brian will . net

Tipping as a replacement for micropayments

A while ago, I proposed a website for funneling donations from ‘content consumers’ to ‘content producers’, and it turns out others have a similar idea and are doing something about it but framing the idea as ‘tipping’ rather than ‘donating’. Nick Szabo, who wrote the best early assessment of why micropayments won’t work back in 1996, comments on this, suggesting that the social aspects of real-world tipping should be embraced in their online form:

I’d add generosity signal features that inform one’s friends or fellow tippers as well as the tipee about the tip. This could be in the form of aggregator “karma” points that name and ranks the most generous tippers. This would be like the “karma” points which people who add content to a social aggregator compete for, but it signals far more — it signals that one is a generous tipper as well as a generous contributor of recommendations. There are a variety of other ways (home or facebook pages, e-mail, etc.) that generosity signals might similarly be sent within a social circle.

My gut objections to this are that:

1. It’s tacky to make a public show of one’s generosity.
2. I’m already increasingly overwhelmed by noise drowning out my incoming and outgoing signals. Information on the tipping habits of others strikes me as just more minutia competing for my attention and distracting others from paying attention to me.
3. We don’t need more markets for buying attention and prestige. Plenty of those already.

I’m not so concerned if we’re talking about keeping information about each user’s personal tipping behavior strictly within that user’s personal group of people they choose to associate with, not the random mass of people who happen to also use the service. That is obviously useful and just a natural extension of what happens offline.

I am concerned, though, about emphasizing the aggregate behavior of the whole user base, such as is done with mass-actor networks like Digg and Reddit; though I use those sites, I dislike how the form—a single feed, basically—turns the affair into a competition between factions for control. If designed poorly, the social mechanisms of a donation/tipping network could result in the same distortion and gaming effects.

Unlike Wikipedia, where the goal is to discourage factionalism, a donation/tipping network is best served by simply allowing different factions to go their separate ways. I don’t really see this as a loss: you just aren’t going to find much ground of agreement between crunk enthusiasts and Parrotheads.