hexbear

I don't see how it's possible to run a mutual aid comm with anonymous people scattered all over the world. Mutual aid really requires a much closer knit network of people working together in tangible non-monetary ways.

What we have is a charity comm. If we're going to run a charity comm some regulation would help.

• Limiting posts to one per week per account to stop the competition for visibility and subsequent blocking of the comm by people overwhelmed by the number of posts.

• Enforcing the use of something like GoFundMe so people can be confident when targets are or aren't met.

• Allowing people to provide suggestions for local support such as food banks or shelters: things that may reduce weekly repeats on the charity comm.

Regardless of moral judgements, donators need confidence in the system for the comm to provide help to anyone. Otherwise it's just a drama generator that fosters contempt and mistrust.

My feedback is the Rachel poster should be banned because they treat the community like a joke.

This user is like 90 percent of the comms problems since the inception of this site

Mutual_aid being used for scamming is inevitable I think, it is sad but idk, it is what it is. If I help 4 people, and one of them was lying and scamming, I still helped 3 people.

when i was in dire straits and in danger of losing my lease one of my requests was killed in the cradle because the first comment said i was a faker. remove that shit

To be clear, I never intended to scam anyone or anything like that. When I asked for money for a new battery for my car, or whatever, I wasn’t lying. I never intentionally misrepresented my needs. I’m just fucking stupid. I would ask for money for some particular thing, and then instead of holding onto it and being responsible, oops!, I’d go buy something stupid, and no, I don’t mean drugs (I need to clarify something about this, down-comment 👇).

I did not spend all or even most of that $4,000 on drugs.

I am a drug addict. So I do sometimes spend some of the money I’m sent on drugs. Some, but never all. I am not the stereotype you probably have in your head: drugs are not the most important thing to me. When I asked for money for a particular thing, that particular thing is what comes first. When I ask for money for gas for my car I NEED GAS FOR MY CAR.

If you don’t believe me, whatever. You believe what you want to believe.

I like how, no matter how many times I say that I didn’t blow all that money on drugs, that I don’t spend all the money I receive on drugs, this shit just persists and persists.

Nobody was honest with me when I posted threads asking if everything was alright, because it seemed like something was up.

I think it's fine as-is.

The WWW is plenty big. There's risks in everything. My risks when donating make paypal a nonstarter, worst case for me is probably someone unfortunately winding up in a situation that makes the cops look at me. I don't want that. Monero and a venmo account I've acquired which can be funded anonymously.

We're already probably the lightest touch active mutual aid community on the internet. It's cool and I like it, but I suspect banning any meta discussion is only going to make donating (already a huge leap of faith sometimes) even less of a trustworthy shot.

I 100% love and appreciate the desire of this site and my comrades to make a judgment free mutual aid zone, people out there are very genuinely in need and shouldn't have to sing, dance and bare themselves to get some help. However, I do think we have to recognise some basic level of practical limits of our opsec requirements and our shitty society. Banning all meta discussion, the tiniest caveat we have to establish some very basic trust, will not help people actually feel able to provide aid to people who need it.

All being said, I think there's a fine line between metaposting and dramaposting. I see no reason the latter should be allowed. Also some relevant world-famous poetry I'm reminded of:

You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.”

The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.

They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.

..

And what desert greater shall there be, than that which lies in the courage and the confidence, nay the charity, of receiving?

And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their worth naked and their pride unabashed?

Meta posting opens the door to shame and ridicule. I've already seen this happen by browsing the modlog a few times - it just got handled and i think that it's absolutely good it was handled. i think there's nothing to really say about MA that can't be discussed as issues arise, privately. For better or worse, there are people who enjoy wrecking stuff like it. Issues with specific users can be handled by mods and admins - a lot of what can be said about it would be to curtail or limit the function of MA - the additional burden would be suppressive of use.

Please don't give any room to the sorts who want to metapost about mutual aid - I'm sure some folks mean well, but it's just going to enable drama that doesn't need exist and will impede function

I think the meta posts should be removed. I've only seen people be harassing doing it and the people that need help in m_a (as I am and have been) don't appreciate being talked down to or given unsolicited advice during a bad period of their lives.

I think it is important to center people who use it; their opinions to me are more relevant in this situation than my own.

As a trans refugee living in a camp, I rely on communities like this to survive emotionally and materially. When I post for help, I’m not just fighting poverty, I’m fighting invisibility.

Removing meta posts that question or critique mutual aid requests is vital. Every time someone casts doubt or makes "meta" judgments, it makes people like me feel small, like we have to prove our pain or our worth.

This space should be about solidarity, not suspicion. Please protect it, so people like me can ask for help with dignity without shame or fear.

I feel like allowing meta posts is going to seed witch hunts and struggle sessions with real monetary stakes which feels gross. The post you're responding to is already fairly obviously some offline drama between a constellation of users. If the mods/admins want to take charge of "protecting the good people of mutual_aid" and allow people to report scammers, I think that's your guys prerogative, and whatever level of transparency you want to give to that is fine.

In general it's incredibly difficult to judge these kinds of things in an online anonymous board, and it would not be our place to moralize who is deserving of aid based on what will inevitably be internecine drama. Allowing for even the hint of purity testing is going to endanger the long term ability for people to access aid on the site, and create an even more unfair advantage for people who are known quantities which they could then also quite easily exploit.

In short, because we can't know, we shouldn't care and it's not our place to. Caveat emptor.

The forum structure of /c/mutual_aid means it functions like a charity market. All the issues we have were already addressed by sites like GoFundMe. Either force users to use sites like GoFundMe or start writing their systems into hexbear's codebase.

We can self crit all we want over it but in the end its a software issue.

It doesn't really feel like the mutual aid is very mutual. And alot of the people posting consistently on mutual aid don't really seem to post or interact outside of the comm. I don't really know too much about the situation but that's just my two cents. Not sure if the comm is accomplishing what it set out to do.