The “Death Spiral” Is Not the Fate of Online Mutual Aid — But Avoiding It Is Why KangAi Commune Is So Complex

Some argue that online mutual aid must eventually fall into a “death spiral”: as mutual-aid events increase, participants’ cost-sharing burden rises; healthy, low-risk people gradually withdraw; the average risk of those who remain keeps rising; contributions keep climbing, eventually driving more people out, and the platform becomes unsustainable.

The logic sounds complete, but it rests on an important premise: everyone is crammed into the same mutual-aid group, and the rules lack adjustment and constraint.

Designed that way, the death spiral is certainly worth guarding against. But the question is: why must online mutual aid be designed that way?

From the very beginning of its institutional design, KangAi Commune did not simply put all members into one giant community. Instead, it created dozens of different mutual-aid groups based on factors such as age, protection responsibility, joining conditions and scope of mutual aid. Each group has relatively independent and clearly defined joining conditions, mutual-aid conditions and cost-sharing rules.

An important purpose of that design is to stratify and isolate risk.

People of different ages, different health conditions and different protection needs inherently have different risk profiles. If they are placed together indiscriminately, obvious cost differences easily emerge between low-risk and high-risk members; but by subdividing into multiple mutual-aid groups, people with relatively similar risk profiles can take part in mutual aid under corresponding rules.

At the same time, KangAi Commune imposes rule-based constraints on joining conditions, waiting periods, health requirements, mutual-aid responsibilities and eligibility — essentially also to reduce adverse selection: a person must not wait until their risk is already highly certain and then enter the mutual-aid group demanding that other members share the burden.

So what truly decides whether online mutual aid can run over the long term is not the simple question “is there a death spiral,” but three more practical questions:

1. Has risk been reasonably classified?

2. Can the joining rules effectively control adverse selection?

3. Can the mutual-aid cost borne by members be kept within an acceptable range over the long term?

If these questions are handled poorly, any mutual-aid mechanism may run into trouble; but if risk is continuously controlled through institutional design, one cannot simply assert that a death spiral is bound to occur.

One might even say that KangAi Commune’s dozens of mutual-aid groups look far more complex than “everyone in one plan,” but that complexity is precisely where its value lies: trading complex rules for a stable risk structure.

Online mutual aid is of course not inherently sustainable; it requires refined institutional design, long-term data observation and continuous rule adjustment. But equally, online mutual aid is by no means inherently unsustainable.

The “death spiral” reveals a risk that must be guarded against, not an unalterable outcome.

To take a risk that may occur and call it the inevitable fate of a model is itself to mistake a problem of risk management for a problem of destiny.

And what KangAi Commune has been doing all these years — continuously subdividing mutual-aid groups, refining joining conditions and mutual-aid rules, and reviewing cases strictly — comes down to one thing:

It is not assuming the death spiral does not exist, but doing everything in the institutional design to keep it from happening.