retire the horn

[chadwhitacre]

We need to reign in our scope, and the horn, unfortunately, is outside of it.

[mvdkleijn]

Does this mean you want to remove the entire current horn functionality? I'd not be in favor. It's being actively used to toot people.

[chadwhitacre]

@mvdkleijn Yes. Just look at how many tickets are closed above: 13. We don't have engineering bandwidth to rebuild Twitter. We need to focus on our core product: giving money every week to people and teams you believe in.

In the future we should revisit the idea of enabling communication between givers and receivers, but probably in the form of linking to and aggregating existing channels.

[zbynekwinkler]

@whit537 I definitely agree with the need to tighten the scope. Good work on closing all the stale issues!

[rummik]

Could possibly use a Twitter API to pull in their tweets/tweet someone else if they have their account linked. Would give the same functionality, but using a pre-existing infrastructure (sounds like #768, but on their profile page)

[chadwhitacre]

@rummik Exactly, that's the sort of direction I'd like to explore.

[rummik]

@whit537 Makes sense :)

[mvdkleijn]

@rummik @whit537 Wouldn't we potentially be running into the Twitter API limits fairly quickly? Also, we'd have to not just pull in from Twitter, but also from Facebook(?) and possibly from GitHub and BitBucket? (activity histories?)

Lots of users won't have Twitter accounts I guess is my point. (I don't mind because I have Twitter)

[rummik]

@mvdkleijn I think it would be along the lines of a Twitter widget, showing recent tweets, which I don't think would be a problem. Admittedly though, I know little about Twitter's limits (I'm just starting to kind of use it)

[mvdkleijn]

@rummik I've personally never been very impressed with twitter widgets of any kind, but I think the limit would still hold.

In any case, I'd be more "concerned" with the rather one-sided source of interaction. Again, not a problem for me cause I use twitter, but it'd be annoying for people not using twitter.

[rpicard]

+1 on this. Good idea.

[rummik]

@mvdkleijn Yeah, I don't really find Twitter widgets that great either. I just think it should be looked at since it might only be a handful of lines of code, and putting in a dozen lines isn't much harder than taking out a hundred

[eric-s-raymond]

Agreed. The horn is out of scope - remove it. I noticed this while exploring the UI, it was the one feature that didn't really fit with the rest.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @issackelly over on #1615.

[clone1018]

I'm going to start working on this in www.gittip.com/remove-horn

[clone1018]

1.84% of our traffic for the past 30 days was to a horn page.

[chadwhitacre]

I think we need more conversation about whether this is out of scope.

The horn was originally implemented because of #7, which has some +1s on it, so it's not a completely unwanted feature. Also, I just checked in the database, and 374 people have tooted so far, which is 17% of our active user base. That's not nothing, especially considering how confusing and poorly implemented the horn is.

Looking at other crowdfunding sites:

• Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe have a "comments" section.
• Crowdtilt and Patreon have a single "activity" stream that can include comments from backers.
• Subbable doesn't implement anything for this afaict.

[chadwhitacre]

The Horn conflates two things that are common on other crowdfunding platforms: Updates and Comments. As mentioned Crowdtilt and Patreon conflate these as well into an "Activity" stream.

[zbynekwinkler]

We don't have engineering bandwidth to rebuild Twitter. We need to focus on our core product: giving money every week to people and teams you believe in.

In the future we should revisit the idea of enabling communication between givers and receivers, but probably in the form of linking to and aggregating existing channels.

I fully agree with your previous comment and don't feel the need to restate it differently.

[chadwhitacre]

One of the critiques of Gittip is that we are too focused on money and not focused enough on "the first gift," the great things that people do that make them worth giving to in the first place. Some kind of updates and comments feature would help us out a lot on that front.

Also, updates/comments combined with email is likely to make Gittip much stickier. We should be sending out weekly digest emails to everyone by default, and those will be much more powerful if they include updates and comments in addition to money numbers.

Yes, we shouldn't try to rebuild Twitter. As the example of the other crowdfunding sites show, adding comments is not necessarily rebuilding Twitter.

[clone1018]

Are comments "toots" and "horns" or "comments"?

[chadwhitacre]

Are comments "toots" and "horns" or "comments"?

Now I'm confused. :-)

What?

[clone1018]

Is this conversation about communicating on Gittip or retiring a unused, unexplained feature?

[chadwhitacre]

IRC

[chadwhitacre]

So now we have only one navigation item, which is goofy:

[chadwhitacre]

I believe before we didn't show the navigation section at all in this case.

[chadwhitacre]

Deployed!