> Don't take them personally

No. They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally.

More broadly, I don't have to excuse bad behavior just because somebody's making money off it or because it makes some too-narrow metric go up. Yes, it's a complex and imperfect world. But to me that's a reason to work harder to make things better, not a reason for people to say, "fuck it" and make the world worse.

> They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally.

This, absolutely! they play on people's psyche and mental cabling by trying to guilt you in the same way your parent would ; it's manipulative, and I have an absolute hatred for these tactics.

I'm good at detecting manipulation now, and the more someone tries to manipulate me the less I will give in.

I just put my money toward people who don't do that crap, and I want the manipulators to see that I'm giving money to their non-manipulating competitors.

I agree with everything before the semicolon. But as an NPR listener, I find it hard to be offended by it.

I bet NPR spends far more of their incoming money on their main product.

They're not your parent, and if you treat them as such, that's a problem you need to work on addressing.

Parental manipulation works because it's completely reasonable given the relationship for it to be effective. It's a betrayal of trust.

If a company tries that tactic and it "works" too well, that's an opportunity to evaluate your psyche, not get mad at them.

Companies do it because it works. You're blaming bad behavior on the people that are being manipulated because, according to you, they have psychological problems. As if the people being manipulated being disabled somehow excuses the company taking advantage of them.

Exactly. Taking advantage of vulnerable people is not a legitimate defense, the fact that they are easily exploitable makes the behavior even less moral.

I'm not saying they are not wrong - it's unfortunate that there is a second hand market for fundraising consulting. It doesn't accomplish anything productive, yet here we are. The key point is to understand that this is caused by Wikipedia having too much funding, not too little. As internet denizens, we can be proud that an open source store of knowledge has money to blow on wasteful consulting, and then proceed to create our ublock filters worry free.

This is different than what is currently going on with venture backed services like reddit and youtube. I would argue that we should block ads there too, but there it is an arms race where we have to consider ways to protect ourselves from encroaching privacy violations. It's much ruder, and that is something we should actually be mad at.

With respect you are misinterpreting personally here.

They don't know you; they don't know me. I'm a nobody, just like you.

I fail to see how being strangers excuses the behavior. You don't have to know each other to cause offense.

I'm not excusing it. I'm saying "do not take it personally" is excellent advice.

Ah, misunderstood, my apologies and agreed.

> Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them.

I don't take them personally, of course, but they do encourage me to avoid forking over any money.

any excuse to not donate!

Not really. They send those emails only to people who donated before.

I donated regularly until I learned the darker side of their behavior. If they’d be more transparent, I might start donating again. Is it so awful to ask for organizations to act better to receive voluntary support?

It's a good idea to be careful where to donate your money to. Most of us have limited resources, and while we should donate to worthy causes certainly, we have the responsibility of at least trying to put those resources to good use that reflect our own values.

Wait till you find out the truth about matching donations.

So...is Wikipedia at the level where they can invest to ensure they're sustained indefinitely?

Wikipedia? Yes easily.

Wikimedia? No, they're a money black hole and will eat whatever you give them.

You ever checked out Uncyclopedia? Nothing on that site is not like, hysterically funny and random. I'm glad Wikipedia has been such as inspiration to us all XD

Edit: check out https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Krispy_Kreme XD

What about Signal? The article they put out is like 30 minutes in my audio reader lol

> Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works.

It's still shitty, even if it's a shitty "standard practice" and not a shitty thing being done to me particularly.

Honestly, it seems like Wikipedia's goodwill is seen as an exploitable resource, that people in Wikimedia are using to do other, unnecessary things (probably building little personal fiefdoms).

Sort of like Mozilla, actually. IIRC, they literally won't let you give them money to fund Firefox development, and any donations you give them go to fiefdoms almost certainty entirely unrelated to why you gave them money.

Yeah I agree. But that's consulting for you. There is a lot to not like about the evils of consulting, but wikipedia being free and doing pledge drives are on the more mild side of what's wrong.

It's basically a attempt at sql injection to the brain. Can't wait for AI glasses to filter that crap once and for all from reality.