should be able to give non-anonymously #236
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As I said, I think the option should exist: the default behaviour will be "anonymous mode on" (on both sides) but the user should have the option to disable anonymity. |
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This strikes me as a feature to "make the donors feel good" (which is something that Flattr was accused of being primarily about). Nothing wrong with it, though, if it motivates certain people to donate more. Care should be taken that this does not exercise undue peer pressure on the people that wish to remain anonymous. Having this as an opt-in is okay, I guess. It seems that there is value (for the people involved) in the social graph this creates. But would this be a single opt-in ("Show my donations publicly") for ALL of your donations? If not, you'd have to manually opt-in for every single one, and that is kind of weird / a lot of work.
Having an additional "Show my donors publicly if they also opted in" for the recipient? This would severely limit the pervasiveness of these public donations, reducing the intended benefits (which are largely a network effect I believe). Whatever you do, always keep this opt-in in some form or other. Do not suddenly turn the switch to have new users give publicly by default (Flattr did that in their drive to become more "social"). |
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Alternatives to consider: a) apparently you can already opt-in to be shown with your total donation amount (but not to who it goes) on the Leaderboard. This should solve the "make donor feel good" part b) About the "want to thank everyone who donated to me, but doing it via Twitter or my blog is not enough" part: Flattr has an option to send a Thank You email to your donors every month. You get to specify the message, but they send the mail, and don't tell you who they send it to. Slightly better than Twitter or your blog, because you can be sure that your donors really get the message (even if they are not following your feeds). |
Personally, I don't really care if the world sees my donations or not, but I would like to eventually show myself to receivers who accept indentified donations. So, I think that the options "Accept indentified donations" and "Reveal myself" are pretty useful. Btw, this project is awesome! |
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On this topic, I'd like to know why the heck anyone would donate money to me. I have done some things: Unimpressive open source projects; moderately successful screencasts for vim; writing on my blog; Which of these things did people like? Which stuff should I continue doing to make people happy? |
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@JustinLilly sounds like a different issue. Maybe a reason field should be added to donation. |
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@victorbjelkholm: +1 to that |
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@JustinLilly I believe your concern would be resolved by #7. While I personally don't have a problem with non-anonymity, I believe it to be outside the mission of Gittip to reveal tippers to tippees. At pyOhio, I brought up to @whit537 that companies could use Gittip as an alternative to hiring developers, opting instead to support the contributors to open source projects from which they've benefitted. In return, the companies might get some input (but no guarantee) that the developers resolve their issues with some priority. I now see that this can't be done, for two reasons: First, Gittip doesn't allow substantial tips from a single tipper to a single tippee. Second, this would make the tippees somewhat accountable to the tippers, even if in an emotional way. This defeats the point of the "Hey, you do good work. Go do more cool stuff!" model that I've come to associate with the platform. So, in short - I oppose revealing tippers to tippees through Gittip. If a tipper really wants the tippee to know, they are free to contact them through other channels. |
Agreed.
Agreed.
Right. Having this constraint—tips are anonymous in the particulars—provides a certain character for Gittip. It simplifies the Gittip story, which helps in product development and subsequent marketing. Of course it's possible to communicate through other channels, but that's out of scope for Gittip. Trying to incorporate that into Gittip would muddy the product. |
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From IRC last night. I didn't manage to point shurcooL at this issue. [shurcooL] What do you guys think about an optional (opt-in) ability to make it public who you give to (perhaps keep the amounts anonymous) on Gittip? |
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Reading the discussion here has been very insightful. There are a lot of great points raised. I just want to elaborate on this thing I said:
The way I imagined it would be similar to getting a new follower on Twitter. But, depending if they chose to use an optional message when backing you, you could see one of these two notifications in your Gittip account:
To be honest, I'd be vary of notifications (usually they're interruptions), but in this case it may or may not be a good idea so I wanted to mention it. The problem is that having this ability may provide benefits (like knowing why people are tipping you), but it may cause serious social issues... P.S. I used the verb backing because I couldn't think of a better word... I took it from Kickstarter lingo. |
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It was suggested similarly that tips could be 'tagged' so that we can start a search engine based on those tags, and the people/projects associated with them. |
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For example, when you make a tip, an option box says, "Add a tag [reason] for tipping. Example: #art, #opensource, #python" |
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+10000 Damien Michael Nichols Sent from my HAL 9000, Dave.
