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Apparently if you send someone a tip with this they get your mailing address as part of the receipt. https://twitter.com/racheltobac/status/1390409874006183936
This is a PayPal issue, but Twitter are responding by adding a warning so people know it will happen: https://twitter.com/kayvz/status/1390423761183117312?
Yep PayPal is awful about this stuff. I have a friend who's deadname was leaking through PayPal reciepts. They couldn't change it because PayPal insisted on showing the name of the account holder which was validated through the bank account linking. To protect them I now manage the account they have people send payments and donations to. It's suboptimal but it's the only way we can be totally sure their deadname doesn't show again.
I knew PayPal was bad before, but I've hated them ever since that info leak.
This seems like an issue on the Twitter implementation side. I don't know how the newer PayPal API handles it but on the one I am familiar with.
NOSHIPPING 1 — PayPal does not display shipping address fields and removes shipping information from the transaction.
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/nvp-soap-api/set-express-c...
That appears to specifically be with PayPal, not the Tip Jar feature in general.
I do agree with the OP on Twitter though. While this is a PayPal thing, Twitter is integrating them into their service and so should be educating their users.
Based on follow up tweets from the OP it looks like Twitter have already reacted to it in some way? Not sure. Would be interesting to see what they do.
This is pretty dissuading from using the tip feature. Ultimately, Twitter had to make a choice of which processor to go with and PayPal was clearly the winner here. Perhaps in a year or so they may move to Stripe.
What would (maybe) be a good move is to process the transactions through Twitter itself?
I remember in 2017 in /r/dogecoin, we would tip each other thousands of doge (back then, it was 1/10th of a penny) for "such many random and much wow comment in forum". This was achieved with a DOGE tipping bot.
This idea will most likely work if Twitter starts supporting it as a first class feature. And maybe it will encourage people to speak about things that are valuable. Or maybe it will continue to encourage the Twitter mob to just tear the other side apart. I don't know.
Not sure if you remember what happened with that. The creator of dogetipbot held the money that wasn't withdrawn, then eventually froze withdrawals and absconded with a possible fortune (they claimed they were burning it to pay for ridiculous server costs, but I can't imagine running it would cost more than $20/week unless it was horrendously misconfigured)
On the other hand /r/cryptocurrency introduced "moons" as tipping mechanism and the quality of the discussions went downhill really quick. Nowadays, there's lots of sob stories or random posts about how a person just bought in to some random coin, personal anecdotes, etc.
I think whatever tipping is implemented needs to be pretty much worthless (aka mostly symbolic), otherwise, people will just spend a lot of their time just trying to game it. In many parts of the world, even making a couple dollars a day is more than they would make in their local economy.
That was such a fun community. I wonder how much the doge donated to the Jamaican bobsled team and that NASCAR sponsorship would be worth now. There was a pretty sizeable Charity:Water donation too.
Ridiculously, I think the aggregate of tiny tips that people forever lost to that tipbot would be worth serious money now. Never would have imagined.
I've tried giving away doge on that subreddit, most people believe receive addresses to be too private information to share, I managed to give out 10 out of the 50 I had allocated for the experiment :D
I think it’s quite smart to launch this sans-crypto to avoid headlines, ensure the feature works well and is received well, and then add additional payment methods weeks or months later.
I do wonder if this hurts or helps twitter as a product tho - I can’t say I’ve been enjoying the recent “only so-and-sos friends can reply to this post” trend. But now we will see very popular tweets with no discussion allowed that is also earning money from sycophants? I can’t say that makes me excited to jump on twitter - although clearly this doesn’t sway a large number of users off Facebook either so maybe I’m not the target market here... it does seem strange though that after a decade of talk about social media bubbles, we seem to be reinforcing them explicitly!
At what point is a read-only tweet, shown only to those who already agree and which asks for donations, any different from televangelism? It feels about as alien to discussion (presumably the purpose of twitter) as one can imagine.
There are plenty of uses for Twitter unrelated to debate or discussion. Sharing news, building a community, posting about your day, etc.
> But now we will see very popular tweets with no discussion allowed that is also earning money from sycophants?
Then unfollow those people
It hurts. It most certainly hurts. Everyone will evolve into the most perfect beggar. Yes, it will possibly be a slow devolution than what happened at YouTube, but it will happen.
Twitter is bad enough without easy money involved. People call it public commenting, but it's not. Not if you can block some one or limit why sees your tweets. Just another curated self to expose to the world, and the money, as I said, will only make not worse.
Twitter seems to be ignoring the development of its website entirely. This is not the first feature that’s been exclusive to just the mobile apps:
- Fleets, launched months ago, is still app-only
- Spaces, the Clubhouse clone, is also app-only.
- Now Tipping.
- Even the uncropped images that launched yesterday (for vertical images) is app-only.
Anyone using Twitter in the browser uses the Twitter website and sees the ads it serves. But many people using Twitter in an app use a third party app rather than the official one. These people don't see ads. If Twitter's goal is to get more ad views, exanding their share of the app market is more important than the web market that they control already.
It makes sense when you consider that all the successful services they are copying (Instagram, Snapchat, Clubhouse) are app-only.
