Tipping, the "Starbucks card" and micro-transactions

New Features Ideas
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I had a good talk with the developer of an app on Thingiverse this morning. He shared an idea for Tipping that I wanted to get feedback on.

When I ask designers, they usually like the idea of tipping, and people downloading objects often bring it up as a way that hey like to reward the creators they like.

The way tipping works today on Thingiverse is that Creators can add a link to their profile, then all of the tipping happens externally (so we don’t even have a view on what is actually being tipped). You’ll need to go through the process every time you want to reward a designer, potentially on different platforms every time (Paypal, BuyMeACoffee, etc.). It’s not really encouraged much apart from on the download screen, which you won’t even see all the time. In a nutshell, Tipping needs a revamp if it’s going to be a serous way for designers to actually receive rewards this way.

The idea that was shared with me was that of an account, like a Starbucks card, that would auto-top up and distribute tips or rewards to designers automatically based on your activity. For example, you could top up your account balance to $20, and you would decide that every time you download a model, the designer receives a $1 tip, or when you upload a make, the designer would also receive a reward from this tipping balance. Once your balance hits some amount, say $5, you automatically top-up another $20. Or maybe you’d set a monthly top-up amount in line with your budget for supporting your favorite creators.

I think this idea is great because it removes the friction of having to visit another site, creating an account, logging in, adding your card details, etc. It makes it much easier to support creators, to a level you feel happy with.

Do you see this work? What kind of creators would you like to support (through download activity, Likes, etc.)? What kind of amounts make sense for you?

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I don’t think that having a “Thingiverse Cash” (or whatever you wanna call it) is necessarily a bad thing; the livestreaming site Twitch has it in the form of bits and pretty much every free-to-play mobile game foregoes allowing you to buy things directly, and instead makes you purchase in-game currency to buy characters and stuff with.

To address the elephant in the room, it’s relatively clear that they do this to encourage people to spend more than they usually would by trying to make it feel like they’re not spending “real money,” even though that’s essentially what it is. However, if this makes it so that people are willing to spend more money supporting creators, well, I’m not too against it, morally speaking.

As for the idea of this account automatically paying out to creators, I’m not too sure I would want it to go that far. Although I don’t do a lot of printing other folks’ models, I generally would want to make sure that the thing I’m printing is quality before I would donate, and I generally always try to post a make when I print something, even if it’s bad. If it was bad, however, I probably wouldn’t want to donate.

My personal idea would be to go ahead and do the “Thingiverse Cash” account-like thing, but instead just provide an option to donate whenever you post a make–make it configurable in settings. Then, you’re reminded anytime you do so that you can donate (if you liked what you made, want to support that creator with your Thingiverse Cash?), and then it is converted into whatever the creator’s currency is, and is added to their “earned funds” (separate from their Thingiverse Cash balance). Once that reaches a threshold, they can withdraw it into their own bank account.

You could also put the fact that people donated and the amount they donated onto the make they posted, if you wanted.

I also think that there should be other ways to get Thingiverse Cash other than just paying money into it–you could have contest winners get some, if you have a Premium Membership it could include some Cash every month, and maybe people that just use the site a lot also could get some. I know MakerWorld has something similar with its Boost system, but it also talks about how much it tries to combat fraud from people that use the free methods to get Boosts in order to convert it to money through various unfair and unsavory means.

Regardless, the whole point is to try and get Cash into the hands of people so that they feel like they may as well use it and support people, in order to get that culture of supporting the hard work of creators more prevalent and common.

Oh, and you may as well keep the donate link that’s currently there as well. It doesn’t hurt, and would help people that don’t want to have to necessarily jump through hoops on Thingiverse to withdraw their money.

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I wasn’t so much thinking about a separate currency (but why not, maybe the Twitch concept make sense too). The way I understood the idea and how it made sense to me was to make tipping a nearly-automatic process, instead of the tedious steps you need to go through every single time you might think of tipping a Creator.

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Yeah, it certainly makes it easier to donate to people when you do that. That way you can make one transaction with the platform, and then you can very quickly use that to donate to a bunch of different creators.

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Tipping should not be automatic - tipping has to be a thoughtful action in recognition of the user’s enjoyment of the object. Tipping on just downloads or makes should never happen automatically.

How much would it cost Thingiverse to manage something like this? I would think that you’d have to buy a service from some provider, and there’s going to be overhead for that. How much would that be and how would you cover that? As as user, I would be annoyed if I learned that a significant percentage of the tip money I put into an account is just to manage the tip program. For example, there are YouTubers I watch who say “support me on Patreon but don’t sign up through the Apple app - Apple skims a huge percentage off the top”. I’d hate finding out that 20% of the tip money I put into Thingiverse is skimmed by some service provider.

If you are looking for a way to encourage content creators to post more content, how about sharing ad revenue with creators? You’d want to verify the creators to ensure that they are posting high quality stuff that actually works, and I’m not sure how you’d do that automatically. But assuming that you could prevent content creators from flooding the site with junk and AI models and can verify that models are at least printable with the specs provided by the creator, perhaps pay the creator based on view, download, and like metrics. Just don’t pull a YouTube a screw over the content creators.

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The main idea is to make it much easier to tip. Members would still have control to set the rules as to how tipping is done. But the reality is that today, tipping is so complicated, having to visit another website, maybe creating an account, entering your details every time you want to even tip the smallest amount, etc. that people simply don’t do it, and designers are the people losing out by not receiving tips.

Building tipping into Thingiverse, rather than relying on a third party website like Kofi or Paypal link also allows to reduce fees by grouping payouts for example.

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Its a complicated scenario but I disagree with the idea of only providing creators with tips. How does that compare to our current society where employers in certain fields do not pay a fair wage and expect others to pay (or supplement) their employees wages by tips or special commissions etc. Tipping has become a social norm in many countries and in North America it usually goes to supplement workers who are generally underpaid for the service they provide. If you want to continue to provide the tip model as a quick thank you then fine but if you are adding ads (as a revenue provider) to cover costs of the digital service then you should be considering using the same ad revenue to help pay for the content which is the service you are providing. Keep in mind that network and server costs are not the only costs for the service. On the other hand, if everyone is providing the services for free (severs, network connectivity, server infrastructure, managers, workers etc.) then they are all doing what your content creators are doing and maybe they should all be getting tips as well.

I would think that the company should be looking at everyone that provides value to your system and share any revenues with all of them. Tips should only be though of as a special thank you, given at the discretion of the individual who want to recognize something special that is offered.

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