comwrote:

This feature could be quite a deep rabbit hole to jump into :-)

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1683#issuecomment-28943307 .

[seanlinsley]

personally selecting to support someone isn't something that needs to be predicated on whether or not other people are supporting that person too.

I consciously give more to under-supported people / organizations on Gittip because their relative need is higher. While you're right that it doesn't need to be predicated on their current income, it certainly helps to know how much more support they deserve in relation to the rest of this micro economy.

I'm currently +0 on this feature because I'm not sure how it might negatively effect our gifting community.

[duckinator]

+1

[MikeFair]

"I consciously give more to under-supported people / organizations on Gittip because their relative need is higher."

Right, what I say you're attempting to do is maximize the number of people who, as I like to say it "get done"; i.e. are meeting their weekly goals. And you're starting with those "furthest away" from their goal (aka the most need).

What if the system could do that for you? Would that change your opinion here?

So here's the "algorithm/payout strategy" in a procedural terms: Note: the model here is that each donor has multiple funds they can tip through which are processed in order of their assigned priorities (assigned to by the donor). 1) Take the donor's money and allocate it to their targets starting with the highest priority fund. 2) For everyone who has received over 13% of their target (when you cumulatively aggregate the total from everyone) or has reached the donor assigned maximum; refund the money back to the donor's gifts and prorata reallocate it excluding those people who have "got done" (or reach their limit). 3) Repeat until the donor's money is gone or everyone in that fund has "got done" 4) If everyone in the fund has "got done" the money overflows to the next highest priority fund from the donor.

Note 2: Most people think of funds as being "hand built" but the idea is in addition to hand building funds they can be built automatically by different algorithms.

We will need to work out the formulaic expression details but I see no reason we couldn't find a way for you to express

"Pay out X to those in the system that are asking for the least amount and have the least amount of money allocated to them after all other monies have been paid out". The system would then tell you who you gave money to after payday. Like a "surprise" to you to find out who you gave to that week.

The ability to express these kinds of statements would make fund construction much more fun.

Note 3: I'm looking at the scientific/mathematical languages/systems to run these pay out algorithms. I just found out about "Julia" (julia.org) that looks like a very promising way to distribute the payday/payout algorithm.

If you didn't have to personally select who to give money to, but instead of have the system give you the results of a search it ran to find people who met that criteria (without telling you the exact details of how much they give or receive) would that work for you in your case?

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 9:49 PM, Sean Linsley notifications@github.comwrote:

personally selecting to support someone isn't something that needs to be predicated on whether or not other people are supporting that person too.

I consciously give more to under-supported people / organizations on Gittip because their relative need is higher. While you're right that it doesn't need to be predicated on their current income, it certainly helps to know how much more support they deserve in relation to the rest of this micro economy.

I'm currently +0 on this feature because I'm not sure how it might negatively effect our gifting community.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1683#issuecomment-28959760 .

[duckinator]

@MikeFair while a fascinating idea, and something I would personally love to start playing around with, I don't think it's worth delving into for this. Unless I'm missing something huge, the only negative impact is that it may skew what people who don't show total receiving actually get -- they may not get as much (or may get more) because people can't as easily compare. Given that it's opt-in and only those who opt-in could be affected, I don't consider it a significant problem.

[tshepang]

Perhaps I'm just too used to it, but I really love the idea of seeing what each person is getting, so I am -1. I love the transparency. Do you guys really think Gittip is getting hurt by being this transparent? What happened to @juliepagano?

As a sidenote, was an idea of reducing this transparency (i.e. the title of this Issue) discussed somewhere?

[juliepagano]

@tshepang Nothing happened to me. I'm totally fine with leaving my amounts public for now. However, I like the idea of people being able to decide.

I got the feedback from some folks I was trying to get interested in gittip, so I could donate to them. The lack of privacy immediately jumped out at them as a barrier to them joining. We had a good conversation about why that convinced me it was a good feature to add.

If not seeing how much one receives bothers someone, they can always choose not to donate to people who keep that information anonymous. I think a system like this leaves plenty of room for people to use it different ways.

[bruceadams]

I'm a solid +1 for this. Supporting personal privacy is important. The only downside I can see is that it might confuse users a little, which seems like a small problem.

[sigmavirus24]

+1

[chadwhitacre]

To be continued on #1721 ...

