Have gofundme and similar sites jumped the shark?
 

Increasingly I am running into gofundme requests for seemingly personal stuff that one would expect to be taken care of by one's own self or family.

At first it started with fundraising for catastrophic health events. But now it's gone into stuff that doesn't fit the definition of tragedy or extreme need.

A couple recently have been "I'm poor and need some extra help paying my bills." It's public or almost-public begging.

Is there anything wrong with this? Oh, I don't know. There's nothing inherently wrong with asking friends and family for financial assistance. But traditionally this was done privately, person-to-person. Not publicly announced in an impersonal fashion.

I'm a little jaded about the whole thing. For example, I'm acquainted with a real-deal severe tragedy that happened to a friend. Some family members started one of these fundraising pages for my friend, and it turns out in the end that the family members pocketed most of the money. This is not generally known. The friend told me. And have also run into a similar situation involving another friend of a friend.

Maybe this is a sign of an increasingly fractured society. Old social networks are failing, so new social networks--people hope--will take their place. Buoyed by stories from others that "I got five thousand dollars by pleading my case!" Whereas people in the past might have approached a church charity, they aren't religious, or the churches aren't interested.

In some cases these requests may reflect real isolation and desperation. And that's sad too. So do I part with a few dollars, for someone whom I don't know or met twice in high school decades ago?

There's also the issue of how momentum can build for one effort, but for another person in a similar situation from the same social group, there is little momentum. Sometimes our dollars are just a raising of the hand to say "I hear you and I wanted to know that I support you."

It used to be that when you thought of donating to charity, you thought of non-profit charities or churches. Now it's much more diverse. Micro-charity.

If they think it's worth it to sacrifice some dignity doing it, let them go for it.