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Comment by yboris | Hacker News Reader

I sell my MIT open source Video Hub App for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it's charityware). Over the 3 years it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria.

Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/

GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...

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I would love to build charity ware to help offset some of the ethically questionable things I do, but I was wondering how did you choose a cause to donate toward? Did you know someone personally who perished from malaria? There’s so many things that can be donated to I don’t know how to pick one or evaluate where donations would even be most effective.

Efforts work best when they are focused on helping with a problem that you have direct experience with.

I think the long term large impact of pushing back against these ethically questionable things, even at the expense of your long term career earnings potential, would have a better result for society.

If you can't push back on that stuff internally, consider publicizing the behaviors and starting a conversation around them.

Don't just dump money into a charity to assauge your conscience.

Efforts work best when they are focused on cost-effective interventions, not things you have direct experience with.

Just about 100% of the US population have no experience with malaria. Yet it costs about $2 to provide a insecticide-treated net that protects on average 2 people for 2-3 years from malaria (while they sleep -- a common time for malaria transmission). There is arguably nothing you can do with $2 of resources in the US that can do as much good as this.

So, please focus on cost-effective charities with a proven track record, that use evidence-based methods to help individuals, and do it in a transparent way (so you know what's happening when you donate). To make it easier, start with GiveWell - an independent charity evaluator: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

Then, it's possible that nets are being distributed by evil people who make their victims kneel for hours before getting help. (This is extreme, but it could involve things diametrically opposed to your values; maybe Islam is being spread in traditional animistic societies[0], destroying traditional culture; maybe they're micro-chipping these people.) Cost-effectiveness is a good metric, but if you know nothing about what's involved in curing malaria...

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Exactly the reason everyone should do research before giving to charity. Since unlike products you buy, which you can test out and even return, charitable donations provide you with no feedback, you must research charities.

The great news is GiveWell has been doing this for over a decade (full time!) and has excellent recommendations.

https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

I would point out that only funding projects that can easily measure and quantify results will rule out a lot of important projects. If you are going to donate, then you should do it responsibly. Using an independent non-profit to evaluate your potential recipients is a way to do that, and getting direct experience with the non-profit is another.

You seem to have missed my point: Doing evil things for money and then donating some of that money to charity is generally worse than not doing the evil things in the first place.

I use givewell.org to find charities. From their home page:

"We search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar."

They appear to be pretty transparent about how they choose charities to recommend. I don't want to misrepresent them, so please check out their site if you want more details.

I focus on cost-effectiveness of charities. Thankfully I can rely on the 10+ years of full-time research by a great team at GiveWell. The charity I chose is Against Malaria Foundation which is the top-rated charity by GiveWell:

https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

ps - I also, for 10 years now, give at least 10% of my income (aside from this project) to cost-effective charities as per my pledge through Giving What We Can https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/ -- this is one of many initiatives that fall under the umbrella of EA (Effective Altruism) https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

Donating money is an act of self-expression. Do learn about effective altruism, cost-effectiveness, impact, etc. but know that it will ultimately reflect your values. Donate to African wildlife if you're fascinated by lions and zebras.

I donate to Wikipedia and the archive.org. I practice rational ignorance: I estimate that the costs of learning more about effective charity are far above the costs of doing it wrong. Maybe Wikipedia uses the money to create more and more small-fry side-projects (Wiki-maps, wiki-this, wiki-that). Maybe it funds Wikifeet, which is thoroughly weird. I don't care -- Wikipedia is one of the greatest accomplishments of H. sapiens sapiens.

(Malaria is still a big problem, and it's so cheaply improved upon -- if that touches your heart, go for it!)

Effective altruism isn't opposed to your values. It's about achieving your values as much as possible, given resource constraints. If your values are different from most EAs, then you'll have a different criterion for "effectiveness".

Effective altruism is a value. A practicing Catholic may find the most effective interventions to be against their religion. A less strict Christian may feel that effectiveness overrules religious directives. In any case, you're operating under your values.

Altruism is simply a concern for others. In broad sense it can mean that you care whether others get more value (according to either receivers' opinion or your opinion about values).

"Effective" just means you don't want to waste money or time on values not important (according to either receivers' opinion or your opinion).

The fact that Givewell chooses certain values (the rational ones) and Christianity slightly different values is orthogonal to the concept of altruism.

