Thanks. I understood all of this from the website. Can you be more specific?
> Flattr is for content. Gittip is for people.
> Flattr is optimized for making tippers feel good. Gittip is optimized for making tippees a living.
What is stopping me from using Flattr for myself? Am I stopped from putting a Flattr thing on my own general personal home page? Am I going to get more money from Gittip over Flattr, and why? Rather than telling me what Gittip is aimed at, can you tell me specifically what Gittip is doing better here? Anything tangible?
I don't believe anything is stopping you from using Flattr.
I don't believe you are stopped from putting Flattr on your home page.
I don't have enough data to say whether you're going to get more money from Gittip over Flattr. I don't have data for Flattr because they're not transparent about who makes a living on their site. I'd love to see data if you have it; I've only been able to find a few anecdotes:
I don't have data for Gittip because it's only a month old. That said, Gittip is much more transparent than Flattr. On the Flattr homepage (http://flattr.com/) I see one piece of data: "Flattr clicks so far: 1,055,458." That doesn't tell me anything about who's making a living on Flattr. A little digging uncovers this Toplist:
There I see that the top ... 30(?) projects have received between 919 and 5,184 "flattrs." When I click on the top project, WikiLeaks' Afghanistan War Diaries, I'm told it has "10 145 flattrs received from 4169 people." I'm not sure how this relates to the 5,184 flattrs mentioned on the Toplist. Whether it's 5,184 or 10,145, I'm not able to find a conversion rate to a real currency, such as euros or dollars. From reading the About page and the FAQ, it sounds like there's actually an inverse correlation, since more flattrs mean each recipient receives a smaller slice of each budget. Moreover, I don't know how many individual people and which ones are behind a project. Are those 5k or 10k flattrs shared amongst 10 people or two? Who are these people? How much do they want to receive?
Gittip is more transparent about who's giving and receiving what, and why. Sure, the design isn't very fancy compared to Flattr. But there's data right front and center on the homepage, and it's in a real currency, dollars. When I click through to an account, I see a statement about what that person is doing to improve the world, and their personal funding goal. I can compare their goal with their current level of funding.
Personally, I'm not interested in playing games with fake currency. Let's move real money for real.
You glossed over the fact that I'm drinking my own whiskey, which I see as a crucial difference. I actually find it a little distasteful that Flattr takes a 10% cut. If the Flattr developers believe in Flattr, why don't they make their living using Flattr? TipTheWeb strikes me as a more self-consistent implementation of the "one-off tips for content" idea, in that they represent themselves as being a non-profit "supported by Tips from our users":
But, of course, Gittip is not about one-off tips for content. Gittip is about sustaining people who are telling a compelling story with their life. Tell me a story!
As a former Flattr developer my impression is that Flattr's lack of focus on hard numbers is due to one of its core values when it was founded - that all flattrs are equal and should be treated as such - that a flattr doesn't just represent the number of euros given but more so represents the act of giving in itself and that that's what important about it and that the actual size of the donation is secondary as that is dependent on so many factors like the givers personal economical status and such.
As long as people feel comfortable with what they are giving away and recievers feel comfortable with what they are recieving then how much each individual is giving is pretty irrelevant.
Flattr would never reveal any numbers about their users' economy as Flattr very much values, respects and sees the importance in their users' privacy. It's of course always lovely to see users share stories about how they are using Flattr in different ways, but the telling of such stories should be up to the users – Flattr should stay out of that business and instead focus solely on just making such stories possible.
Regarding fees, I think the Pinboard blog makes a great case for why they should exist: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ Apart from that I also think that micropayment services are a bit like what Steve Jobs described Dropbox as: "a feature, not a product" Features are embedded into products and are not something you pay for separately. Flattr isn't the goal – it's the means to realize the goals – it's the goals, the "products", that people want and it's they that will be flattred and it's they that should be flattred.
> How does this compare with Flattr? It may be slightly different, but is it sufficiently different?
Gittip works, flattr does not for the most part. Flattr works probably if you push out a ton of content, but that's pretty much it. If you want to get recurring donations for an open source project or something similar without spending a lot of time with the system you can pretty much ignore flatt.
Also you can't be paid on flattr unless you pay others at the same time.
