Gittip, Year Two (opens in new tab)

Gittip is a nice idea. But sadly, it has become a place for certain people to receive hefty monthly paychecks from anonymous patrons in exchange for incredibly aggressive and toxic trolling. Despite original intentions, this is not making an ecosystem of love and gratitude. So if its creator isn't even making money from it, it's probably better if it goes to sleep.

It seems to me that Gittip is making the same mistake that Gnu/FSF have made: the most effective change comes one step at a time. Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work. But instead of focusing on this goal, they are also (from the article):

* running a non-traditional "open" company

* shunning investors not willing to work with an "open" company

* only doing "open" interviews

Stallman deserves much credit for starting the FSF movement, but there's a reason that Linux has succeeded where Hurd has barely even shown its face. Linus has always been a pragmatist. In the end, we have a world where software development is much more "Open" today than it was 30 years ago, but who deserves more of the credit? Stallman the zealot? or Linus the pragmatist?

I love Gittip's primary mission, but I hate that they'd rather see this primary mission fail than compromise on any of a list of additional secondary goals. Regardless, I think that 5-10 years from making a decent living doing open source work will be far more feasible than it is today, but who will make that happen? Gittip? or Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/Crowdtilt/Patreon/Bountysource?

Let me preface this by saying: I want Gittip to succeed. I really want them to succeed. I would love to be able to spend my time getting paid by a community to develop open source software. However... those growth curves look linear, if not sigmoid. More importantly:

>The Gittip team receives $20,339 per year (averaging the past ten weeks). There are 39 people splitting that money.

$500 per person per year? That's not within two orders of magnitude of sustainability.[1] In addition, even the greatest collector of revenue on Gittip can't make a decent living from it. $40k per year is quite close to minimum wage in California.

I truly wish it were otherwise, but this post makes me seriously worry about the future of Gittip. Apparently, they did not make something people want.

1. I realize that only a few people are full-time on Gittip, but that's still a huge red flag. Unless the author is being extremely generous with his profit sharing, those numbers are inexcusable.

I have a few criticisms of Gittip, with the caveat that I'm largely criticizing you for not being something else that I want, rather than for not doing a good job at the thing that you're currently doing.

1) Is there some sort of legal reason that Gittip doesn't want to manage all of my non-profit giving?

2) What's with the focus on programming? The programming community is tiny, and will be better off piggybacking on the larger culture rather than trying to create one of our own. Why not focus on supporting free culture writ large, like musicians, writers, artists, and charities?

3) The reason my own donation is shitty is because I have to figure out who to donate to and how to donate to them, and then I end up having to maintain as many channels for cash as I have things to donate to. Can't you just offer me curated funds where percentages of my monthly tithe go to a range of things that are often supported together, and you guys just keep it updated?

4) The greatest sin that gittip commits in my opinion is not being donator focused. It seems to be a platform for people to get money donated to them, rather than a platform to manage my donations, as a person who has money.

OK: I hope this isn't too incoherent, because I'm a bit busy; my bottom line is that I want to donate $10K - $20K a year, like many people I'm sure, and if you can help me with that problem, that's where success lies. Right now, it seems like you primarily help marginal people receive money instead of helping me give it.

I want to give to 100 software projects that I know about, and 200 that I don't. I want to give to 10 charities that I know about, and 20 that I don't. I want to give to them whether or not they're aware of gittip. I don't want to be Joan Kroc giving all of her money to NPR because she didn't know of the myriad of other companies that make up public radio. I don't want to spend more than an hour a year on it. Can you help me?

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.

Took me some looking around to find a link on bottom of the (gittip.com) page to actually find out what gittip does.

First thought was - is it a way to get paid by submitting patches through GitHub? No, actually thats a site where you give/receive donations to people on Twitter/GitHub/Bitbucket

I would suggest one thing that may be controversial, and I hope you take it as constructive criticism: Change the name of Gittip.

Maybe you've discussed this before somewhere but… The name suggests two things that I think hinder the service:

- This is a service for software developers only (git)

- A tip is a small amount of money in exchange for quality service

There is no reason to tie yourself only to software developers. There are a lot of other places where people may want to show appreciation for each other in an open way.

There is also no reason to associate yourself with tipping culture. Tipping causes many people anxiety and has power dynamics and cultural norms attached to it. Tips are supposed to be small and in exchange for service.

