allow for tips in other amounts

[chadwhitacre]

@jacobian: "hm, I’d be more inclined to want to give 1 dev $100/mo than 10 devs $10 (or 100 devs $1). Anecdote != data, just my gut feeling." (twitter)

Tips are currently constrained to 0.08, 0.16, 0.32, 0.64, and 1.28 a week.

[chadwhitacre]

My concern here is to preserve "no strings attached." What happens if Alice gives Bob $200 a week, and then stops? Bob may very well have been depending on that money. Now he has to scramble. Moreover, Alice and Bob may both feel that Alice has more control over Bob due to her high percentage of his patronage. Maybe she quit to punish him for disagreeing with her. I want Alice to have a small, powerful-in-aggregate influence on Bob, but not a direct influence via Gittip in this way.

I want, if possible, for people on Gittip not to be doing personal fund-raising. If you're pulling gifts from 1,000 people then that's a different game than if you're pulling from 10 or even 100 people. I want people to focus on making the world better in the long term, and not "raising money" as a short term game.

Maybe there's some throttle, like, you can give up to 2% of a person's total? So if Bob pulls $200/wk then Alice can give up to $4/wk. If Alice wanted to give $25/wk to Bob (~= $100/mo) then Bob would have to be seeing $1,250 a week. Probably just let it run if for some reason Bob drops way down, since the point is that that happens slowly (just as build-up is relatively slow).

[chadwhitacre]

With the new $24 per week amount, Gittip now supports @jacobian's "1 dev $100/mo" use case. If the "custom input box" idea crops up again (see also #95), we'll make another ticket for that.

[chadwhitacre]

I want, if possible, for people on Gittip not to be doing personal fund-raising.

For the record, it seems now like Gittip is turning into exactly this. Hrm ...