2022: How to Get Help Boosting Your Social Media Shares from Me

Updated Thursday May 4, 2023: Here is the new page with the same information as my original Social Media Policy below, but with less rage and more organization. Going forward that is my new Social Media Policy page, and it supersedes everything below. And it will be updated when people behave like haters.

NO BOOSTS FOR ANY REASON UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

Once a week I'll do a #MutualAidThread marked #MABCrowdfund.  If I follow you it'll mean I have vetted you. People I follow can post there starting on Sundays. People I have not followed can post on Mondays IF they follow the rules.

I might post people in that thread. I might not. If you are an asshole at any time I will hide your fundraiser.

If you don't follow me you can  retweet the thread and the person IN the thread with the lowest retweets. I'll add those people to my list of profiles to brose ONE day a week.  No promises.

I'll help completely at my discretion. Except for people who ask.

EVERYONE WHO ASKS FOR A BOOST THAT IS NOT A CLOSE FRIEND WILL BE MINIMUM MUTED BUT LIKELY BLOCKED.

Until further notice.

Because even when I am literally desperate myself and trying not to die most of you STILL CANNOT MANAGE COMMON COURTESY.

IF the day comes that people stop treating me like their personal PR slave? I'll start retweeting for people again.

Until then, any offer of free help below this paragraph  is rescinded. But my rules like DO NOT SEND ME  LABOR still apply.

Really this should be about how to get help boosting from anyone, but I'm too tired. Suffice to to say,

• checking to see if a person is okay, and able to help,
• checking to see if they have a policy or guidelines or assigned assistant

before asking?

Is strongly advised.

Your community leaders are not pack mules, assigned to do the labor of the world, especially if they are Black women like myself.

Most of us don't need anyone to kiss our asses to get a retweet, despite the rumors going around the web. What we do require is to be treated like human beings who are doing a free favor for people that often amounts to 20- to 40 hours a week of unpaid labor that we do for the love of our community.

The more are abused during this process, the more they stop helping people to preserve their own mental help. I really don't want to become one of those people and these rules have really helped.

These are the rules for mutuals on Twitter and they apply on every other social platform as well.

That means DM me a tweet, not your GoFundMe (gfm) link. I am a chronically ill person like most of the people I serve. I don't have the energy to write a tweet for 75 people a day. And I can't do it for you "just this one time" because if I do it for you, then I have to do it for everyone. Or I'm not treating incoming requests equally.

You may notice that there are days I create a thread to help someone, but those are people that I choose at random, or friends who I may not necessarily owe favors too, but who have somehow earned my help, mainly by just being who they are.

It's not a privilege that can currently be bought. At least not until I find a way to do it that doesn't corrupt the process or overload me with too much work.

As community leaders, we decide how and whether and who we can  help.

So it is in your best interest to make it really easy for us to say yes to your request, because trust me, there isn't enough time in the world to say yes to everyone.

We are forced by the constraints of time and resources to say no to some requests, even if we were to work every waking hour.

We are people. Not machines. Not "accounts."

We need rest, lunch breaks, time to work our whole ass other jobs.

So we all have to draw the line somewhere. The easier you make it for us the more likely we are to say yes, and speaking for myself, the more likely my boost assist team is likely to assist, as I only ask them to help me with posts that comply with my guidelines.

The reasons we might not be able to help aren't always personal. For me, most of the time it's that you didn't pass my vetting process or you did something I have specifically asked people not to do. Helping you usually make it harder for me and also isn't fair to the people who did as I asked.

If you don't know us, we might not feel comfortable helping. We might not have the energy to vet your information, check that you are who you say you are, and not just running a scam to get people to give you money.

And our community is that important to us, we don't want them to get ripped off because we told them to be generous. So please be mindful that some of these requests aren't just for my convenience, they're to protect or make it easier for other people to help as well.

Here are my rules for strangers who need urgent boost, including non-mutual social media connections

DO: Share a Tweet via DM on Twitter if we are Mutuals

I will happily reshare a tweet. Again, I do not take requests to write threads or tweets for people.

And I run several projects that have their own handles. So if you're lucky? You might get a LOT of retweets from playing by the rules.

DO NOT: TAG ME FOR BOOSTS

EVER. Period.

I allowed people do that in the past, and they abused me terribly. That's over. About three people are allowed to tag me to ask for labor.

None of them are you. It is the number one reason I skip/mute/block people.

I have brain fog and other cognitive/ neurodivergent/ other issues that cannot deal with being tagged thousands of times a week as a way to take in projects or information that needs to be acted upon.

Please don't. It will be the last tweet of yours that I see, whether that means muting your or blocking you.

DO: Nudge me gently by DM a week later if you need more help.

I'll un-retweet and re-retweet your same tweet again after a week ONCE.

No, I cannot do it more than that. My goal is to one day be able to help all people who ask for it, on the day they ask.

For that I'll need to have at least one assistant to queue them up for me after I review. The faster I get to having most people comply with my guidelines, the more people I can help. For example, once I put these up I went to being able to help a max of 25 people a day to being able to help up to 75 people a day.

DO NOT send me to your pinned OR expect/ask me to do any other additional labor

It bears repeating that I can't write your thread. Not for free. Because no matter how many times I say it, people will ask.

NO, I can't go get your tweet from where you pinned it on your profile. Dozens of people ask me to do that per day. It adds up to time I could have been helping more people who could have taken five extra seconds to share a tweet with me.

So please, send it where and how I ask you.

This goes for friends, acquaintances, princes, duchesses, strangers, colleagues, unicorns, everyone.

If I did labor for every person I could help, I would be back to helping lee than 25 people during the amount of energy I have, not 75-100 some days.

No. I'm not doing that. I will skip you so I can help more people get help.

DO: Check my pinned thread for recent updates

You want a favor that brands would pay me cash for? Then YOU do the labor.

You will get helped faster anyway. I sometimes cannot physically do the labor, it's not simply a preference. Having to stop and tell you these rules or ask you if you read them is again taking up time I could be using to help someone.

And my help works. Because I have proven to my community that they can trust me, and brought people together who WANT to help people.

How will you know if I can't do extra labor? You should really just assume that means always. I am never not disabled. I am never not chronically ill. But there sre times when things are worse than usual, so it make take me longer to get back to you.

Normally you can tell, again, from my pinned tweet.

For example: if my pinned tweet is about  fundraising for myself, I'm in a state bad enough where I can't help you. Weird that I have to state that, but apparently that's not obvious to some, despite the fact that crowdfunding for oneself is a full time job.

And I only fundraise for myself if I have no other options. I must be  flaring or recently in the hospital or the cancer is back.

That limits my daily activities - and sadly this happens several times a year.

But the person you should contact instead, who leads my Mutual Aid Booster team while I'm away will also be listed in that pinned tweet.

When in doubt, add the hashtag #MABCrowdfund and I'll make sure someone gets to you first. Please don't use the hashtag AND DM me.

It will just get your tweet un-tweeted while four people check with each other to see who vetted the tweet. And then possibly never again, which is what happens when someone screws up our process.

Also I'm also struggling, just less than you.

I'm not a damn bank. Being a verified user of several platforms does not give you an automatic revenue stream.

Even when I'm not broke, I have kids to feed.  Stop asking me for money.