For your point on trust, hexbear users mostly just have to trust that the user is acting in good faith as there isn’t really any way to properly verify if the person is telling the truth without forcing them to reveal personal, and potentially identifiable, information.
And for your point on funding destructive behaviours, if we assume that this individual is telling the truth about their situation, then you aren’t funding their drug addiction by helping them pay rent or buy food.
That’s fair and I respect it, we need to have the courage to trust other people and I’m sure people have received much needed aid from that community.
But at the same time we have to recognize when a system is vulnerable to abuse, and consider ways to prevent that abuse from happening, or at least limit it. Sometimes, people aren’t going to tell the truth, and sometimes they may not know how to help themselves. It’s very hard to recognize those scenarios when your only context is an anonymous username on an internet forum.
In that case, you simply just have to take the risk. A well-off person giving money to another well-off person pretending to be poor isn’t as harmful as a well-off person not giving money to a poor person because they think they are a well-off person pretending to be poor.
For your point on trust, hexbear users mostly just have to trust that the user is acting in good faith as there isn’t really any way to properly verify if the person is telling the truth without forcing them to reveal personal, and potentially identifiable, information. And for your point on funding destructive behaviours, if we assume that this individual is telling the truth about their situation, then you aren’t funding their drug addiction by helping them pay rent or buy food.
That’s fair and I respect it, we need to have the courage to trust other people and I’m sure people have received much needed aid from that community.
But at the same time we have to recognize when a system is vulnerable to abuse, and consider ways to prevent that abuse from happening, or at least limit it. Sometimes, people aren’t going to tell the truth, and sometimes they may not know how to help themselves. It’s very hard to recognize those scenarios when your only context is an anonymous username on an internet forum.
In that case, you simply just have to take the risk. A well-off person giving money to another well-off person pretending to be poor isn’t as harmful as a well-off person not giving money to a poor person because they think they are a well-off person pretending to be poor.