Losing Users in the Short Term, Protecting Fairness in the Long Term: Why KangAi Commune Has Always Kept a One-Year Observation Period

From the very beginning, KangAi Commune understood that the hardest thing about mutual aid is not how many people you can recruit, but whether it can keep running over the long term.

Because the timescale is so long. A rule set today may look entirely fine, yet produce a completely different result a few years later. Once the rules are designed wrongly, the debt incurred early on will sooner or later have to be repaid.

For example, at its founding, KangAi Commune set a one-year observation period for most of its health-based mutual-aid groups, and it has not been touched in all the years since.

That rule put enormous pressure on us.

After other mutual-aid platforms were founded, their waiting periods were only one month, three months, or at most six months, while ours was a full year. Side by side, we looked thoroughly uncompetitive. Large numbers of members left KangAi Commune to join other mutual-aid schemes. Internally, we certainly discussed whether to shorten the observation period.

In the end, we did not change it.

The reason is simple. Online mutual aid works on a post-payment model; at the point of joining, it relies mainly on health disclosure, and it is impossible to require everyone to undergo a medical examination. If the observation period were too short, there would be no way to prevent someone who already feels unwell, or who has already shown signs of illness, from joining the mutual aid.

If such people keep increasing, the cost ultimately falls on those who joined while healthy and faithfully kept going for many years.

That would be unfair to them.

For mutual aid to exist over the long term, a crucial precondition is that people join in roughly comparable circumstances. We cannot eliminate adverse selection entirely, but we must at least reduce it as far as possible through the rules. A one-year observation period is long, and it certainly keeps some people out — but it also protects those who keep to the covenant over the long term.

Looking back now, we think that holding our ground and not changing it may have been right. (Though we are not certain, because it also extinguished many people’s enthusiasm for joining.)

There are in fact many similar provisions; much of what people find hard to understand reflects our thinking about long-term operation.

After all these years of running KangAi Commune, one thing has sunk in more and more deeply: some rules look very unfriendly in the short term and may even cost you a great many users, but if they are necessary for long-term operation, they cannot be lightly changed because of immediate pressure.

Thinking in terms of a decade or more is different from thinking in terms of one or two years.

Some things look at the time like we were the ones losing out; only when enough time has passed and we look back do we realize that this was precisely the price long-termism has to pay — though the price is sometimes painful.