Archive.org donations are currently matched by a generous supporter 2-to-1

Just curious: what are the two distros?

>> into my apocalypse drive

I've often thought of what humanity would due given an apocalyptic scenario, and individually what I would do. I've never thought about creating an apocalypse drive, but am now considering making one! I'd be curious to see/ compare peoples full apocalypse drive.

I'm not a lawyer or an expert, but looking at the Wikipedia page for the DMCA [0] there appears to be protection for retro games:

"An exemption was made for 'Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.'"

EDIT: Actually archive.org posted an article about exactly this [1]

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright...

[1]: https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

The publishers of these games might not be terribly into making trouble.

Copyrighted music and video however (stuff that MPAA is interested in) is not available online, and you actually have to go to the physical Archive in SF to access them. In that sense it works kind of like a library.

Just a wild guess, but in those cases, "nonprofit" means a lot. There are often different copyright laws for nonprofits.

It's a library. They explicitly define themselves as a library.

It's a really awesome place to visit if you ever get the chance!

I think Archive Team (a separate effort that utilizes and contributes to the Internet Archive) downloads stuff but doesn't always make it conveniently available online. This is a neat hack around the DMCA (and hosts that are beholden to it) because copyright holders are less likely to file a takedown than they would if the web pages were restored in their original format (same to a lesser extent with Wayback Machine) but requires some effort to make use of the data. https://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Frequently_Asked_Que...

Maybe in the distant future there will be a Geocities Museum that has all Geocities pages because enough generations have passed that putting Geocities sites online by default isn't a privacy concern.

can you elaborate on those orgs? any story to read?

A common problem for Australians too.

Canada too. It's one of many Americanizations that we have to tolerate daily online. And if you think it's bad for the Kiwis or Aussies, because Canada is in America we are regularly grouped into "America" or "North America" for things like online store region. Leads to confusions on a regular basis.

Thanks for pointing this out! An oversight on our part, we'll get it fixed.

What’s the story here?

It's a way to leverage their money. If by matching up to $1M they can get the group to raise $1.5M, that's better than outright donating that money.

While the conclusion matches yours, I don't think the article you link supports your argument. I agree with the article in that I dislike the manipulative aspect of donation matching even if it's mild and for a good cause. However, it's not necessarily the case that a wealthy donor is donation matching instead of donating the flat amount to avoid donating more. It could be that a donor who is donation matching up to some amount X only ever intended to donate X, but wants to encourage others to help contribute a total amount of X+Y. If Y is below expectations, the donor can still donate the full X.

Whether this plays out like this in practice is different, and you would likely never hear about it because it would devalue the influence of donation matching if people know the donor will donate the full amount anyway.

I don't think it's necessarily bad. It's also a way to donate to a cause many others cared enough to donate. Letting others "vote" but acting to magnify the contribution.

Either way they are donating when they could easily donate nothing.

Matchers may not know what needs their help the most. If you were a wealthy person and wanted to donate, but weren't sure what a good cause was, you could match what other people donate. Person A and B could come to you, and ask you to match their donations to charity C and D. Without knowing anything more about the people or the charities, matching acts as a proxy for which one is more important. The person who spends more is likely a better use of your money.

From a company point of view, it's advantageous to match. If two employees want the company to donate to their pet charity, then matching is a way to not accidentally play favorites.

> "If they care and have the money and are going to refuse to donate it unless people of limited means donate, I don't want to encourage that behavior."

People of limited means judge wealthy people and organizations no matter how much they donate. The wealthy also know that there is diminishing efficacy from throwing money at a problem. So therefore linking it to public interest is the compromise.

I think you and others looked at it backwards, where the public interest is tied to the matching and why it shouldn't be.

This has nothing to do with the motivations of the wealthy matcher.

All parties exist together in an ecosystem.

I just became a recurring monthly donor because of this. It's a good way of raising awareness and making others contribute to the cause.

You're free to pass on this "deal".

Also, what makes you think that the anonymous donor did not throw in some amount unconditionally as well? We don't know that.

Maybe they want that people realize that the project in question depends on donations. If they just give them a bunch of money, many people won't notice.

There are several good reasons to do this. I mean for rich donors.

For example, you may want to donate, but not decide which organisations get donations. You may think that ordinary people should have more power and rich people less, and so your allow small donors to decide your donations for you.

Or you may think that the receiving organisation ought to focus on small donors and its users.

It's not about the large donor making a fixed sum donation - they're using the large donor to encourage even more donations with the matching, getting them more money than they otherwise would have in a single lump sum.

It's quite possible that the large donor has said I'll match up to $X even if it takes a while to reach that goal - effectively the same as a lump sum.

Especially if they're able to use this to establish recurring donations or reach out to more potential donors when they're fundraising, it can really pay off down the line.

Other people have said maybe this is a way for the large donor to optimize their donations, but personally I doubt it, there would be limited benefit at best to that, it'd only find the most popular charities, not the most worthy and those numbers are trivial to look up. If I had to guess, this is probably something the charity suggested when they were offered a large donation because they can make more from it in the end.

> I don't buy into donation matching.