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Stirred the pot: |
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I like that you're checking in on this, especially as gittip continues to grow. But I feel that anonymity is one of the core characteristics of gittip, that could help it achieve its true mission: enable people to earn full-time income pursuing their open source passions, as they see fit. The idea presented above that I think has the most merit, in keeping with the core mission, is to allow donors to specify a reason. That brings up interesting issues as well, though. Example: I donate to Chad, and say in my reason, "MyCompany really appreciates the work you do on gittip. Keep it up!" I'm not sure how you would keep people from slipping identifying remarks into their reasons. Letting go of anonymity will not affect the fact that gittip support grows slowly and drops slowly. But I think it is one of the core characteristics that will help gittip achieve its mission. |
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@ehmatthes, Chad recently added a new feature where you can toot people's horn. Basically, say "thanks for doing awesome thing X" or whatever you want. It's independent from tipping as far as I can tell. I haven't used it much yet, but so far I really like it in theory and it should solve the "cannot express what specifically you're thankful for" issue that was there earlier. |
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+1 from @barringer via Twitter. |
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+1 from @zmanring in private email. |
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I'm beginning to warm to this, after talking to @workergnome (#1074 (comment)) and now @bjorn (IRC), and thinking about how to help Gittip really take off. What if we show who gives to whom, but don't show dollar amounts? Now that we have a one cent minimum, I can tip my whole social network for between $1 and $10 per week, on average. Perhaps that becomes a sort of baseline entry fee for Gittip. I think that's good for Gittip if it does. Then unfriending is no more dramatic than it already is on Facebook or Twitter. We should only reveal your givers if you have more than a few of them, to pool the variability (if I'm the only one giving to you then you know for sure how much I'm giving). What's the right N here? Dunbar's number (150) is too high, because that's the average size of one's social network, so it would be hard for most people to get that many givers on Gittip. I like that we set the bar high enough with communities that some people aren't happy with it (#1316). It should be an achievement to have enough givers on Gittip that they're revealed, but it should be an achievement within reach of most people. Maybe 50? I'd like to see some numbers on the distribution of follower counts on Twitter and Facebook, as well as where we stand on Gittip right now. It would still be possible to give anonymously. New accounts would default to this new public sharing plan. Current users would have to opt in. |
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@whit537 I agree with some of the previous comments that this feature just seems like making donors feel good. That should not (mostly) be what Gittip is about. Gittip should also raise awareness that receivers have just as much rights to decide on these matter as the donors. If you're going through with this, rather than Gittip deciding an arbitrary number and since you want existing users to opt-in, I would simply set a default number and allow receivers to opt-out or, if they opt-in, set a value no higher than say 150 before the visibility is triggered. |
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As already mentioned, I would rather this be opt-in. I do, however, prefer that this feature request be rejected... anonymous tipping is a good feature. |
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Reading through this, there seems to be a few possible implementations (A):
With the following considerations (B):
So the question then becomes which combination of things, and how can it be implemented. Thinking of how it could be implemented, would probably be a form like this for receivers:
And for givers:
What are people's thoughts? |
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Here's my thoughts on the above combinations.
