After discussing this with the people most often using the mutual aid community and feedback here we will be making a single change.
Meta posts will no longer be permitted in [email protected] critical meta posts must not be about specific users and posted in [email protected] at risk of removal.
We will change the mutual aid sidebar to remove the clause permitting meta posts, we will also ask that users post once a day so that everyone's post's can be seen but this is not a hard rule as it is pretty clear that removing posts is a last resort in that community. This joins the other community recommendations that users include currency, how much is needed, updating when a user has received funds, or updating/locking the post when the need has been met.
This will be unfeatured in about 12 hours
~~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~~
You know what, I will chime in here too. I was facing homelessness and begged for cash on mutualaid and I watched as someone asked for money for a vehicle and received $4,000. Then they bought drugs with it.
$4,000 is 8 months rent for me. I went homeless.
I won't otherwise make value judgements on anyone involved, but I don't think you're shitty for calling it out.
I think from the perspective of competing needs the more likely issue is that some people get more because they are more popular / appealing than others which is another form of market logic of its own. I think that's a fair criticism, but it's still a criticism of those who choose the allocation of resources rather than a criticism of those who need them.
My point is that being the arbiter of competing needs on a person to person basis is morally fraught (and typically on some level dishonest) which is why real mutual aid is a communal and social function rather than a peer-to-peer market function. Also that enforcing a system of account on those who are in need is just opening up a can of worms for petty sectarian moralizing that is going to wind up with harming more people than preventing scenarios like this.
There's also just a lot of unverified, unknowable information to make a call here, and digging thru the post and user histories that started this thread it's incredibly difficult to tell what the truth of the obvious off board drama between the involved users is.
FWIW you shouldn't have gone homeless, that's a failing of society on multiple levels that should be eradicated.
I wasn't taking it that way. I just think that your POV matters, but should be treated different than the POV of someone giving.
I think this is very noble of you.
Yeah I agree with this, the best we can do is caveat emptor.
I just think that adjudicating it before/after the fact or debating whose rules are more moral is pointless and harmful. There's already calls for the user to get banned, from people who likely only read scenario as presented by Adkml which is not productive. I think there are scenarios where the $4k/car/drugs thing could be extremely shitty sure, but I don't have all the information to judge, I don't want the user to provide it, and it's not my place to judge to begin with.
This is a message board, meaning it's already a suboptimal way to distribute aid. At the end of the day this wasn't someone pretending to be in need, they did get a car with the money, this person is still homeless. People should just live and let live.
You are talking an awful lot about a situation you clearly don't know.
You are 100% correct, and it is 100% none of my business to find out.
And then were also donated a car. And then got it impounded within a week because they were intentionally antagonizing the people living in the house they were staying in front of.
Lol no.