
Change.org Raises $30M Led by Reid Hoffman; Sam Altman and Bill Gates Invest Too - artsandsci
http://fortune.com/2017/05/26/reid-hoffman-change-org/
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dgranda
There is much better option in some countries if you want to change some law
or government policy. For example, in the UK any British citizen or UK
resident can create an online petition to be discussed in UK Parliament [1].

If a petition gets 10,000 signatures, the government will respond.

If a petition gets 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in
Parliament.

And source code is available on GitHub [2]

[1] [https://petition.parliament.uk/](https://petition.parliament.uk/)

[2]
[https://github.com/alphagov/e-petitions](https://github.com/alphagov/e-petitions)

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dpeck
can't tell if this is in jest, is "considered for debate" really a better
option for bringing about change?

At the end of the day influence (and by proxy money since it buys influence)
is pretty much all that matters in changing policy.

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JumpCrisscross
The point of physical petitions is they're hard. Showing a politician a few
thousand names, with verified voter-registration statuses, who wrote out their
addresses, and maybe copied a single sentence expressing their support for
your cause, is much stronger than a million people who clicked an Internet
button. The former can be organized to the politicians benefit (or against
him, to his detriment). The latter probably can't.

~~~
dpeck
I would tend to take the cynical view that the point of petitions in general
is that it lets people feel like they're making making their voice heard and
acting as a pressure relief valve of sorts for all but the most serious of
grievances. Most protests today fulfill the same purpose.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Have you been involved in a legislative process? (I haven't, directly, at the
federal level.) At the local and state levels, hard petitions are huge. (In
some jurisdictions, they're required to get on the ballot.) Protests are
meaningful inasmuch as they are willing to show up, time and again.

Why? Off-season elections, which most of these politicos must win to keep
office, are not games for numbers. They're games to motivate people to
inconvenience themselves by voting.

Remember why politicians like PAC and campaign contributions. They spend that
money on turning out voters. If you can turn out a bloc of potential voters,
or people whom you can reasonably claim are upset enough to vote against them,
you'll catch attention. The active minority wins against the disinterested
majority. Internet petitions represent the latter; hard petitions and protests
high in repeat attendance demonstrate the former.

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woollysammoth
This is a little frustrating. Don’t get me wrong, the site should definitely
exist and serves a useful purpose. My criticism comes when I read that they
have ~300 employees. They are ranked 1,269 globally on Alexa. Craigslist is
ranked 99 globally with only 30 employees. Even more so, on Glassdoor their
benefits include “Fully stocked kitchen with everything you can imagine,
catered dinners, massages, game room, nap room, open and comfortable work
space.” [1]

“The world is kind of in the shitter and Change.org could be the world’s
greatest plunger.” Not if it continues being a bloated company focused on
recouping their massive expenses.

[1] [https://www.glassdoor.com/Benefits/Change-org-US-Benefits-
EI...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Benefits/Change-org-US-Benefits-
EI_IE582921.0,10_IL.11,13_IN1.htm)

~~~
frankdenbow
Not every company is Craigslist or aspires to be. It can be argued that if
Cragislist had more employees they could do more for their users.

~~~
remotehack
Microsoft has tens of thousands. Does Windows do more for its users than
Ubuntu Linux?

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seattle_spring
Yes?

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d4mi3n
I worked for Change circa 2010 ~ 2011. Interesting to see how their revenue
model has changed.

IIRC they were previously making money by building email lists for non-profits
and other orgs that would essentially contract Change to get them exposure.

From what I read here, seems that wasn't really working out. Not sure what to
make of becoming it a crowdfunding platform.

~~~
ben_jones
This strikes me as an organization that should be run similar to Wikipedia.
But I suppose its far to late for that.

~~~
notatoad
The difference is that Wikipedia actually provides some public benefit,
whereas change.org doesn't accomplish anything so there's not going to be many
people interested in donating resources to keep it running.

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koolba
Is change.org a for-profit enterprise?

The name suggests otherwise. If so, it's not really an investment in the
traditional sense where you'd expect a return.

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dragonwriter
> Is change.org a for-profit enterprise?

By their own description, no, though they are identical to one in at least
superficial legal form (I don't know if their corporate governing documents do
anything to address this.) Note that not-for-profit is not a crisp legal
category ("nonprofit" is a term used for specific tax classification which
requires a number of other qualifications and accepting a number of behavioral
restrictions, including on political activity, on top of being not operated
for profit.)

~~~
alexbeloi
The linked article describes them as a for-profit org.

> Change.org, a for-profit petition and fundraising website focused on social
> and political change.

They are a B-corp for what that's worth.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The linked article describes them as a for-profit org.

The linked article provides no basis for this description and, without any
cited basis and given change.org's consistent description of not being
operated for profit, seems to be making the (fairly common) mistake of
confusing the absence of the tax status of "nonprofit" (which requires a lot
more than being not-for-profit) with being "for profit". There are quite a
number of not-for-profit entities that are not nonprofits.

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pestkranker
I would like to see a world where petitions are much more taken into account.
Unfortunately, for many leaders, they are not taken seriously.

I hope Change.org can do something about this.

