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Comment by judofyr | Hacker News Reader

https://gratipay.com/ exists already, and it's mostly (all?) open-source as well.

Patreon is more popular, though, and used by a lot of artists. You'll need more arguments than "well it exists too" to convince users to sign up for both.

It seems to not be there now, but some months ago, patreon's entry page listed out the types of "creators" that one could sign up as. As I recall, this list seemed to take actual pain to not mention open source software, among an otherwise exhaustive list of creative endeavors including not just art, music, writing, but technical endeavors as well as such as research. I always took this to mean "programmers not welcome". This was about the time that there was a mass exodus of bloggers from Gittip (what gratipay was called at that time) to Patreon so they almost seemed related.

edit: finally got through their registration. You get: "Which category fits what you make best?"

Video & Film

Music

Writing

Comics

Drawing & Painting

Animation

Podcasts

Games

Photography

Comedy

Science

Education

Crafts & DIY

Dance & Theater

.. it's clear that programmers (unless you're a game programmer) are not welcome.

patreon engineer here! we are very welcoming of open source programmers, and have quite a few on the platform. Many of them, we actually use their code in prod (and pledge a fair amount).

it's pretty impossible to have an exhaustive list of all the kinds of things you can create.. so we've been talking about ways to let people put in their own categories for a while now, but that also has its own set of UX complications.

good to know! thanks

I'm not so sure, there are compelling arguments for both "Writing" and "Crafts & DIY." I think I prefer the latter.

$Manager: What are you working on today?

$Programmer: The usual Cratfting/DIY.

$Manager: OK, sounds good.

I would't take too much stock in that category list, their category system does not work that well. I know they are working a category overhaul (source: I'm the guy behind Graphtreon)

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