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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

What would be fantastic is if this service scaled contributions across projects whose code you are actually using in your repos.

Minor nitpick: I don't think a badge is really considered virtue signaling because you've already put your wallet where your mouth is.

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I like that idea too. Though it definitely may lead to some troubling scenarios where bad actors try to get their modules listed as dependencies of popular projects to piggyback on their downloads. You could alleviate this by not funding dependencies of dependencies but there are some low-level tools (say, CSS autoprefixers) that are rarely used in their "raw form". It's tricky.

I see this being a major issue in the NPM ecosystem, lol. One thing is you could make transitive dependencies strictly opt-in, or have a decay function.

Or each package's maintainer can set a proportion for each of its dependencies, so that every time a donation is received, a certain amount of that donation is automatically transferred to those dependencies according to the proportion set by the maintainer. The donation sent to those dependencies is then propagated to their dependencies automatically according to ratios set by the maintainers of those dependencies.

It has to be scaled correctly somehow. For instance some big project uses isEven, which depends on isOdd, which depends on isNumber. All different npm modules. There are some people notoriously making these really small functions, and then creating a huge web by depending on other modules by the same author. Then just hoping one of them will get traction.

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