[chadwhitacre]

Process derp, sorry. IRC

[chadwhitacre]

There seems to be less than consensus on this ticket. See also IRC. What I'm hearing is that from the personal privacy standpoint, the feature makes sense, but that it might have unintended negative consequences on Gittip as a whole. Shall we unpack that a bit?

I guess I've been expecting that this feature would be seldom-used and would basically create two Gittips, in the same way that protected Twitter accounts seem to create two Twitters: the public one and the private one. My sense is that the private Twitter is much smaller (anyone have data here?). Certainly protected accounts are a very, very small part of my own Twitter experience. I follow maybe ... two or three protected accounts, out of 952? I'd be fine for Gittip to end up like that: a "public" Gittip with an overwhelming majority of users, and a much smaller "private" Gittip. However, if Gittip were 80% hidden or even 50%, I think I would feel quite differently about Gittip than I do now. Anyone else? What can we say about the desirability or likelihood of a "mostly private Gittip" scenario?

[rummik]

It seems like funding goals will keep the majority of it public, plus most people probably aren't going to tip private accounts. So I'm guessing we'll wind up with the "mostly public Gittip" scenario

Edit: Also, +1 from me :)

[juliepagano]

My expectation is that this use case would make gittip an appealing platform to a new demographic of users. That demographic is largely comprised of underrepresented groups, so that is likely to keep it to the desired minority. I also think the nature of the people involved in the system will keep this to a minority. As others mentioned earlier in the thread, some people will be less inclined to donate to someone who has their amount received anonymous.

The impact on the ecosystem seems similar to the impact of setting your giving to anonymous, which is already a feature. My impression of gittip is that it is for giving small, no strings attached, weekly gifts to people when you appreciate their work. I don’t see anonymous values (either for giving or receiving) as counter to that goal. Absolutely requiring that you share these values seems a bit counter to the “no strings attached” part.

[tshepang]

The most attractive thing about Gittip is its radical approach to transparency, which is quite rare, if not unique. I will be sad even if only 1% of people hide their receipts. Why do that? Why not use another platform if you want to hide things (there isn't a shortage)? I suspect that people who do not join due to this radical transparency need to do some extra reading (there is not a lack of quality blog posts by @whit537), and just go away if they are still not convinced. I am not belittling the severity of the suffering others may get based on what they get (though I wish someone actually shared a link), but is hiding stuff the right way to combat such suffering?

Let's keep things simple... and radical. Let's not relent to the pressures of existing practice.

[bruceadams]

One founding principle of Gittip is anonymity. Recipients do not know who is giving to them. I see this feature, in part, as a minor extension of that existing pillar of anonymous giving.

Also, not showing amount received is not some minor preference. Some people have good and serious reasons to fear taking some kinds of action in public. The internet is often a vicious place. That vitriol can quickly escalate to physical danger in real life. There are plenty of places on the internet for nastiness. Supporting a small measure of safety within Gittip is a very good thing.

[tshepang]

@bruceadams I maintain that Gittip is not the right funding platform for such people. Let's not try to be everything to everyone. Why do we want to include them here, while sacrificing the ideals of openness in the process? We worried we'll lose them to other platforms? It's not like we are having growth problems. It's like having an option for Stack Exchange users to hide their reputation.

[bruceadams]

I don't see your point about openness. This issue has nothing to so with Gittip being open.

[tshepang]

@bruceadams Hiding information has nothing to do with openness (transparency)?

[bruceadams]

Gittip hides all kinds of personal information: bank account numbers, credit card numbers, current balance within Gittip and, optionally, how much one is giving. What makes how much someone is receiving special?

[tshepang]

Shouldn't we stop there in terms of hiding things? I wish to live in a world where hiding income is unusual. It's part of the idea of transparency, which excites me. it makes @whit537 my hero. I want more of that goodness, while many here want less.

Sharing Gittip admin password or credit card numbers would not help the cause even a bit, or would it?

[rummik]

@tshepang I'm in favor of adding this, not because I want it for myself (I'm also publishing my current recurring expenses), but because I can see it as being a necessary feature for some to protect their privacy. I don't think we should force people to sacrifice their privacy to use Gittip.

