Quote Originally Posted by Nellasaur View Post
This is basically exactly what I was just going to say about the line between a donation towards a non-necessary expense and a gift. It's one thing when a person decides to make a "donation" in the form of a gift towards someone they love, and another for a person to reach out to anyone, even potential strangers, and ask for money. Even, say, a honeymoon fund jar (or online donation fund) is a gift situation-- if you're setting up a fund where wedding guests can make a donation towards your honeymoon, then clearly that would be considered part of their wedding gift to you. Same thing if I reached out to a bunch of my friends privately and said "Hey, I want to buy this snake for my birthday, can you give me money in lieu of a physical gift?" (I actually did that this year as I was trying to save up for some Transformers figures that I wanted. A few of my friends "donated" money to me, but it was specifically in lieu of an alternative gift that they would have bought me anyway.)

Additionally, I don't think it's fair to equate a tip jar to crowdfunding non-necessary expenses. When you leave someone a tip, it's generally considered a payment for exemplary service received. I don't tip to randomly donate to staff at a coffee shop or ice cream parlor, I tip because they're served me really well and I want to show them my appreciation. Even online tip jars-- like a link to a Paypal account on someone's blog-- is generally still considered to be a gratuity given in appreciation for a service. It's just that in the case of a blog, the service you're appreciating is the content the blogger provides, whatever that happens to be.
I pretty much agree with the first part. It is a lot different with people you know and with items that you know it is for (even though it can be used for other things, you have an inherent trust in the person).

The second part I feel just gets into semantics about payment method, though. I agree that it is unfair to compare the straight setting up of a gofundme and a tip jar. If you tweak it a little im curious if you think it is still okay? For example:

If i had a donate button on my blog that took them to a gofundme instead of a paypal.me link and it happened to be for a snake, would that be acceptable?