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Gittip, Year Two

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Re: Gittip, Year Two

#91

Post by whit537 »

ronilan wrote: post #88
whit537 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking three to five years to reach profitability is normal. In the mean time, we paid out $300,000 in no-strings-attached gifts this past year. That does not feel to me like the wrong thing to be doing. :-)

Chad, the passion and effort you've put into your project are clear. I hope it will eventually become beneficial to you, if not directly, then down the road through the doors it must have opened to you. That being said, I think I'm not the only one who would have advised you to let go of something that is half dead (edit: meaning "vegetative" by comparable standards). Also, wouldn't the mission be better served as a…

We paid out $41,000 in our first year, and $300,000 in our second. How is something that just grew 632% half-dead?

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#92

Post by pessimizer »

I have a few criticisms of Gittip, with the caveat that I'm largely criticizing you for not being something else that I want, rather than for not doing a good job at the thing that you're currently doing.

1) Is there some sort of legal reason that Gittip doesn't want to manage all of my non-profit giving?

2) What's with the focus on programming? The programming community is tiny, and will be better off piggybacking on the larger culture rather than trying to create one of our own. Why not focus on supporting free culture writ large, like musicians, writers, artists, and charities?

3) The reason my own donation is shitty is because I have to figure out who to donate to and how to donate to them, and then I end up having to maintain as many channels for cash as I have things to donate to. Can't you just offer me curated funds where percentages of my monthly tithe go to a range of things that are often supported together, and you guys just keep it updated?

4) The greatest sin that gittip commits in my opinion is not being donator focused. It seems to be a platform for people to get money donated to them, rather than a platform to manage my donations, as a person who has money.

OK: I hope this isn't too incoherent, because I'm a bit busy; my bottom line is that I want to donate $10K - $20K a year, like many people I'm sure, and if you can help me with that problem, that's where success lies. Right now, it seems like you primarily help marginal people receive money instead of helping me give it.

I want to give to 100 software projects that I know about, and 200 that I don't. I want to give to 10 charities that I know about, and 20 that I don't. I want to give to them whether or not they're aware of gittip. I don't want to be Joan Kroc giving all of her money to NPR because she didn't know of the myriad of other companies that make up public radio. I don't want to spend more than an hour a year on it. Can you help me?

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#93

Post by mholt »

I ended up using my own badges from shields.io because the widgets generated for me say "I receive $null from GitTip." And the buttons don't say anything useful: People don't know what "Gittip" is by itself, and "3.00" (actually, for me, they say "NaN") doesn't mean anything either. I made a badge on shields that says "tips|accepted" because I 1) wouldn't want people to know how much I'm making on Gittip and 2) don't care how they donate, really. But I like the idea of Gittip and hope it continues and grows.

I'd love to see actual stories of donors/receivers there, too.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#94

Post by petenixey »

whit537 wrote: post #66
primigenus wrote: post #63

I love Gittip. I don't love the homepage. When I visit the homepage, I see "Sustainable crowdfunding: inspiring generosity", followed by a call to action input asking me to enter someone's username, and finally three groups of lists of people. None of these things mean anything to me if I'm new to Gittip. The headline at the top describes your company mission statement, not what the product does. Instead of telling m…

Thanks! Awesome feedback, especially on the homepage! I've added your comments with a +1 to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 . Re: the name, that's mentioned a couple other places on this thread. Do you think it's important enough to focus on in the next year? Do you think it's the crucial missing link to making Gittip itself sustainable? Or is that something we tackle once we've demonstrated that…

FWIW I agree with all the UX feedback but think that the name's great. I wouldn't change it. Also you've got brand equity in it now it would be hard to argue that with zero marketing budget you could outdo it at this stage (plus it's great :)

Best of luck with it, great story!

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#95

Post by eswat »

infruset wrote: post #33

I was really surprised to see they don't accept Bitcoin. I feel like it is the perfect use case and would probably help them gather some more enthusiasm from the community. However, one could also contend that Bitcoin might very well kill them..

We can do payouts in Bitcoin currently, but it’s a manual process.

We have an Issue on GitHub to remedy this to make it automated while making sure we do it right. Any help would be appreciated: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1960

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#96

Post by iodfgj »

I think gittip had the potential to become something great and yea, sure, you've had a substantial increase in traffic since last year but an increase in traffic does not mean an increase in quality.

I've been looking over at gittip for a while now and saw it was doing good things for good open source developers but your homepage shows the problem. The top 2 money recipients are 2 feminists which have never seen a line of code in their lives (one of them doesn't even have a github account!). This got me really confused as to what the objective of the website really is since apparently anyone can signup and receive cash without working for it.

So that's why I don't use the website to receive or to give. I think its kind of insulting for the developers that actually do something for the community.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#98

Post by pekk »

matdes wrote: post #26
pekk wrote: post #12

Gittip is a nice idea. But sadly, it has become a place for certain people to receive hefty monthly paychecks from anonymous patrons in exchange for incredibly aggressive and toxic trolling. Despite original intentions, this is not making an ecosystem of love and gratitude. So if its creator isn't even making money from it, it's probably better if it goes to sleep.

heavy eyeroll if this is supposed to be a "hidden" jab at tech feminists.

No, that wasn't a jab at feminism in tech! Feminism is great and there are some big problems to address in tech. But paying people to stir up heated conflicts and throw Tumblr-style tantrums isn't fixing anything, it is actually misrepresenting women in tech and doing harm to their cause.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#99

Post by whit537 »

petenixey wrote: post #94
whit537 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Awesome feedback, especially on the homepage! I've added your comments with a +1 to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074 . Re: the name, that's mentioned a couple other places on this thread. Do you think it's important enough to focus on in the next year? Do you think it's the crucial missing link to making Gittip itself sustainable? Or is that something we tackle once we've demonstrated that…

FWIW I agree with all the UX feedback but think that the name's great. I wouldn't change it. Also you've got brand equity in it now it would be hard to argue that with zero marketing budget you could outdo it at this stage (plus it's great :) Best of luck with it, great story!

Thanks! :-)

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#100

Post by zheshishei »

pessimizer wrote: post #92

I have a few criticisms of Gittip, with the caveat that I'm largely criticizing you for not being something else that I want, rather than for not doing a good job at the thing that you're currently doing. 1) Is there some sort of legal reason that Gittip doesn't want to manage all of my non-profit giving? 2) What's with the focus on programming? The programming community is tiny, and will be better off piggybacking o…

Something like a donation dashboard might solve your problem? They could let the donor set an optional maximum monthly contribution. Of that maximum contribution, the donor could set how much of it goes to each tip. The giving page seems like a good place to put such a thing.

As for tipping a charitable organisation that might not be on gittip, perhaps setting up proxy accounts where the monthly tip is donated by gittip would work. Of course, this would be susceptible to a social engineering attack where a scammer could fraudulently claim to represent the organisation and ask for control of the account.

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