hexbear

I think meta posts being allowed is good. There should be a way to make suggestions and such and meta posts allow that

I think there should be a one post a day rule. I've personally needed help and never posted because the current meta is to drown each other out. It makes an already stressful thing to do feel adversarial, and I don't want to be pushing other people down.

As for if there's people scamming? Of course there are this is the internet. Not much to be done about that without also potentially harming someone in need.

No to all of the above. Honestly it feels like you're trying to fix something that wasn't broken. Was the issue of people scamming even that bad? Afaik all the posts I've seen in the mutual aid comm feel and seem legit. If anything I think we should probably have stickied fundraisers for people who're homeless or on the verge of missing rent. Putting all these arbitrary limits on people's posting feels like it's setting up the comm to die and I hope the moderators understand that people's lives are literally on the line with this shit.

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 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.

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 mostly donate to Palestinian gofundmes because I figured scammers would get more money by pretending to be an Israeli having a panic attack because they saw a Palestinian flag once on top of, you know, them trying to survive a genocide. I don't think there's any real way to distinguish between a sincere person and a scammer in an anonymous forum.

In case this feedback is relevant, the comm has been abused by certain members spamming posts multiple times per day every day, so I blocked it 🤷