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.
Today's ten thousand: "Deadnaming" is apparently calling a transgender person by the old name they abandoned, a "deadname" being the name of their former identity.
Deleting a record in some databases uses a process of marking the record with a “tombstone”, processes can be killed. Abandoning a former name that doesn’t align with a gender identity? Yeah, it’s dead to me.
Oh I get the logic all right, but I imagine the transition is a pretty sensitive topic that can be difficult for some family members or acquaintances. And this kind of vocabulary (death-related) in this context sounds like an odd choice.
But that's just a thought, I have no idea how it feels to transition and what kind of emotions are involved. Maybe it's more definitive that way, acting like the former identity does not "live" anymore.
you have to update your social security card first. it's doable, but it's a whole chain of paperwork and documents. I transitioned 5 years ago and I still haven't really updated my legal name.
I mean, I can claim my name is whatever I like, but when the police pull me or a bank clerk ask me for an ID to identify myself before withdrawing the money, what stays there would be something different.
I am surprised that in the USA one is even allowed to present himself in the official context by the "non official" name. Is changing a legal name there so complex? Yes, it's a lot of work to change all documents, but does it really take five years?
* Court order to change name (I've done this, but decided I didn't like the name so I need to do it again.)
* Send form to change sex on driver's license (did this.)
* Go in person to DMV to update name and get new photo (haven't done this because pandemic.)
* Update gender and name on passport (requires attestation from doctor, copy of court order, previous passport and current ID, if passport is expired) (haven't done this.)
* Update gender and name on social security card (requires updated passport.)
* Update name on bank (requires updated social security card)
And to change sex on birth certificate, according to the rules of my state:
* Get endorsements from therapist and psychiatrist for vaginoplasty.
* Get vaginoplasty.
* Doctor attests to the state that you have a vagina now.
* Original birth certificate, attestation and passport -> updated birth certificate.
The last step isn't super necessary unless you're emigrating to another country.
Looks unnecessary complicated, but it seems there's no way around some of the complexity if you live in a country without a centrally issued ID for every citizen.
However, the whole gender and name changing process should not have to be more complicated than what people that want to change name after marrying have to do. But I guess there's still no political will to make it simpler.
It's the name a transgender person used to be know by prior to their transition.
It's highly offensive (to some at least) and refering to someone by their "deadname" is considered grounds for a permanent ban on a number of silicon valley services.
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?
Let me clarify - I meant a class of issues usually described that way, but spelled out it's "members of the team have little direct or indirect contact with people impacted by higher privacy needs, who are quite often global or context-specific minorities or people commonly exposed to abuse that impacts them". I wish we had a unique name for it because it keeps repeating online, and is often shortened the way I commented, which is not entirely correct. (In that yes, women are not magic privacy issue detectors)
People seek privacy in different ways and for different reasons. One end of the spectrum is the privacy for everyone as an ideology. Somewhere else is for example immediate protection from an abusive (ex-)partner embedding spying software on your phone. If you haven't heard groups caring about the second case, maybe it's due to your usual contacts?
I should have not have just trusted the parent comment and just looked at how it worked. I wrongly assumed it was some account setting like “enable tips” and then it walks you through a PayPal setup and then suddenly millions of people are going to be unwittingly exposing their address to strangers potentially without knowing and with no alternative except to not accept payments. It’s literally just a way to add tip links to your profile which is way more benign.
Sorry, I explained myself more under the sibling's reply. The way I understood it seemed such a gross vulnerability that it should have sounded terrible to either gender, but apparently the actual feature is much more tame.
Because relatively it impacts non-men more. Anyone interested in privacy would point it out, but not everyone has incentives to think about privacy in every situation.
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)
> but I can't imagine running it would cost more than $20/week unless it was horrendously misconfigured
Oh boy do I have news for you! Todays technology evangelists always starts a new product with at least three instances running three docker containers each, on expensive EC2 instances where you even pay for the bandwidth that should be free. Doesn't matter if you've found a product market fit first, engineers will read the latest Medium posts and implement things before thinking if they really need it.
I've stopped counting the number of times I've seen over-engineered systems simply because developers just jump around implementing stuff they seem fit without actually researching things.
