Why I like TTT... and musings on an alternative model

I like Tweet Tip Trusts because they are a way of showing how much you value the things other people do. And the Trust being a closed system there is a sense of safety, that you won't "lose" what you are giving away because, as long as you do something other people value, it will come back to you further along the line. Of course they could store up what's been given them, but as they can't use it outside the Trust, there's not much incentive for this. There's more incentive to be generous and show that you are paying attention to other people's actions, because then (you'd expect) they're more likely to do the same for yours.

The incentive is the simple "hit" of pleasure from knowing that somebody agrees that what you thought was worth doing, really was worth doing. And the extent of their agreement is shown by the size of the tip.

This set me thinking about other models. In the current system there's a limit to how much you can tip – which is how much you have in your account. So you might think that what someone did was the most amazing thing ever, but if you've only got a few quid left in your account, you won't be able to tip in proportion to this. This means, in effect, you have to "earn the right" to tip – once your initial investment in the system has been distributed, you have to keep getting tipped in order to be able to tip back.

What if there was a system where you could create new value and add it to the system (but still could not remove it)? I guess this would mean not using "real money", which is an important feature of the current system in terms of encouraging people to take it seriously. But it would allow for the decision on how much to tip to be made entirely in response to how much you value someone's action, rather than how much money you have at your disposal.

I wonder how the dynamics of the two systems would differ?