Refine a measure of stability/ volatility as overall funding levels grow

[ehmatthes]

There was some interesting conversation about stability and volatility of a recipient's funding level during the discussion of issue #1041, "add $100 as a tip option". Briefly, the consensus was to up the maximum tip to $100 for the sake of supporting overall growth in the platform. These large tips create volatility in an individual's funding level, but we accept that volatility in order to support rapid growth.

Two core goals of gittip are to support people at a living wage level, and to give people stability in funding. As people start to reach a living wage level, we may see some people choose to leave their jobs based on gittip funding. These people need accurate, objective measures of the stability of their funding.

It seems we could make a formula that condenses stability down to a single number, but I'm wary of telling people their funding is stable when we can't really promise that. This seems especially important as people make significant life decisions around their level of funding. It seems the best approach might be to give accurate statistics related to stability/ volatility, and share the patterns that we see about funding overall.

The key metrics regarding stability of funding seem to be:

• tip size distribution
• how long someone has been tipping you

Here's an interesting long-term thought, related to stability. We allow people to set funding targets. If we could measure stability, could we allow people to set stability targets as well? For example, if you get $1000/ week through ten $100 tips, that is not as stable as forty $25/week tips. Could people set their own maximum tip level, or maximum number of tips at any given level?

I obviously value stability, but I can accept volatility as long as the recipient has an accurate sense of the volatility of their current funding level.

These concerns may seem far off, but we are one order of magnitude away from the top recipients receiving something close to living wages.

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[chadwhitacre]

I think the answer here is a visualization. Here's a sketch of what I have in mind:

That shows time left to right and individual givers top to bottom. So Giver 1 gave two large gifts and then disappeared, Giver 2 tapered off over five weeks, etc.

I'm concerned that displaying individual givers this way would give too much information vis-a-vis Gittip's anonymity principle. I'd want to play with this viz to obscure individual givers and see if that gives enough info re: stability.

[seibert]

I think we might be able to go a little simpler here. Maybe just a statement on the user page that says:

"You receive $250/week in tips from 37 people.  58% of your income comes from 2 people."

The second sentence is constructed by sorting the user's tips in descending order and count the smallest number of tips you have to sum up to exceed 50% of their total weekly income. This should tell someone if their income is dominated by a small number of people pretty easily. (I assume this would only be visible to the account owner?)

I'm not sure what the best approach is to show how long people have been tipping you. I worry that the above box diagram / giver strip chart would be too difficult to interpret.

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in light of our decision to shut down Gratipay.

Thank you all for a great run, and I'm sorry it didn't work out! 😞 💃