process feedback from User9812

[chadwhitacre]

Found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844633:

Same thing here, I had no idea about this site, so I click their mission from the article.
http://building.gittip.com/big-picture/mission

Well, that made it more confusing, so I click process at the bottom of the above page.

Now it sounds like it's a giant pool of money, anyone can volunteer for anything, and take some of that money. So, I can say I want to keep the elderly company and go play scrabble with them in the evenings, and take $10/hr from Gittip for my time? So, I visit the site directly to see if this is accurate...

https://www.gittip.com

Apparently not. Ok, now I'm suppose to enter a Twitter username? This is to donate money to Twitter users? Still confused, so I click a random profile of someone receiving money. It starts to make more sense, so these are just people marketing themselves, and asking for weekly donations. The about page confirms this...

https://www.gittip.com/about/

Far too much work to figure out what's happening here. I still have no idea what I can donate money towards. I mean, how do I browse causes? If I want to support musicians, or people cleaning up garbage on their beaches, where do I go? I can't find any type of listings, or categories here. Is this just for programmers? I need to know their Twitter/Github username, or randomly click profiles on the site?

I give up, I've spent 20 minutes reading, and browsing this site, and my only conclusion is that it's a place to sponsor your favorite programmers, by giving them a weekly donation. I've been programming and freelancing for over a decade, and I can't think of anyone by name that I'd donate towards. This site gives me zero help in finding people to donate towards, aside from aimlessly browsing hundreds of profiles, hoping for someone to catch my attention. I don't have that kind of time.

This entire thing is too frustrating. I don't have a Twitter, GitHub, Bitbucket, or OSM account, so they won't even let me sign-up anyway. However, they say, 'Gittip's audience is everyone; it's intended to be a mass-market consumer product.'

http://building.gittip.com

Browsing the above, it looks like they spent way too much effort on over-analyzing everything. They have widgets, an API, browser extensions, but they're missing the most important thing, I working business model. It seems like the result of too many engineers and programmers in a room, while no one is spending a minute thinking about marketing, sales, or the user experience.

[chadwhitacre]

Actually, gonna process inline on HN.