I really think a more abstract name would allow people to connect with it better.

Good luck with year three!

I love Gittip. I don't love the homepage.

When I visit the homepage, I see "Sustainable crowdfunding: inspiring generosity", followed by a call to action input asking me to enter someone's username, and finally three groups of lists of people. None of these things mean anything to me if I'm new to Gittip.

The headline at the top describes your company mission statement, not what the product does. Instead of telling me the abstract of what Gittip is about, it should tell me the benefit of using your product. For instance, "Support your favourite people by automatically donating to them weekly." Skip the generosity, sustainability, and crowdfunding mentions for now. Put them behind the About link, which I might click if I'm interested in learning more about how and why you're doing this (I'm probably not).

The call to action input doesn't help me much. It's asking me to enter someone's name off the top of my head, and it's using a very vague label ("who inspires you?") to do so. I would scrap this approach and instead provide a way to sign up to Gittip with a call to action that ties back in to the headline. So you want to donate to people you like? Step 1: sign up for an account. Step 2: add people from your Twitter, Github, Facebook, etc. Step 3: Look through the list of people (Gittip should use some magic to prioritise the people by likelihood of my wanting to support them, such as looking at how close they are to me on Facebook, or how many followers/stars they have on Github and how many of their projects I've starred) and select up to 3 that I like. Done! Step 4: Decide to give someone something minimal (say, $0.25) per week by entering my credit card details. If I choose not to do that, at leat I made a profile on the site, got familiar with how it works, taught you a bit about who I am and where I came from, and you can maybe email me later and remind me if someone I have in my friends list did something interesting (like published a new project, blog post, insightful tweet, etc)

The list of people at the bottom of the homepage is boring. It's not contextual to the goals of the homepage, which are converting users to understanding Gittip and wanting to join in. Right now you show me static lists of new users, top givers, and top receivers. I don't really care about new users other than as proof that this site isn't dead, so you can reduce their importance right off the bat. Top givers and receivers aren't relevant to me unless you tell me what they're giving or receiving. So I would reformat these lists: andyet gives x per week to a, b, c, and more. ashedryden receives x per week from a, b, c and more. I need to understand that Gittip is about creating a direct personal relationship between people giving money and receiving money. Right now, these lists don't imply any kind of relationship.

I also think you need to revise the name. I know you've decided that "Gittip" is just a new word and shouldn't be understood as a portmanteau of git and tip, but it's a terrible, hard to remember, hard to spell word. "Giddip? So with a D?" "No, with two T's" "The heck does that mean?" "I dunno, it's just some weird word" -- you're missing the opportunity to give the product a memorable, clear, unique name that either represents your product as it stands apart from competition, or is memorable and quirky enough that it just sticks. Patreon got it right: it evokes "patron" but it's slightly different, so you can intuitively guess what it's about and still remember the brand itself.

I recommend reading the book Seductive Interaction Design by Stephen Anderson: http://www.amazon.com/Seductive-Interaction-Design-Effective... - it will help you combine your existing ability to reason about the product with some basic psychology and mental modeling that will allow you to word things in such a way that the benefit is more clearly communicated and you're speaking to the user instead of rambling about the company vision to nobody in particular.

Good luck with Gittip in year 3. I'll be watching - and giving :)

I feel an emotional attachment towards Gittip. Here's my story:

This is my GitHub profile https://github.com/HashNuke and this is my Gittip profile https://www.gittip.com/HashNuke/

I've been writing opensource software full-time for the past few months. A few weeks ago, I checked my Gittip profile out of curiosity. I found out someone was anonymously giving me $0.5/wk, for the last 4 weeks. I had $2 as my balance. I was in tears when I saw that. I felt that mattered. Someone cared about my work.

I'm excited that in a few weeks it can pay for the domain name for my next opensource project.

Thanks to Chad, the Gittip team and the community. I hope Gittip works out well for them financially to sustain themselves and do more.

Ok, you guys need to make some changes, and I would recommend:

- Allow monthly payments, instead of only weekly: most people receive money monthly so their economy math is based on monthly periods.

- The company giving the biggest amount of money is giving $1095... you should try to involve Mozilla and other big non-profits to donate, basically because giving monthly money to open-source (non-employees) devs is one of the boldest statements they can make in favor of open-source.