So for me, I would have the following checked as the receiver:
This way I can say thank you to them (my choice would be privately), send them a letter or something. As well as respecting their wishes for allowing them to mention they are donating to me. And for me, I would enable the following as the giver:
I would actually turn off the following:
Because it seems more like bragging, and creating FUD for non-givers and superiority for myself, if I were to enable that. However I like the idea of displaying on my profile who I'm donating to, as it is clear indicator of whom I really dig and support (providing they are okay with it of course, respect is important!). As well as being an amazing way for my followers/friends/supporters/etc/whatever to be able to discover awesome new people, kind of adding a great social and viral aspect in a way. For instance, I would be very interested in finding out who Chad supports, as most probably, I'd want to support them too! A concern with this, would be, well what if I discover Chad donates to political party I hate. Oh well, have some maturity and get over it, or as well, it could also be a way for us to grow and expand our learnings and appreciation of one another. Also, I think that being able to opt-in, means that I could make it so donations to say "highly controversial party" or whatever, wouldn't be public unless I explicitly opted-in for it to be so. Eliminating that concern. |
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Prior art: #3112. |
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Soooo ... what emerged on #3112 (w/ links back to this thread) is that this gets reeeeeeeeal complicated real quick. Are we looking at a Facebook-style fine-grained sharing implementation? That sounds like a nightmare to me, both from a user experience and privacy angle, and in terms of implementation difficulty and maintenance burden. To avoid that, we need to trim the possibility space ... but that still means comprehending it first. |
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Let's take it that:
There's the matter of what is shared:
And there's the matter of who it is shared with:
The reality today is fixed for all payment instructions at:
Further complicating factors:
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A couple further lines of inquiry:
Bit of a mess. 😳 |
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My preference as a giver would be to allow sharing identity, optionally the amount, with the recipient. It hadn't occurred to me to share it publicly, but then again I might not have stepped as far into radical openness. |
Actually, I think the way to simplify is by cutting out the variation on the receiver side. Back at the beginning, Gittip receivers were all individuals, and payments were understood to be no-strings-attached mini-genius grants. Giving was a very personal act, very close to a positive judgement of someone's worth as a person. Retracting a payment was therefore fraught with interpersonal peril, and enforced anonymity was designed to reduce this peril. Now, of course, we've phased out giving to individuals entirely (and Patreon has generally shown that anonymity was probably never that important vis-a-vis individuals in the first place 😆 ). All projects on Gratipay are understood to be just that: projects, not individuals (even if the project happens to be a "team of one"). I am ready to say that if someone takes their project so personally that knowing the identity of the retractor of a payment is a source of significant anxiety, that's their problem. I think instead that projects should want to know who starts and stops giving, so that they can tune the products and services they provide, whether in the aggregate, or in particular. I'm seeing this as a natural step in Gratipay's evolution from individuals, to individuals + teams, to teams, to projects. 👍 (I can imagine a project that wouldn't want to know, but I'm willing to say that we don't support that, for the sake of simplifying our task here. The full set of combinations is just too complicated to support.) Here's my proposal:
* I think @chrisdev's case is actually more about collecting addresses for those who are not anonymous, which is out of scope. Surely charities must be able to receive anonymous donations! |
Hopefully we can offer both identity and amount options without too much clutter. 👍
Interesting. I actually [don't like the term "radical" 😝 and] wouldn't see this as necessarily that radically open. Don't most other crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, Patreon, and Open Collective default to public sharing? |
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@balupton @sam-toland What's your feedback from the receiver side? |
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EDIT: I've reconsidered. See below.
I disagree that this should be the default, because this is the antithesis (if that's not too strong a word) of what Gratipay has been about. Whether you were giving to an individual or are now giving to a project, the gift has been a gift without strings because the giver was/is anonymous. I don't know the technical solution, though, especially if the project has the option to toggle off/on anonymity (e.g., to appear as though they only accept anonymous donations, but in reality knowing exactly who was giving the most, and changing behavior accordingly. I don't know why someone would do this, so it may be an edge case.) I guess it would really boil down to the hobbyist versus project that is trying to break out and raise some real money. It's awesome if you fiddle around with code in your spare time and some people chip in $5 a week for it, but it (subjectively?) becomes less awesome when you realize the person giving you most of that $5 is the neediest person in your issue queue. That being said, you should ask someone who is in that position--I've made more money working for Gratipay LLC than I have from my own project on Gratipay! |
Sounds good to me. Is a simplified version that still accomplishes the actual needs, versus some imaginary desires, of what I proposed at #236 (comment)
What does this imply? I am not familiar with what Gratipay considers a payment instruction. I think:
I agree. Also things like someone losing their job over who they have given money to in their private life is silly The need for givers to have their donations private is essential. As the examples of people being discriminated against for their political views and whatnot is high, and also high even in the tech world. So the cost of people's donations being public is very high. - this will be accomplished by your proposal Chad The need for receivers to have their donations private is hard to pin as essential. I can imagine problems for this only in the political arena - e.g. Clinton receiving money from Wall Street, or Trump giving money to Clinton earlier - I can't think of tech examples, even in political journalism, where a simple "oh, they donate to me, ask them why they do it" won't suffice. - and for now I don't think anyone at all has expressed a need for this empowerment, until they do, it just seems a imagined desire |
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+1 to @whit537's proposal and the thoughts behind in #236 (comment). Additionally, as the emphasis is more on new company givers, the trimming down seems particularly proper to me. |
I've reconsidered. The proposal at #236 (comment) sounds good to me. That's what people want now, and if there is groundswell of support for going back to the Gittip version of anonymity, I'd be behind adding that functionality, but for now let's move forward. |
Our
Future payments: yes. Past payments, I'm not so sure. I was thinking not. Once that info is out there, can it really be taken back? With the rewards platform you're building, once you scrape that data, it's too late to pull it back. No? That said, I'm having second thoughts about foisting non-anonymity on existing projects. Can we make it a simple either/or, without all of the complication and opt-ins? Either a project only accepts anonymous payments (as now) or they accept any type.
