Not sure how many people were around four years ago for the original drama, but @[email protected] was a banned user from early on the site’s history, and I’ve seen quite a bit of speculation recently that a current frequent poster in c/mutualaid is an alt of hers due to having a similar MO and personal details (such as them both living in the same city)
For context, u/storyofrachel was an unhoused trans woman, who frequently solicited money from the community and had problems with substance abuse. She eventually made a post bragging about scamming money from users here (I myself was one of the users who sent her money) and blowing it on drugs (with a picture of the drugs in question) and a
bunch of homophobic slurs (TW: homophobia, self harm).
She later claimed that her account had been hacked, which frankly I did and do not believe. She was unbanned but later banned for other shit which I don’t recall and am unable to reconstruct from the modlog and came back on a bunch of different alts, all of which were banned.
If there’s any truth to this, it is deeply fucked that this person is still here, evading her ban and scamming people four years later. As one of the people who was taken advantage of previously (and, possibly, again with this current user!), people should at least be able to make an informed decision with all available context. If we want this community to function, and I say this as someone who has sent hundreds of dollars to people over the years through this community, we should be able to guard against bad actors who are trying to take advantage of the compassion and generosity of our user base.
Edit: There’s an Instagram with both usernames on it, publicly available. It’s 100% the same person. Not going to post it because I don’t want anyone to get doxxed but yeah.
Edit edit: I’m going to go touch grass now. Anyone who is being willfully obtuse about why I made this post can read it again or any of my other comments in this thread
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Nobody is forcing anyone to give to anyone else here and now that there’s a block button for users it’s even less important to ban people imo. If someone wants to give money to the person constantly complaining their life is a mess because they do too much meth then more power to them, I just block and move on 🤷
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Isn’t there a point where you just become an enabler though? I don’t know if you can OD on meth, but if someone abused heroine and a community financed that abuse until the user OD’ed, wouldn’t that kind of be on the community?
I’m genuinely asking by the way, not trying to do some weird debate thing of thinking up some odd hypothetical or some shitty rhetorical framing in order to shame people for helping. The example is just to explain my thought process.
I expect it’s the kinda thing that doesn’t have a clear answer, but I feel like there’s also people who know a lot more than me about mutual aid, who will have a much better answer.
I personally wouldn’t become an enabler bc I don’t give that person money, and it’s not my place to set the morals of another group of people be it the community or the user in question. The original identity of the user is sort of moot imo bc if you read the posts, it’s pretty much what you see is what you get. So if that’s not the kind of content you want to see, block and move on.
The only argument I could entertain is, well, if you have money and youre a communist and this other person doesn’t it’s your responsibility to help them, which I guess would be the case, but you can’t help everyone and there are plenty of opportunities here to help others even if its just sticking to the people I know.
First off thank you for your answer. I am writing this follow-up because I feel my question was phrased poorly and thus led to an answer to a different query than the one I had in my head.
I’m not talking about passing judgement on others, but I can see how that’s what I described with my phrasing. I’m also not talking about caring about what others spend their money on, but again, I phrased it poorly.
If I give financial aid anonymously to someone , whom I know abuses drugs which can kill them*, and I know this person is stuck in a pattern of financial aid they needed for housing or food on drugs instead, and I keep giving them money whilst they complain that their drug habit has gotten worse, and they then OD…
IF all of this in this very long and needlessly complex hypothetical happened, would I not then be some kind of enabler? Isn’t there a point where me giving money unconditionally to someone who spends it on harmful and addictive narcotics (who complains about their habit) becomes hurtful instead of helpful?- I specify this to make it more extreme in order to more clearly phrame what I am asking about, not in order to eliminate nuance or grey zones. Its easier to draw the line here than with less harmful drugs, and I feel like that’s a bit of a pitfall of a discussion which isn’t really what I’m trying to ask about, but I also feel the need to acknowledge that by making it about OD’ing I am phraming the discussion in a certain way. So therefore this footnote.
