Ask people why they stopped tipping (i.e. do an exit survey)

[greggles]

Right now people stop using gittip and there's no sense of why that happens.

It would be nice to know why.

• Step 1 is probably starting with some metrics on the average number of weeks that people tip and identifying "churn"
• Step 2 is writing the survey (see below)
• Step 3 is probably figuring out how to notify people of the survey - since these people no longer come to the site we can't put it as a call to action on the site so it will have to be via email (sign up with or link email address #89) or twitter (notify new receivers on Twitter via a twitter bot #646) or gh interruptions (ask for permission to send GitHub interruptions #73)

Maybe these questions would be good:

• Why did you start tipping someone on Gittip?
• Did you know you've stopped tipping?
• Why did you stop tipping?
• Is there an improvement to Gittip that would make you start tipping again?
• Anything else? (free comment area)

From a logistic perspective, there are lots of free or low cost survey tools. I personally like https://webform.com but there are lots of other options (Survey Monkey, survey.io etc.).

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[ceboudreaux]

@greggles I agree that we should work towards answering the question of why users stop tipping. But I don't know if an email survey would be the best way to do that. Perhaps we could do some data-mining and try to identify some user behavior trends to give us insight into when and why the tips stop, as well as why people sign up but never tip at all.

@whit537 What do we currently have in place to collect/analyze user behavior data? Besides the items on the Charts page, what user behavior metrics do we log?

[greggles]

@ceboudreaux I'm all for data mining, but couldn't think of a way to divine the motivations from the data. Do you have some suggestions of data analysis that would be insightful?

[ceboudreaux]

I think we should look for trends associated with users who stop tipping. What do they have in common? For example:

• Expired credit cards
• High/low numbers of tip recipients
• High/low tip amounts
• High/low number of visits to Gittip.com
• Length of time between sign up and initial tip
• Length of time between initial tip and discontinuation
• Amount of money given (tipped) versus received
• Number of connected accounts
• Number of communities joined
• Characteristics of tip recipients (whether recipients receive from other tippers, whether recipient accounts still exist, etc.)

Again though, if we don't log any of this data, then we can't begin to analyze it. Assuming that we do log user behavior data, we should brainstorm reasons WE think users would stop tipping, and then test those predictions.

[mvdkleijn]

@ceboudreaux Are we logging any of this data already?

[chadwhitacre]

We have detailed records for:

• every tip and change to tips
• every transfer of money within Gittip
• every exchange of money between Gittip and the outside world (credit card, bank account)
• every join/leave of a community

So much of what @ceboudreaux lists we can compute. Things we don't have a good record of include:

• success/failure charging credit cards (keep track of credit card failures in the database #364)
• visits (log visitor stats ourselves #1497)

Those two tickets are in the current "Infrastructure" milestone.

[different2]

Hey I just found this because I was curious if it was possible to tip people in github. I realize this is 2 years old but you guys might get notifications.. Also you might still be looking for improvements.. Anyways I searched for it because I didn't want to search for a way to pay programmers. But I'm a noob programmer asking people I meet for help, and I think "wow great this guy solved my problem so quickly! I feel so stupid now but I am really thankful!" The issues I am having is I am poor, like most programmers or aspiring ones. So if you market it towards people who have problems they would like help with, especially noob programmers. Also figure out ways for people to pay "alternatively" that they can earn money with. Perhaps a "future payment thing" People have an unlimited amount of coins. Coins are worth money, they vow to pay this person in the future so many coins for their help.

[chadwhitacre]

Glad you found us, @different2! You're discovering us at an interesting time. We've recently revamped our model significantly. Probably the best place to catch up with our current status is this Gratipay 2.0 post.

[mattbk]

In light of Gratipay 2.0, I think this should take a backseat to getting everything working again, but this is definitely a +1 from me for data mining.

[webmaven]

@mattbk:

In light of Gratipay 2.0, I think this should take a backseat to getting everything working again, but this is definitely a +1 from me for data mining.

I agree, but that day is creeping closer. We will need to determine at some point to what extent the 'gittip crisis' directly affected users leaving, and to what extent the subsequent loss of critical mass caused users to leave as a second order effect.

Those answers should inform how cautious we are about enforcing 'brand alignment' in cases like sexy-bash-prompt.

[mattbk]

I read your response on the application and I suppose I understand.

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in light of our decision to shut down Gratipay.

Thank you all for a great run, and I'm sorry it didn't work out! 😞 💃