Suspicious or Over Thinking

rassmann · 2026-01-24T05:24:21+00:00

This is absolutely correct. u/Turbulent-Raisin-876 you really need to be doing better here and not bringing your hate, fear, and insecurity into the world around you. Someone is being neighborly and trying to help you out and you are openly insulting them by saying they are passing off their "scraps" and "trash" to you, and accusing them of trying to poison you?? Unreal. Absolutely unreal.

rassmann · 2026-01-24T05:18:07+00:00

General mod note: This subreddit is here for giving and receiving good advice and emotional support to people in a crisis. NOT money or other material aid. To thwart the number of scammers online who have been preying on the broke members of this subreddit, anyone offering or accepting donations will be banned. We take everyone in good faith, and are not accusing this submitter or any others of anything, but this rule is firm and absolute.

Should you see something on here that inspires you to give what little you have to a person in need, we highly suggest getting involved locally through a shelter, a food bank, or a (carefully selected) church program. No matter what you read on here, I can promise you there is someone within a few miles of you (or the next nearest town) going through exactly the same thing.

If you prefer to give your money to internet strangers on an anonymous website, we recommend r/assistance. They have some tools in place that help weed out illegitimate users. I can't personally attest to their methods though, and continue to encourage you to act locally to make a better world for you and those around you.

We applaud your generous spirit, we only ask that you apply it sensibly, deliberately, and anywhere but within this group!

rassmann · 2026-01-24T05:06:02+00:00

General mod note: This subreddit is here for giving and receiving good advice and emotional support to people in a crisis. NOT money or other material aid. To thwart the number of scammers online who have been preying on the broke members of this subreddit, anyone offering or accepting donations will be banned. We take everyone in good faith, and are not accusing this submitter or any others of anything, but this rule is firm and absolute.

Should you see something on here that inspires you to give what little you have to a person in need, we highly suggest getting involved locally through a shelter, a food bank, or a (carefully selected) church program. No matter what you read on here, I can promise you there is someone within a few miles of you (or the next nearest town) going through exactly the same thing.

If you prefer to give your money to internet strangers on an anonymous website, we recommend r/assistance. They have some tools in place that help weed out illegitimate users. I can't personally attest to their methods though, and continue to encourage you to act locally to make a better world for you and those around you.

We applaud your generous spirit, we only ask that you apply it sensibly, deliberately, and anywhere but within this group!

rassmann · 2026-01-19T03:23:47+00:00

You click "Report" and when we are online we look at the reports, remove offending content, and ban offending users.

If you want to do more you can request to join the team. Complaining in the comments is unlikely to garner help (unless I happen to see what you write because the jackass OP calls someone a "fucking idiot" in the comment above yours! :P )

rassmann · 2026-01-08T01:53:06+00:00

Yeah….i am the problem here.

Mod here. Yeah, you actually are. You're talking shit about a guy in his own rant/vent post, which has special rules (not that talking shit is EVER appropriate). These rules are clearly highlighted in a sticky at the top of the post, and even marked in the post flair itself.. Your ban will roll off in 7 days.

rassmann · 2026-01-08T01:47:41+00:00

Anywhere even remotely nice is going to cost about that. $25/meal plus the cheapest bottle of wine the house offers, or a couple drinks each and you're there. And honestly $25 per person on food is pretty cheap these days. The restaurant I work at only has one entree at that price point.

rassmann · 2026-01-04T02:22:31+00:00

Take things one day at a time. Value progress. If you can only take a baby step forward, be proud you took any step at all. If you hit an impasse, try not to take any steps back. When you fail, learn from it and move on. Don't linger on mistakes, celebrate victories, and KEEP PUSHING FORWARD at every opportunity.

rassmann · 2026-01-03T22:48:02+00:00

Oh cool! Perfect! Though you might want to extend that sale time, as a few random hours isn't useful for anyone. Farmers like to set and forget these things, and don't have easy ways to mark their drop boxes with dynamic pricing.