Also, sharing admin passwords, or credit card numbers, would be a major security risk. Gittip itself doesn't even know the card numbers anyway (those are stored by Balanced, and then Gittip gets a token that can be used for creating charges to a card)

[tshepang]

@rummik Those people are not forced to use Gittip. There are plenty of other funding platforms where hiding stuff is ok. Let's not have Gittip be yet-another-such-platform.

[tshepang]

What exactly are the dangers of sharing (Gittip) earnings publicly? I hear mention of certain demographics getting harassed (and I hope we are not merely speculating here, or overreacting on some isolated incidences), but no one is sharing links.

[juliepagano]

Certainly nobody is being forced to use gittip, but my impression was that Chad (and other members of the community) would like to get a wider variety of communities to participate. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that.

My assumption is that gittip intends to be open to any communities interested in giving weekly no strings attached gifts to people whose work they appreciate. I've been trying to evangelize about the platform and regularly reach out to folks I want to gift if they're not in the system. As mentioned earlier in the issue, that's how I got this feedback.

I got this feedback from a few women who write about social justice related topics. I appreciate their work and wanted to be able to donate to them and reached out about gittip. One of these women already has a PayPal donation link on her site, but I thought gittip might also be of interest to her. The other women do not currently actively seek donations. One mentioned that she has been considering starting to do so. Their immediate concern upon looking at the site was the visibility of donations on the front page and the public listing of what you receive. We had a long conversation about it that helped me understand why this was a concern to them. Considering their concerns about privacy, I'm not repeating all details or giving you their names.

Some common themes that came up in the discussion include:

• Policing of their spending. For example, the woman who has the paypal link on her site sometimes gets nasty messages from people trying to police what she does with her money. She was rightfully concerned this would be even worse if people knew how much she received or if her picture was on the front page.
• Concerns around general privacy. People who receive regular threats and harassment tend to prefer to keep as much of their personal information private as possible. The women who I spoke to are regular targets for threats and harassment.
• Harassment issues related to asking for donations. Certainly this could still happen if what they receive is private, but making the amounts public can exacerbate it. I've already seen a few people accused of "begging" for asking for gifts on gittip.
• Issues around competition when comparing who gets "enough."

[tshepang]

Thanks for sharing that info @juliepagano.

About the inclusiveness comment, I was saying that if accommodating a certain kind of people comes at the expense of compromising Gittip ideals, then such people should be excluded. It's not the right platform for them. As great as Gittip is, it's just not right for everyone, nor should it try to be.

[zbynekwinkler]

Just a quick note - I am following the discussion with interest but I do not have an opinion yet on whether I :+1: or :-1: this feature. I am trying to understand the concerns about harassment but it is certainly not helping that I have never meet anyone who has been a victim.

I can also see the arguments for the other side. One of them that has not been voiced here (I think) is that showing publicly the amount of money one receives could even help the person who would otherwise be harassed. It is a show of a public support of ones work. It shows how many people put their money where their mouth is. I could see the argument going like "oh, I am reviewing this persons work and other people have already done that and decided that this work is so important that they are giving the person such amount of money - why are they doing it, what am I missing?".

But as I said at the beginning, it is just a theory from my side.

[juliepagano]

It seems like the ultimate issue here is whether this feature falls in line with gittip's ideals/goals or not. I filed the issue because it fell in line with my understanding of the goals of the community and how I want it to progress. Some others on the thread agree that it fits in. Some others do not. Chad seems to be on the fence about it, thinking it's ok if it's a minority use case. Maybe it would be useful to reach out to some other heavy users of the platform to get their feedback?

I can see arguments for both sides even if I lean on the side of allowing privacy. For those of you who think this breaks the openness principle of gittip, how do you feel about the fact that giving can be anonymous. It seems inconsistent to allow anonymous giving, but not anonymous receiving, if the concern is openness.

[wilkie]

+1

Privacy is important. Simply put: we don't force people to tell us how they are spending the money, then we don't need to force them to tell us how much they have.

This helps those who want to keep some invisibility and control over that visibility by protecting them from abuse or harm based upon how much they receive. There are indeed various reasons why somebody would want to hide their income.

Also, people who are already very visible/popular can elect to hide their total as well so as to remove it from view as being a score. Hopefully by encouraging them to do so, they can be removed from those arguably insidious lists of "top receivers" and make even more progress against #216 and #634

I find it strange that we allow someone to hide what they give, but not what they receive. Why give those with wealth more options and more room to hide?

