Show HN: Tipping culture for developers on the Web
tips.60devs.com
tips.60devs.com
Not that I care, I think it's still an interesting project.
If you gave a developer company accounts to spend as they saw fit then they would probably make good decisions too. Why a developer would give their own money is a mystery to me as any time they save has to still be used for their employer.
Instead, at best a manager can make these decisions and even they are usually limited by corporate policy which must deal with the complexity of tax and corporate law.
If you want to fix the problem, push a tax compliant product that startups can use to supply their developers with quarterly funds for this purpose and then advertise it as a benefit of their work environment.
A Sharing Economy Where Teachers Win: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10179385
"To date, Teacher Synergy, the company behind the site, has paid about $175 million to its teacher-authors, says Adam Freed, the company’s chief executive. The site takes a 15 percent commission on most sales."
"Teachers often spend hours preparing classroom lesson plans to reinforce the material students are required to learn, and many share their best materials with colleagues. Founded in 2006, TeachersPayTeachers speeds up this lesson-plan prep work by monetizing exchanges between teachers and enabling them to make faster connections with farther-flung colleagues."
I think this is a good idea. Many people accept help online and feel guilty about getting extensive assistance for free because they understand someone went out of their way to help and it's human nature to not want to take advantage of others.
There are already a lot of sites where I've seen people post small bounties like "$25 to anyone who can help me with this small problem." They can't afford to have someone write an entire program for them, but it's worth paying someone to get past a thorny issue.
1) The wheel is closed-source, and I do not trust the vendor with that component. Linkages to that upstream code/license might not be acceptable/cannot not be justified given the cost/headache of dealing with the transaction.
2) The wheel is open-source and the code is crap or the license incompatible.
3) The wheel is open source and I worry that the direction of the project is not compatible with my needs. It might be awesome for the moment, but given that the project can potentially deviate in a direction that won't work for the needed solution, linking my code to that upstream project doesn't make sense. If the project does end up going in a different direction, I must break my stride, drop what I'm working on, and go back to retrofit that particular solution.
I don't think it is appropriate to say that developers don't value their time and therefore need managers, as a blanket statement.
Why on earth we'd ever want to see "tipping culture" brought into the world of software development is beyond me.
Worst-case scenario I'm imagining right now:
This whole "tipping culture" thing catches on. A rough amount of tips developers earn becomes public information somehow. Unscrupulous employers use this to offer lower salaries and/or raise increases. This persists for years, allowing salary negotiations industry-wide to employ an expectation of tipping to replace good wages, driving salaries down to incredibly low levels. This becomes institutionalized to the point that developers become just another kind of service worker, dependent on their tips to actually survive.
Best-case scenario I'm imagining right now:
Worst-case scenario happens. SV Developers get a harsh dose of reality and humility by learning what a horrible thing "tipping culture" is. SV Developers become incredibly more conscious of how people live on non-SV salaries.
I want to be positive - the best I can offer is go very niche. Dominate a very tiny language/framework and build out.
would you tip an oncologist who gave you a second opinion for free? Nope. You would just be very grateful. - basically, this is a reason why it's called "Tipping culture", when you go to a restaurant you have a choice to pay or not pay a waitress there, and nobody can force you to leave tips, right? - But, usually people don't say, that the service was super nice and that's all :( normally they leave tips.
Here, it's the same. Previously, you didn't have an ability to pay developers who helped you and now you have it, so it's up to you to pay or not to pay. It's all voluntary.
It's too bad that these ideas keep failing, if one system would work out it would make the web so much better.
I wish the very best to the developers. Maybe you guys can make it work.
It works on reddit with gold, so it's not like it's impossible to pull off....
The alternative is what I call "microsubscription": a middleman takes a single fixed subscription, then distributes on behalf of users. Examples include Amazon Underground, Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix, Google Contributor and so on.
Where these fall down is that they're walled or semi-walled gardens. They don't really work on the open web, users have to be funnelled through some central pipeline for reliable tracking of usage.
Which is understandable: open web schemes up until now have had the problem of fraud. Manageable but potentially fatally expensive and offputting.
I'm interested in this problem space for two reasons. First, advertising sucks. It distorts the vision that the early internet held out. We got linkbait and exploitatively addictive web design instead.
Second, I solved the problem of reliably tracking visits to websites on the open web (patent granted in Australia, pending in the USA). As a side effect, the same protocol can be used in apps, games, API calls -- anything that has a network request-response system with some kind of command channel (especially headers). Plus it can seamlessly integrate with paywalls.
Of the microsubscription providers already in service, the one I worry about most is Blendle, because it presents no upfront mental barrier to consumption. On the other hand, it's another walled garden. We'll see.
I think that this still doesn't work because it still requires thinking. The whole magic of microsubscription is that no additional decision making is needed on the part of the subscriber. They pay once and thereafter consume without consideration or guilt.
Any act of making people think, no matter how small, is a barrier to entry. I think this is the fatal flaw in any classic micropayment or tipping scheme.
Tips in the service industry are functionally a means of bolstering income for people who are, by and large, distinctly low-paid workers; developers, even on the low end of the scale, tend not be. I think it's also fair to say that most (most - I realise it's not all) active contributors to open-source projects have day-jobs that provide adequate-or-better income. So what would motivate a common-or-garden developer to court for tips in the first place? And how would a "tip-sized" tip even be noticeable to someone on a developer's salary?
[edit to add: perhaps the issue is the metaphor? A "tip" is roughly what I described above - but it's not actually any different from a "gift", a "donation", or myriad other terms (except, yes, in legal terms of course).]
I've had minor contact with a BTC-based tipping system on Reddit, and to be honest it both annoyed me and creeped me out. I forget the name of it, but there was a period where it kept spamming me with "FooUser has tipped you $UTTERLY_DERISORY_AMOUNT, go to $SUSPICIOUS_THIRD_PARTY_SITE and connect up your identities on umpty-zillion different sites to claim it" notifications. I'm not sure who was supposed to benefit in this scenario, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't me.
OK, where's the Stripe & Square integration?
1. It supports B2B payments. We us this model, because we don't want to keep your money. Whenever you want to tip somebody you do it directly to that person.
2. You can still receive money even without being a member of PayPal. If you are not a member and somebody makes a payment to you, PayPal sends an email asking you to register and receive your money.
3 It's very simple for you (you just need to put an email address).