Even if I believed in Flying Spaghetti Monster I could care whether others have a steady supply of macaroni. This makes me an altruist in my book. And I could act effectively about it. But I wouldn't complain about Givewell in that case.

And that's why I don't like conflating rationalism with effective altruism. It's just another case of emotional loading of a phrase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

"Rationality" is similar to "effectiveness", in that it's value-neutral. The existing movement named "rationalism", of course, is made of people who have particular values.

Mike Monteiro (a self describe asshole: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/ruined-by-design/ ) thinks and talks and writes a lot about this.

A particularly cutting piece I like to remember is:

"But here’s the thing. You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. We need you to work ethically during that day job much more than we need you working with that non-profit." -- https://deardesignstudent.com/ethics-cant-be-a-side-hustle-b...

He's outspoken and hard lined and uncomfortable to listen to. But he's probably right as well.

If that’s the case then I simply won’t do anything at all and focus on my day job.

But I don’t think that’s the case, because I think doing something is still better than nothing, and for some people ethics offsets can help soothe their weary souls.

Pretty cool product. I have a very similar product but my question is that how did you convinced the users to pay for the product if its already free

It's not "free" in the sense that there's a download button for it. 99.9% of the people wouldn't be readily able to build the app from source.

Given I've spent 3 years building it, I feel comfortable selling it for this price. When I first released the app I didn't have the source code available; so it's more like a "commercial product" with the source code available if anyone is interested.

Oh I see, yes I was a little curious that product source code is available and I wonder why people are still paying for the product but you just made it clear with your answer

thanks man !!

Have you ever thought about charging more?

It's scary. I sell about 120 copies per month. I suspect charging more will drop it down to fewer than 100 copies. I'd rather more people use the app.

I will be working on adding facial recognition; I might have a pricier option for facial recognition features perhaps.

I've never had the experience of pricing a product, but my intuition tells me this could be a win. We occasionally see articles on HN that describe how to increase prices without losing your audience.

Perhaps there are others here that can offer feedback and advice.

Research and experiment. If you do embark on this, a postmortem write-up with your learnings would be a great read.

Best of luck with whatever your plans are. It's a cool app!

Thank you! For the reference, until I released version 3.0.0 (last November) the price was $3.50 (and all of it went to charity). The number of sales didn't take a hit - but it coincided with some publicity and major improvements to the app.

Great App!

Just purchased 2 copies cause I am lazy building it from source & cause charity, why not!

Tested the demo about 1 hour ago and I was impressed. Very good UI and fast scanning, although on the icons are a bit on the small size for my taste but excellent otherwise.

Keep up the great job :)

Thank you! In the settings (scroll to the bottom) there is a "-" and "+" between "reset zoom" button. That will help you adjust icon size and text across the app. Great for a 4K TV.

How do you collect the money?

I use https://chec.io/ checkout process (a service) which uses PayPal or Stripe for processing payment (it allows more payment types but these are the only two I use).

The charity aspect is a strong motivator for many people.

Maybe George Costanza's idea -- The Human Fund, Money for People -- needs to be revisited.

I was actually looking for something just like this since I won't have access to my Jellyfin server for a while. This looks perfect.

You should buy this guy’s application, but also keep in mind you can put Jellyfin on any Mac/Linux/Windows box and connect to it locally from your web browser. Obviously you’d also have to move any video you want to watch offline to your travel computer, but that’s true for any offline viewing.

Thank you. I have a few people looking for solutions like this for their video collections.

Doesn't Plex already provide a desktop app that does this ? https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/

You know, that kind of thinking is usually what deters me from building something, but I've come to realize that I (or HN crowd for that matter) is my customer.

A quick glance at the Plex site vs his shows a different appeal. One is a "Free Movies & TV" something, while the other is "Like YouTube for videos on your computer"

I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way :-) I'm not picking on you or on plex or anything... I'm just wanted to point out how the thinking patter of "but you can do that with [enter FOSS name here]" has been often paralyzing for me.

The key feature I wanted for VHA was the ability to scroll through thumbnails without having to be connected to hard drive where videos reside. This is particularly great when you have many external hard drives and/or remote volumes but just want to see if you have a particular video already.

With my app, clicking opens the video with your default video player. At the moment you cannot stream to another device (though it's a feature I'm hoping to add in one day).

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