Hacker News Reader

Comment by powera | Hacker News Reader

What does this really mean (and the list of random requests is just pointless):

Is it a sign of a breakdown of the traditional ways of making money (as a summary, the replacement of "working the farm" to earn money with "driving for Uber" to earn money)?

Is it the de-centralization of existing support networks? Asking your friends for money isn't new, maybe it's just that you talk to your friends over the internet that's new.

Is it the corporatization of personal budgets, where everything has to have some nice-sounding reason attached to it, even if it's obviously a waste of money? (unless you really believe that all the leadership summits in Hawaii are really cost-effective)

View on HN

I think it's an internalization of the "It's always okay to ask" mentality, which itself is a symptom of a transition from a society built around a few common cultural institutions to one based on a pluralistic conception that different people may have different values. It used to be that there were common norms of behavior, and you didn't step outside those norms unless you wanted to risk strong social censure. Now, the norm is that anything mutually agreed upon by two parties is fine.

On the whole, I think this is a good trend - it makes the economy more efficient, it encourages people to celebrate diversity instead of shunning it, and it's how the upper classes have operated for a long time, which is the source of a major power imbalance where corporations & rich people feel entitled to ask for anything and then working-class people feel ashamed to refuse. This is just the same attitude filtering down to formerly middle-class people, likely fueled by desperation as the traditional social compact breaks down and their previous income stream dries up. It'll take a period of adjustment as people realize that "No" is a perfectly fine answer that you'll have to give the majority of the time, though, and many people are very uncomfortable at the breakdown of unspoken norms (hence the article).

I want to know if these people are getting gofundme requests from people they know. If so, what are they doing differently from me?

Because if you're getting gofundme requests from people you don't know, we've all been getting hit up for money from shady "charities" forever; it's just that the internet has democratized the technologies used to ask randoms for money. This isn't really a change, in my mind.

I'll accept that it's a cultural change when I get these sorts of requests from people I know, rather than from random strangers.

> ...it's just that the internet has democratized the technologies used to ask randoms for money.

You hit the nail on the head.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time. Services like GoFundMe simply make reaching "some of the people" much, much easier.

> I'll accept that it's a cultural change when I get these sorts of requests from people I know, rather than from random strangers.

I get these ridiculous GoFundMe requests from people I know (including relatively close friends) on a pretty regular basis.

It's different from the classic "charities" in that the pressure is much higher when it's a personal appeal from a friend.

Most of the post is pointless, agreed. Trying to explain the phenomenon would be more interesting than simply listing dumb requests.

> Is it a sign of a breakdown of the traditional ways of making money (as a summary, the replacement of "working the farm" to earn money with "driving for Uber" to earn money)?

I don't see how funding campaigns compare to "driving for uber". Driving for uber is an actual job, while putting up a nice page saying "I want to go see the pyramids, give me money" is different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com