That paragraph sounds awful. No, I don't think that. I'll be lazy and point to John Scalzi I guess: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

I don't think that individual advice is useless. I'm skeptical that certain people are giving useful advice. Useful here involves a criterion of novelty. Giving someone advice they have heard 1000 times is not helpful. I guess necessary but not sufficient is a good description of personal effort in this context.

Working three jobs doesn't leave a lot of time to get educated and then use that education to post large amounts of philosophical text on a Reddit like rationalist site. And being poor and black in the real world isn't the optimal condition for creating meat space walled gardens.

As far as individual action, its my opinion that individual charity is helpful but not sufficient. And often comes with coercion I don't approve of. Religious charity would be a good example here. Strings attached? More like ropes.

For the second thing you quoted, I wouldn't say that I am the most productive person in helping the less fortunate. Although that's somewhat for psychological and/or financial reasons. This is orthogonal to the efficacy of certain strategies to promote social change. Just because I don't turn on the faucet doesn't mean that if I did water wouldn't come out.