Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gittip, Year Two

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 218 posts

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#131

Post by whit537 »

webwright wrote: post #127
whit537 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Wanna help with marketing? :-) You're right that it's not just "what we do" but "how we do it" that matters for Gittip. For me they're actually related, though I guess I haven't convinced everyone of that. Basically I just don't feel grateful and generous when I'm spending most of my time working for a paycheck. I want to give my labor away for free! I want open work! I wrote a post about "open products" for The…

You should read: http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/10/startups-miracles.html I think you're shooting for two miracles here - the core idea PLUS the idea that open work is the best way to create a consumer/facing service when all of the evidence seems to point that it's not.

Thanks, I read it.

> Many people delude themselves on whether they are a one-miracle, or multi-miracle startup. They way to tell is to ask yourself what your product or business end goal is. Is your approach directly focused on achieving that end goal? If not, you may have a multi-miracle plan without realizing it.

Gittip's end goal is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love.

So you tell me: is our approach directly focused on achieving that end goal?

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#132

Post by neilk »

jballanc wrote: post #32

It seems to me that Gittip is making the same mistake that Gnu/FSF have made: the most effective change comes one step at a time. Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work. But instead of focusing on this goal, they are also (from the article): * running a non-traditional "open" company * shunning investors not willing to work with an "open" company * only doing "open" intervi…

> there's a reason that Linux has succeeded

I think you mean GNU/Linux? ;)

You are asserting that the real goal of Gittip is to create a new economy, but that's not Chad's goal. You say that this makes him like Stallman, but it also makes him like Linus.

Linus has made it clear that his primary goal isn't to extract revenue, and in many ways he doesn't care much about traditional success metrics. Instead he wants to maximize values like "fun". Chad wants to maximize other values, like "generosity". Is it up to us to say that's wrong?

Also, Gittip has a model of self-funding. Even funding a team of people with different talents. Linux doesn't; it's organized around a code repo, and depends on enthusiasts and enlightened corporations to keep contributions flowing. If you're a marketer or designer who wants to contribute to Linux, you're going to have a lot more trouble. You only think of Linux's model as pragmatic because it's been around for so long, and you've gotten used to the deficiencies.

And when it comes to openness, in big open source projects like the Linux kernel, it's considered rude to have any significant discussions off the mailing lists. I think Chad's insistence on making everything public just updates the principle to modern tools like video chats. I used to work for the Wikimedia Foundation, and we did similar things, so the community could act as a watchdog. Our "full disclosure agreements" were difficult for partners sometimes, but they didn't preclude alliances with Apple or Facebook, or donations from Google.

Now, from where I sit, Chad might have taken the openness tactic a little too far. Some discretion is appropriate, especially when people are just starting to form a relationship. And contributors need privacy. To their credit, the Gittip community is currently reconsidering some of the rules around openness, and Chad has been admirably open to that -- another way in which he's not a Stallman.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#133

Post by dinkumthinkum »

chroma wrote: post #19
sspiff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $40k per year is quite close to minimum wage in California. Exactly. In California. If you want to live off of what is basically donations for community work, you might want to relocate to a much cheaper place. Eastern Europe or South-East Asia are nice places to live on a tighter budget. I donate a small amount every week myself, though I find it hard to make a bigger commitment to it.

Living in cheap places is fun when you're young, but eventually you take on more responsibilities and your body fails you. Are eastern europe and southeast asia known for their health care? Are dentists cheap there? Most importantly, are they good places to raise a family? I can totally get behind you when it comes to arbitraging cost of living, but not everyone can do that. At best, one could live in an inexpensive…

I love that many of the responses to this are basically advocating yes that developers should just try to live on $40,000 and move overseas to live cheaper. This hardly smacks of "sustainability." Now, Gittip has to convince programmers that they should want to live with no low income and then therefore be able to use the service.

As an aside, as others mentioned, the health care in most Southeast Asian countries is not as bad as you might think.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#134

Post by dinkumthinkum »

joaren wrote: post #113
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.

I never liked Gittip because of how it advertises its top earners and givers... it stops being about rewarding good work and starts to become a game of who can score the most validation points and use them for political gain. Yelling on Twitter and demonizing men for existing is not "promoting empathy and equality". Begging for legal money for your civil lawsuit is not "sustainable crowd funding" (hint: what is she b…

Yes, and what in the world does such nonsense have to do with rewarding open source developers? I feel like its a hobby business but everyone makes their own decisions.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#135

Post by whit537 »

mholt wrote: post #93

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…

Did you know that Gittip and Shields are in cahoots? :-)

http://blog.gittip.com/post/59396458675/gittip-has-acquired-...

Re: stories, I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#136

Post by rgbrgb »

I just signed up. What's the easiest way for me to put a gittip badge in a Readme.md on Github? I'd recommend putting that front and center unless I missed it.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#137

Post by whit537 »

teawithcarl wrote: post #111

I love Gittip, and believe deeply in their philosophy goal. I visited their hackathon Jan 2nd-4th, in Ambridge, PA. Great team ... hard working, talented. Chad is a superb full-stack engineer, and completely sincere in his honorable goals. I believe he and the team will succeed. And when they do, since it's bootstrapped, it will not be owned by investors. Gittip is truly a new and deep way of thinking.

Thanks for the support, Carl! Loved having you here! :D

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#138

Post by j46a1 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #47
peteretep wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three of the top four receivers appear to fit the label "moderately well known and divisive figure in the tech feminism scene".

I think more seriously https://www.gittip.com/noirin/ has stuff on her profile that directly deprecates her husband. I don't anything about this case, but I'd say in general it makes me uncomfortable that somebody is bringing up a personal conflict on a platform like this.

I'm glad that others are voicing their dissent. Gittip has went from an idea of giving open source developers a way to supplement their income via time spent writing software. Instead, it's been hijacked by toxic social justice warriors. One is even for someone supporting their legal issues (unrelated in any way whatsoever to tech). I'd love to see a statement by someone at Gittip responding to this.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#139

Post by whit537 »

kmfrk wrote: post #35
jve wrote: post #8

Took me some looking around to find a link on bottom of the (gittip.com) page to actually find out what gittip does. First thought was - is it a way to get paid by submitting patches through GitHub? No, actually thats a site where you give/receive donations to people on Twitter/GitHub/Bitbucket

Surprisingly, I hear, by far, the most about gittip from feminist circles; it's easy to explain the reason for using gittip in that context. It's great that people use gittip for that, but I also think the barrier to understanding gittip is easier for people who support feminist causes than for most other demographics. I've tried using gittip as a single-donation tip jar for people who fixed or forked broken repos, b…

It's a design decision, not a tax/regulatory issue. We've had one-off tipjars for decades and they haven't changed the game. My mortgage is recurring so my income needs to be recurring as well.

We currently have an "Other Ways to Give" on your profile where you can link a bitcoin address or Venmo account. That's an outlet for one-offs. We may mix in first-class one-offs eventually but we're not in a rush. See https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#140

Post by whit537 »

rgbrgb wrote: post #136

I just signed up. What's the easiest way for me to put a gittip badge in a Readme.md on Github? I'd recommend putting that front and center unless I missed it.

Awesome, thanks! :D

See http://shields.io/ for README badge. I've added a +1 for you to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1145.

Post reply on HN