"gift bombs"

[chadwhitacre]

We have "gift tips" (gittips), let's add "gift bombs."

Gift tips are small recurring micro-donations optimized for stability (see, e.g., #113). I propose that we implement a complementary function where tippers can blast out a one-time "bomb" to the whole community. The idea is for someone to be able to unload a larger amount of money without violating our "no-strings-attached" philosophy. Doing it this way allows larger-scale benefactors to deal in, without a) requiring them to set up small tips to tons of people, or b) "buying" too much of one person.

Bombs would be public by default with an inline option to make them anonymous (the option should be remembered next time).

The definition of "whole community" would have to be sophisticated to avoid gaming the system (see @chmullig on #84). We should analyze usage data as the basis for our algorithm. Bombs should be equally distributed amongst the "whole community" to avoid feelings and accusations of unfairness.

Bombs would show up on the history page (#43).

[colindean]

If gittip grows to a large size, couldn't this bomb result in everyone receiving less than one cent? I'm not sure of the value of that.

[hansent]

maybe instead of to the whole community or in addition to it, allow gift bombing a specific subset (like an open source project or open company).

I'm thinking e.g. contributers/admins for certain projects/causes could set up an open organization (ala github organization) and define their members + suggested contribution weight. There can be multiple suggestions for weighing fund allocation(e.g. each member can suggest one, or an average of the suggestions), the benefactor could go with a default suggestion, or adjust if he wants, while still having the benefit of not having to set up multiple individual tips/gifts for multiple receiver accounts.

that would still allow (as originally mentioned) larger-scale benefactors to deal in, without a) requiring them to set up small tips to tons of people, or b) "buying" too much of one person.

[ceboudreaux]

+1 The idea of tipping a community
-1 The word bomb.

Bomb is very negative. Consider blast and other alternatives. Business people are comfortable with email blasts, but not email bombs.

[ceboudreaux]

"Community tip" would be self explanatory.

[mvdkleijn]

@whit537 Just pointed this issue out to me over Twitter (https://twitter.com/whit537/status/378583535231057920) but it seems to me that this is over complicating things. This is just a one-time donation to a fund. Both of which have active issues.

To implement this:

• Implement funds
• Implement one time donations to a fund
• Auto generate a fund per community. (i.e. python community has its own fund containing all community members)
• Auto generate a fund for Gittip, containing all receivers.

[chadwhitacre]

Fair enough, @mvdkleijn. One way or another this is out of scope for our core product.