[sigmavirus24]

It seems inconsistent to allow anonymous giving, but not anonymous receiving, if the concern is openness.

This was my reasoning for giving my :+1:

... then such people should be excluded. It's not the right platform for them.

That was not the opinion of Gittip when Chad created it (or at least not how I remember it). The original goal was to make Gittip a platform for everyone -- not just programmers but authors, artists, performance artists, etc. Why should this issue make you so uneasy @tshepang and why do you feel the need to assert a different set of ideals?

It is also quite worth noting that the people I can imagine needing this feature are people who are already excluded from several different groups and communities. As you put it, Gittip already has some radical ideals, why then should it compromise its reputation as such a radical and inclusive community because some users need their receiving amounts to be hidden?

Beyond that, it makes sense to echo @wilkie's closing statement:

Why give those with wealth more options and more room to hide?

If people who are giving can hide their giving, they're likely hiding it because they can afford a great deal. People who would otherwise be in alignment with Gittip's ideals but would like to hide their receiving total are being told they should find somewhere else? You're also driving all the traffic from their supporters already using Gittip as well as potential future supporters to another website. Gittip isn't going to transform into some radically different or broken service by allowing this one change.

[tshepang]

Having Gittip open to everyone does not mean it should bend to everyone's wishes. So, if Gittip is too transparent, just don't use it. Is it so harsh to say such a thing? Compromises have to be worth it, and I don't think it is in this case? Do we really want to celebrate Gittip openness (it's killer feature IMO), yet provide an option for people to hide how they benefit from it? What's the point? We don't just want yet-another funding company do we?

I do not want to comment on the ability to hide what users give... I haven't decided on it. I do however think it's less essential. It would be interesting to know why people hide such info though. Also, why use that feature as an excuse to hide even more. Aren't we doing enough hiding for an open company?

[sigmavirus24]

@tshepang you make an excellent "all or nothing" case except that isn't what is being asked for.If people were asking to hide their entire account on here that would be one concern; parity between hiding receiving and giving is another. If your solution is to remove anonymity for those giving anonymously, you'll be doing Gittip far more harm than you probably realize. You probably see this only as a matter of ideals, but Gittip needs to continuing to grow and by respecting the users' privacy that will garner more trust than simply having the extreme transparent model you're advocating for.

The fact of the matter is that Gittip has bent in the past on certain items and stayed firm on others. It has picked its battles and it has picked them intelligently. And on top of everything, Gittip has fought its battles in the public and transparently. That's how Gittip -- the company -- functions. Gittip -- the community -- does not need to be bound to the same rules as the company but it doesn't seem there is a distinction to you between them. The company already operates transparently while allowing anonymity in the community.

GitHub the company is not an open company but it does provide the most popular platform for open sourcing code and making procedures transparent. Imagine where Gittip would be without GitHub. The community surrounding Gittip would not be so strong and the visibility it provides would not have made so transparent a company possible.

Perhaps I should stop referring to the early days of Gittip, but in the beginning discussions of privacy were taken more seriously than this. I can remember a few instances where Chad chose privacy over transparency and there's a certain danger in the "transparency trumps privacy" opinion that many will not hesitate to leave Gittip over.

[tshepang]

I am aware of the bending that takes place. Examples are using, even embracing, closed services like Github, Twitter, Hangouts, Mailchimp, Tumblr, Medium, Heroku, etc. (which is kinda ironic I think). I am wondering if we need to add more to the list. We are already seeing good growth without hiding receipts, so am not worried about that. I am also not advocating an all-or-nothing approach, and acknowledge that compromises need to be done at times.

in the beginning discussions of privacy were taken more seriously than this

What do you mean by this @sigmavirus24?

[rummik]

@tshepang I think what @sigmavirus24 is saying that in cases where privacy vs transparency has come up, the weight of privacy loss (or missing privacy) was taken into consideration.

I personally think the complaints on this issue illustrate why privacy needs to be taken so seriously -- because it's hard to regain privacy when it's lost in a community setting.

[duckinator]

The idea of an Open Company, as far as I understand it, dictates absolutely nothing about how public or private user data is. I simply fail to see how this is related to Gittip-the-company's transparency, openness, etc, unless Gittip's Gittip account were to use this feature.