lol, i always wondered what happened to her. i can’t believe A) its been 4 years and b) i never heard the story of how she got banned
her posts always irked me. even taking them at face value and not being skeptical of her intentions, i was confused at why the community kept rallying around someone who constantly sabotaged herself so much. she’s not someone who is ever going to stop using, because deep down she doesn’t have the desire to.
ooooohhh i get it she was one of the bad ungrateful addicts see that’s why i always give to my local church because then i know they’re good people who deserve it
“Getting someone to stop using” shouldn’t be the goal of anyone here looking to do mutual aid online. There are specialized services that help with that and if you want to help people stop using go work with or volunteer at those services.
The goal here should be to keep people alive long enough to make the choice for themselves to seek the help they need. Assuming they even have access to those services, which many unhoused folks with addictions do not or cannot access those services for various reasons.
You aren’t going to get someone to stop an addiction by posting at them. All you can do is help them stay alive long enough to hopefully choose to find help
It’s so gross and protestant brained when people look at mutual aid and direct giving like they’re somehow morally responsible for trying to fix or control a person’s behavior. Like yeah they might spend the money you give on shit that won’t directly benefit them, sorry we live in such a sad, fascist society that one more good feeling seems more productive than attempting to get out of a bad situation. We’re just trying to keep people alive, not perform rehab.
Generally I don’t care how people choose to spend the money I donate to them, however if it leads to a loss of trust in our community and subsequently causing people more reluctant to donate, then it negatively impacts all other comrades who are genuinely in need of monetary aid.
On a side note, I wonder how Rachel is doing these days and sincerely hope that things work out for the better for her.
i’m really not talking about the particular user who abused it. but if their abuse leads to reactionary attitudes from others, we still have to work out those reactionary attitudes, no?
I don’t ask for receipts when I give someone cash, but them not coming on here bragging about scamming me, calling me slurs, and then asking for more money is a reasonable ask, I think
yeah i’m not really commenting about your post, just that other poster’s attitude about mutual aid. obviously people who are bigoted opportunists that take all the air away are not welcome.
You aren’t going to get someone to stop an addiction by posting at them. All you can do is help them stay alive long enough to hopefully choose to find help
to clarify to you in particular, i was commenting in agreement with this point by infamousbit and nothing else, i generally stay out of something as messy as a user that has abused the mutual aid system that i know for a fact has benefited some of our most well-known and kindest people here.
i didn’t ‘post at’ her. i politely ignored her and hoped others would wisen up and do the same. i only started passing judgement out loud when i found out 4 years later that my gut instinct was more or less correct, and she’d gone down in flames because of it
she’s not someone who is ever going to stop using, because deep down she doesn’t have the desire to.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around this issue. addiction really alters your neurochemistry such that you behave and think in ways you otherwise might not. Some people say your “true self” is revealed when you’re on substances, i.e. if you become an asshole you were really just an asshole all along, unlikely to ever change, and not deserving of additional chances, while other people say you “become someone else” on substances, not liable for your actions, and fundamentally absent from reality for the duration of the substance’s effects, and I think neither of those ways of thinking is exactly correct for substance abuse, anymore than it is for medication, especially given the variety of substances and the different interactions they have with our brains and bodies, which aren’t even consistent each time we use them, but highly dependent on stuff like mood, food intake, etc… Fundamentally, it’s a shame that someone took advantage of a mutual aid community, thereby decreasing its effectiveness. That’s really the heart of it. Whether she’s capable of change is more of a philosophical issue. u/happybadger made a good post in this thread about the pitfalls anonymous online mutual aid. You either sacrifice privacy or you sacrifice stability. You either make your users vulnerable to doxxing, or you make your community vulnerable to sabotage by bad actors. I’m wondering if there’s a way to engineer a resolution to this so you can get the best of both options?
i’m not sure i get what the “scam” is here. was she not open about struggling with addiction, mental health, and homelessness? yeah, sometimes you give money to a homeless person and they spend it on something you don’t approve of, and sometimes a mentally ill person acts like an asshole. you kind of just have to suck it up without resolving to unperson them.
