Found a post tonight on reddit from a kid just out of high school, put out by his parents, being shipped across Massachusetts with nowhere to land. Nine comments, most of them asking him to explain himself before they’d help. I had an outfit in Greenfield in my head already, one I’ve driven past a hundred times, and I was most of the way to typing their number into a reply.
It would have been useless. Massachusetts routes homelessness services by region, and that agency covers the four western counties. He was landing a hundred miles east, different territory, different nonprofit. He calls that number, gets told he’s in the wrong catchment, and burns a day he doesn’t have believing he had a lead. Worse than saying nothing. Ten more minutes of looking turned up the right one — a young-adult program for exactly his age that covers case management and money toward first and deposit, not just a bed. That last part is what actually ends the problem instead of postponing it. Posted it and moved on.
Then I got ambitious. I’ve got leftover capacity on a subscription I already pay for and it evaporates most cycles, so why not point it at that subreddit and get told when somebody asks a question I can actually answer. Poll the sub, filter locally for whether the post names a place — that one test does most of the work, since “someone is homeless” isn’t signal on a subreddit about being homeless — and only spend the expensive step on what survives. The thing detects. It does not answer. A bot that auto-replies at people in crisis is worse than no bot and would get me banned inside a week, correctly.
I’m going to pursue this idea.