Gittip - Set up recurring tips to people who do great work.

I love the idea, but I'm not so keen on the name.<p>The mission statement gives examples of how this is a great idea for musicians, coffee shop owners, and other generally smart people ("genius grants for the rest of us"). On the other hand: the name, the required GitHub authentication, and the list of suggested tippees all strongly imply that this is solely for programmers. This says to me that the grand plan is to start out by focusing on programers (which makes sense, since it's a group of people who are on the whole really good at recognizing and rewarding people and projects that make their jobs easier), and to eventually expand from there.<p>The problem with this is that 'Gittip' is an incredibly technically-focused name; it makes perfect sense in context of tipping your favorite GitHub contributors, but not so much when your average non-engineer Joe wants to give money to the guy who makes his coffee every morning.

This is potentially nefarious to everyone.<p>1. People perform poorly, creative and intellectually, when there is a reward at stake, specially if it is cash. This is proved by multiple studies.<p>2. Small cash compensations will shift the focus from the main reason people enjoy to code and contribute. Worst, if the amount of cash reward is inferior to the true value of the work they do (and it will be), people will feel undervalued and loose motivation. Either pay them well, or not pay at all.<p>3. It will be a constant remainder they should be making real money instead of making tips on github.<p>4. The system benefits developers by popularity instead of quality. Besides popular developers are those who need it the least.<p>5. Popularity and profit will poison the minds of the young Jedi's while coding thus decreasing overall code quality, creativity and productivity.

It appears some of the people who you can tip on the site actually had the tip jars set up for them without their knowledge. I think this was on HN before about why that isn't cool.<p><a href="http://krisstraub.com/2011/11/20/kachingle-and-the-transgression-of-opt-out/" rel="nofollow">http://krisstraub.com/2011/11/20/kachingle-and-the-transgres...</a>

Is an interesting idea. Presumably taxes are the responsibility of the recipient when they "withdraw"?<p>Also, would it be appropriate to have a widget? Includes stuff like:<p>-"Hey. Here is how you can support this work"<p>-Gittip Overview Link<p>-Github handle<p>-Public income numbers<p>Or is that too "gimme"? Is this meant to be more of a "for hackers by hackers" thing? Or more mainstream?

Do you really think the tips should be recurring to the same person every week, rather than also having a one off option? Also, once you've started tipping someone, it's possible to stop?

From the name I thought it's about sending tips to someone (like tips &#38; tricks) how he could improve his code via some git pull request or something.

Kickass!