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Re: GitHub Sponsors

#361

Post by nathanvanfleet »

whatever_dude wrote: post #268
benatkin wrote: post #209

Not so fast. People have said this about gittip (now Gratipay), Patreon, Twitch, and now YouTube and Facebook. All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly: https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-pa... "After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time…

I think that whole article is a pretty shallow take, accusing Patreon of things that are not Patreon's fault (and I say this as someone who thinks Patreon is shady). Yes, people who make some stuff that takes a lot of time and effort might not get a lot of money on Patreon. But you know what? They're doing what everybody else is doing. I feel that nowadays everything want to think of themselves as "creators". They'll…

You're kind of agreeing with them though aren't you? It might seem like a really useful feature but, like Patreon, it might not be worth the time and effort for anyone.

You're just a lot more focussed on making us all believe it's the persons fault somehow.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#363

Post by 0xffff2 »

sah2ed wrote: post #207
0xffff2 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Keep in mind that they will only take a payment processing fee, unlike other services that charge a cut from the payment in order to pay for their services... How are those different exactly?

The first scenario is a loss leader -- it doesn't contribute any revenue for the business to stay afloat. The second may or may not be a loss leader, but it will contribute something in revenue for the business to stay afloat.

That's charitable. Nowhere do they say that their "payment processing fee" will be limited to the fees charged by their payment processor. They could very well charge some multiple of that value to generate a profit.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#364

Post by hombre_fatal »

Paul-ish wrote: post #333
benatkin wrote: post #209

Not so fast. People have said this about gittip (now Gratipay), Patreon, Twitch, and now YouTube and Facebook. All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly: https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-pa... "After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time…

I've noticed that when a side project becomes a Patreon project, suddenly more time is spent with community involvement; blog posts, live streams, etc. Even $100 a month creates this implicit reporting obligation to keep the community in the loop, which might end up eating time that might be spent doing something else. It might also burn out a more introverted developer.

You'd deal with the same problem if you received $100 through a donation button. People would start saying things like "I didn't pay $5 for you to take a leave of absence for a month!" or "I paid $5 and you aren't going to implement my request?"

Accepting money at all is not a trivial decision.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#365

Post by patcon »

sercand wrote: post #355
patcon wrote: post #338

This is NOT about helping us out, fellow maintainer-kids, it's about owning the playground and burning the forest. This fee structure is predatory af & straight outta amazon's playbook. (2x matching funds and all fees waived for first year?[1]) There has been an ecosystem. If this was about anything except market capture through burning VC/reserve funding, GitHub would have engaged in existing nacent and experimental…

You can add sponsor button next to Watch/Star button [1] which supports opencollective. For example, ReactiveUI [2] repo has one. [1] https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-but... [2] https://github.com/reactiveui/ReactiveUI

Thanks! I realize that :)

Interestingly, diapers.com could have legally sold their diapers as a vendor on Amazon as well.[1] That doesn't really affect the predatory nature of Amazon's steep and unsustainable 20% discount, which went away after diapers.com went under.

[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#366

Post by munificent »

patcon wrote: post #353
rtempaccount1 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask where you're getting that info. on the fee structure, I can't see that on their pages easily. From reading the FAQ it sounds like there are no fees in the first year at all and afterwards it's a payment processing fee? Also I got the impression that matching was Github adding additional funds to the payment, sounds like not a bad thing really?

First off, thanks so so much for engaging. Truly grateful From the FAQ[1]: > In the first year, GitHub will not charge any fees, so 100% of sponsorships will go to the sponsored developer. In the future, we may charge a nominal processing fee https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-github-sponsors#ab... And yes, money feels nice. But there are politics here that are real. The meaning of a sum of money is also wrapp…

> Decision-makers at GitHub aren't stupid, and so the future their money creates should be assumed to be the one they intended.

This is always true, for any person or organization at any level of scale. They spend money to bend the world in the direction they want.

This is not a instrinsically bad thing. It's only a priori bad if you assume the world is zero sum and any change to benefit party A is necessarily a harm to all other parties.

I think you have to have a little more sophisticated analysis to see if something a business does is a net good or ill to the world. When I buy cookies, I acknowledge that I'm helping create a world where more cookies are bought and consumed. But I'm pretty on board with that world too, so that's OK.

In this case, I don't think anyone can accurately predict the large scale consequences of what GitHub is doing.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#367

Post by clarkmoody »

cwyers wrote: post #272
clarkmoody wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that companies are already paying GitHub to host private repos, so it's part of their monthly payment flow. With simple nudges toward sponsorship, many companies will chuck in an extra few bucks toward the projects that they build their codebase on top of.

No they won't. I, and a lot of other people, cannot get accounting at where I work to cut a check for that kind of sponsorship. I can get accounting to cut checks for things that matter. Typically if someone asks what's the difference between paid and free, and you answer, it supports Active Directory, you're most of the way there if you can show a business need for the product. But just a straight-up donation? It's…

You're thinking in terms of this first announcement (large sponsorships). I'm thinking about the next step in the process, which is more like Patreon.

GitHub will know two very interesting data points: the relationship graph between projects and dependencies and the sponsorship level of those dependencies. Combine that with Issue and PR activity, and it could therefore identify which highly-depended-upon projects need funds the most and nudge accordingly.

"Did you know that you and 2,500 other codebases depend on $lib.js? Why not pledge $25 to support its development?" That sort of thing.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#368

Post by libria »

naniwaduni wrote: post #286
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the quality would improve? There's a condition I call "open-source-itis" that a lot of projects suffer from, where tons of new features (usually of dubious merit) get added but nobody ever bothers to fix bugs or make sure the foundation is actually solid. It makes sense, because that's unsexy work that people generally don't want to do and they're all working for free, but it makes a lot of open source software…

I'd expect it to get worse. People pay for features over maintenance even more strongly than they allocate prestige.

Nah, there's a bug out there right now blocking my work I'd throw money at if I could. I can't be the only one who feels like this.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#369

Post by zapita »

zild3d wrote: post #277
zapita wrote: post #80

I’m glad open-source maintainers will get one more way to get paid... But it feels wrong to lock this into a git hosting platform. Maintainer payment is important enough to be a first-class product, open and accessible to all... instead it’s being used as a bargaining chip to keep developers on a hosting platform. The subtext is pretty clear: “if you want to get paid, you better not leave Github!”. Meanwhile nonprofi…

> Meanwhile nonprofits and startups focused on solving the problem of open-source sustainability for everyone, not just Github customers, will suffer from this announcement. Frankly, those startups/nonprofits haven't done a good enough job. If you want to be paid well in OSS it usually means you have to take on consulting work. If people were able to be paid well for working on OSS directly, there wouldn't be a probl…

> If you want to get paid as a video creator, you better not leave Youtube either

That is of course Youtube's message to creators. But platform-neutral competitors like Patreon are keeping them in check. I hope the same thing happens with Github.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#370

Post by pkamb »

I'd still like a product for putting putting bounties on small individual scripts / functions / pieces of code.

Kind of a payment system on top of Stack Overflow or Github Gists; less-so a competitor to Upwork.

I don't want the overhead of "hiring a freelancer" to do the work. But I'd definitely pay a bounty if someone came in with the answer / script / extension / app that solved the problem.

previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14554542

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