Twitter not taking a cut is surprising and welcome.
They know there will be an uproar if they take a cut today. But once everyone is used to using it they'll introduce their cut and make money.
Like when instagram started they promised they'd have no ads
In my experience it's better to shop around payment processors to see if they are willing to take less than the 2.9%, and keep that markup to yourself.
Is there a way to link to the Tip Jar, or do you have to direct people to your profile? When I've seen people offer tip jars, it's at the end of a long thread and takes people to a payment service. I wonder how "Tip Jar is on my profile" would perform against a link in a tweet.
Onlyfans strangely not mentioned. I see a lot of people on twitter with viral tweets shilling their onlyfans
Bingo. This is going to get used for sex work, and then Twitter will have to either act surprised and ban a whole swathe of users or embrace it and face condemnation from the religious right.
> On Android, tips can also be sent within Spaces.
Why only on Android? I suppose they could not avoid 30% Apple tax.
Wonder if / how this will change people's sharing behavior. A common scenario like:
People like to do X for free (status, virtual points) but if a way to get paid while doing so is introduced, the dynamics change. People that don't get paid much (overall, or relatively compared to their peers) feel bitter even though the outcome is exactly the same as before but they get discouraged, stop sharing, stop doing it for free etc.
Money will always change people's behavior. And I have never seen a time it changed it for the better, unless they were giving it away.
I'm not even using twitter and I know that the crypto community has a bunch of coins and twitter bots [1] that implement tipping way way better and also likely did this years ago.
The key part of making it better is that everyone can receive tips with these systems you dont need a payment provider that matches or in fact you dont need one at all.
Ofc you cant cash out without but you can tip what you got to others. The same "dollar" can move around to hundreds of people like that without any PayPal or whatever in between that would suck it up by removing fees.
[1]For example xrptipbot.com also cross platform and works on reddit and discord too.
Seems like a lot of taps to send a tip.
I was expecting an experience closer to Tippin.me [1] where there's a click to tip, and another to confirm. Tippin.me, happens to be built on Bitcoin's Lightning Network so maybe Twitter will leverage Square's (also run by Jack Dorsey who's keen on Bitcoin) CashApp to do something similar in the future.
I could see the tip jar functionality go in the direction where a user deposits some amount of BTC to Twitter (opens up a LN channel with Twitter in the backend) and then a tap or click on the tip button results in a preset 100 sats tip.
Would like to see some Zelle integration, as almost all major banks in the US already integrate with it. No need for crypto or closed wallets (PayPal and Cash app), just tie into existing instant payment infra.
I don't feel like tipping someone for making an observation or a joke. This means turning a conversation into an economic transaction. Is this where the world is going? Pathetic.
There is a huge community of artists, podcasters, video content creators who can now use this to ear an income from the public.
I don't think this feature is only for conversations, though it will effect them. How? I can only speculate.
Who says you have to? There's a lot of artists, people reverse engineering things or people writing up historic events on Twitter. Just like on Patreon you support the person because you like what they are doing, not a random meme account because they posted a funny repost.
Surprised to see no bitcoin after all of dorsey’s crypto boosting.
How do they avoid giving 30% to Apple? I guess there's a carve-out for P2P cash, like Venmo? Is this why they're not taking a cut?
Have anyone ever actually sent or received a tip of any kind?
I've only ever once gotten a "donation" and it was $1, for SDL-Ball together with a message asking me in not so kind words to stop my pathetic e-begging :D
I once sent someone a few bitcoin, but that was in 2009 or 10.. ^_^
> Tip Jar is an easy way to support the incredible voices that make up the conversation on Twitter.
The conversation is mostly snarkiness and trolling. I really hope we don't start rewarding that with cash.
Social Media has a broken business model that does not respect its users. Any experiment that might result in better-aligned incentives for users and company is welcome!
how to make people even more angry with Twitter:
Allow us to tip the "Promoted" tweets so you don't see them again.
You're welcome (sorry)
At the same time, YouTubers get rich just by creating content. Tipping won't help that much.
> Tip Jar is an easy way to support the incredible voices that make up the conversation on Twitter. This is a first step in our work to create new ways for people to receive and show support on Twitter – with money.
I hope this will create an incentive for people to be less partisan and divisive and look for donators outside of their algorithmic bubble.
So like only fans, which I also refuse to pay for?
So, Tip Jar is literally just a built in linktree?
Wow, this is the end of Twitter. Everyone looking to make money will fill the platform up with garbage.
Neoliberalsim is turning you all into beggars.
makes gambling on twitter much easier
Somebody has mentioned this about Patreon before. But couldn't a drug dealer now just sign up to Twitter and get Tips from their customers instead of cash?
> *Payment service availability and features vary by region
Why do companies think they can compete with internet payment services that don't have any of these arbitrary restrictions placed upon them?
Just want to point out:
As it is implemented currently, the “Tip Jar” is literally just a list of hyperlinks. Clean hyperlinks, even.
If you need a handy example for trying it out: I’m @NeoYokel
I entered every link except CashApp because I don’t have that.
(DO NOT PAY ME. This is not a sly attempt to get you extremely wealthy hn readers to send me unsolicited cash.)