Just looked beeminder up. If anyone else doesn't know it's goal tracking and contracts where you pay them if you fail. I'd feel a lot better about that if they were doing something positive with the money, like donating.
when I made my bets to places I don’t approve of—-well I would never lose a bet where I had money to the KKK on the line, I’ll tell you that
PS: As you know I'm a huge fan of Pavlok -- https://pavlok.com/ -- and definitely don't think that my arguments against anti-charities apply to it even though they're both very punishment focused. Pavlok (obviously I'm saying this for others, not Maneesh, founder of Pavlok!) is more about classical conditioning while Beeminder is more operant conditioning.
Ideally you want something the person doesn't like to happen, that way you feel like you're doing real good (preventing harm) by accomplishing your goal. Like an alarm clock I saw once that donates a dollar to a political party you hate every time you hit the snooze button.
We get that a lot ("where does the money go? wait, you do _what_ with it??") but I'm surprised to hear that pushback on Hacker News. Is the existence of Beeminder not "something positive"?
Also when we / Beeminder derail on our own goals we pay our users.
Not sure if either of those things make it feel ok. I guess we're keen for you to feel like we're any other SaaS that you're happy to pay for. Beeminder makes you awesomer and you pay for that, just at random times, or when you most need a kick in the pants, instead of a fixed monthly amount (though that too if you want a premium plan). If Beeminder isn't worth it overall then you'll stop using it; it's not really the perverse "make money when your users fail" that it seems prima facie. There's a myopic sense in which that's true but overall it's quite the opposite! As must be the case for us to have stuck around for 9 years.
But as I said to Maneesh above, I think anti-charities are anti-good. https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/