Think of it not as "donating", but as crowdfunding for an enterprise that both you and other people might care about. If you donation match, you incent others to pitch in for the effort, because they can "leverage" their own donation. And of course, this incentive effect is a kind of leverage from your own POV as well. (There used to be a _formal_ proposal for a 'fully decentralized' form of donation matching as crowdfunding for public goods at https://snowdrift.coop, but I'm not sure if that effort is going anywhere...)

They're using their money as a force multiplier to maximise effect towards their goals, rather than just using it directly. It's the kind of thing you do almost automatically if you're the kind of person with serious money, because in one form or another it's the only way to make serious money.

I'm often quite cynical but this is really cynical even by my standards. The idea is to use the large, generous donor to encourage many more, much smaller, generous donors to donate. Of course they can just go ahead and donate, but this way the recipient will essentially get 50% more as a result of people who can only donate small amounts.

So, lots of opinions and critics. But: Did you donate? I did :-) And I did it because of the donation matching being done. This way my donation results in 50USD instead of 25USD.

My understanding is most of the time when the donor says they'll match up to $X, they're unlikely to actually give a smaller amount, regardless of the outcome of the drive. It's mostly just a manipulative, but rather effective advertising technique.

The part about coordination matching is interesting: it's pretty much what Snowdrift [1] hopes to achieve at a larger scale. Unfortunately it appears it will always be vapourware, but still...

[1] https://snowdrift.coop

There are different kinds of donation matching. I think the kind that stores do where they advertise it or products that advertise it are doing it for positive publicity (especially if the "charity" they are donating to is just some "BigCorp Foundation" that they themselves set up).

But if it is something like an npr pledge drive where they say "for the next hour all pledges will be matched"or like this then I don't look at it so cynically.

>I don't buy into donation matching.

I'm not sure what this means. You don't buy into it as a donor whose donation will be matched? Or as the one doing the match? Or as a charity? What is there to buy into?

>I also want to donate to the cause that I feel is most important for me to support, not to who has the best deal.

I understand the sentiment. I do not, however, see this as any different from an influential person donating and telling the world they donated, in order to raise awareness of an organization/cause. In both cases the goal is to advertise an organization that they think is worthy of donations. And yes, both are manipulative behaviours. As is any kind of persuasion technique. I know many of us don't like the ad industry these days, but persuasion by itself is not immoral, and can be quite positively moral.

>If they care and have the money and are going to refuse to donate it unless people of limited means donate,

If it means that on average the organization gets more donations than without this technique, I'm OK with this aspect of it. At the end of the day, if I like a charity, I want to maximize the amount of money it can receive. If I have $100K and I set up a 1 for 1 matching, and individuals like you and me give a total of $60K, then yes, I gave only $60K and not $100K. That leaves me with $40K to give to some other charity (preferably with a similar deal). The net effect, though, is that the first charity got more money because of my match than if I had just given them $100K. And now another charity will get more money than had I just given $100K.

As a donor (wealthy or otherwise), I've set aside money I intend to donate. Whether I give it all to one organization or split it up across organizations is the same to me. I want to donate to them because I like them. And because I like them I want to maximize how much money they can get.

I really don't see this as any different from me posting on Twitter that I strongly support Archive.org and everyone should support them. Except I may be wealthy and not famous. So I'll use a tactic more appropriate for my situation.

I think your concern may be that poorer donors will now prioritize a matching arrangement for donations than non-matching. Perhaps - I would like to see a study showing it. While I do know people often donate when a match is announced, I've yet to find someone who goes shopping for matching arrangements. I'm sure such people exist, but they are probably in an extreme minority. If archive.org had been a mere 1:1 match, my instinct isn't "Let's see which charity out there has an even better match!" It's "Cool! I like archive.org and should have donated a while ago. Let me just do it now."

All the sibling threads make fine points about why donation matching is helpful, or why you like it, etc.

But to echo and add to parent: "matching" donation campaigns make my "regular" donations feel less valuable.

I've set up monthly donations to a number of organizations I want to support. I set the donations at a level that I feel I can afford. Those same (great, worthy) organizations often send out solicitations for special "double" or "triple" matching promotions. I try not to pay attention, because I've already set up a regular donation for the amount I can afford.

But it makes me feel like I'm doing it wrong. Should I cancel my regular donations and put the money aside waiting for a special promotion on donations? Should I choose recipient organizations based on how good their promos are? Maybe I think org A has 130% of the impact of org B per dollar, but org B has a 3X match while org A only has a 2X match this year, so I should choose org B??

I can't logically fathom that my regular donations really are worth less than "matched" ones, but all the hoopla makes me feel like they are.

> I think if those wealthy people and organizations who are matching donations want to donate, they can just go ahead and donate

Seems like trying to encourage other people to donate to a cause they find worthy is a thing worth doing. It's one thing if they're making the same donation anyway - as the article points out, that's dishonest. But if they do tie the donation to the received donations, how is it a bad thing?

> also want to donate to the cause that I feel is most important for me to support, not to who has the best deal

Of course - that's up to the donator in all cases. You donate to what's important to you. But things like this can move someone from "I keep meaning to donate to them" to "Now's a good time to donate to them".

I've had 2 cases where I had already donated, and was asked if the charity could count my donation toward a matching campaign. I.e. I would be in the group that matches new donations. (The charities weren't archive.org)

One had already cashed my check. One hadn't. If that matters.