- Create spontaneous requests, for example if someone is giving 10 dollars to some folk the app could pop up and ask if they want to give her/him a one-time gift of $20, and ask again once the next month (just remember to also show a checkbox to disable those notifications). The people is full of greed based on impulsive behavior, why not let generosity also be impulsive?

I was really surprised to see they don't accept Bitcoin. I feel like it is the perfect use case and would probably help them gather some more enthusiasm from the community.

However, one could also contend that Bitcoin might very well kill them..

I've never heard of Gittip nor Patreon before reading this article. Looking at both websites the website for Patreon is much more engaging and less cluttered. Gittip looks intimidating with all those small pictures and numbers going around. A good redesign for the index would propel the business more than all those commits. Love both ideas though :)

Inspiring service (once I figured out what the heck the post was talking about and managed to make sense of the home page). This post and the site's homepage scream for the attention of a person who has a head for marketing.

I think Patreon is winning because the people leading the charge care most about solving the problem (connecting patrons to creators). Gittip, while they are also clearly passionate about solving the problem, seems to have a big chunk of their passion/attention aimed at HOW they solve the problem (the whole site/process seems to be open-sourced: http://building.gittip.com/).

What they're creating is really a consumer-facing product/service. Are there any/many examples of consumer-facing OSS stuff that's better than the standard path of "find/hire amazing devs/designers/marketeers who love what you're building and pay them to kick ass?"

Funny thing is most top earners don't even seem to code.

One thing that I think Gittip is going to require is that people actually ask to receive donations. I'm guessing that the people who are doing best through Gittip do just that. It's a voluntary gift-oriented community, but that shouldn't get in the way of asking.

Chad: one thing I will note is that, though you are very open in the article about what you are making, and clearly you want more gifts to sustain yourself and gittip, you don't actually ask. For gittip to succede you don't just need a volume of people, you need a volume of people who are actively asking other people to participate. And you should start with yourself!

For gittip that plea can take different forms. Well-funded groups can ask for tips that they redistribute. People doing small projects on the side can still calculate out their expenses (my expenses are just a few domain names, but they aren't free) and can ask for exactly that modest goal.

In a sense you want to teach people how to ask, and you want to normalize these pleas, which is best done through demonstration.

I wonder why Patreon took off and not Gittip. Personally I've heard more about Gittip than Patreon, which I only encountered recently, being used by some YouTube channel for sustenance. Maybe that's precisely the kind of market which Gittip should focus on.

There's been a push in the perl community to start using gittip, and I think it's a great thing. So please do keep up the great work.

My company (Nestoria) just started a "module of the month". Each month the dev team picks someone whose code we use and via gittip we'll donate $1/week for a year to that person. That's not a fortune obviously, but our hope is that others - individuals and companies - follow our lead, and in many cases it will be obscure modules that don't otherwise get a lot of attention.

http://devblog.nestoria.com/post/86216883403/module-of-the-m...

This reminds me that I have a small amount of tips on gittip. However, I can only withdraw it by adding a bank account. Security concerns make this not appealing, at least not at the current level of funds. The cost/benefit is not there for me.

And so I've not yet really made money on gittip, which doesn't give me much incentive to promote it. (Beyond thinking the open company idea is pretty cool. But that also means I value their time, so I'm not seeing the cost/benefit on emailing them for a manual bitcoin withdrawal, either..)

On the other hand, flattr at least lets me withdraw money using paypal.. Or they have so far. They seem to be possibly moving to european bank account only, which will kill it for me.

It's an incredibly admirable thing to be doing.

These are the hardest. See, when a company or project is dead on arrival there is not much to do, you bury it, do a post-mortem and move on.

If a company is successful then you ride the wave as far and as long as your stamina will let you and then you hopefully pocket a nice chunk of cash.

But when you're in the middle, too big to die, too small to succeed it gets very hard. Killing it off feels completely wrong, pushing it feels like you are adding to the opportunity cost with a relatively small chance chance of eventual success. It's a very practical illustration of the sunk-cost fallacy in all its gruesome glory.

Personally I hope that gittip will continue to grow and that the team will stick with it. They serve a very important role, pioneers in uncharted territory. And even if a lot of those pioneers ended up dead in creeks with arrows in their backs they pointed the way, showed what works and what does not. And they still have a sufficiently large shot at success if they stick with it. But if they'd pull the plug I would not fault them.