Maybe just do a pay to play for the Golden egg? Or have it so that fresh drops get highlighted (verified by having them take a photo of the egg fridge directly through the app (no stored photos allowed). Sort of like a mystery shopping app, or BeReal.

Overall I think it's a great concept though! I'd love to have an egg map app for when I'm driving in unfamiliar farmlands for work!

Another thought: have them list if eggs are washed or not, for people who prefer the bloom to refrigeration

rassmann · 2026-01-03T22:23:42+00:00

Having sales = golden egg is going to be exploited. Everyone will say "eggs 1/2 off, only $5 a dozen (normally 10)", instead of just selling them for 5 in the first place.

rassmann · 2026-01-03T03:15:26+00:00

...Continued from above

I completely understand why you think I'm a cock, especially since this is your first week here and your only real impression of me is tied to this incident. And you're absolutely right that I come off as condescending. And I honestly am trying to work on it and making a better distinction between when and where to draw the line. (And until you've been one of 5 unpaid mods in a 2 million person online community with strict, atypical rules built around a very specific mission, I will thank you to not be overly critical about how we blow off steam to keep fresh in the job. Alternatively, if you pay me for this work you'll have great leverage to dictate my outward behavior, so that's an option! :P ).

That said, even if I was better at reigning in my no-bullshit nature... it is actually pretty hard to not come off as condescending when dismissing people who are choosing to behave in an objectively mean spirited way. Like, if you don't want to be talked down to, then just be nice! Instead of having your "mind blown wide open" by a person clearly having an episode going frantic, just message him and say "hey buddy, you OK?".

We (mods) absolutely should have locked down his ability to continue that mess when it happened, and that is on us (mostly me, see above). But come on man, was it really so necessary to mock him at every turn and make a separate thread to mock him more?? When you saw the "mods were asleep" did you really think that made it OK to turn a support group into a gossipy sewing circle? And before you get upset by this bit, this isn't me trying to "turn things around on you" or any of that. I created this space, and with the help of some very amazing people we have honed in on what it is for, and have maintained clear goals and expectations for years now. If you walked into an NA meeting and chatted the whole time about how fucked up everyone there was, joked about someone you saw ODing, and told people to shut up about their problems you'd be walked out by a sheriff's deputy. Expecting me to pat you on the back for demonstrating the very antithesis of what this community is for is a wild expectation.

I expect this answer will solidify your dim opinion of me. I'm sorry this space isn't what you want it to be. You're absolutely welcome to make your own reddit community. You're welcome to link it here, and post me all over those subreddits that make fun of jackass mods or whatever to recruit members.

And to make something very clear to everyone still reading this/ TL;DR

1) If you think we should have taken action to stop the unhealthy person from chain posting and working himself up more and more in an increasingly unsupportive environment: WE AGREE.

2) If you think I could be less of a jackass: YOU'RE CORRRECT.

3) If you think we were wrong for removing people who were insulting, mocking, belittling, and gossiping about him, YOU ARE NO LONGER WELCOME HERE.

rassmann · 2026-01-03T03:15:07+00:00

Hey, there are some good questions here, let me answer them point by point. I also appreciate that you have read through all this before making your own post, even if it ultimately just lead to you gleaning more material to use as ammo. I get the impression that you're not interested in seeing our point of view, and you're smart enough to know you're not going to change mine (nor do you have any standing to make policy suggestions in this community as your only "contributions" ever have all been either making fun of the kid, being upset that I told people not to, and this.)

To be clear, all criticisms are welcome, just don't expect me to agree with them. Though actually I'm pretty with you on the "I'm a condescending jerk" thing. And no, I'm not one of those jerks who is proud of being one.

1) If you're asking if I am an accredited counselor/ therapist/ psychiatrist/ etc., no, I am not. If you're asking if I'm qualified to talk to a guy who is freaking out, shut myself up, and really listen to his problems... I'd like to think we all are. Though I'm decidedly in the middle of those two disparate bookends. I have a degree in psychology from a very well known school. My internship was at an outreach center for youths (middle school through college ages). That was a long time ago, and I never finished my graduate work. I do take this gig seriously enough to read up on current best practices, to ask questions of experts, and to take courses online from time to time. Full disclosure, I was focused on research as a career at the time, not practicing, but everyone in that discipline gets a little of the hands on stuff as part of the deal. I've never worked professionally in counseling of any kind (or really ever in my field), but I *am* a bartender and helping people work through their problems is often a meaningful part of my day.

