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Comment by guappa | Hacker News Reader

I think signal is already funded by USA taxpayers.

Wikipedia has a ton of money and for a few decades doesn't really need any donations.

Wikipedia and Signal both do me tremendous good. I think that's reason enough to donate to them. I don't think an organization/person/etc. has to be in crisis or short on funds to "earn" a donation.

AFAIK given Wikipedia spending they have ~1.5years of runway. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

They will have ~1.5 years of runway forever, since the Foundation tries to spend away any money it receives to justify pressing increasingly aggressive fundraisers. The site offers the same service as 15 years ago while ingesting 10x more money, none of which goes to the content producers.

More info here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

There's been a ton of development in Wikipedia "sister projects", all of which ultimately benefit Wikipedia itself and the free content ecosystem more broadly. It makes no sense to say that "they provide the same thing as 15 years ago".

> I think signal is already funded by USA taxpayers.

Are you speaking about Open Technology Fund? AFAIK they've contributed just 3mil, while Signal costs ~40mil a year.

Is the goal of this thread to judge other people's donation choices?

No. But if people are looking for ideas of things to donate to… perhaps it's better to make it known that some do not really need the money.

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