allow for one-off tips

[chadwhitacre]

The essence of Gittip is recurring tips, but once we solidify that I'm open to mixing in one-offs.

The reason recurring tips are important is because my mortgage is recurring and Gittip is about paying my mortgage.

There is a $80 open bounty on this issue. Add to the bounty at Bountysource.

[thiloplanz]

Maybe not. The sustained weekly tip seems to be the main differentiator for gittip. The motivation behind it is very good, better not to muddle the message. Since the amounts involved would tend to be bigger, this could also lead to (legal and fraud) problems . You can use Flattr (or PayPal) for one-offs. And I suppose you can even use gittip right now for one-offs by just changing your preferences a week later.

[chadwhitacre]

Agree, let's ride the "weekly" wave for a while. We can reticket this if/when there is demand.

[chadwhitacre]

Via HN:

I see no reason why you couldn't just represent the values separately on admin panel... "You are 'earning' $200 a week on GitTip, and also got $50 extra in your tip jar this week."

[felideon]

Maybe one way to not break the core recurring model is to implement an "extra tip" feature. So if I commit to $1 a week, every now and then I can tip another dollar (or more) above my current commitment. So it would be more like a base salary + bonus compensation.

[chadwhitacre]

+1

[chadwhitacre]

I like it, @felideon.

[chadwhitacre]

Not sure we want to constrain to people you already tip though. Maybe it's global? If you give at least $10 a week on Gittip you "unlock" one-offs?

[felideon]

That's a good point. I think the bottom line for a developer must be "Can I live off this?" and as long as arbitrary tips don't give a false sense of security then it should be fine.

(Disclaimer: I am not an OSS hacker.)

[kn0ll]

for what it's worth, i'd imagine recurring tips provide a false sense of security- not one off tips. living off recurring tips would require accepting that at any time, xx% of my living wages could be withdrawn for any or no reason.

with a 1 off tip, there is no expectation other than "here is some money i got, better spend it wisely".

[felideon]

That's a good point @catshirt

[chadwhitacre]

living off recurring tips would require accepting that at any time, xx% of my living wages could be withdrawn for any or no reason.

@catshirt The low tip amounts are meant to mitigate against that. It would take a high percentage of people withdrawing support to put you in jeopardy.

[thiloplanz]

Since the amounts involved would tend to be bigger, this could also lead to (legal and fraud) problems

Some ideas to mitigate this:

• One-off-tips are not instant, but occur during the usual weekly payout. (Until then they can be cancelled or changed)
• One-off-tips count towards the weekly per-donor maximum amount.
• One-off-tips follow the same privacy/transparency rules as weekly donations: Receipts are made public, donors stay anonymous.

So in essence, they work just like a weekly payment that you set up one week and cancel the week after that.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from /r/Anarchism:

Gittip should also add support for non-recurring tips. For one, this is necessary for any system that wishes to subsume the current transactional market economy. Also, with the above model for organizing groups that avoids the problem of capitalist exploitation, one of the main problems with exchange relations -- that it obscures exploitation -- is avoided.

[chadwhitacre]

We should have a UI for leaving a fixed amount in your Gittip account each week to use to fund one-off tips.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @danostrowski via Twitter. See his further comments on #255.

[thiloplanz]

The possible cooperation with Flattr (which is all about one-off tips) could also bring interesting options here, see #284.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @jonsmock via Twitter.

[jonsmock]

Thanks @whit537 - I missed this issue somehow.

I was picturing the situation where someone posts a helpful screencast or article, but they're not the type to post often. Or they helped me on IRC. Or they helped me on Stackoverflow. I may not want to tip them indefinitely, but perhaps I'd tip them $X this week, because it really helped me out or taught me something.

Seems like the problem for Gittip in general is "converting" people into recurring tippers. One-off tips may be a gateway for people, since the commitment is lower, but it's a concrete stepping stone. And I'd imagine at volume, many one-off weekly gittips would become indistinguishable from a single recurring gittip to the receiver. So there'd be a place for both to coexist.

Example: a screencaster posts on a wide array of topics and has a gittip badge on her site. Perhaps she doesn't have a consistent enough thread to illicit many people to consistently support her through recurring tips, but her screencasts are helpful enough that each week many people offer one-off gittips, not necessarily on her current week's post but also on her backlog.

Not pushing the feature, just offering some food for thought :-)

P.S. this is perhaps pie in the sky, but linking Gittip to StackOverflow could be powerful. (I'm sure someone has thought of this before - sorry!)

Edit: I completely understand that the goal is paying the mortgage, as noted at the top :-) Perhaps I should have focused on the gateway part of this thought rather than my example.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @jacqueminv via Twitter.

[jacqueminv]

+1 duplicate but just to show my deep interest in this. Keep going the good work!

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @aaronbrethorst via HN.

[alexcouper]

+1 to the stackoverflow linking by @jonsmock. Had a similar thought last night and that brought me to this "issue".

[chadwhitacre]

This would really be powerful in concert with our "Gittip Everywhere" browser extension:

https://github.com/zetaweb/gittip-everywhere https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gittip-everywhere/ffbkkncpfcobpjaolefljnpmianmflig

[joonas]

Some thoughts from a twitter thread: https://twitter.com/coreyhaines/status/280011881597513729

[chadwhitacre]

+1 via HN

[fractastical]

+1

[nicksergeant]

+1 from a Gittip contributor :)

[chadwhitacre]

@nicksergeant :D

!m

[clone1018]

+1 just to fit in

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @whitmo on Twitter

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @kcruby

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @philwinkle via Twitter

[chadwhitacre]

When we get to this, I expect it to be an option for those who are already giving to someone on a weekly basis. The current minimum is $0.25 per week, and in a sliding-scale (#434), fund-centric (#449) future, that will be lower still, but you still won't be able to give one-off gifts to people unless you're also giving them weekly recurring gifts.