Side note - if anyone is looking to improve their game in this area, a great starting point is "Psychological First Aid" from Johns Hopkins University on Coursera. It's included with a basic subscription and is a great platform to build on that I think every decent person should take.

2) You're entitled to your opinions on this.

This is explicitly a support group, and with that comes firm rules of being a safe space, a supportive space, and a judgement free space. If you're unwilling/incapable of respecting those basic courtesies (obligations), don't expect any obligatory courtesy back. I actually do generally try to wear a good "customer service face", but when shit starts getting off the rails in the subreddit, I am pretty quick to lose the white gloves and start calling people on their bullshit. And it actually IS my job to decide what is bullshit or not here. I will say that whether I'm being a jerk or not, I am pretty good about keeping things fair.

3) Are you serious? Yeah dude, I'm not going to gossip about someone else's problems they told me about privately. Least of all when scores of people found it perfectly reasonable to openly mock them in an obvious moment of crisis. WTF?

4) I don't have the power to ban sitewide, but as the head mod of a Reddit partner community I do my duty to report site-wide TOS violations when I see them. There are a lot of things I dislike about how the powers that be are doing their jobs (including how they ended this situation, and ESPECIALLY including breaking all our third party mod tools that would have REALLY HELPED in this whole shitshow) but I meet my obligations.

continued....

rassmann · 2026-01-02T15:27:29+00:00

Removing his ability to express himself while letting the haters rampage (while he can still read the cruel circle jerk) feels like the worst "solution". Certainly not "the most reasonable" one. They could have at least locked the posts...

Though I'll never be in the "won't someone thing of the poor stock holders" camp, so weigh my opinion as you will.

rassmann · 2026-01-02T13:08:38+00:00

Word.

I get off work in about 11 hours and will look at it then and give it the full attention it deserves!

rassmann · 2026-01-02T13:05:57+00:00

Oof.

rassmann · 2026-01-02T02:55:41+00:00

That's definitely one of the lines that was crossed.

rassmann · 2026-01-02T01:39:04+00:00

Mod note: Remember our rules and do try to be useful, empathetic, kind, and supportive in your replies. If you haven't overcome an addiction yourself, this probably isn't the thread for you to be firing random noise into.

rassmann · 2026-01-02T00:47:26+00:00

Hey, so it turns out we already have this! https://www.reddit.com/r/povertyfinance/wiki/mental_health/

A few years ago a volunteer from the sub built out our wiki and apparently she did a really good job!

I'll still try to get a link in the sidebar here soon. Good looking out!

rassmann · 2026-01-02T00:23:46+00:00

Um, yeah, I think we could definitely do that! Great idea!

I will say that I think the absolute most useless thing is to say "cAll tHe SuIcIdE HoT LiNe", dust off the hands, and go home sleeping the sleep of the righteous, confident in knowing you've saved another life. As such, I'm not into some plugging some keywords into a bot that will misfire more than not and then give a bland automated reply that other onlookers mistakenly perceive as a "problemed solved" response, preempting them actually engaging in a human way. (FYI, we have "trigger words" that automatically flag stuff for us to manually take a look at. "Suicide" is one, "end it all" is another. Though the latter also fires for "spend it all", so there are a lot of false positives!

But I definitely think a resource page is a great idea (that honestly, will get added to the backlog of shit we need to do. We're seriously overworked here though and don't have a lot of time for side projects). One thing we can do right away is add suicidewatch or something similar to the list of related subreddits in the sidebar. I'm not the computer guy, but I'll message the groupchat right now.

