HN user
Because of their little suicidal robots that scan the email and then go boom (targeted advertising), i keep getting viagra ads everywhere. Plus there's the whole NSA thing as well...
EDIT: Of course there's adblock and i dont see the ads on my main browser but when logging in on another computer in a public space... BAM, penis pills
Why not open source all of it? I find it hard to trust a closed service especially after what happened with gmail.
Read HN's welcome: "As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality." Your top 2 Receivers have never contributed anything of value to the community (this is subjective, I know but the majority would agree with me) and yet they receive an amount most others would dream of receiving. Yes, a person has the privilege of doing whatever they want with their money but your website is endorsing bad actions so I won't support it. Just because the amount you payed out increased, it doesn't mean that (community & value wise) it isn't half dead.
Sorry, this is my opinion.
so its just a website for technologically capable street beggars?
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.