Can you give any other metric for its popularity? Stars aren't a good one - Github stars are bookmarks, not a reflection of whether one actually uses a given repository. Personally, I have 301 starred repositories, of which I maybe use... 5?

I'd say a repo needs more than 150k views to get ~5k stars. I can confidently say the number of users who derive actual value from it is measured in the hundreds at least (compared to none on a viral meme site). If those views aren't generating 0.01% * $1, I can bet the house on viral meme site not generating that much, unless they happen to land very generous donors.

Edit: Just checked Homebrew analytics. >10k recorded installs in the past year (low single digit number of releases during that period, no major publicity event). I don't have readily available analytics for other installation channels on macOS, or analytics for Linux and Windows which are pretty fractured. Point is the user base is sizable.

I think regardless of how good a metric stars are, it's still more likely to receive donations than a meme site about a recent event.

I can't remember ever hearing someone talk about how successful their donation button was. I can remember plenty of people describing how few people ever click it, though...

I'm one of the maintainers of Streamlink [1] which has members from around the world and we've been running various methods of donation since 2017 or so. In that time our Open Collective [2] has made about $1600 USD. We have 6k+ stars, and over 50,000 users across all platforms (based on download stats as we don't collect any metrics in our apps so it's potentially higher) yet the entire amount we've collected is thanks to less than 100 people. We note the Open Collective on every release as well, and have donation links in the documentation.

My own personal donation methods total $15 from one person in the past 5 years since we forked the project and started maintaining it. We have more users than many start ups do and I know that there are several companies using our software.

[1]: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink [2]: https://opencollective.com/streamlink

Stars are even worse than bookmarks, they're more like likes on social media. Costs nothing and worth nothing, literally imaginary internet validation points. "Oh this is a cool thing, I'll star it why not."