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xexers
There are some petitions on change.org which I, as a citizen, would like to
petition against (rather than for). A petition may have huge support but it
also may have huge opposition... that opposition is not shown on change.org.
Not showing the opposition to an issue paints a skewed image that I hope
politicians can recognise.

For example, if the evangelicals made a petition to ban abortions in USA, it
could potentially get a lot of support but yet there is no way for others to
show their strong opposition against that as well.

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paganel
> For example, if the evangelicals made a petition to ban abortions in USA, it
> could potentially get a lot of support but yet there is no way for others to
> show their strong opposition against that as well.

Plus, even if somehow the evangelicals and those supporting them were to have
the upper hand in terms of numbers, you still can't do things like ban
abortions based on numbers alone. Basic, more modern human principles
shouldn't be left to democratic vote (i.e. the voice of the majority). The
right of a woman to have an abortion is a basic (and more modern, judging by
recent history, if we exclude the Romans) human principle.

~~~
jnicholasp
> > Basic, more modern human principles shouldn't be left to democratic vote

What process should be used to decide which are these modern human principles
that are too important to be left to majority rule, and who gets to
participate in that process?

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paganel
It's a centuries old question. I for myself am a Kantian
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative))
when it comes to morals (or at least I try to be one), but leaving aside what
I believe, I think it is fair to say that majority rule has historically been
against lots of things that we now see as being "morally good", so to speak.

~~~
jnicholasp
It's a _millennia_ old question, and still the best answer for how to produce
collective agreements, on questions we do not collectively unanimously agree
on, is simply to count the votes and do what most people want to do.

Yes, the majority has often wanted to do things we now think were
reprehensible, and this is certainly an ongoing situation. But Churchill is
still right: democracy is a terrible form of government, it's just that it's
not quite as terrible as every other form we've tried.

And you haven't answered my question - what should we replace democracy with,
and precisely how would that process work - and without answering that
question it's tedious to make pronouncements about how much better some
undefined alternative would be. G.K. Chesterton: "Revolutionaries are always
right about what is wrong, and they are usually wrong about what is right."
It's easy to see the flaws in something that exists in front of us. It's very
hard to design something that would in actual fact be better.

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ryanx435
Is sama investing as an individual or is he investing through y combinator
somehow?

If it's as an individual this can be interpreted as further proof that he is
positioning himself to run for governor of cali in a future election.

~~~
GuiA
Curious to hear what some of the prior proof would be.

~~~
exolymph
Details here: [https://www.recode.net/2017/5/14/15638046/willie-brown-
colum...](https://www.recode.net/2017/5/14/15638046/willie-brown-column-sam-
altman-might-run-governor-california-2018)

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tabeth
I wish there was a TLD that was regulated such that only a legitimate _not for
profit_ organization could have it, similar to .edu. Change having a .org TLD
is incredibly misleading. It's not a non-profit, and no, B corporations do not
count.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Change having a .org TLD is incredibly misleading. It's not a non-profit,

Even when there was a notional nonprofit requirement for .org, it was never
enforced, and it hasn't actually existed for some time. It's only misleading
to people who impute a meaning to .org that it does not claim and had never
actually had.

~~~
tabeth
I think people are intentionally misleading by using a .org though. Otherwise,
why not do a .com? Clearly they believe and/or know there's some sort of
"social" aspect to it.

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pvnick
With the rise in interest in political activism, it's worth reading Saul
Alinksy's Rules for Radicals. All sides are moving towards utilization of the
tactics and ethics contained therein, and it's helpful to understand how
community organizing works in the age of mass media.

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dandelion_lover
I truly cannot understand how such a non-profit website could implement Google
analytics, which tracks the users. Any desire to sign the petitions
disappears.

They could utilize piwik analytics.

~~~
teej
I don't think it's worth tossing out such a statement without at least some
justification of the tradeoffs and costs.

Do you think it is a smart deployment of capital and mindshare to spend money
for server costs, eng implementation time, and devops time to maintain and
scale piwik?

Do you think piwik will realistically work on a website with 180 million users
and growing? From what I can tell, Change.org would be one of the largest
piwik installations on the internet. Their site mentions they "know of several
websites with 100 million pageviews per month".

If not piwik, is there something else?

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3131s
How about no analytics at all?!

It's weird that GP is downvoted for suggesting that Google should not be given
a free pass to spy on a site that contains sensitive information about
people's political opinions.

~~~
teej
You cannot run a massive, scalable website without analytics the same way you
cannot run massive, scalable infrastructure without monitoring. It's like
driving with your eyes closed.

This discussion got me thinking about releasing my own open source replacement
for Google Analytics and how I would achieve that. Seems like such an
interesting challenge.

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suckerberg
Yes, lets have Gates investing our app, google provide stats, facebook for
logings. What's wrong ?

Some companies make me laugh loud. How many petitions you really can take
part, before you recognise that your facebook site is blocked and youtube
account deleted.

I hope people could wakeup for reality.

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supercars
Every time when Bill Gates kind of people invest on something, my alarm bells
start to ring. Something is not right.

Agenda will change for sure, investors will change the company.

