Comment by ssl-3
7 hours ago
It's OK for a donor that provides matching funds to wish for, and to be granted, anonymity.
It's also OK for primary donors to be suspicious of this for any reason that they choose, including no reason at all.
Maybe the matching-funds donor is all peachy and clean. Maybe they're the root of all evil.
We don't know.
This lack of knowledge doesn't let people make an informed decision, and people are allowed to seek to make informed decisions and to get turned off when that isn't possible. :)
(For the record: I'm more motivated to toss a few dollars in the hat when there's a multiplier at play than when there is not. I don't really care who it is that supplies the extra money.
My mentality might lead me to a situation wherein my donation to the local orphanage is anonymously multiplied by a nearby orphan crushing facility that turns lost kids into soylent green, but it's a risk that I'm willing to take.
Others are free to be as averse or accepting as they wish.)
> Maybe the matching-funds donor is all peachy and clean. Maybe they're the root of all evil.
If they were the root of all evil then shouldn't you want to donate even more, to increase the amount of money they donate to the non-profit and reduce the amount they have left for their evil doings?
Not necessarily, no.
Evil has no boundaries.
"Evil has no boundaries."
Pseudo-profound statements on my HN?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WDFXJZabt5s
> Maybe the matching-funds donor is all peachy and clean. Maybe they're the root of all evil.
Money going from the root of all evil to the Internet Archive?
Two cakes.
I could see it being a Zuckerberg "charity" thing motivated by a need for training data, so, yeah.
The reason to avoid working with sketchy donors is so they don't unduly influence you. If they're anonymous, how can they influence you?
Even when their matching donation is anonymous and the direct influence is zero, the orphan crushing facility wants the orphanage to be successful.
The orphanage's rising success serves to limit the supply of orphans. This means that there aren't as many free-roaming orphans available for crushing as more of them get taken off of the market.
This improves the supply-and-demand ratio for orphan-derived products. A successful orphanage means that the the orphan crushing facility can make more money while doing less of that tedious work of -- you know -- crushing orphans.
(I don't know what kind of secondary or tertiary games could be played with anonymous matching donations to archive.org; my creativity has limits. But I do know that my support for enabling people to make informed personal decisions is approximately boundless, as anything less would be stifling.)
Maybe I misunderstand the analogy, but in this scenario it seems that the orphan crushing facility's donations to the orphanage are an unalloyed good. Their motives are bad, and they are bad, but their donations to the orphanage are causing more orphans to be taken care of and fewer orphans to be crushed.
Personally, my worry about anonymous donation matching would be that the anonymous (to me) funder is influencing the recipient (to whom their identity is known), and without knowing who they are I can't know the nature of this influence or whether it should cause me to reconsider my support. But I don't see any extra reason to care about anonymous donation matching in particular, as distinct from any other funding whose source is opaque to me.
I think in this hypothetical, the existence of an orphan-crushing industry should make you reluctant to donate to orphanages regardless of who's doing the donation matching.