[diggan]

> As a user, I don't want to throw money at a project

To be fair, GitHub Sponsors doesn't even allow you to sponsor a specific project, but only users or organizations.

I think BountySource (https://www.bountysource.com/) was the first player on the "Bounties for GitHub issues" side of things. Long time ago I actually came across a issue with a bounty though, so not sure it's actually working at the moment.

https://gitcoin.co/ is another attempt at aligning the incentives, but it's heavily involved in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and also been spamming projects in order to be setup on their platform, so I've been kind of avoiding it.

I think Open Collective seems to be the best platform for supporting projects with funding, but they don't have any "per issue" funding as far as I know. But it's a open project, someone should propose that feature!