一句话：首次实证研究 Twitter/X 上推广推文对 GitHub Sponsors 获得赞助的影响及其在平台上的接受度。
GitHub Sponsors 于 2019 年推出，旨在让开源开发者获得资金支持，但 2022 年的一项研究发现，仅有五分之二寻求赞助的开发者真正收到捐赠；该研究还指出，除了向赞助者提供权益等内部手段外，开发者会在 Twitter/X 等社交媒体上宣传自己的赞助主页。本文据此考察包含 GitHub Sponsors 主页链接的推文对赞助获取的影响，以及这些推文在 Twitter/X 上的反响，并对推文进行刻画以理解其语境。研究发现：(1) 此类推文确实能提升开发者获得的赞助者数量；(2) 与 Open Collective、Patreon 等平台相比，GitHub Sponsors 的互动量显著更少，但在 Twitter/X 上更具可见度；(3) 开发者往往在发布此类推文的当周对开源软件贡献更多。
GitHub Sponsors was launched in 2019, enabling donations to open-source software developers to provide financial support, as per GitHub's slogan: "Invest in the projects you depend on". However, a 2022 study on GitHub Sponsors found that only two-fifths of developers who were seeking sponsorship received a donation. The study found that, other than internal actions (such as offering perks to sponsors), developers had advertised their GitHub Sponsors profiles on social media, such as Twitter (also known as X). Therefore, in this work, we investigate the impact of tweets that contain links to GitHub Sponsors profiles on sponsorship, as well as their reception on Twitter/X. We further characterize these tweets to understand their context and find that (1) such tweets have the impact of increasing the number of sponsors acquired, (2) compared to other donation platforms such as Open Collective and Patreon, GitHub Sponsors has significantly fewer interactions but is more visible on Twitter/X, and (3) developers tend to contribute more to open-source software during the week of posting such tweets. Our findings are the first step toward investigating the impact of social media on obtaining funding to sustain open-source software.
@inproceedings{paperbot11463,
title = {"My GitHub Sponsors profile is live!" Investigating the Impact of Twitter/X Mentions on GitHub Sponsors},
author = {Youmei Fan and Tao Xiao and Hideaki Hata and Christoph Treude and Kenichi Matsumoto},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1145/3597503.3639127}
}