Let's hope there will be a 3rd instalment of this article, where gittip grew steadily for the 3rd year in a row and it became profitable. That would be the best way to see this go.

I guess the issue being raised here by many is this: You need to justify why the non-standard moves you've made are necessary for you to achieve your mission. If there is a story, it's not coming out. If they're not necessary, then your mission doesn't align with your actions. Perhaps your true mission is 'make all our dreams come true at the same time' but you have to be conscious of the fact that the conditional probability of everything working just right at the same time is orders of magnitude smaller than something like gittip being executed with better understood tools and structures.

I think someone else mentioned this idea, but I can't find it anymore. I wish there was some way to donate to a group of people that was automatically managed by you guys (or crowd-sourced if you can make that work).

I wouldn't mind giving a little bit each month, but I don't really feel like searching for specific users that do work I want to support, and then checking back every few months to make sure they still are.

Also, it would be a lot more meaningful to see a list of groups on the homepage rather than people that I have mostly never heard of.

I ran a similar site a few years back (youtipit). The biggest challenge was actually getting people to give money for things they can have for free. Looking at Chads figures, I think there definitely has been a huge change in the way people respect "free" work, and are now a lot more willing to pay for it.

I hope for him (and all others in this market) that this trend continues and that more people can start making a living from free work.

I love Gittip, and believe deeply in their philosophy goal.

I visited their hackathon Jan 2nd-4th, in Ambridge, PA.

Great team ... hard working, talented.

Chad is a superb full-stack engineer, and completely sincere in his honorable goals. I believe he and the team will succeed. And when they do, since it's bootstrapped, it will not be owned by investors.

Gittip is truly a new and deep way of thinking.

I've been using Gittip since practically day 1.

I really love the system, and always feel happy knowing Chad is the one leading it! If you haven't met Chad before -- you should. He's one of the nicest, most genuine people I've had the pleasure of meeting!

Best of luck with Gittip moving forward! <3

I ended up using my own badges from shields.io because the widgets generated for me say "I receive $null from GitTip." And the buttons don't say anything useful: People don't know what "Gittip" is by itself, and "3.00" (actually, for me, they say "NaN") doesn't mean anything either. I made a badge on shields that says "tips|accepted" because I 1) wouldn't want people to know how much I'm making on Gittip and 2) don't care how they donate, really. But I like the idea of Gittip and hope it continues and grows.

I'd love to see actual stories of donors/receivers there, too.

I just signed up. What's the easiest way for me to put a gittip badge in a Readme.md on Github? I'd recommend putting that front and center unless I missed it.

While the discussion is mostly about Gittip vs Patreon, I never quite understood why they could grow despite flattr(.com) being around since 2010.

I like flattr's model of having 1 fixed monthly donation that gets split among all of a user's flattr clicks from this month. It somehow removes a true monetary value from a click and allows to spread them more freely. For whatever reason, it's pretty big in the German podcasting community.

For anyone wanting to donate to Gittip itself: https://www.gittip.com/Gittip/

Lets say i have a serious problem i need solved and i see gittip as a great way to encourage someone to do. How do i go from this homepage to giving my money to the person who will solve it? Or is this just for the case where someone has already done great work, and i want them to continue it (literally a tip)?

Kinda shocked by all the negativity here. Gittip seems pretty successful to me. Have those telling Chad to quit really challenged themselves in their own lives like this? I highly doubt it.

Maybe I'm confused about the mission of Gittip, but I always thought it was (based on the name) supposed to support valuable open source work. Given this, it seems sad that the leaderboard prominently features people whose contributions are definitely not made in the form of git commits.

I've always associated Gittip with GitHub, and contributing small amounts to cool open-source projects. But from the article, it seems like its mission is much more ambitious than that.

In that case, if the service wants to shed its tech-only image, maybe a rebranding is in order?

The thing is, there's little money in open source; the users don't have that much money to spend, the developers usually do it in their spare time or are sponsored / paid for by their developers.

Paying open source developers would only become sustainable if said big companies funneled a lot of money towards gittip; tens of dollars instead of cent amounts, times dozens of companies.

I've been using Gittip for my free software projects, and while I am nowhere near being sustainable, it's more than I expected to get. There is certainly room for two players (see Kickstarter/Indiegogo), and I much prefer Gittip's minimalism and lack of flare.