Gittip Anyone on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Gittip Anyone on Twitter

blog.gittip.com

56 pointswhit53715 comments

Chad (disclaimer: I work for Balanced https://www.balancedpayments.com/ and we handle the payment processing for gittip. I mainly focus on fraud). It's wonderful you are doing this. It enable forms of donation other than via github. Not sure, what information you collect via twitter login, but I would watch out for:

1. Twitter account creation date 2. Number of followers/following 3. Location information (if available) 4. # of tweets

Esp. (1) and (2) would be very useful. When I last analyzed the github accounts, almost all fraudsters had relatively recent github accounts and (unsurprisingly) zero/almost zero followers for their repos. As with most things related to fraud, these do not guarantee fraud protection, but serve as very strong signals.

Thanks npcomplete. With the current volume of growth I'm able to keep up with Gittip's fraud review dashboard pretty easily. As we scale let's start looking at more signals in an automated fashion.

Interesting! Do you think this risks diluting your brand?

If it's less "Tip A Dev you like", and more "Pay some guy", it falls into a much more generic payments category..?

Indeed, and what are you going to do with the name going forward given that 'git' means something completely different to the non-technical minded?

We had a big go-round on the name a while back:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/138

We decided (in part) that "gittip" doesn't mean anything at all to non-geeks. "All names are stupid until you become rich and famous with it." http://barry.warsaw.us/software/laws.html

We'll reopen the name discussion when either GitHub or Oprah complains.

Why would Github complain? They very much do not have a monopoly on the word "git"!

I bet they'd be disappointed if Oprah confused the two. :^)

Let's hope she does some day.

Just for example — to steal shamelessly from Reddit — you could call this product "Twitter gold".

"Give Twitter gold to this user".

The long-term vision is for Gittip to be general-purpose. Of course, with only a few hundred active users, Gittip has barely scratched the surface of the open source world, and it's possible that now wasn't the ideal time to cast the net wider. I committed Gittip to Twitter support when I threw together a half-baked implementation ahead of the XOXO festival a few months ago. Then I got side-tracked by fraud and other things and just now was able to really land this. For better or for worse, it's there now.

The next big feature is non-U.S. payouts. That's becoming a critical problem, because it means that Gittip is stuck holding money that belongs to other people. My goal is to solve that in the coming months, and then we'll be in a much better position to aggressively pursue growth. Where to focus those efforts in terms of communities will be part of the discussion.

I still think the brand around "tipping" can be preserved. I'd love to be able to use gittip to pay the guy who sings and plays guitar at my subway station every morning. But yes, twitter integration moves this away from devs only.

Stoked for this. Now I can support my favorite artists, etc. for $1/month (or more).

The minimum got upped to $1/week:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/180

The tip structure needs work. Hoping to revisit after landing international payouts and visual revamp.

Seems like Gittip is moving more and more in the direction of flattr(.com)

I expect it will move closer yet before all is said and done. E.g.:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/316

However, the primary distinctive is that Gittip is funded on itself, whereas Flattr is for-profit and takes a hefty cut. I don't see that gap closing anytime soon.

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