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
Hey I’m glad to see this situation getting attention but starting out the discussion post with
and then turning around and saying “okay here’s a list of sweeping changes based on feedback” feels like a major shift. I didn’t post any generic suggestions about what to do with the comm because I thought the post was intended to be specifically about one rule changing
anyhow, of that list:
This includes various suggestions made by users and mods both on this post, others and the mod chat
my reading comprehension might just be bad on this tbf. I read it 3x before realizing the second half of that first quoted line I posted was opening up the floor to a broader discussion.
anyhow, I think slap-dash tracking of donos could easily end up worse than doing nothing. we don’t want to deanonymize people more than necessary, we don’t want the system to be exploitable for harassment of specific users or be hard to navigate.
similarly leaving no avenue for complaints seems bad. The (very uncommon, less than once a month) meta-posts attract so much attention because there are some genuine scams going on, not just because they’re bringing out reactionary sentiments (though there always seem to be at least one or two comments that go too far). And unless mods are going to police what is and isn’t a scam, social pressure and metaposts are the only outlet this stuff has. It’s a very thorny thing to balance but I’m glad we’re trying to improve it