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No. The question OP ask was.... who is paying for the matching? The donation got 3x, sure somebody is paying, right? I was planning to donate, and this omissi

• 0xDEAFBEAD 10d ago
  Why are you guys getting worked up over this? What's wrong with donors wanting to be anonymous?
  • ssl-3 10d 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.)
    • 0xDEAFBEAD 10d ago
      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?
      • ssl-3 10d ago
        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.)
        • 0xDEAFBEAD 10d ago
          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.
        • retsibsi 9d ago
          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.
          • ssl-3 9d ago
            Oh. Right. You just introduced the concept of non-anonymous (to the orphanage) matching funds. I didn't think of that. More money for the orphanage means more orphans can be taken in. That's good, right? But since the extra funds are not anonymous (to the orphanage), then it can come with influence on policies. Policies like: All orphans are now accepted up to a certain age regardless of circumstance, and all orphans now get kicked out at age 12 regardless of ongoing need. The stated reason is that the orphanage only has so many resources, and little kids need a lot more care than 12-year-olds do. So a line must be drawn somewhere, and that line is at age 12. It's a popular policy: After all, when given binary choice, everyone would rather see a 3-year-old be taken good care of than a 12-year-old. Think of the little children! For the orphan crushing facility that helped to impart this policy with their very generous policy-adjustment matching funds, that's a solid win: The orphanage now acts as a livestock kennel where orphans grow in size. There's still fewer of them coming out the far end, but they're bigger than they were before and are now much easier to process in bulk. People know about the orphan crushing facility. They know they can't do anything about it; it just looms over there like any other dark fact of life. But the streets aren't full of roaming herds of abandoned kids anymore at all, so folks logically conclude that the 12-and-out policy must be working. Out of sight, out of mind.
    • AnthonyMouse 10d ago
      > 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?
      • ssl-3 10d ago
        Not necessarily, no. Evil has no boundaries.
        • 0xDEAFBEAD 10d ago
          "Evil has no boundaries." Pseudo-profound statements on my HN? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WDFXJZabt5s https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WDFXJZabt5s
        • mitxela 9d ago
          Donating to archive.org is considered boundless evil now?
          • ssl-3 8d ago
            archive.org is astoundingly great AFAICT, but we don't have any way to know what the intention of the anonymous funds-multiplying donor might be.
    • zorked 9d ago
      > 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.
      • smolder 9d ago
        I could see it being a Zuckerberg "charity" thing motivated by a need for training data, so, yeah.
• losteric 10d ago
  why?? It's extremely common for nonprofits to have anonymous matching donors. Even my local animal shelter.
  • Daneel_ 9d ago
    Then why not just say that in the post? "Our matching donor wishes to remain anonymous, but we thank them for their generosity" Simple.