[nicksergeant]

Is there a specific technical reason you want to approach it like that? I think there's a pretty strong case for people wanting to do one-off tips without committing to a weekly thing. Like... some of my dev friends and I will say "I'll pay you $50 if you go build this right now" and we'll end up just PayPal'ing each other. I'd rather use Gittip for this specific purpose - even if I'm not already giving them weekly tips.

[chadwhitacre]

@nicksergeant Not a technical reason, no. I want to encourage weekly giving.

[nicksergeant]

Maybe game it a little bit? Say "you can give single one-off tips for the entire number of people that you're giving money to weekly".

So if I'm giving money to 15 people, I'm allowed to give 15 one-off tips.

Some variation on that would be cool...

[chadwhitacre]

Yeah, I'm open to a variation. Do you think it's time to prioritize this feature?

[nicksergeant]

Honestly I think it's a huge value-add to the service. I can think of 2-3 times this week that I'd have thrown some cash at people but didn't want to do it via weekly contributions (some because it would take multiple weeks to get to the amount of cash I wanted to give to the person).

[nicksergeant]

Instead of people saying "yeah PayPal me" they can say "I'm on gittip".

[nicksergeant]

This might even encourage people to give one-off tips to people because right now there's no way to give one-off tips to people without first asking them "hey do you have a PayPal account?"

[nicksergeant]

Sorry for the comment spam. But, to drive my point home, one-off tips can only be a win-win for both Gittip and users. If people don't want to give weekly tips - they can still do it on Gittip. And once they start one-off tipping, they'll get used to the service and then maybe start some weekly tipping.

[chadwhitacre]

I agree that it's a good feature and we should add it (in balance with the emphasis on the recurring baseline). I guess my sense is that optimizing the new user flow is higher priority right now, though. If we can figure out how to work in parallel I'm up for tackling both together.

[whitmo]

"weekly" tipping is more like tithing or a church offering. Tipping in the rest of the world is more a tit for tat thing: you helped me, I tip you for it, we are even.

I would expect these payment to be less frequent per user and of larger size. I would also expect them to be more public. I want person X to know I tipped amount Y for act Z.

Toward the ends of sustainability, I think the promoting weekly could come on the other end of a one time tip. If I receive a big tip, perhaps a feature could me to dispensate it to several pre-determined people I think are should be supported in general. Being able spread the wealth automagically would be awesome. Since most folks are probably more interested in spreading the love than the money, I could see this being popular. It could also possibly allow me personally to contribute more without having to explain the weekly charges every week to my spouse.

-w

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 6:59 PM, Chad Whitacre notifications@github.comwrote:

I agree that it's a good feature and we should add it (in balance with the emphasis on the recurring baseline). I guess my sense is that optimizing the new user flow is higher priority right now, though. If we can figure out how to work in parallel I'm up for tackling both together.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/zetaweb/www.gittip.com/issues/5#issuecomment-13527800.

<=> david "whit" morriss

"If you don't know where you are, you don't know anything at all"

Dr. Edgar Spencer, Ph.D., 1995

[philwinkle]

FWIW, I didn't have any concept of the service, at all, have never seen or heard of a thing called Gittip. I saw a tweet from @cowboy and I replied to him. I thought this would be like Flattr, quite honestly. I have no problem sending someone a few bucks, but I couldn't wrap my mind around the recurring charge and thought that somebody should know.

I get that the service and it's creator(s) have a goal and a vision and I applaud them for it. I think that it was assumed that there was some ire in my response regarding the nature of the service. However, after submitting my honest 140-character feedback I sensed immediate hostility from the project creator about whether or not $0.25/week was onerous or not; receiving multiple @-replies and even a suggestion that maybe I should delete my account. Defensive, much?

Is $0.25/week onerous? Of course it's not. But perhaps the point of the service or the messaging of the brand should be apparent from the very first page rather than 'sign in or join to send a tip.' Or, rename it. http://Gitcur.ly is available, lol. On second though, maybe I'm just blind.

[chadwhitacre]

@philwinkle Sorry for the snark, and thanks for sticking around. :-)

The suggestion that you delete your account reflects my self-consciousness at not having implemented account deletion yet (#54). I was trying to avoid a situation where you went to delete your account and discovered that you couldn't(!). :-)

I did assume that you were familiar with Gittip already and consequently that your initial tweet was snarkier than it was. That's my fault. Sorry. :-)

So how do we make the recurring aspect clearer for others in the future? One change I made yesterday that might help is that new site visitors now see this:

Instead of this:

That is, they get the same buttons with the "Your Weekly Gift" text as signed-in users get, along with the prompt to join.

Does that help with this?

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @larz0 on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/larz/status/305885406593957889

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @dylancopeland via Twitter.

[dylancopeland]

Here's another +1 from me via GitHub. I'm very hesitant to allow a service to perform reoccurring payments and I'm sure others feel similar. A one-time tip would allow someone to give how much ever they're willing to and then not have to worry about stopping the reoccurring payment down the road. By not allowing one time tips, potential givers are being turned away for no good reason at all.

[chadwhitacre]

potential givers are being turned away for no good reason at all.

I disagree. The reason to turn away one-time gifts is to dampen volatility. A gift stream on Gittip should be stable enough to depend on to pay one's bills. The concern with one-time gifts is that they would cause week to week gift totals to vary too wildly.

[chadwhitacre]

-1 via Twitter.