@tswast For your use case it sounds like you'd be more interested in something like #2521, maybe? |
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I should also say that I'm reaching some clarity that the driver here from the receiver side is being able to provide specific rewards/products/services to specific givers. This is not on the critical path to providing reputational benefit to companies for supporting open source, which we were able to do with seeming adequacy under Gittipay 1.0 by recognizing company giving in aggregate, and which I think we could get back to under gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#987 via #4297 without going through this ticket. That is, there seem to be three points on a spectrum: Donation — Rewards — Products Today Gratipay is only about the donation side. Traditional commerce is on the right, fee for service. Kickstarter/Patreon occupy the somewhat awkward middle ground where part of the value is reputational (you are listed as a backer or supporter), and part is concrete (you receive a reward in the mail). On that model, I'd almost rather see us implement this as a product listing feature than a rewards feature, to keep the clarity of the existing donation model. So projects would list products/services, and companies would either give anonymously, or make a purchase. The latter case is where we would, of course, divulge to the project the amount of the purchase and identity of the purchaser. This becomes a "store" feature, in other words. |
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Yes, actually #2521 would be sufficient for my thoughts. A backer update tool could be used to share patreon-like rewards with donors. |
Removing from the Recognize companies project, therefore. |
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pushed up the first public commit of my earlier mentioned sponsorship service - gratipay task over at bevry-archive/sponsored#3 |
any chance at getting this api call added in the meantime? or something similar, at the most essential level, all I need is someway of knowing the total given amount over all time I've also updated https://github.com/bevry/sponsored with more info on the goals of the project |
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+1 from @ntnsndr at https://social.coop/@ntnsndr/17510. I can't figure out how to respond (remotely?) on Mastodon or I would. 😞 |
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Yes please! We need this to use Gratipay as the basis for co-ops.
∴
Nathan Schneider
nathanschneider.info
…On May 1, 2017 3:04:27 PM MDT, Chad Whitacre ***@***.***> wrote:
+1 from @ntnsndr at ***@***.***/17510.
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You are receiving this because you were mentioned.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#236 (comment)
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And pseudonymous would be okay!
Let's think.about features that.could even do more to make gratipay the go-to tool for new co-ops.
- accounting tools
- github integration for open contributions
- legal structure support, payroll
∴
Nathan Schneider
nathanschneider.info
…On May 1, 2017 3:04:27 PM MDT, Chad Whitacre ***@***.***> wrote:
+1 from @ntnsndr at ***@***.***/17510.
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You are receiving this because you were mentioned.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#236 (comment)
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chadwhitacre
removed this from the Refocus on Corporate Sponsorship of Open Source milestone
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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! 😞 💃 |
and others
GittipGratipay does not divulge who exactly gives to whom. The reason we do this is to preserve the "no-strings-attached" nature of the gifts. You know how unfriending someone on Facebook can be a big deal? We wanted to avoid that kind of friction. We also don't want receivers to feel pressured by their larger donors. Like, "if I piss off so and so, I'll lose X dollars." Better not to know in the first place so you're not on eggshells.Now, when we launched we were very focused on individual-to-individual giving, but since then we've started bringing groups onto
GittipGratipay.For giving to individuals, I expect us to always stay "anonymous in the particulars" to avoid the social friction mentioned above.
For giving to groups, I think we can relax the constraint, allowing it to be double opt-in. If you give to a company or organization or project, we should let you advertise that. If a company gives to another company, we should make it possible to see that.
Update 2017-01-20: And now as Gratipay 2.0 we are only for giving to groups, i.e., projects.
Original
Turicas in IRC:
As a receiver, I don't really want to know who you are. I do of course have people telling me in person or by other means that they tip me. Maybe it would be opt-in on both sides?
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