Oh... and only for 750$ a month. The other sponsors pay more, but have to appear alongside those.

That's an interesting form of guerrilla advertising. Find a project with decent website traffic that displays sponsors, and commit just enough to be displayed in the list of top contributors (which includes some delicious SEO-friendly backlinking juice too). $750/mo and it's already getting the companies mentioned in the currently-top comment of a thread on the front page of HN!

I'm not sure there's a lot of SEO-friendly back linking juice. They're marked as rel="nofollow sponsored"

I'm a core developer of Crystal.

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.

That's a bit of an indictment on how poorly projects are supported. If those sponsors feel like the eyeballs they get from supporting this project is worth it, probably at least some of the owners of those eyeballs are getting enough value from the project to overbid.

Is it an artifact of the Individual/Organisation split of OpenCollective? I see the top 10 individuals that have put in $1000 or more.

I'm a core developer of Crystal.

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.

How does the team feel about selling Google reviews and Instagram followers? How do 84codes and Manas.Tech feel about being placed alongside these sketchy sponsors?

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.

This is a problem we have with the current page layout. We agree that these need to be clearly marked as ad, instead of legitimate sponsors.

Quite frankly, this is something new to us (ads paying enough to be there), so we're still figuring out.

But you don't see a problem with accepting an ad placement that is legally and morally dubious? The FTC is moving to ban these outright, and their justification is 100% valid:

> 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/...

I've come across some legitimate open source projects where all the listed sponsors are dodgy gambling sites, I doubt they actually use the tech, it's just a way to get relatively cheap backlinks from a legitimate website.

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"?

I know it's easy to say from the outside, but a project is under no obligation to accept a sketchy sponsor. If someone offered money to post a link to something obviously illegal, it would be illegal to accept that deal. If they offer money to post a link to something dubiously legal, it is likewise dubious to accept that deal.

That they're starving open source developers doesn't remove the obligation to vet their sponsors before posting their links.

In my opinion, if it gets interesting projects funded I'm all for it. Otherwise, who knows if this language might get the support to thrive.