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 !mutual_aid@hexbear.net critical meta posts must not be about specific users and posted in !feedback@hexbear.net 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 !mutual_aid@hexbear.net
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~~
I don't think those desperate to have basic needs met is on the same level as having to scroll past posts if this is supposedly a space inhabited by leftists that care about marginalized people. As someone who's experienced homelessness I can understand not wanting to get to that point because it becomes exponentially harder to leave it once you're there.
Yeah. When I post multiple times a day, it’s because I really need help and nobody is…helping me.
That's because people have seen you recieve thousands of dollars and multiple vehicles and have seen you post how bad you need necessities, recieve money, and then post about the sweet new bong you bought to go with all the awesome drugs you just got.
For an outside observer if they have limited resources and it's between somebody you don't know anything about and somebody you've seen squander money they got under false pretenses the decisions pretty obvious.
I've kept my mouth shut about this for months to not cause any trouble but I can not believe you are the one saying the comm has a problem with people sucking the air out of the room and scamming.
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.
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.
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.
Yea i normally wouldn't have said anything if that exact person wasn't the one complaining about other people dping that now.
what the fuck. $4,000? WHAT THE FUCK THAT COULDVE DONE SO MUCH GOOD.
Please tell me that at least that user was banned
Nah, still a regular here.
Still a regular in mutual aid
Amazing
What's more is we aren't even allowed to talk about it but that user can be defensive out of nowhere and call names.
I did not blow it all on drugs. Hell, I spent at least a quarter of that, in other words a whole entire rack, on other people in need. In other words, giving it away to my homeless friends. I sent one friend alone $400. I sent $200 to another.
I’m not saying I didn’t buy drugs with it. But it was not even a quarter of that $4K.
You know what I did blow it on? DoorDash. I spent maybe $1,000 on DoorDash.
I’m ashamed of how I squandered that money either way and I’ve learned from my mistakes but I know nobody fucking cares so why the fuck should I bother.
Well, I'm sorry if I misrepresented the situation. It just really sucked to watch play out. I'm glad to hear you learned something from it and I hope you're getting by okay.
I was totally expecting you to double down and insist that I’m lying, etc., because that’s what I’ve come to expect in arguments like this one. Thank you.
That is disturbing to read, I'm sorry you went through that and I hope you're at least okay now.
I feel like there could be more emphasis on a hierarchy of needs in this comm but idk how to implement that without opening the cans of worms that come from basically means testing. That would go against the purpose of the comm. But maybe at least some feedback system that allows people who want to donate to understand whose requests are being ignored or whose requests still need to be fulfilled.
I think the answer that sums up this whole chain is that it is necessary to set boundaries with people, even if the person is having a rough go. We're kind of over-correcting the other way because everyone is scared to be paternalistic or patronizing or enforcing capitalist work ethic. Under communism we're still going to have set boundaries with each other. It's just part of human interaction.
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.
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.
You are talking an awful lot about a situation you clearly don't know.
Sure, but you also have to be honest with yourself that this is about your ego and wanting to maximize the good that YOU do according to YOUR beliefs. I also doubt that this same calculus applies if the person who might be spending money on drugs is more closely related to you rather than some person on the internet.
This isn't some self evident logical principle, this is a reaction to your own feelings and ideas. Mutual aid is not about purchasing the most "alleviation" or "goodness". You're exhibiting the same form of thinking that calls things like breakfast programs frivolous luxury. The comm is called mutual aid because mutual aid is unconditional. You're attempting to make personal a normative value judgement objective rather than what it is, subjective.
Someone is saying, I have a problem and I need help. You are saying, there's plenty of people with problems in the market so I'm only going to help if I like the way you solve your problem. That's not charity or mutual aid, that's an investment.
No that's total fucking cope lol.
Me saying that I would rather my limited money for charity go to feeding somebody in need rather than someone using it for recreational drugs is not a sign that I have an ego problem.
Multiple vehicles? Lol.
bongs are really cheap
This one was not.
You have absolutely no idea how much it cost
Is this dialectics?
There's not really a need for that, here and now in particular
Then where?
I feel like there are a handful of users who have to bite their tongue while another handful of users don't have to. It's not like this stuff isn't done out in the open. The user in question comes on here and posts about it! I've never seen them over in self crit either....
At the time this was more about soliciting advice on how to go ahead with the comm as a whole lol, which didn't feel appropriate. But at this point we have all the drama aired out here anyway so whatever
I get that but it seems like a popular topic that a lot of people are afraid to discuss. I'm not even trying to take sides right now but I feel like sparing the feelings of one person at the expense of the people trying to help isn't a good strategy. There are a lot of people ITT that said they blocked the comm for the drama and that sucks for a lot of reasons.
We should be able to trust our users to talk about sensitive community issues and mod anyone that gets out of pocket. It's toxic to just bottle it up and wait for the next person to explode. Then everyone is like "what is @Longstanding_user_who_contributes problem?" Instead of looking at the whole issue.