Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanmercer | Hacker News Reader

The larger theme is

"Technology makes it easier for individuals to beg strangers for money".

I can't open social media without seeing kickstarter/indiegogo this, gofundme that, need money quick, can someone paypal/venmo me money for thing, etc. Then a day, week, month later you see pictures of their brand new cabinets or of their vacation or they are hitting people up for money again for something else because people gave last time so now they expect regular handouts.

Instead of getting creative, people now just go "hey, stranger, you have it better than me, give me your hard earned money!"

View on HN

I think both of these themes are equally true. Informal (and formal) community organizations have long supported those they feel are most in need, and people have long begged strangers for money. The internet simply makes it easier to do both.

I'm having trouble figuring what you're actually saying here.

Do you not like that people can beg? Or that they have to at all?

>I'm having trouble figuring what you're actually saying here.

I'm saying the internet, specifically social media and payment apps/crowd funding sites, allow people to unabashedly give their (true or otherwise) sob story and beg complete strangers for money, I imagine the vast majority of people on sites like gofundme would hesitate to even phone family for financial assistance and I suspect nearly all of the people begging on social media simply wouldn't ask if they had to walk up to random strangers in person and ask.

Keep in mind, I say this while my nephew currently has a gofundme trying to raise 260,000 USD (!!!) for his mother for some experimental, questionable (cryotherapy for her kidney cancer, when it's usually used for skin cancer for example), cancer treatment in China.

I think these sites/methods serve a useful purpose, I think however trying to get gas money to give to your mother to go see your undocumented step-father in another state because he was drink driving and is likely to be deported or remain incarcerated... or hitting people up for beer money... is not a valid use of such sites/methods.

> gas money to give to your mother to go see your undocumented step-father in another state because he was drink driving and is likely to be deported or remain incarcerated... [...] is not a valid use of such sites/methods.

Why not?

But that is creative, utilizing a medium/tools outside its usual purpose.

> Instead of getting creative, people now just go "hey, stranger, you have it better than me, give me your hard earned money!"

This isn't new. This is the basis of some rather infamous socio-economic systems which have resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Didn't think I'd see panhandlers get equated to Nazis today.

I think yakshaving_jgt meant communism. Or socialism? Hard to tell since all the major systems have killed a lot of people.

Maybe. Equating panhandlers to Stalin is just as weird, though.

It's more like deKulakisation.

Either way, it's pretty damn weird to try to connect begging for money with mass slaughter.

Also straight up ignoring the millions of people who die under capitalism.

Found the Commie.

Please don't do this here.

I’m a little confused why I would be flagged when most of my comment history is on topic, and it seems most of the comment history of the account I was replying to is political and divisive.

Two reasons. One is that it was you who first swerved onto a generic ideological tangent, which was the original sin of this subthread.

The other is simply that we don't see all the comments—there are far too many. It's understandable that people want us to be consistent and even-handed, but that's not fully possible. It's also not fully necessary, since someone else violating the site guidelines doesn't make it ok for you to do so. (You can get pulled over for speeding even though others were going faster—which of course they usually are.) But I've taken a look at the other comments now, and did some additional moderation.

Ok, I think that's reasonable.

Thank you for clarifying.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. Doing that is against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it because it destroys the curiosity that HN exists for. Could you please stop posting like this? Also, please don't post in the flamewar style generally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com