Hacker News Reader

Comment by eof | Hacker News Reader

I'm really, really surprised and confused by what seems to be the overall sentiment here.

This tipping project was born of a hackathon combining cryptocurrency (cool) and supporting open source projects. Awesome!

Then when people started getting tipped tiny amounts it generated spam... annoying, but it was fixed.

It's a bit outrageous to claim that emailing someone after they have received free money (over some threshold) to invite them to accept it is going over the line.

Claims about taxes, etc.. are laughable. HOW DARE YOU GIVE ME FREE MONEY AND ALLOW ME TO DECLINE IT. Give me a break.

Overall the tone of alexanderz is extremely reasonable. It is not clear to me why the equivalent of a social-site invite being emailed on behalf of some user is suddenly worth getting angry and talking about international spam law. Especially when the exact same opt-out functionality exists. Click one button and never seen another email.. what's the deal here.

View on HN

I guess the aspect you aren't addressing is that people feel like a listing on the site creates an association between the site and their project (quoting from the bug report I do not want to be associated with this kind of thing.).

You can disagree about whether the listing implies an association and disagree that such an association is a bad thing, but it should be clear enough that there are people who do think it creates an association and that they do not want that appearance.

fair. It seems 'opt-out' is fine to me though and here is why: I want to contribute to some persons tiny little 4-stars github project because it saved my ass.. it is a bit audacious for long-tail repos to be signing up to accept tips; but sometimes my long-tail tip will cross her long-tail repo.

Even more, what does mitsuhiko care if other people are getting money for contributions to his repos. If mitsuhiko is getting spam or seeing stuff in his issue queue despite opting out; that is a serious breach of ettiquite.

It doesn't seem to me this is the case though.. it's like he is angry that other people are getting emails?

I don't think he is angry, I just think he isn't comfortable having his projects listed on sites like this. Read his comments on the bug; they are polite, they explain his perspective, they ask for a specific action, they don't contain insults.

In your scenario, if you actually wanted to tip a meaningful amount, I think it wouldn't be a big deal to simply contact the project directly and see how they wanted to handle it. If you are talking about software users keeping $0.50 tips instead of the projects collecting them, I think that argument is sort of neutral to the opt-in/opt-out question (if a project thinks the combined small tips are worth dealing with, they will likely opt in).

It's not just free money, it's wasted time from related PRs, and the noise created and the damage it does to OSS in general.

It's a cool hack -but they forgot to ask for permission from the people they "collect" money for.

And when asked, they refuse to remove the code and instead spew out asshat logick...

Thanks for fucking with OSS, guys!

hey, i have another great idea combining two wonderful things: children (wonderful) and sex. Awesome! I'm off to email you some offers...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com