nothing against the language but it's a bit suspicious that the top sponsors include "buy Google reviews" and "buy Instagram followers" (if you navigate to the actual Crystal language site)
Not sure what you're supposed to do as the project maintainer, might also be a bit strange to selectively only display some sponsors that you think are "trustworthy"?
That they're starving open source developers doesn't remove the obligation to vet their sponsors before posting their links.
Is it an artifact of the Individual/Organisation split of OpenCollective? I see the top 10 individuals that have put in $1000 or more.
All sponsorship contributions pay some development hours, so they're valuable to improve the project.
Sponsors presentation is only based on their _current_ contribution, not the accumulated total.
I get that money is hard to come by, but I hope you realize that you might be doing more than $1500/mo in damage to the project by accepting these ad placements.
Quite frankly, this is something new to us (ads paying enough to be there), so we're still figuring out.
> Fake reviews not only waste people’s time and money, but also pollute the marketplace and divert business away from honest competitors.
Labeled as an ad or not, you may well lose sponsors over this who don't want to be associated with that kind of behavior, and you're certainly losing potential users and contributors here on HN. My perspective on Crystal has changed from positive (I always love new programming languages) to negative over the course of this conversation, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
This damage can't be measured as easily as money flowing in can, but it's very real and you shouldn't discount it. Some of us don't believe that receiving money for something is sufficient justification to do it.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/...
We've been wondering about why it's worth the money for these sponsors. The links ideally shouldn't have much effect because they're marked as `sponsored`. Anybody got any ideas?
Either way, it's money that helps the project so we're fine with accepting it.