[cx1000]

The ted talk "What makes us feel good about our work?" illustrates this perfectly. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good...

> Now there's good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "Uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.

Which brings us to the totally free, and very low friction way to say thanks: http://saythanks.io

> SayThanks.io provides a handy URL for you to share with your open source projects— it encourages users to send a simple thank you note to you, the creator of that project.

> This simple link can be added to READMEs and project documentation.

> Then, you can enjoy a nice inbox of very small but thoughtful messages from the happy users of the software that you've toiled over. :)