I'd agree more strongly if it had a couple of fixes for obvious problems, so I proposed some.
Problem: Some people don't want to have it be public that they donated, or how much.
- Proposed solution: Let people choose pseudonyms if they like; offer default pseudonyms (like Google Docs does, giving random animals for anonymous contributors) in order to avoid creating trivial inconveniences.
Problem: Scale of donations matters as well as timing; we don't want to just incentivize a bunch of $1 donations on the first day.
- Proposed solution from Alexei: make names larger, bolder, or more visible if they donated more.
- Problem with proposed solution: $1 FIRST POST person still gets to be at the top, biggest donors don't get to be near the top
- New proposed solution: Donation tiers, starting with the largest occupied tier and sorting within tiers by who was earliest to enter that tier (aggregating multiple donations from the same person)
- Claimed side benefit: Schelling donation amounts can encourage people to give more than they otherwise would- they're more likely to stretch upward to the next tier than to drop their donation to the minimum for the current tier.
- Evidence for this: charities and crowdfunding sites love doing donation tiers.