I Believe in Gittip

http://blog.gittip.com/post/27072581481/i-believe-in-gittip

by jordanmessina • 14 years ago

94 55 14 years ago

blog.gittip.com

wildmXranat• 14 years ago

So Gittip is a recurring donation platform for Github authors ?

kingkilr• 14 years ago

Pretty much, yes.

whit53722• 14 years ago

I want to expand it beyond GitHub, but yes.

kiba2• 14 years ago

About doing what you really want and getting an income: sometime they don't mix well.

Right now, I am just building projects on whatever I felt like doing. Some are no doubt, useful to everybody else. However, the rest may be just be interesting only to me or solve a problem that is unique only to me.

Do I know where I will get my money? No clues. However, it been a blast for me, personally. I learn a few tech such as meteor.js and how to develop chrome extensions, although I really want greybeard knowledge(algorithms, debugging, and other core skills), not the latest fad.

whit53722• 14 years ago

Yeah, it's about making the world better on your terms. I think the crowd can be a better proxy of value to society than the corporation.

kiba2• 14 years ago

You will still need to market yourself to the crowd and find work that you like but that the crowd will fund.

Some passions, no doubt, will not be rewarded.

rpwilcox• 14 years ago

Eating your own dogfood: an excellent idea :)

Smudge• 14 years ago

Figuratively speaking.

whit53722• 14 years ago

Can it be drinking my own whiskey instead?

I guess if I want it to be that I'd better make some whiskey. Hmm ... ;-)

_ak• 14 years ago

my previous managers always talked about "drinking your own champagne"...

chubot2• 14 years ago

I like the idea of Gittip, and I have definitely thought about the problem of how society can encourage things that benefit it (i.e. open source software).

I had a bad experience with Gittip though. I tried to tip you. It said sign in with github, so I did. Then I go back. I tried to tip you again, and it said there was an error. Then I clicked "back with a credit card". And it says I need to sign in with github to add a credit card. But it already says I'm signed in as my user name in the upper right corner. So something is wrong.

Also I think it would be better to allow one-time payments too. I just wanted to try your system but I wasn't committed to making a recurring payment. I was going to cancel it after I tried it. I would have been fine with a one-time payment.

whit53722• 14 years ago

Ouch, thanks for reporting. :-(

Digging a bit ...

whit53722• 14 years ago

Started a ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/143

whit53722• 14 years ago

On the one-time payments issue, see:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/113

The short story is that Gittip is targeted at funders, and the current wisdom is that one-off payments would erode confidence in the stability of one's funding stream. Yes, you can do what you were planning to do, pay for a week and then cancel, but Gittip doesn't want to optimize for that, I don't think.

bmelton• 14 years ago

Is there a way for people to tip without being members of Github? I imagine that a lot of the beneficiaries of say, jQuery's goodness, aren't necessarily on Github at all.

aarlo• 14 years ago

Why are you targeting for "funders" (I think you mean the people getting paid)?

In general, getting the money into systems is the hard part. If money is there, people will come - easy! Getting people to give money - whether to a company or for donations - that's hard!

Also, frankly, this is a nice proposition from the POV of the "funders". You seem to have built it for yourself. But, the value for the donors? Sounds like a tough sell.

So making donors happy is most important. Without them you're toast. With them you can AT LEAST support yourself, if nothing else :)

reedlaw• 14 years ago

I applaud his courage, but leaving a job for $115.73 per week seems a bit risky. Maybe if this concept was combined with something like Kickstarter it would be more effective. E.g. you create an open-source project and pledge to continue development on it as long as your Gittip payments stay above a certain threshold.

nollidge• 14 years ago

> In the mean time, I will be looking for about 50 hours a month of contract work to stay afloat

radarsat13• 14 years ago

Please make it accept bitcoin. No, seriously.

If you convert the bitcoins to cash automatically on reception I don't see any issues with people's confidence in the currency -- it just transparently becomes a payment vector for real dollars that automatically get exchanged via mtgox or whatever.

I really look forward to the day when I can just toss a few bitcoins towards programmers or musicians on the internet. Right now, signing up my credit card for every website I want to interact with is just not going to happen, and Paypal isn't an option for me either.

