When I first stumbled across Publish0x back in February I would have never guessed how much I'd use it some weeks later. It's one of five tabs that stays open all day every day. I enjoy writing as much as reading what others have to say and more often than not I end up reading about stuff I've never even heard of before. I love the tipping system and how you can use it to show your appreciation for the content you are consuming. Still there's one major problem I face every day: I run out of tips way too early.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for an overall increase of the amount of tokens I get to tip. What I'm asking for is a way to give tips to more people. As most of you are probably aware of, right now your first tip is a pretty big one, followed by a decent one and four smaller ones. After that you have to wait for the next day to tip again. That means I'm usually out of tips around 7:30 a.m. Consequently every further article I read won't receive anything from me. Sure, I can come back tomorrow and tip, but that's not solving the problem as I'll run out of tips for fresh articles even faster. The second issue I have is that my first tip is always the big one. I sometimes bookmark an article I really enjoyed and come back to them with my first tip of the day. More often than not though it just goes randomly to the first article I read.

So I pondered a while how those issues could be solved and I came up with two ideas that I'd like to share with you. I don't want to make any of those ideas the new default as I'm sure the current system is fine to many and I really don't want to take anything away from them. So each idea could be implemented as an optional opt in setting for those interested in distributing their tips to more authors.

1) Have an adjustable amount of tips each day

This one would be pretty straight forward and should be easy to implement. Having the 6-tip-split would still be the default option but we could have a second option where you get to chose how many tips you'd like to have each day. So say you get a total of 20 super-awesome-tokens with your 6 tips each day. You could than chose to evenly distribute those tokens across a certain range of tips - let's say between 6 and 25. While every single tip would be smaller individually this way I could show my appreciation to more authors each day.

I think it's important to have 6 as the lower boundary to prevent abuse. I'm not really sure if an upper boundary would be needed but I guess having a 100 tips just wouldn't make that much sense and also we'd get into an area where the tip wouldn't be felt at all. I personally think it would be best to be able to chose that number on a daily basis so I wouldn't waste half my tips if I don't have much time on a certain day. Still I'd be willing to take that risk if it means I get to tip more authors each day.

Implementing this option would already solve my problem but there's always a better way to do it so I have a second suggestion to make.

2) Chose how much you want to tip every time

his would probably be a little more work to get it right but the basic idea is this: You get a tipping pool of 100% every day. Each time you do a tip you get to chose how much you want to use for that tip. This could be any amount between say 2% and 16,6% of your total tipping pool. This way you not only get to tip more people over the course of a day but you also get to chose how much you want to tip to each of them. So if I stumble across an article I really enjoy I can tip more, if it's a smaller article without much new information I could tip less accordingly. Obviously this would make the tipping process a little more complex. Personally it's something I'd gladly use and having it be strictly optional would mean nobody would have to bother with it if he wasn't interested.

This system would also address the problem of not having enough time to make all tips that suggestion 1 might create. If I run out of time I can just fully charge my tips and be done with it for the day. Since I'd still have to distribute my tipping power to at least 6 tips each day there would be no way to abuse the system (well at least none that I can think off). 

So what do you guys think? Am I the only one with this problem? Would those suggestions work for you?