11 ms·
Change.org Raises $30M Led by Reid Hoffman; Sam Altman and Bill Gates Invest Too
- d4mi3n 9y agoI 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.
- thejosh 9y agoYep, so much spam from change.org after signing a petition, had to unsubscribe
- ben_jones 9y agoThis strikes me as an organization that should be run similar to Wikipedia. But I suppose its far to late for that.
- notatoad 9y agoThe 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.
- ryanx435 9y agoIs 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.
- vonklaus 9y agohe's only run YC for 3 years. Not knowing him personally; everything I've seen from him publicly points to him believing that he can do more as head of YC than in a public office like governor. I also suspect he believes that to do either job effectively it would be mutually exclusive. I think he is committed to YC short term; but maybe you are correct if you look pretty far downfield.
- GuiA 9y agoCurious to hear what some of the prior proof would be.
- exolymph 9y agoDetails here: https://www.recode.net/2017/5/14/15638046/willie-brown-column-sam-altman-might-run-governor-california-2018 https://www.recode.net/2017/5/14/15638046/willie-brown-colum...
- pestkranker 9y agoI 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.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoChange.org could remedy this by adding a feature that would Mail, Email and or Phone the person and or group . If you would do this people would take it seriously.
- michaelchisari 9y agoThere has to be a progression in order for leaders to take them seriously. It has to start with a petition, but there has to be something that happens if the petition gains critical mass but leaders don't acknowledge it. It has to go from petitions to protests and electoral losses at the very least. If it stays a petition, it's much too easy to ignore.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI think in order to succeed, they need to take responsibility for more than just the petition. Measuring people's basic feelings about issues is just the first step in the process. They need to nurture the entire discussion, through debate with counter-arguments, policy formation, public debate of policy, balancing of priorities against other issues, and building a legislative caucus. If they can move ideas through all of those stages, they can usher them into law. But just aggregating petitions is like asking 100,000 people what their dream house is and then claiming that you've done your part and now politicians need to solve the housing crisis.
- xexers 9y agoThere 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.
- tabeth 9y agoI 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.
- blahbwah777 9y agoI too get annoyed when people don't abide by history as I know it. Then realize it's a silly thing to waste focus on and move along.
- eli 9y agoI think you just described .ngo, though I've never actually seen one in the wild.
- dragonwriter 9y ago.ngo/.ong doesn't require official non-profit status, it just (in that dimension, there are requirements in other dimensions) requires an organization to be non-profit-focussed.
- eli 9y agoI don't understand the difference. You mean like a C-Corp might technically qualify if they happen to be focused on the public interest and not generating profits? As a global TLD it surely makes more sense to look at what an organization actually does than just blindly go by what the local tax authority thinks.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> 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.
- supercars 9y agoEvery 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.
- dgranda 9y agoThere 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
- bshimmin 9y agoUnfortunately, whether or not the petition is debated in Parliament, it won't actually change the law or government policy, because the government doesn't in the slightest bit care about the petitions.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI'm not sure that is totally true, it would be silly to ignore something that got a strong response.
- Angostura 9y agoTrump's still been invited on a state visit.
- pc86 9y agoAre people in the UK really signing a petition that amounts to "don't invite the President of the United States to the UK on an official visit"?
- zastrowm 9y agoI wondered the same, so I looked it up: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/171928 https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/171928
- GlobalServices 9y agoI don't know. To me, change.org seems like the world's largest and best-funded cyberbullying site. Don't like the opinion of some sitting judge in a case you didn't personally hear, but were angered by a friend's Facebook meme about it? Start a change.org petition to remove him!
- koolba 9y agoIs 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.
- rmc 9y ago> The name suggests otherwise. Do not underestimate the power of someone to make a business selling the feeling that your not part of a business!
- dragonwriter 9y ago> 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 9y agoThe 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 9y ago> 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.
- yuhong 9y ago
- pvnick 9y agoWith 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.
- dandelion_lover 9y agoI 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.
- phpwn 9y agoThe article describes Change.org as "a for-profit petition and fundraising website..."
- electricEmu 9y agoThat's a pretty entitled viewpoint. Block it, politically organize, or develop a better product that costs less in time. A non-profit might be wasting money if they're trying to get piwik analytics working. Time isn't free.
- teej 9y agoI 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?
- 3131s 9y agoHow 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 9y agoYou 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- woollysammoth 9y agoThis 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_IE582921.0,10_IL.11,13_IN1.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Benefits/Change-org-US-Benefits-EI...
- frankdenbow 9y agoNot 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 9y agoMicrosoft has tens of thousands. Does Windows do more for its users than Ubuntu Linux?
- seattle_spring 9y agoYes?
- cm2012 9y agoYes, without a doubt.
- woollysammoth 9y agoDefinitely, it’s not a perfect comparison — it just seems to me that a company with somewhat low revenue and an altruistic mission should do everything it can to be lean.
- AWildDHHAppears 9y agoChange.org is just a cyber bullying site. Don't like something an Executive said? Disagree with a Judge's ruling? Start a petition to get him fired.
- suckerberg 9y agoYes, 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.