Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Time is running out: please help the Internet Archive today. The average donation is $45. If everyone chips in $5, we can keep our website independent, strong and ad-free. That's right, all we need is the price of a paperback book to sustain a non-profit library the whole world depends on. We have only 150 staff but run one of the world’s top websites. We’re dedicated to reader privacy so we never track you. We never accept ads. But we still need to pay for servers and staff. If the Wayback Machine disappeared tomorrow, where would you go to find the websites of the past? We stand with Wikipedians, librarians and creators to make sure there is enduring access to the world’s most trustworthy knowledge. I know we could charge money, but then we couldn’t achieve our mission: building a special place where you can access the world’s best information forever. The Internet Archive is a bargain, but we need your help. If you find our site useful, we ask you humbly, please chip in. Help us reach our goal today! Thank you.

Please consider this. They are a real bargain and provide a real service to humanity. Instead of upvoting this comment, please give them $5 instead if you can.

If you buy a lot from Amazon, you can also choose Internet Archive as your supported charity.

(I was also going to suggest nominating Internet Archive as a charity for Humble Bundle purchases as well, but it seems like they no longer support choosing your own charities.)

This is a good idea. On AmazonSmile I currently support National Park Foundation but can think of supporting this one too in the future (maybe rotating basis quarterly). I am curious which other similar nonprofits HNers think are available on AmazonSmile to think of donating to?

I picked EFF

I found a couple of old scanned mathematics books on the archive, which I could not find elsewhere. Many times a web.archive.org link cut short a journey to an old blog post, that might have been lost in the ether.

Thanks archive, I'm glad I can support you a bit.

Totally agree and signed up for monthly recurring $10.

Thanks for the nudge. I donated.

Thanks for this nudge. I signed up for a recurring donation.

Why do they need 150 people to run a non interactive site?

I'm not against anything about them but if they want donations, their way of expense should be clearer.

"Non-interactive site" wtf, do you even know the trickery you have to do in JavaScript files to remotely work outside their intended domains? Or how hard was to create a working playable copy of hundreds of old games? Or how much people you need to handle an ever-growing data storage (e.g everyday bigger than the day before) while making it available over internet?

While the code needs maintenance to adapt to edge cases, it's build once and maintain feature. It's not user registering site that needs support for customers and no need to introduce new features to keep going.

Data storage is also single purpose job. While it needs technical capability to store huge amount of data, I still don't see how 150 people are needed to maintain the archive.

You say as if 150 is a small team but how are they used?

They provide an archive of THE INTERNET!

Please forgive my pithy comment, but the size of the task goes someway to explaining the size of the workforce in my mind.

> Please consider this. They are a real bargain and provide a real service to humanity. Instead of upvoting this comment, please give them $5 instead if you can.

What do users of the archive gain by it being independent of advertising?

And why can't it be a non profit and also offset expenses by selling advertising?

Look at it this way.

There are plenty of non profits that can only make money by donations. They can't easily make money off of advertising. Internet Archive can. So in theory any money that someone sends to them would not go to an organization that might have a greater need. Make sense?

Now of course you are saying 'give them $5 instead of upvoting'. So that is a small enough amount that you would say 'you still have $5 to give to someone else'. But I say when people (en masse) behave like that a portion will feel that they have done their 'good person' duty and not make another donation to another cause (that once again can't sell advertising).

By the way 'service to humanity'???

Edit: One other thing. I'd be glad to pay IA for 'service'. That is if I need to get a page taken down or I need to get something scraped more or less I'd gladly pay for being able to discuss with a real person and get something done. This idea that free means 'you take what you get and you don't get upset' to me is just nonsense at the core. Maybe have a free no ad service but then charge for things to raise revenue not just 'donate donate donate'.

It's more about being "independent of advertisers" than whether advertisements are practically hosted on the site. An archive should be a third-party, neutral source, and advertising jeopardises this.

It's not a newspaper (as only one example) where they hold editorial control over the content and are therefore (in theory) beholden to the people who pay the bills (the advertisers). Forgetting for a second whether it would have any major impact (I say it would not I mean they scrape web pages in a very clear fashion) it's hard to believe it could go the route of say YELP in their mission. Or that a minor impact to what they do would not be offset by not having to beg for money. (With PBS it was called a begathon when they had to raise money).

And even with donations they could in theory be 'corrupted' just the same. A rich person could give them a large sum of money (as a donation) and then would have some defacto say in how things were done.

Take as another example ball parks (to even counter my point). They sell naming rights. That does not mean that the entity who purchased the naming rights gets to decide who plays on the team or who coaches the team although you could argue that that could happen (and I would say it does not offset the benefit of not having that 'independence'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com