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Comment by ronilan | Hacker News Reader

I got early access a couple of weeks ago.

That’s my profile: https://github.com/sponsors/ronilan

I’m conflicted about the concept.

I understand that when a software project has no formal institutional “home” (it’s new, or it’s small, or it’s beneficiaries are themselves “homeless”) - a community funded model can help maintain/develop things that benefit the community at large.

At the same time I don’t feel comfortable that funding is for a person not a project and I’m at unease with the tiers (and resulting reward) structure.

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Got early access to it as well (not validated yet, Stripe's interface is really not user-friendly and asks for papers I don't usually have handy).

And yeah, I totally agree with you. I felt really weird writing the tiers. GitHub's wording seems like there shouldn't be any reward, so I didn't put any reward (and I don't really feel like pushing rewards anyway). But why do tiers then? Perhaps it will help herding people into making it to higher tiers? I don't know, from my point of view, I'd prefer let people free.

As for person vs project, I don't really have the problem, though I agree with you. I feel like small projects won't setup this, because it feels much more complicated than doing a paypal (perhaps paypal got so cumbersome as well? it wasn't when i made an account there.), and big projects will need teams.

I have to mention that I also have an account at liberapay for donations, and they do handle teams! (they basically do a round-robin, so you need enough donaters)

Edit: Yup, Stripe is really annoying. They somehow denied my ID, without saying why, and I can't seem to link this account into liberapay.

I also got early access, and ended up signing up for a librepay account as well because I was curious to try it out. (Stripe setup went OK for me. Here's my project FWIW: https://github.com/luvsound/pippi)

I set up tiers, because they seem to encourage it, but they're all basically just early access to stuff that I'll make free anyway.

I work for a listener-sponsored radio station and I really think this model is pretty exciting -- keep access free for all and allow those with the means to support it financially. (And rewards I'm sure are good motivators for some.) It also means you aren't beholden to "the man", shareholders looking for profit, etc...

Cool project! This is something I've always been looking for. I'd love to contribute.

I work at Stripe. Sorry you ran into that. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can see why your ID was denied? (We've also been working on improving that flow. I'd love to hear more on how it could be more user-friendly.)

>At the same time I don’t feel comfortable that funding is for a person not a project

i'm guessing this was an intentional choice to head off controversies about how a project divies up their GitHub sponsorship money. If everybody understants that they are giving to specific people, that avoids a lot of potential drama.

I’m sure it’s intentional (this is a well-thought and well-executed feature). I also understand the logic.

I feel uncomfortable with it.

It creates patronage relationship between people and a) I personally do not want that kind of relationship and b) maybe I’m wrong (or stretching it a bit) but it feels like that’s not really the kind of relationship the tech industry needs more of.

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