She quite literally bragged about scamming people on here
also, years ago it was pointed out that there’s pretty much no appeals process for people who get banned, and the expectation was that you make a new account and not get caught and not do the same thing you were banned for. i realize that this is just an internet forum and it’s not that big a deal but like that’s a joke of an accountability process that would be entirely unworkable in a more serious context.
i mean idk have you guys never given money to a homeless person who said it was their birthday? did you think that was true? would you be mad at them if it wasn’t? aggrandize yourself if you have to, but please break free of the austerity mindset you’re fucking communists for christssake
I don’t usually give money to anyone who calls me a slur, guess I’m not a real communist
This isn’t about a
“these people don’t deserve to have things” approach. This is a discussion about potentially harmful actions, that’s all.Ideally mutual aid happens in person where you can easily know a person. On the Internet with anonymity, you need to have these kinds of conversations to be a sustainable project.
lying about it being your birthday and repeatedly soliciting money in a political space, taking photos of you spending it on drugs (not even cool ones), and calling the people who gave it to you homophobic slurs and telling them to kill themselves are two different orders of magnitude
e: they’re also qualitatively different, she harassed the community too
e2: this all said, people can grow and change, and while it’s up to the individual offering the aid, holding something against someone forever, especially when their behavior is from a situation of crisis or duress, is not productive.
edit, nevermind, dont want it to seem like im calling for anything just wanted to add to the rachel lore. and i got stuff to do today
Damn this whole thing just sounds sad.
I can’t imagine how empty my life would have to be to be so genuinely angry and upset with an online community of like 300 people.
Regardless of her shitty behavior the site was just as shitty to her beforehand. The homeless person we shit on for buying drugs being a bigot doesn’t justify us jumping on a homeless person for buying drugs. It just means we’re lucky it wasn’t a fully innocent person who got the brunt of it
Oh yeah, I remember reading a lot of that. Has it really been four years since. It’s amazing how time flies so fast.
The whole situation is just incredibly sad and was only ever going to end in tears after the large donations. You’d have to be very naive to think otherwise. Honestly I’m just happy that Rachel is still alive.
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No, thankfully.
IPs dont work like that even if we did log them
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Is it really worth collecting identifiable data on all of us just to “catch out” banned users who came back? In this case it is widely known they are the same person, and there is evidence, but it is against the rules to post it, for good reason IMO.
In this case specifically, IPs would not have helped much considering the user left for an extended period of time, and was almost certainly on a mobile internet connection the vast majority of the time which wouldn’t be consistent at all, nor necessarily even map to a geographical region reliably.
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wtf is the intention behind making this post, except specifically trying to drive the user in question off the site because she did some fucked up stuff 4 years ago and called you a rude word, because it’s oviously not an intervention or attempt to help her.
like is it out of some concern that the people who voluntarily gave her money while fully aware of her situation were too stupid to realise that there’s a chance she might misuse it or is it just some way to make sure you never have to see her posts again? because there’s a much easier solution than the whole “i just think you guys should know” style call out post shit to the latter:
I think I’ve been pretty clear elsewhere in this thread
My proposed change is that a known scammer who is evading a ban should be banned for the health of this comm, and that allowing someone like this to operate on here makes it less likely for others who need it to get help
there’s been nothing to suggest that the user is maliciously using the mutual aid comm or whatever since she came back, if she had been actively trying to scam people why even mention getting the 4k donation and then messing it up when there was no way it would benefit her and actually led to multiple threads of shit like this? everyone on this site likes to act like they believe in rehabilitative justice until they see someone they dont like not being nailed to a wall or some shit for something they did years ago.
and if anything’s going to make it less likely to get help, its massive call out threads like this on people for using the mutual aid comm while having a drug addiction and using the blank cheque they got given poorly
edit: you’re transparently not doing this to help other people out, either people donating or people receiving, it’s so obviously just a ploy to get someone you’ve got a chip on your shoulder about either kicked off of or made to feel completely unwelcome on the site (and put in a much worse financial position) for shit they did years ago
Part of rehabilitative justice is restoring the harm caused to the community and making amends. Care to point out when that happened?
