its called vegging, virtual begging. I coined it years ago when venmo was becoming the top vegging platform.
The rise of pity marketing
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather than allow my compassion to be decimated, or chipped away bit by bit, I simply outsource my compassion. I never take pity on individuals, whether they are begging at the train station, a grocery store, or somewhere on the Internet. No pity for individual situations. I absolutely cannot and will not trust someone's claims and I absolutely cannot judge their worthiness for charity. I give generously to charitabl…
> I give generously to charitable organizations that do the most good. This is my religious obligation, and it's also the best way to maximize my bucks. And they maximize your bucks with outlandish purchases for executives and "fund raising" parties for their selected few. I stopped caring for large NGOs when I found out how deeply corrupt their management is, including middle management. If you want to help, don't g…
Check out this charity...
https://www.givedirectly.org/
Their goal is to give as much money as possible to the poorest people as efficiently as possible.
Data supports that this works and simply giving money helps those people. The charity also openly publish their data on how efficiently they are operating, currently at about 90%.
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The grandparent spoke of corruption. In your comment you ignored the corruption comment and instead commented how your community had benefited and that therefore you supported the organization. By not addressing the corruption it could be interpreted that you're okay with corruption as long as you benefit from it. Was that your intention?
alleged, unsubstantiated corruption, is that what you meant to write?
Ehh, the Red Cross’s budget is 3 Billion and they spend 670 million on disaster relief and 360 million on admin.
If your goal is to support disaster relief then they are an inefficient use of your resources. However, they also run blood drives and then sell the blood which is part of their overall budget independent of donations. $921 million is just salaries for people running blood drives, with similar expenses for overhead on supplies and equipment.
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#54I wonder if this means all the great music we made as a rock band in the 90s without getting signed can get a new audience. It logically should, since pretty much everything in the genre has been some form of theft or reiteration, until everyone forgot that music like that had existed 20 years earlier and suddenly the stars aligned and ripoffs of rip-offs were considered original. (To be fair, we stole everything fro…
Tangential comment: we also kind of stole everything from the 1940s as well, but very few people are alive to care nowadays, or to even know about it. The "nostalgia" segment pretty much caps out in the 60s-70s now.... :)
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather than allow my compassion to be decimated, or chipped away bit by bit, I simply outsource my compassion. I never take pity on individuals, whether they are begging at the train station, a grocery store, or somewhere on the Internet. No pity for individual situations. I absolutely cannot and will not trust someone's claims and I absolutely cannot judge their worthiness for charity. I give generously to charitabl…
> I give generously to charitable organizations that do the most good. This is my religious obligation, and it's also the best way to maximize my bucks. And they maximize your bucks with outlandish purchases for executives and "fund raising" parties for their selected few. I stopped caring for large NGOs when I found out how deeply corrupt their management is, including middle management. If you want to help, don't g…
Fuck straight off with trying to call the Red Cross corrupt. You are an absolute ignorant wretch. Never in my life have I run into a batch of people I would trust more. Every single person in that org is highly underpaid or unpaid and they work relentlessly actually helping people. Saints, the lot of them.
I worked there for years and had intimate access to detailed branch financials and operations.
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
alleged, unsubstantiated corruption, is that what you meant to write?
Ehh, the Red Cross’s budget is 3 Billion and they spend 670 million on disaster relief and 360 million on admin. If your goal is to support disaster relief then they are an inefficient use of your resources. However, they also run blood drives and then sell the blood which is part of their overall budget independent of donations. $921 million is just salaries for people running blood drives, with similar expenses for…
In fairness, internal combustion engines are an inefficient use of resources. They just happen to be the best option.
It is basically impossible to design an organisation that directs resources to economically unproductive people. $700 / $3,000 going to the right spot could be reasonably effective. I mean, at least the Red Cross won't take a fraction of the money and use it to fund ruinous, murderous and pointless rampages across Afghanistan. So they're doing better than the US government. And I think they might be outperforming the major churches for number of abuse scandals although that sort of thing is hard to measure.
So it is less efficient than personally doing something locally, but if the local community is going OK then I could imagine the Red Cross might be the next best alternative.
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#57I feel that there's really no "rise," here. The difference, these days, is scale and reach; which applies to all kinds of other things.
Begging is the world's [second?] oldest profession. It relies on our innate social instinct, and is pretty effective.
Like most ways of making money, it gets abused.
It's my thought that people who live in relative abundance, may not necessarily understand the levels of desperation that extreme poverty can engender. I have family that was very involved (and still is, into their seventies) with addressing poverty. They (I believe rightly so) think that poverty and wealth inequality may be the most pressing issue in humanity, these days, as it directly, or indirectly, affects almost all the other issues.
I grew up in developing countries, and remember the "beggar pimps," that would deliberately mutilate and cripple children, in order to send them out begging. It was pretty horrifying.
But I also help people that no one else wants to help (for good reason). Tough crowd. I need to enforce my own boundaries, and am pretty damn good at saying "no." Also, some of the folks we help, can turn around, and become fairly vile, once they have their asses out of the sling. Just comes with the territory.
"Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know."
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
- Mark Twain
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#58Are we sure all the examples cited were manufactured? Isn’t it possible that in a lot of the examples, someone had a bad day and other people responded with kindness?
Where does the article say they were faked? > While it may be true that Grier only had one audience member at her initial preview, people soon realised that she had posted a nearly identical tweet at the start of the Fringe in 2022. Pity moved tickets both times. It seems the article is talking about "pity marketing" as a whole, even if true.
Yeah this is the point. Whether the claim is true or not, as a marketing tactic it has nothing at all to do with the quality of the product being sold. Marketing for a comedy show should convince me of the conedian's humor, not try to guilt me into filling an audience seat for them.
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#59This reminds me of those cases where creators have faked illnesses to market their work and get attention through sympathy, which usually goes horribly wrong. For instance, folks like Belle Gibson here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-32420070 Or the folks documented here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03... Or the example that reminded me of this, when a Super Mario World modde…
A famous contestant from a Korea reality show faked cancer to solicit donation. He later got caught and was basically banished. He ended up taking his life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Sung-bong
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Re: The rise of pity marketing
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather than allow my compassion to be decimated, or chipped away bit by bit, I simply outsource my compassion. I never take pity on individuals, whether they are begging at the train station, a grocery store, or somewhere on the Internet. No pity for individual situations. I absolutely cannot and will not trust someone's claims and I absolutely cannot judge their worthiness for charity. I give generously to charitabl…
> I give generously to charitable organizations that do the most good. This is my religious obligation, and it's also the best way to maximize my bucks. And they maximize your bucks with outlandish purchases for executives and "fund raising" parties for their selected few. I stopped caring for large NGOs when I found out how deeply corrupt their management is, including middle management. If you want to help, don't g…
> I stopped caring for large NGOs when I found out how deeply corrupt their management is, including middle management.
This happened for me at a bar in Seattle when I was sitting next to two women when were literally giggling about how the Gates Foundation paid them $300k a year for nothing.