Do we need a tipping button?
The Steem blockchain is paying automatically for content creators, but should there be also an easy way to give tips?
I was thinking that many times content can be very valuable only to very few people. It's not going to get rewarded because most users will ignore it and not vote for it. This could be something like a great answer to an important question.
Maybe Steemit could make a tipping button so that users could do both things easily: voting and tipping.
Tipping is already possible, of course, but it's not as easy as it could be. Now user has to go the wallet page and type account name to make the transfer.
Any thoughts?
It is a trade off between a simple user interface and giving the user lots of options.
But tipping might be very useful and wanted feature, even essential. We will have price stable cryptocurrency with free transactions! That could be a huge success for people who want to give and recieve tips.
I like it simple too. But definitely think about the tipping, because there’s a lot more that function might achieve. Tipping could be a gateway into crowdfunding on here, either in a small-scale way or larger if that’s what the community wants. A (verified) charity could post an appeal for its donation campaign. An inventor could describe a product he wants to develop. And instead of getting a basketful of upvotes and walking away with a $20 post, suddenly that poster has the money needed to create a new product or charter a plane full of medical supplies into some hurricane-torn developing country. I’d be a little wary of the cash-outs, so might suggest there could be a maximum dollar amount, a seniority requirement (enough posts and good will over time), or maybe anyone participating in crowdfunding would need to have a certain vesting stake. Something to think about.
I am always one to fight feature bloat. And I very much appreciate keeping a clean UI. But tipping does seem like a useful feature to have. What kind of community do we want to foster here? One where people frequently go above and beyond to reward quality content? That sounds good to me!
Of course, this feature should be pretty trivial, so feature bloat isn't a huge concern. In this case, also, I think there's a pretty decent option available in terms of UI design, which is that the tip button can be hidden behind the upvote button. In general, I'm probably not going to tip a post I haven't already upvoted. Since I can't upvote twice, why not show a tip button when I've upvoted?
That was always the struggle I had with my side project. There's so much data and so many features we could make, but there's only ever so much screen real estate and time to work with and competing factors to account for.
I think it's a good idea, fairly inevitable, and in terms of adoption is probably worth the trouble and clutter in the UI in the long run. There is probably a way to do it so that it's not obtrusive.
@officialfuzzy Sharebits?
A tip button would be nice, since the votes of a standard user usually do not appear to raise the value of the post.
A tiny coin icon next to the vote\value would be cool. Set to a microtip like .01 steem since everyone only starts out with 10, but configurable in settings to whatever size you like.
Something to consider, the new free accounts will have only "Steem Power". They can't tip with that anyways.
I like the idea. We can avoid clutter by putting new features in a menu then promoting the ones that are used a lot.
It could be feature creep, but it's definitely not scope creep. Steem is a coin blockchain and steemit.com already functions to send STEEM. Tipping is sending STEEM where the only difference is it's called "tipping".