This relies on an EA adjacent market fallacy where we can resolve all moral action down to funding actors of various moral alignments - there's no reason to believe that the end utility (or whatever metric) of the action is linear w.r.t amount of cash moved.
Garage band EvilWebsite.com is going to appreciate that 5$ way more than the SPLC or whatever.
This isn't to say that the policy is strictly bad, I just worry that it reinforces pretty negative patterns. Carbon offsets barely work, and that's an actual market - bigotry offsets are a dark line to walk.
(edit - misread the policy; it's not about matching cash flows through the service to offending websites, it's donating profits from offending costumers. That seems more consistent to me.)
Nearly free speech for me is one of those services still (excellently) run by nerds.
Its no-frills, functional UI reminds me of the old internet before services and sites began coalescing into bigger, faceless, soulless monoliths. I didn’t know about this policy before today, but now I love them even more.
If you’re looking for a place to host your next project or domain, I can’t recommend them enough!
> 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.
This is vulnerable to "false flag" abuse, from faux-morons.
> 1. The recipient organization does share our values.
This partly mitigates that risk.
Faux-morons can still generate more funds for recipients chosen by the site, and/or hurt the profitability of the site, but at least it's for causes within the values of the site.
The amount of money made from those sites (and spent for good) is surely infinitesimal to the bad they do by spreading hate. Much better to just not host the content. I don’t believe in slippery slope nonsense, it’s easy to know what sort of speech is about harming other people and no I don’t believe in publishing that.
lanternfish ·5 days ago
Garage band EvilWebsite.com is going to appreciate that 5$ way more than the SPLC or whatever.
This isn't to say that the policy is strictly bad, I just worry that it reinforces pretty negative patterns. Carbon offsets barely work, and that's an actual market - bigotry offsets are a dark line to walk.
(edit - misread the policy; it's not about matching cash flows through the service to offending websites, it's donating profits from offending costumers. That seems more consistent to me.)
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jibcage ·5 days ago
Its no-frills, functional UI reminds me of the old internet before services and sites began coalescing into bigger, faceless, soulless monoliths. I didn’t know about this policy before today, but now I love them even more.
If you’re looking for a place to host your next project or domain, I can’t recommend them enough!
Show replies
neilv ·5 days ago
> 2. The recipient organization is as opposite (and hopefully as offensive) as possible to the site operator that funded the donation.
This is vulnerable to "false flag" abuse, from faux-morons.
> 1. The recipient organization does share our values.
This partly mitigates that risk.
Faux-morons can still generate more funds for recipients chosen by the site, and/or hurt the profitability of the site, but at least it's for causes within the values of the site.
Show replies
Mistletoe ·5 days ago
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ginko ·5 days ago