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Comment by mherrmann | Hacker News Reader

Hi Devon, I posted this comment elsewhere in this thread [1], but now feel that here is a better place to write it:

It would be very cool if there was an easy way to sponsor all the projects I've starred. Then I could just pay (say) $10 per month to "support open source", without having to worry about any of the details such as picking projects. If you as GitHub then also reach out to the project maintainers and say "hey, there's someone who'd sponsor you", then I feel this could significantly increase the uptake of this feature on both the sponsor and the maintainer side.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19990110

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Am I using stars wrong? I have starred 771 projects on GitHub. To me, a star means anything from "I use this" to "I think this is a cool project". Giving $10 a month to 771 projects would result in about a penny for each project.

I'd rather separate starred from sponsored. If I could select a subset of that 771 and say "split $10 among these projects" then I'd be happy.

I'm in your shoes too. I've got 457 stars (and I don't think I've ever un-starred a project).

I think it'd be a reasonable default for most people to start with though.

Perhaps offering the projects that you `watch` a higher priority than those you've starred would be a fairer default?

This is interesting, but it raises questions, mainly: if a project is abandoned and you've still given it a star, does it continue to send money to it? Will it cause people to un-star projects?

I could see having some kind of "tip amount" per project that gets taken from a pool would make a lot of sense, but not as stars.

Doesn't that problem still exist though? Say you sponsor a project individually and it eventually goes unsupported. Would your sponsorship live on if you never manually cancelled it?

Using stars as a proxy for sponsorship, I think, is the wrong idea anyhow. Sponsorship should imply star, but not the inverse. I think what would be best is an easy way to sift through your starred projects and "upgrade" them to a sponsorship. Then once you've done that once, you can manage stars and sponsorships independently going forward.

They could factor in the repo's "pulse". More active projects get a bigger slice.

No, they shouldn’t, because doing that would incentivise improper activity.

This would be a nice feature, less overhead for the donator too as the amount donated can automatically be split up among all of your starred projects. Bonus points to offset a sponsor dashboard where you can use a slider to change the percentage splits. In the future a budget feature can be added for sponsored projects and this dashboard can show which projects haven't yet met their budget for the month or quarter, similar to the banners that show on wikipedia, "this is an open source project and need x amount in order to keep operations going smoothly, if everyone donates y amount that will fund development for z time period."

This dashboard could also have suggestions for sponsoring projects that you either forked or use as a dependency in your project.

If I forked a repo it’s because I was making a PR to fix something. It says nothing about whether I’m still depending on that code.

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