That was always the problem with /r/snackexchange and the other real-world subreddits I tried to make. 95%+ of the time it works as intended but without some kind of extra safety step there are people who have no problem punching down or sideways. We were never willing to do top-down user verification due to the privacy concern but that was the essential step that we would have needed. c/mutual_aid is going to have those same pitfalls as the site gets larger, especially if people hear about this place before they do Hexbear more broadly.

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.

I hate all of this. What a fucked up and sad situation.

So as the person who apparently pointed this out to people, I have a few things I'd like to say here.

One, after I posted my previous comment, someone responded to me with more information which confirms that, yes, this is the same person. (I'm gonna be honest, I had assumed it was from pretty early on, given all the things that lined up, so that came as no real surprise to me.)

Two, whatever the story was behind Rachel's behavior years ago, I have never observed her saying anything unkind or inappropriate since her return to the site. As far as I can tell, she at least learned her lesson on that. I've been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, and it looks to me like she's made good on that trust and not been toxic like she was before--in spite of all this drama that has descended on her lately.

Three, and this one is pretty big for me: I have never caught her in a lie on here since she came back. Not once. And as people may have realized by now, I pay pretty close attention.

Seriously, consider her actions in recent weeks, and tell me if this sounds like scammer behavior: First, she voluntarily tells everyone she raised nearly $800 from a single post. There was absolutely zero reason to tell anyone that. Why on Earth would a scammer, whose whole scam depended on making people think they were desperate, tell people they had just received a windfall? And that is of course magnified by the post letting us all know about that $4k. No scammer with half a brain would tell us, and no scammer with even one brain cell would let on that they got so much money and then spent it all inside of a month's time. If anything, that proves to me that she's being honest, even to an arguable fault.

And I want to mention that I have caught at least one recipient of my largess here on Hexbear in a lie (it was an utterly pointless lie, too; I had already made clear I was going to provide this person with money, and they then lied to me to make it sound like they had better means to pay it back than they really did, even though I had not asked to be paid back in any way). I have not given that person any money since, even though they have made posts here requesting funds since then. Another user changed their original ask after someone sent them the amount they requested and said so in a comment, which really rubbed me the wrong way. I reported that to mods but never heard anything back, and the post stayed up, but I never donated to that user again either.

By contrast, Rachel made clear that she was spending the money on food, and honestly, I think the small-time donations really were used that way. But even if not, even if she did sometimes buy drugs with that money, well, you can't give money to a meth addict and expect them not to use it in ways you might not like. And I say that as someone who gave her upwards of $400, all told.

Is it disappointing that she didn't succeed in making her situation permanently better with that four grand? Absolutely, and it seems clear to me that she's more upset about that than we all are. But I don't really agree that her recent behavior makes her a "bad actor."

@[email protected] was a banned user from early on the site's history,

FYI that account's not actually banned.

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.

Oh yeah, I remember reading a lot of that. Has it really been four years since. It's amazing how time flies so fast.

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 🤷

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.