This idea will most likely work if Twitter starts supporting it as a first class feature. And maybe it will encourage people to speak about things that are valuable. Or maybe it will continue to encourage the Twitter mob to just tear the other side apart. I don't know.
Oh boy do I have news for you! Todays technology evangelists always starts a new product with at least three instances running three docker containers each, on expensive EC2 instances where you even pay for the bandwidth that should be free. Doesn't matter if you've found a product market fit first, engineers will read the latest Medium posts and implement things before thinking if they really need it.
I've stopped counting the number of times I've seen over-engineered systems simply because developers just jump around implementing stuff they seem fit without actually researching things.
So yes, probably most of the infrastructure you visit today could have been more lightweight, but that's not what the people implementing said infrastructure aims for.
I think whatever tipping is implemented needs to be pretty much worthless (aka mostly symbolic), otherwise, people will just spend a lot of their time just trying to game it. In many parts of the world, even making a couple dollars a day is more than they would make in their local economy.
I mean it makes sense - a monetary incentive for good (at least superficially) behavior. Same as the physically world.
Moons also allowed a lot of people to get paid for their Reddit activity. For people living in the developing world, this has in some cases been a life-changing sum.
This is a PayPal issue, but Twitter are responding by adding a warning so people know it will happen: https://twitter.com/kayvz/status/1390423761183117312?
I knew PayPal was bad before, but I've hated them ever since that info leak.
IMO that's a weird term.
NOSHIPPING 1 — PayPal does not display shipping address fields and removes shipping information from the transaction.
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/nvp-soap-api/set-express-c...
I do agree with the OP on Twitter though. While this is a PayPal thing, Twitter is integrating them into their service and so should be educating their users.
Based on follow up tweets from the OP it looks like Twitter have already reacted to it in some way? Not sure. Would be interesting to see what they do.
What would (maybe) be a good move is to process the transactions through Twitter itself?
This will eventually lead to crypto donations. They're Trojan-horsing that in eventually is my prediction.
Micro-paying with Bitcoin on a centralized platform like PayPal is essentially the same as dollars. Final settlement in BTC can come later when someone wants to withdraw their balance.
I do wonder if this hurts or helps twitter as a product tho - I can’t say I’ve been enjoying the recent “only so-and-sos friends can reply to this post” trend. But now we will see very popular tweets with no discussion allowed that is also earning money from sycophants? I can’t say that makes me excited to jump on twitter - although clearly this doesn’t sway a large number of users off Facebook either so maybe I’m not the target market here... it does seem strange though that after a decade of talk about social media bubbles, we seem to be reinforcing them explicitly!
At what point is a read-only tweet, shown only to those who already agree and which asks for donations, any different from televangelism? It feels about as alien to discussion (presumably the purpose of twitter) as one can imagine.
The people who decry changes like being able to restrict who can reply to you as "eroding discussion" don't seem to realise that what they're actually saying is "either you commit to listening to/engaging with random total strangers yelling whatever they want at you or you shouldn't say anything at all". In my opinion that silently stifles far more speech than the alternative.
Then unfollow those people
Twitter is bad enough without easy money involved. People call it public commenting, but it's not. Not if you can block some one or limit why sees your tweets. Just another curated self to expose to the world, and the money, as I said, will only make not worse.
Like when instagram started they promised they'd have no ads
It's similar to why Clubhouse isn't currently taking a cut of creator payments: they can't do it without paying the App Store fees.
Then why they couldn't do this on iOS as well?
Why do companies think they can compete with internet payment services that don't have any of these arbitrary restrictions placed upon them?
Bittorrent (in its traditional use case of piracy) is still as illegal as ever and still going strong. So are cocaine sales, as is Uniswap's giant permissionless unregulated/unregistered securities market.
I think perhaps people overestimate the ability to effectively regulate.
- Fleets, launched months ago, is still app-only
- Spaces, the Clubhouse clone, is also app-only.
- Now Tipping.
- Even the uncropped images that launched yesterday (for vertical images) is app-only.
I don't think this feature is only for conversations, though it will effect them. How? I can only speculate.
The conversation is mostly snarkiness and trolling. I really hope we don't start rewarding that with cash.
I hope this will create an incentive for people to be less partisan and divisive and look for donators outside of their algorithmic bubble.
So the most misguided people keep pointing at the counts to justify whatever they say, do or think.
Before Twitter finding a large bunch of such people, characterized by 2 traits (1. they have no idea how misguided they are 2. they have endless energy and can spend 24x7 broadcasting bullshit) was very hard. Now you just have to search for a particular hashtag that signals crazy and tip the people with the highest posting frequencies.
As long as you can find more people than the number that work at Twitter support you have ready made chaos injection system.
No one seems to have any issues that the capability exists to impose such random ignorant reward mechanics at population scale. Ignorance is bliss.
As it is implemented currently, the “Tip Jar” is literally just a list of hyperlinks. Clean hyperlinks, even.
If you need a handy example for trying it out: I’m @NeoYokel
I entered every link except CashApp because I don’t have that.
(DO NOT PAY ME. This is not a sly attempt to get you extremely wealthy hn readers to send me unsolicited cash.)
I don't think their behavior will change. This image and text only non-realtime format is not conducive unlike twitch and only-fans.
I was expecting an experience closer to Tippin.me [1] where there's a click to tip, and another to confirm. Tippin.me, happens to be built on Bitcoin's Lightning Network so maybe Twitter will leverage Square's (also run by Jack Dorsey who's keen on Bitcoin) CashApp to do something similar in the future.
I could see the tip jar functionality go in the direction where a user deposits some amount of BTC to Twitter (opens up a LN channel with Twitter in the backend) and then a tap or click on the tip button results in a preset 100 sats tip.
You're welcome (sorry)
People like to do X for free (status, virtual points) but if a way to get paid while doing so is introduced, the dynamics change. People that don't get paid much (overall, or relatively compared to their peers) feel bitter even though the outcome is exactly the same as before but they get discouraged, stop sharing, stop doing it for free etc.
It's also much easier for the Feds to track you on Twitter.
Why only on Android? I suppose they could not avoid 30% Apple tax.
The key part of making it better is that everyone can receive tips with these systems you dont need a payment provider that matches or in fact you dont need one at all.
Ofc you cant cash out without but you can tip what you got to others. The same "dollar" can move around to hundreds of people like that without any PayPal or whatever in between that would suck it up by removing fees.
[1]For example xrptipbot.com also cross platform and works on reddit and discord too.
Neoliberalsim is turning you all into beggars.
