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.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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I've done some self crit and no longer think meta posting should be allowed
I think the path forward dealing with potential scams should be the user who thinks someone is scamming should message the mods/admins, they can determine if the accused user should be banned, and then they make a mod post if they choose to ban them
They've been resisting being seen as arbiters and I don't think they want the extra workload.
I agree it'd be extra work, I dont know if there's any way of doing things better than we are right now but wish things could be improved :/
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I think any changes at this point will ultimately reduce the amount that mutual aid users receive so I am against them.
The recipients need to be prioritized over everything else. Onlookers/bystanders don't belong in this discussion at all. The goal should be to maximize aid, not make it easier to ignore cries for help.
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.
No perfect solutions here.
Meta stuff should be kept to a minimum. If somebody thinks/knows a post on the comm is dodgy, they probably should DM the mods of the com with their 'recipts'... but... we're all mostly strangers to each other here so I'd be incredibly surprised if more than a tiny fraction of these "snitch" DM's would have iron clad claims. But if the mods decide there's enough there to act on, it should be a mod who drops a post about why a specific user or post has been locked/deleted/banned with comments from the other mods on the post letting the rest of the hexbear user base know that more mods were okay with the action than not and the conversation stops there.
Nobody here should be gatekeeping what "mutual aid" means. This is an online forum, of anonymous users, where practically no Hexbears are ever physically around another Hexbear user. What "mutual aid" means in this context is pretty much, drop a few bucks in a Venmo or post emojis of sympathy. If you want to drop some change in somebody's digital tin cup, awesome. If you're worried about "being ripped off" you might want to rethink what you're doing looking at the mutual aid com.
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What benefit is there to allowing meta posts? The description of mutual aid should be changed to reflect that it is mainly used for fundraising, but if you don't or can't contribute, just unsubscribe or block the comm.
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
I used to give pretty regularly but ended up blocking the comm once folks started doing rolling fundraisers for multiple hundreds per month. Just rubbed me the wrong way. There's not a soul on this site who couldn't use an extra few hundred for bills per month. I was more interested in helping folks out who were experiencing acute emergencies.