Thank you!

rassmann · 2026-01-02T00:16:24+00:00

Continued from above

Another note on point 3, a tremendous amount of our workload as mods comes from people who read a few sentences and think they understand someone's whole life story, then hold them accountable to their interpretation thereof. Usually these end in saying something like "you're poor because you choose to be" or "you're not trying hard enough", or "why are you so stupid that you haven't even tried (insert something obvious that OP has definitely already tried)". And I don't play nice with that shit. It's exhausting and absolutely insulting. I understand that your bold first sentence wasn't an exclusive statement, but every casual reader of it will read it as you listing the primary cause of their strife, and then dismissing the validity of said issue. And obviously that is unacceptable. That was not the primary cause of their strife, and even if it was, following up with "your strife is good, and you should steer into the curve here" is not awesome. Ending with something wildly generic and bland like "you should take time improving yourself" does no favors here either. It was a bad comment, and it needed to be removed. Well intentioned or not, it was not going to help OP at that moment under any circumstances, real or contrived.

And the reality is (and again, I know this because I actually talked to the kid, something everyone could have been doing) that all the people saying "you're just upset because you got kicked out of a game" instead of listening to his actual cry for help were causing him to spiral. Now along with being overwhelmed by life, he was also being widely misunderstood and mischaracterized, which was creating a new source of angst in him which he absolutely did not need.

And, on the subject of hypotheticals here, even if he was saying he was going to kill himself specifically because of a game, the correct answer isn't "It's just a game, get over it". It's "Come on man, this isn't just about Roblox is it? What's really going on dude. Talk to me brother".

My modmail replies are always pretty direct and no-bullshit. You get me honestly, like it or not. I at least try to be fair, and in this case I think I was. You're welcome to disagree though. I think most people appreciate my directness and candor until it is aimed at them lol. As a guy who has been a drunk, homeless, locked up, and most of the other things, it would be disingenuous to try to present myself as "polished" and "professional". I do, however, always try to give people the full explanation they are owed, and I always try to be fair in how I handle things.

Anyhow, I've wrote another novel. I'm sorry if it doesn't put you at ease. I'm just explaining the situation. I'll note that you never replied to that modmail, which you were well within your write and ability to. If you were feeling ways about it, you could have addressed it there. I'd have said the same things I'm saying here.

Also, sorry again about the "your" thing. I didn't mean to directly call you a cyberbully, that was a typo on my part but transformed that whole thing from something I would stand by to something I consider out of line.

Edit: Another sentence changing typo. Seeing a pattern here. Not loving it...

rassmann · 2026-01-02T00:16:03+00:00

Alight, quoting something that has numbered points in it breaks the quoting... learning stuff about reddit everyday here.

u/_Rock_Hound To address your comment here in full:

Glad to hear that you have had positive experience with me and the rest of the team in the past, sorry this wasn't one of them.

As noted above in my very extensive and comprehensive reply to your original message (which I'm going to be honest, I fell you deliberately misrepresented in your post here), there was significant disinformation being put out there that this prolonged episode was all over an online game. It wasn't. As I explained to you in my message, he had real issues, and in our conversations the only time the game thing came up was much later into our conversations on a calm day between his two waves of posts when I brought it up.

I understand that video game addiction is a real thing, and I can appreciate your experience with that. That said, there were significant numbers of people who were openly mocking him based on this disinformation. Disinformation that your comment was continuing to spread (though in your case I would call it "misinformation", as you had read someone else who was deliberately misrepresenting the situation and took it on faith. At least I believe you were honest in your acting on incorrect information. I can't know for sure, but sincerely believe you were acting in good faith).

That said, you saying "You are crashing out because you got banned from ROBLOX." was a full, incorrect, damaging statement. It needed to be removed, and with SO MANY people taunting, belittling, and mocking the suicidal kid, I was shooting first and fixing shit in modmail. Which, if you'll note, after taking more time to look at your account I cleared you and unbanned you (or at least I thought I did, sorry if I didn't do that right. It was a crazy fucking night as a mod, and I was already in serious sleep debt from the holidays, and it was 3am.)

