Comment by arsenische | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arsenische | Hacker News Reader

First, I want to apologize. We have received a lot of negative feedback suddenly and I can assure you that we take it seriously.

I temporary disabled ALL the email notifications (even though I don't think they were a real problem) and added a warning that we are not affiliated with project owners. When my teammate is online he will probably also some of the other issues.

I see a lot of misinformation about tip4commit and our intentions. I can't quickly respond to everybody, but I'll try to keep basic answers here: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/wiki/FAQ

Perhaps some people just misunderstand the project and hate it.

Also I think that it is normal that developers try to understand the motivation of users and ask questions in order to find a better solution, please don't take it as offence or reluctance to change.

We are going to resolve every issue or close the project.

Btw, if you think this project shouldn't exist - welcome to https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 - that could be the easiest solution for all of us.

If you believe the project can be improved - welcome to leave your feedback on the desired improvements, such as https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/152 and https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/154

or others.

Thanks for reading this and please accept apologies if we offended you (never wanted to).

Please don't take this the wrong way, but tip4commit is a poisonous project that does more harm than good. You should shut the whole thing down.

Providing monetary incentives gamifies the development process, which is not a good thing. It has been shown that providing monetary incentives below a threshold decreases both the quality and quantity of contributions. For more information about this I suggest reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink.

Tip4commit was started for the bitcoin project. I'm a bitcoin developer. We don't like tip4commit. What results in practice is that we end up with ill-formed, poorly thought out, excessively large, trivial, time wasting pull requests to review, which takes time away from beneficial development.

Your service is not helping open source software. It is hurting it. You are paying people to provide distractions which slow down development. Please stop.

>> Btw, if you think this project shouldn't exist - welcome to https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 - that could be the easiest solution for all of us.

The project should be opt-in or shouldn't exist at all.

I think that implementing "opt-in" is the natural solution and yet the maintainer writes that it will "brake everything". I don't understand this extreme reluctance of Tip4Commit to acknowledge the right of owners of projects to control things tightly related to the projects they own.

For what it's worth, I don't believe maintainers have a moral or legal right to control what happens between third parties - that is, contributors to their project and those who wish to support them.

I wouldn't be opposed to implementing opt-out at a project level... but it's not my project.

As I told you on reddit, I'm going through hell trying to opt-out as an individual. I know for a fact that they harvested and have been using information about me from GitHub without my permission and in violation of GitHub's terms of service. Since your comments consistently resort to legalism, how do you resolve that conundrum? I'm honestly trying very hard to not just go with the nuclear option of starting to seek enforcement of service-provider terms to shut down tip4commit, but they aren't exactly leaving tons of other options.

If they're violating Github's T&C, that seems like a good place to start. You've obviously given them plenty of notice of your discontent - they've had ample opportunity to work with you to resolve it.

I guess they still have a moral right to ask their contributors to be up front about the incentives involved in their contributions (they can't demand disclosure, but they could still refuse contributions where they don't feel they have enough understanding of the incentives involved).

The point being, setting the thing up behind their back brings a lot of risk of poisoning the relationship between the contributor and the project.

Maybe it's stupid for a project to act like that, but once it turns into a hair splitting exercise, you might as well split all of them.

Devil's advocate: If you wish to tightly control everything related to your project then perhaps use a private CVS rather than a public repo on Github. By using Github's free and very social oriented service you are implicitly giving up some control over the project.

Opt-in would kill the project. But I think they could do opt-out if they were a LOT more sensitive to their constituents.

Why would being opt-in kill the project?

Because instead of having a million projects, you'd have 3. The power of defaults and opt-out is pretty well-understood to the point I'd call it non-controversial.

They would have projects from people who are interested in their services, and interested in having them accept money on the projects behalf. If that number is 3, so be it.

Which is why you have to be way more aggressive in just about any endeavor.

So what? That is a typical use case for an opt-in platform with possible good outcomes. If you do it opt-out, it's unsolicited, unwelcomed and just badly setup. This discussion and the one on Github itself is a perfect example why.

You can't blame someone else for not having a responsible (e.g. opt-in) growth engine...

If opt-in would kill your project, it's probably a bad project. Much in the same way that if your business can't survive without exploiting people, it's a bad business.

Opt-in doesn't mean they couldn't inform projects when someone actually wants to donate. First donation just needs to be framed as an invitation to use tip4commit with no being a valid (and default) option.

The point of your service as it stands right now is that people give you money in exchange for a promise to make it reach other people, who have no idea that you are collecting it on their behalf. If you can not reach them, this money remains with you (as the "donation pool" is under your control). You are very likely to run into legal trouble beause of this, sooner rather than later, so IMHO it is in your best interest to stop the service in its current form.

You have to work with the community rather than against it. If there are maintainers out there that really want this, collaborate with them and grow from there.

The objection is you're committing fraud. You're soliciting 'donations' for a third party (everyone committing to a project) without their consent. Unbeknownst to the donaters you're then keeping these 'donations' because the third-party has no interest in taking them. This is pretty shaky ground to be on, and it only takes one person to decide to take legal action against you.

They should simply state and then execute that refused donations will be sent to other projects or returned. I don't think this is that big of a problem.

They don't do that, they just lie.

https://tip4commit.com/github/django/django

    Project maintainers have decided not to notify new 
    contributors about tips and they probably don't like
    this way of funding.

Then they return the tip to the 'project' pool which is themselves for unclaimed or unwanted funds:

    Funds that are not claimed during 30 days get returned 
    back to the donation pool of the project

The donor is deliberately deceived about whether the person or project will ever get the money.

You could have avoided the entire controversy by taking the entirely reasonable step of honoring the initial request to be opted out.

I think sticking with opt-out is ok since it will be the difference in having a million projects or 3 projects. But, it means you have to be more considerate of the project owners requests. Thinking that the emails "weren't that bad" is more evidence that you aren't listening very well.

> "I think sticking with opt-out is ok since it will be the difference in having a million projects or 3 projects.

There is a difference between "right" and "convenient for tip4commit". Assuming that no project maintainer wants to be part of tip4commit, should they all be made to opt-out? I'd argue that it is tip4commit that have to make a case for themselves and convince stakeholders of their benefits. Avoiding marketing by choosing defaults that are convenient for you but possibly a nuisance to your stakeholders is a very arrogant and short-sighted position to take.

You might like to change the wording.

"We are not affiliated with most of the projects, their owners may be unaware of or actively against using tip4commit."

Opt-in or opt-out would allow everybody using your service to win which is much nicer and more sustainable than lying to donors and developers.

I don't know if this happens often but I would like to take a moment and point out that after hearing a strong negative reaponse, It's nice to see that the developer is willing to work through the problems with the community to change his/her project to a better state.

Yup, points and kudos to them for engaging with users/critics.

OTOH, still negative infinite points for even arguing when a maintainer comes in and asks to opt out.

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