So yes, probably most of the infrastructure you visit today could have been more lightweight, but that's not what the people implementing said infrastructure aims for.
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.
I, too, have noticed this in /r/cryptocurrency. Lots of posts that are just obviously trying to farm moons with generic popular opinions. Meanwhile, the mods are getting a salary in moons. Really interesting stuff, for sure. Back in the dogecoin days, this wasn't an issue because it was purely for the memes. Sending someone a few thousand doge as a meme tip cost you a few dollars at most, and that point the karma was worth more than the doge itself. Looking back, those tips now equate to thousands of dollars!
Like giving someone tulips as a present in 1637 and then finding out there is a tulip mania and had you grown new ones from the seeds you would be a millionaire. Some things never change.
The famous 1636/1637 tulip mania (such as it was) lasted just a few months over the winter, collapsing in February. There was no time to grow anything in that period.
This is just how those forums end up during these massive market increases (or bubbles if you so feel inclined). I remember back in 2017/18 /r/cryptocurrency it was a lot of sob stories and anecdotes mixed in with a bunch of pump and dump shilling.
Well it did tone down the aggressive argumentation, shill shrieking, negative behavior, etc. in the subreddit. At the cost of what you already stated. People are being more performative and excessively positive/empathetic/comedic to farm moons.
I mean it makes sense - a monetary incentive for good (at least superficially) behavior. Same as the physically world.
Quality on /r/cryptocurtency was always very poor. Moons improved the quality, if anything, excepting the rise in sob stories you mention.
Moons also allowed a lot of people to get paid for their Reddit activity. For people living in the developing world, this has in some cases been a life-changing sum.
Nope, quality went down a lot with even more unfunny memes and reposts than previously thinkable.
Moons made it worse, just like donuts ruined ethtrader (and even lead to most of the users leaving starting their own sub). Of course that won't stop reddit to roll crypto tokens out side wide.
/r/CryptoCurrency has never been more active, and while much of that could certainly be attributed to the recent price gains, going from 500 comments a day in Jan 2020 to 40,000 comments a day today is more than can be explained by just the price.
So objectively speaking, CryptoCurrency is more appealing/engaging now than ever before. The only question is how much of that can be attributed to Moons. As for /r/EthTrader, the split happened before donuts were even launched, and that was due to a smear campaign that was run against them by a few influential users.
EthTrader saw rapid growth in subscribers after donut introduction, and is today one of highest subscriber crypto forums.
So I do think Reddit rolling out Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens site wide makes sense from an engagement perspective, and will also go a long way in enabling more decentralized and distributed ownership structures, that allow for more effective economic coordination. If Reddit successfully executes on the plan, it will also mean hundreds of millions of people having a new source of income.
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.
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.
Not just that, there are plenty of debates and discussions that don't need every single one of the billions of people on this planet as potential participants.
The people who decry changes like being able to restrict who can reply to you as "eroding discussion" don't seem to realise that what they're actually saying is "either you commit to listening to/engaging with random total strangers yelling whatever they want at you or you shouldn't say anything at all". In my opinion that silently stifles far more speech than the alternative.
>there are plenty of debates and discussions that don't need every single one of the billions of people on this planet as potential participants.
But WHO decides that? It is just like here on Hacker News, you cannot down vote until you have 500 upvotes? I may have a new novel idea or frame of reference that could benefit the world but I get downvoted on everything I say it never gets out.
So who decides? The one's in control of the platform. And that is horrible. Look at the trouble the woman who invented the mRNA vaccine went through!
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.
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.
> Instagram stories (and IG in general) has been functional on the mobile web for more than 3 years
Maybe that's geo-locked? When I visit instagram.com and log in I can only consume content, I cannot upload anything, normal posts nor stories.
Edit: I realize now you said "mobile web" while I was thinking "web" in general and visit from my desktop. Seems weird it works on 1/2 of the web versions they have...
Kind of. There are still settings that are available only in the app, which I ran into recently - can't remember exactly what but eventually I gave up and installed the app.
Keep in mind that if Twitter took a cut of tips, that would automatically trigger the App Store's 30% in-app payment tax for any user who tips on their iPhone. (According to App Store rules, if an in-app payment goes 100% to the creator with zero platform cut, then Apple foregoes the 30% fee.)