I dont think that a homeless meth addict who also needs to buy hrt should be expected to pay back money she spent on her meth addiction so that she can afford to eatHow about an apology or any kind of acknowledgement of fault? Is that also unreasonable or is anything less than a free pass acceptable?
Feels like your idea of “rehabilitative justice” is that someone who wasn’t even around when the harm took place (you) will declare everything is cool now if she decides that enough time has passed. Not really what I think of when I hear the term
i give her money sometimes. i know its the same person. I dont feel scammed. I can see how someone not knowing the history or not having put together the clues could feel that way theoretically but ultimately I dont think there’s anything actionable here besides maybe clarifying the policy on alts of banned users. (though sometimes it feels like the ambiguity gives the team latitude to deal with things on a case by case basis in a way thats positive overall)
Maybe we should have some kind of official ban appeal process? I’ve seen some heated moments go down on this site and users get banned for it who were otherwise good posters but let emotions or drugs or whatever get to them.
Idk, I wasn’t around for this first incident so I don’t have a grudge or anything or even much information about it but it does bother me that she won’t even acknowledge it happened (at this moment)
I want to believe that that’s all that was, some kind of heated moment
In the past at least, acknowledging you were an alt of a banned user was bannable behavior. Not something I’d want to risk if I frequently relied on this place for sustenance, idk about you.
True but accounts also get banned for people finding out they are alts of banned users (like DayOfDoom’s alts)
And it’s pretty out and obvious now
yeah sometimes. I’ve said elsewhere in the thread I think the policy (or lack thereof) on banned users alts provides a way for admins to exercise some discretion. Maybe that’s unfair, but I generally trust and agree with their decisions. Someone who comes back repeatedly and inevitably breaks the rules each time is different than someone who comes back once and doesn’t break the same rules over again, for example. It’s easier to leave some ambiguity than it is to spell out exactly what the policy is and risk it being exploited by rules-lawyering bad actors.
This community has really been a life saver for me allowing me to get food for myself and my son when in a precarious situation. I’ve also given back to other users when I’ve had the means to do so.
It makes me sad to think that somebody would take advantage of the kindness of other users here; that said, it seems like this person is openly struggling with mental health and addiction issues and I have enough first hand and second hand experience with those things myself to know how giving thousands of dollars lump sum to somebody in the middle of it is going to go. I guess I don’t have much useful advice to give here, I just wanted to comment to add another voice in agreement with the other users that this comm is such an important resource and I hope that this incident doesn’t scare people off of donating altogether. Seems like it’d be hard to implement more security without making it harder to donate or receive donations. It’s probably a good idea to check post history before giving and decide for yourself whether giving money to any individual person is the kind of help they really need.
Hey heads up the formatting of this comment is off and it’s really hard to read
Yeah I don’t know what happened there, I guess trying to indent the paragraphs made it a weird text box or something. I just edited it, hopefully it’s readable now.
It is
I hate all of this. What a fucked up and sad situation.
Thats where im at. :(
This whole situation is really upsetting me, especially some of the attitudes people here seem to hold about “personal responsibility” and addiction (having struggled with this it’s not so simple a problem to deal with) :(
Idk how we can solve the problem of trust in /c/mutual_aid or if it can even be solved but I just wanna say people here have helped me and my friend* stay fed multiple times and we really appreciate it
*Receiving money from “tankies” has changed his view of them to a more positive one btw lmao