I wish services like bandcamp and things like bug bounties and the like allowed me to just throw some coins their way, but instead there's this whole complicated credit system with one or more third parties to deal with, and it's annoying. I hate typing my CC number into every damn website I want to make a microtransaction with.

Personally I don't know or care whether bitcoin will transform world economics the way some people predict, but I do think it's a pretty convenient way to deal with internet transactions, even if it's just used as a temporary medium for real currency. This kind of thing, in all honesty, is its "killer app."

krasin3• 14 years ago

The issue with bitcoin (at least, now) is that it does not easily allow to make recurring charges (which is what gittip about)

radarsat13• 14 years ago

I disagree. If I started getting into the habit of throwing some bitcoins at gittip, I might be inclined to send a few over and keep them there with the intention of distributing them to people without having to do a new transaction each time. If they're just used as a way to fill my account there and then instantly changed to dollars, what's the difference between that and a bank transfer? (Except that there is no fee and no hassle.)

whit53722• 14 years ago

I'm not opposed to accepting bitcoin if it's transparent as you describe. As krasin mentions the recurring thing is a sticking point. Here's the ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/14

radarsat13• 14 years ago

Thanks. Some pretty interesting discussion on that bug actually. Although I think it wouldn't be too hard to rig up yourself, I have to agree with the guy who suggests just hooking up with a 3rd-party bitcoin payment processor--it might make things easier and more similar to handling other currencies.

chmullig• 14 years ago

BitCoin has a pretty serious stigma as an unreliable, hacker friendly currency/scam for trying to buy illegal shit. I think embracing it on a platform that's already niche will make it harder to be seen as a legitimate platform for earning a living.

krasin3• 14 years ago

Please, elaborate.

bryanp• 14 years ago

He's proven his belief in the product by taking a stand. This is already more than most could hope to do. For that I offer my applause. If this isn't a next big thing, it at least offers a life changing mindset. For that I offer my thanks.

whit53722• 14 years ago

:^)

Kliment• 14 years ago

So what are the restrictions on getting money out?

That's a major concern to me. You say you handle them manually, but do you have restrictions on how much money can be paid out, what country the recipient may be resident in, etc?

whit53722• 14 years ago

Here's the ticket for implementing automatic payouts:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/22

Balanced Payments is contributing code for integrating with their service. I'm hoping to have this rolled out in the next week or two. Balanced can only underwrite payees in the US. Hopefully we'll start seeing support for Canada, UK, and Europe in 2013.

Gittip itself has no a priori restrictions. You can withdraw your full balance less processing fees at any time. If we can't find a way to get you your money automatically then I'll write you a check and put it in the mail. Or PayPal it. Or whatever.

rlpb2• 14 years ago

How does this compare with Flattr? It may be slightly different, but is it sufficiently different?

whit53722• 14 years ago

Flattr is for content. Gittip is for people.

Flattr is optimized for making tippers feel good. Gittip is optimized for making tippees a living.

Flattr takes a 10% cut. Gittip is drinking its own whiskey.

rlpb2• 14 years ago

Thanks. I understood all of this from the website. Can you be more specific?

> Flattr is for content. Gittip is for people.

> Flattr is optimized for making tippers feel good. Gittip is optimized for making tippees a living.

What is stopping me from using Flattr for myself? Am I stopped from putting a Flattr thing on my own general personal home page? Am I going to get more money from Gittip over Flattr, and why? Rather than telling me what Gittip is aimed at, can you tell me specifically what Gittip is doing better here? Anything tangible?

the_mitsuhiko• 14 years ago

> How does this compare with Flattr? It may be slightly different, but is it sufficiently different?

Gittip works, flattr does not for the most part. Flattr works probably if you push out a ton of content, but that's pretty much it. If you want to get recurring donations for an open source project or something similar without spending a lot of time with the system you can pretty much ignore flatt.

Also you can't be paid on flattr unless you pay others at the same time.

qzio• 14 years ago

Correction: You do not have to pay others at the same time.

austinlyons• 14 years ago

can you use dwolla to reduce your costs?

http://developers.dwolla.com/bd/why

I Believe in Gittip

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