this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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hexbear

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Hexbear Proposals chapo.chat matrix room.

This will be a place for site proposals and discussion before implementation on the site.
Every proposal will also be mirrored into a pinned post on the hexbear community.

Any other ideas for helping to integrate the two spaces are welcome to be commented here or messaged to me directly.

Within Hexbear Proposals you can see the history of all site proposals and react to them, indicating a vote for or against a proposal.

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All top level messages within the channel must be a Proposals (idea for changing the site), Feedback (regarding non-technical aspects of the site, for technical please use https://hexbear.net/c/feedback), or Appeals (regarding admin/moderator actions).

Discussion regarding these will be within nested threads under the post.

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founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hello users of hexbear:

Due to recent meta posts in our mutual aid community we wanted to open up discussion about the community [email protected]

We will never require explanation or justification from a user asking for aid in the community, and the mod and admin team continue to commit to not featuring an individual's mutual aid request to prevent unfair exposure.

In addition, we will maintain a strict "No critical comments or meta comments" on a mutual aid post.

This post is to discuss the mutual aid community's rule of allowing meta posts: mutual aid as a community, those making posts in it and those commenting on posts.

We are considering removing the exception allowing meta posts but wanted to involve the userbase before committing to a change.

Please comment with any thoughts, feelings, or suggestions regarding this change.

Thank you

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (45 children)

Gotta be honest this is a you issue and it's incredibly shitty. You're combining the 2 incredibly fun tropes of "noble poor" and "the worst thing about poverty is that I have to see it".

People asking for help don't actually owe it to you to prove that they're min/maxing money that you gave them. There is no amount of money that you could realistically receive from posting on mutual_aid to bootstrap your way back to financial independence. It's all survival money. Survival isn't just coping with your hunger or exposure. It's also about coping with your feelings. Being homeless and impoverished is an incredibly lonely, dreadful and long existence. It's an experience filled with anguish, self abasement, and uncertainty. Using drugs to survive that isn't some moral failing, because raw-dogging such an existence is not a moral virtue.

By criticizing the purchase of drugs you are supposing that theru's a utility cost to that money that would fix the root causes. By conditioning aid on sobriety, you are demanding that people impoverished people should actively suffer. By complaining about the visibility of cries for help you are demanding that impoverished people should suffer in silence.

Your meager help is contingent on imposing harm because you cannot rid yourself of the ego and moral judgements when interacting with the most vulnerable members of society. You actively are showing your ass that you think poor people are inherently bad and must act a certain way to regain their "goodness". Nobody owes you atrocity porn to sate your own negative feelings about the ideas you hold.

Charity cannot be wasted because charity is a social relationship, it's not a measure of marginal utility. Charity can only be abused through deceit, but that's not what your criticizing. If you don't want to give money to people who will spend it on drugs that's your business, but don't pretend that there's some universal logic around the way people should act because of your personal feelings.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (43 children)

As I said last time this all came up I have no problem with people spending donated money on whatever they want as long as they didn't lie to get it.

I don't care if people spend it on drugs or anything else, as long as they didn't say it was for something else.

Saying you need money for basic survival items, getting the money and then turning around and spending it on drugs is shitty, especially when it's surrounded by posts of other people also saying rhe need survival necessities.

I don't think I'm the only one who, given the option to donate limited resources to people starving in Gaza or facing eviction or having that same money go to somebody buying gard drugs, I'd rather it be used on the thing that is going to actually improve the situation.

Especially if you're then going to go on to say that other people are making outside observers less likely to donate.

That's before you get into the history of bragging about scamming people and calling people slurs when you get called on it.

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