Just noticed this Guardian piece from yesterday arguing that crowfunding carries the risk of reintroducing "Victorian" notions of the deserving versus undeserving poor (a point I've been arguing about the disintermediation of giving for a while) : https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/02/crowdfunding-welfare-state-pandemic

If you want some more relevant historical whatnots on this topic, here's a thread I did about the history of Victorian "voting charities" and what they can tell us about the risks of putting unmediated human bias back at the core of giving: https://twitter.com/Philliteracy/status/1144585568090775552?s=19

And also this thread about the history of the role empathy has played in philanthropy, which contains a bunch more stuff on quite how obsessed the Victorians were with concerns about "indiscriminate giving" to "undeserving" cases: https://twitter.com/Philliteracy/status/1138421127779377152?s=19