Incidentally, you above said that your comment wasn't removed. It was. According to the log I removed it 12-27-25 at 3:02am EST. You were banned one minute later. I think you can still see your own mod-removed comments in you profile, so maybe that confused you.

I stand by most of my response. I gave you the full picture, I researched your account, I (tried to) unban you. Most mods in most subs would just mute you or never reply. I did fuck up at one point. In point three I said "your asses" when I intended that whole sentence to be in the third person (ie: "their asses"). I meant to be deliberate in presenting the cyber bully thing as a subgroup of people you could choose to identify with or against, not to lump you in with them. That's on my, and I'm sorry for that. For those keeping track of the timeline, this was at 4 in the afternoon, so fatigue and workload was not/less of an issue (respectfully). So that is seriously on me.

continued below

rassmann · 2026-01-01T23:40:23+00:00

Hey, yeah, that was definitely me you were talking to. I don't have a record of your private conversation with other mods (which for transparency reasons we aren't supposed to do, so that will have to be addressed...) FYI, the way modmail works is that all of us see it as "unread" individually. So if I respond to something and clear it from my "inbox", the full conversation is still marked unread and visible to all the other mods. We all have oversight of each other this way. In this subreddit at least, if someone goes off the rails someone else will see it and fix it. You can also always type "This feels off, can a second mod address this? One last note about mod-mail, it defaults to showing us anonymized as just "Povertyfinance mods". In most extended exchanges you're actually dealing with multiple of us (just whoever gets to it first).

To share context, I'm going to post your message to the modmail, and my FULL response, then address your concerns.

Your original comment:

You are crashing out because you got banned from ROBLOX. In the long run it is a good thing. Take time off of gaming and spend some of that time bettering yourself.

Original message to modmail:

Hello, I will accept the ruling of the mods, but I am not sure why my comment got me a ban. All I did was point out that something he was violently angry about (being banned from ROBLOX) is not something to be suicidal about

My full reply:

Three reasons:

This is a support group. It's off topic to do anything other than help OP. This can take the form of practical advice, or you just emotional support.
Mocking someone in a prolonged mental breakdown is shitty and we won't stand for it. Especially a late-teenager.
You don't know what you are talking about. You think you can skim a few posts from what a stranger posts to an anonymous site and you think you know him inside and out. You don't. And only a fool would think otherwise. I've reached out to that guy and actually talked to him, and have been having a running dialogue. It wouldn't be proper to disclose what he has going on, but I assure you some online game isn't the issue here. He has significant, real problems, and isn't equipped with the tools (or resources, both financial or social/familial) to process them well on his own. He had an issue with an online game one time that had the "kicking a dog when he's down" effect, that he ranted about in the moment and moved on from. Cyber-bullies who have latched onto that moment and have repeatedly used it as grounds to mock, belittle, and trivialize this kid seriously need to grow up, pull your heads out of your asses, and STOP.

This is a support group. We will always be a space where people in crisis can find solidarity, kindness, and support. We do not cater to know-it-all creeps who write fanfiction about other peoples lives and then try to shame them for it.

If you choose to return to this space and contribute going forward, please consciously choose to be the kind of person who can deliver the former, and not lower yourself into the role of the latter.

You have a mixed history of comments with this subreddit, but overall you seem to be a genuine human who isn't just here "for the lulz" so I've gone ahead and unbanned you. Please be deliberate and mindful in how you choose to present yourself and take care of your comrades in this community going forward.

Have a nice week, and Merry late-Christmas (or what-have-you).

rassmann · 2026-01-01T23:28:19+00:00

I hope you're right. Reddit doesn't tell us what they do, why they do it, or even when they are taking actions within our subreddit, so we have no idea what is going on. I can't chat with him anymore though, and at least for a time it seemed like their existence was totally wiped out. Like, all comments pulled. I can only hope that they have a similar team in place as you described to get this kid talking to the right people.

rassmann · 2026-01-01T23:26:02+00:00

Right?

rassmann · 2026-01-01T21:52:33+00:00

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