It's similar to why Clubhouse isn't currently taking a cut of creator payments: they can't do it without paying the App Store fees.
It's shit like this that makes me wish people would switch to Mastodon, but it won't happen because the "big names" aren't on there. Wil Wheaton tried, but got bombarded with an endless slew of "Shut the fuck up Wesley" until he quit. The cynic in me thinks this could have been a coordinated effort by Twitter to try to keep people from leaving for greener pastures, but that's probably just my tinfoil hat showing.
Mastodon is that, but also the opposite. It literally depends entirely on which instance you choose. There are servers of all kinds, here are some listed on their site:
General (41)
Regional (29)
Art (7)
Music (2)
Journalism (1)
Activism (7)
LGBTQ+ (7)
Gaming (5)
Technology (15)
Furry (3)
Food (2)
You don't need a conspiracy if your success relies only on people on the internet being scumbags. Unfortunate reality is that you'll always win taking that side of the bet.
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.
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.
There is a thriving art community that shills their NSFW art and services on twitter through fan engagement and community building. Through this clout they shill their Patreons and only-fans.
I don't think their behavior will change. This image and text only non-realtime format is not conducive unlike twitch and only-fans.
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.
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.
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.
This feature is built upon user-specific URLs, and Zelle unfortunately doesn't have a public URL system. In fact, you can only access the Zelle network within the site/app for your bank.
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.
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.
You surely don’t think that actual dollars settle every time you pay with a credit card, Venmo, or PayPal? You realize that settlement takes weeks?
Micro-paying with Bitcoin on a centralized platform like PayPal is essentially the same as dollars. Final settlement in BTC can come later when someone wants to withdraw their balance.
Credit card settlements happen next business day, not after weeks. Venmo and PayPal transactions settle instantly. You can spend the money immediately. PayPal also supports instant bank transfers, so you can transfer it out and withdraw it from an ATM as cash a minute later if you'd like.
They are referring to cash settlement, not spending ability, I believe ("You realize that settlement takes weeks?"). The difference is nearly unnoticeable to the end user, whether or not the actual cash is moved, because they can still spend it.
3.2.1.vii Apps may enable individual users to give a monetary gift to another individual without using in-app purchase, provided that (a) the gift is a completely optional choice by the giver, and (b) 100% of the funds go to the receiver of the gift. However, a gift that is connected to or associated at any point in time with receiving digital content or services must use in-app purchase.
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.. ^_^
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!
I don't know if this will work on Twitter, but on Instagram, I decided to deal with annoying ads by liking all ads from reMarkable, a device I already own and whose ads at least look visually nice, and reporting all other ads. So far I only ever see rM ads and I hope it stays that way. Which it might as long as reMarkable runs ads on Instagram.
> 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.
You can bet the russians and chinese will be busy tipping the biggest buffoons on all sides just to stir the pot. Right now they do it with Likes and Followers.
So the most misguided people keep pointing at the counts to justify whatever they say, do or think.
Before Twitter finding a large bunch of such people, characterized by 2 traits (1. they have no idea how misguided they are 2. they have endless energy and can spend 24x7 broadcasting bullshit) was very hard. Now you just have to search for a particular hashtag that signals crazy and tip the people with the highest posting frequencies.
As long as you can find more people than the number that work at Twitter support you have ready made chaos injection system.
No one seems to have any issues that the capability exists to impose such random ignorant reward mechanics at population scale. Ignorance is bliss.
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?
It's probable that drug dealers could use this, but there's a bit of a marketing hurdle if they do decide to go that route. Can you imagine the awkwardness of explaining that you want funds received through Twitter? It's a nightmare since twitter is a public arena and doesn't even use E2E encryption for its DMs, so police can have a nose at your convos.
In part because the cloud is just someone else's computer, and someone else's computer runs somewhere and is thus subject to human civilization and laws.
Bittorrent (in its traditional use case of piracy) is still as illegal as ever and still going strong. So are cocaine sales, as is Uniswap's giant permissionless unregulated/unregistered securities market.
I think perhaps people overestimate the ability to effectively regulate.
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?