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I’m co-Founder of Tipjoy. We’re very much alive and well, and about to release some very exciting new features. You will hear more about them soon. We’re hiring, raising money, getting new office space, and still working hard to make the service better.

The use of Tipjoy has been consistently growing, and we expect this to accelerate. Just as you said yourself, it takes more than a few months for a product to become huge. It’s an iterative process where we listen and learn from our users and continually add new features for them.

We too believe in the social side of tipping. We’ve made it easy to see who else has tipping something, and see everything they’ve tipped. This is all syndicated with RSS. You can see the tips I’ve given here: http://tipjoy.com/userstream/ivankirigin/

If you want to make your tipping public, change your settings here: http://tipjoy.com/settings/

The social side of the site is going to become much more interesting, especially as we add plugins to social networks so you can track what your friends are tipping on the sites you’re using most.

It's a valid strategy, but it's not a business model.

It's not that great a strategy either...

A user once complained that a job was running too long. After some research, I found something like this (SLEEP 10 seconds) inside a loop. I removed it. The batch time went from 7 hours down to 23 minutes. The user thought I was a genius. When I told my client (the IT manager) what I had done, he was pissed. He said, "You should have changed it to a SLEEP 5, so we had something to give him the next time he complained."

Figuring out if a webpage is worth tipping is like going to the store and trying to figure out which toothpaste is the best. It's stressful as hell because they all look the same and you're afraid if you buy the wrong one you're teeth are going to fall out. Except instead of having to do that every three months, Tipjoy asks me to do it every couple of minutes. Even if you're only tipping a quarter the cognitive load is just as bad as if it's a much larger amount. In many ways it's worse because you know the people you're tipping are only getting a quarter for the mental effort; the end result just doesn't justify the process. So just let me contribute as big a pie as I want, and then make hitting the tip button just cut out an extra slice from the pie. It completely eliminates the stress of having to figure out whether or not to spend money, and the cognitive load goes down a lot as well because you can, for example, favorite Fred Wilson's blog once and then a slice of the pie automatically goes to him each month. And speaking of, Crest solved this problem by just releasing their new Pro Health product, the one that costs an extra couple bucks but just does everything. Which of course is the toothpaste I now buy. Tipjoy has to figure out a way to do the equivalent. Because as is, Tipjoy makes being nice feel like pulling teeth.

Plus parts of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=200028 devolved into a conversation about Arrington.