[chadwhitacre]

Chad seems to be on the fence about it.

Well, I've already given a +1, so I would say I'm leaning against the fence. :-)

I at least felt like we needed more conversation ... which we have now. Thank you. :-)

May I share some personal experience that informs my own thinking on this ticket?

Three months ago, @BryanBraun tweeted a link to a post he wrote entitled "I Trust You," in which he approves of my sharing my contact info on Twitter (@bruceadams made me aware of the post in IRC). @skud responded with a story of when sharing her contact info seriously backfired, and @ultrasaurus and @sabreuse generalized to a statement on gender inequality: "not much of a level playing field if the guys get to extend trust and women need to prepare for trolls," "Yeah, exactly - to frame info as 'trust', you have to be safe sharing it in the first place."

A week later, @skud picked up the conversation by saying, "boggled yet again at how much easier dudes in tech have it. like @gittip guy who loves handing out his phone number to the world." @skud went on to share more details of her experience, while @anildash recognized the "privilege of communication openness" (he also lists his phone number on Twitter). @kennethlove offered (tongue half in cheek) that I might not "realize how weird" I'm being, and @buchuki suggested that my "risk today may someday make it safe for women" to also share their contact info openly. I was especially struck, though, by @competentgirl's comment (is she on GitHub?): "I don't particularly hide my info. My stalker seems to find me at will no matter what I do. Nothing else is that scary." That must really suck, to have your own personal stalker. :-(

My own decision to be open with my name, address, and phone number crystallized two years ago, after I scared the hell out of myself by doxing someone on Reddit. That's when I internalized how easy it is to fuck with someone, and on the flip side how thin the veneer of safety and privacy really is. My response was to start letting go of my illusion of privacy. My strategy for avoiding getting fucked with, then, is to try to disarmingly befriend and learn from anyone who shows signs of maybe someday influencing someone who might want to fuck with me eventually. Guaranteed to work? Nope (but what is?). Way easier because I'm a man? Yup. I've had one kind-of-scary experience with this so far, and as @skud and others have pointed out, I'd be having a lot more if I was a woman.

I'll admit, I've been having a lot of fun with the whole "openness" thing. Part of the attraction for me is the thrill of it, the risk of opening myself up to the unexpected, of making myself vulnerable. The flip side of that is the serendipity of openness, the delightful surprises. However, it wasn't until the above conversations that I took on board that openness is also a matter of privilege. Yes, it's risky for me to advertise my phone number, but it's not that risky. To @skud @ultrasaurus @sabreuse @anildash etc.: thanks for calling me out, and sorry to you and everyone else for being insensitive and crass about the privilege of openness. I'm still committed to practicing personal (and institutional) openness, but I hope I can be more humble about it. When the topic comes up in interviews, I now try to mention that it's a privilege that we need to work to make available to everyone.

So what?

I remain +1 on this, because I respect the input of @juliepagano and others that this feature will make Gittip more accessible to some people whom I am significantly unlike. Also, I agree that letting users hide their giving but not their receiving is imbalanced. I don't see that we could reject this feature without also phasing out anonymous giving.

It turns out that we have a minority, but a significant one, using the anonymous giving feature. We had 1,456 givers this week, and 331 (23%) are giving anonymously. I'm comfortable saying that the anonymous giving feature has helped us grow. Perhaps some of that 23% would still have joined and started giving without the feature, and perhaps some would stick around if we were to roll back anonymous giving. It seems unwise and untrue to say to those 23% that they have violated the ideals of Gittip. I haven't felt that way to date, at least.

I think the balance we have now with the anonymous giving feature is a good one: it's a cultural and software default, with a clear option for the significant minority who hold a different preference. I think we should aim for the same balance with anonymous receiving.

The one red flag I'll wave is that hiding both giving and receiving potentially opens us up to unwanted corporate behavior, as @timothyfcook suggests above. Of the 48 "plural" users who gave this week (3% of total givers), only 3 (6%) are giving anonymously. We might consider scoping both anonymous giving and anonymous receiving to "singular" users only.

[tshepang]

I suppose "plurals" are organisations?

[clone1018]

I am now :+1:

[chadwhitacre]

I suppose "plurals" are organisations?

Yes, sorry. That's internal db/code jargon for groups / organizations / companies / projects. Any user with "We are" instead of "I am."