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#Reddxit Recap: FDS Ghosts, Blocks & Deletes Our Ex, As is Our Brand
34 Plays3 years ago
One month since FDS left our scrote ex Reddit in the dust, The Queens analyze how the fallout paralleled leaving an abusive relationship, acknowledge common user criticisms, provide additional insight on the behind the scenes struggles, and discuss what FDS is doing to solve them going forward.
Part 2 on Patreon on Friday, featuring insight into FDS' future.
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Transcript
Savannah's Return and Podcast Updates
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back Savannah.
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey everyone.
00:00:01
Speaker
It's good to be back.
00:00:03
Speaker
We missed you a lot.
00:00:05
Speaker
I missed you so much.
00:00:06
Speaker
I miss you too.
00:00:07
Speaker
And I missed all of you too, but it seems like there are a lot of exciting stuff that has been developing in my absence.
00:00:14
Speaker
So tell me more ladies.
00:00:15
Speaker
Yeah, honestly, a lot has changed since you were gone.
00:00:17
Speaker
The main thing that we have now is we now have twice-monthly War Room, which is an idea we got from our book club on our Patreon, where women would ask me questions, asking me a question about a problem, and then as a group, we'd all strategize to solve that problem, right?
00:00:35
Speaker
So we decided to make it official.
00:00:37
Speaker
This is now a twice-monthly thing on the Queen Shit tier.
00:00:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:40
Speaker
In addition to all of the great bonus content, we have over 60 plus episodes of bonus content and we release new bonus content every Friday.
00:00:48
Speaker
We have some extra long interviews with our guests that are exclusively on our Patreon, some roasts of the media, some exclusive strategy content, and you'll get more live commentary and real-time commentary on current events, as well as you can submit a story to be read on our podcast.
00:01:06
Speaker
The roast is gross.
Subreddit Closure Reactions and Fallout
00:01:07
Speaker
That's our bread and butter.
00:01:08
Speaker
Let's be real here.
00:01:08
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:01:10
Speaker
If you have a story of a man in your life who you just want us to drag for absolute filth on the podcast, submit it via our roast scrote on our Patreon.
00:01:17
Speaker
The FDS barbecue is not just for summer.
00:01:20
Speaker
It's all year round.
00:01:21
Speaker
It's a year round barbecue.
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, I love that.
00:01:25
Speaker
And you can chat with us live on the Discord.
00:01:27
Speaker
We're constantly on the Discord getting more ideas for shows and topic bases from our Patreon subscribers.
00:01:33
Speaker
So thank you to those who are participating because we love actually live chatting with everybody.
00:01:36
Speaker
It's a growing Discord as well.
00:01:38
Speaker
So if you have an interest and want a separate channel for it, it will happen straight away.
00:01:43
Speaker
So we have a pet channel, we have a cooking channel, we have a fashion channel, any sort of channel that you want.
00:01:50
Speaker
If you're in the Discord and you request it, it will happen straight away.
00:01:53
Speaker
Shout out to Ro for being really on top of that, by the way, because every time someone's like, can we have a channel for pets?
00:01:58
Speaker
Within five minutes, Ro is like, boom, pets channel, done.
00:02:03
Speaker
Immediately.
00:02:04
Speaker
Love it.
00:02:04
Speaker
The other thing you'll get is a Patreon exclusive badge for website access.
00:02:08
Speaker
So you'll get exclusives on our website as well if you sign up for our Patreon.
00:02:13
Speaker
And if you're a man who's a fan of FDS, we will permit you to talk to us, but only on our Scroat Strike Back tier.
00:02:19
Speaker
If you want to submit a debate question, you want to argue with us, if you have your own dating question that you want the queens to help you solve and give you more perspective, you can submit your question via our Scroats Strike Back tier on Patreon.
00:02:31
Speaker
That's patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy.
00:02:35
Speaker
And on to the main show.
00:02:42
Speaker
What's up, queens?
00:02:43
Speaker
Welcome to the Female Dating Strategy Podcast, the meanest female-only podcast on the internet.
00:02:47
Speaker
I'm Ro.
00:02:48
Speaker
I'm Savannah.
00:02:50
Speaker
And I'm Lilith.
00:02:50
Speaker
And yay, Savannah's back.
00:02:52
Speaker
The return of Savannah.
00:02:54
Speaker
Hey.
00:02:55
Speaker
Hey.
00:02:56
Speaker
Just in time.
00:02:59
Speaker
Just in time for the drama to go down.
00:03:02
Speaker
For the drama to go down.
00:03:03
Speaker
Because now we're doing, I guess it's going to be 30 days or so by the time we release this episode.
00:03:08
Speaker
A recap of the past 30 days.
00:03:09
Speaker
It's been 30 days.
00:03:11
Speaker
It feels like ages.
00:03:12
Speaker
I don't know if it's just me.
00:03:14
Speaker
It feels like it's been an eternity since we shut down the subreddit.
00:03:16
Speaker
It feels like it's been a while, yeah.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah, we set it down somewhere around April 27th when our last episode came out.
00:03:23
Speaker
Yeah, April 27th.
00:03:24
Speaker
Yeah, so when this comes out, it'll be around May 25th.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah, and we went out to Tupac, so...
00:03:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:31
Speaker
Shout out to Tupac.
00:03:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:34
Speaker
So I thought this would be a great episode to address a lot of the questions and concerns and criticisms and comments that we were getting from lovers of FDS about why we shut down the subreddit and then also get our input on like the reaction because the reaction was pretty mixed.
00:03:50
Speaker
And some of the reaction we thought we obviously thought was pretty toxic and unhelpful, but other ones was like a lot of people seem to be pretty supportive of the move.
00:03:57
Speaker
But I think giving a little bit more context about why we're doing it and what the benefits are, we think to both ourselves and obviously the community is what we're going to do.
00:04:05
Speaker
So this is like basically a recap episode slash pitch episode about Brexit.
00:04:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:10
Speaker
Well, 30 days after Brexit, where are we now?
00:04:12
Speaker
Where are we now?
00:04:13
Speaker
Okay.
00:04:13
Speaker
So I think we should start with like the fallout from when we closed the subreddit.
00:04:19
Speaker
So how I wanted to frame this, because I really think that it's important to kind of see how the reaction in a lot of ways mirrors what women go through when they try to leave a toxic relationship.
00:04:30
Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
00:04:31
Speaker
And I'm not accusing anyone in our audience, especially the ones that were like really antagonistic of being like flying monkey or an abuser or like an abuse sympathizer.
00:04:39
Speaker
But I am saying that like I felt as we were starting to defend ourselves and like why we had to make the move, a lot of the narrative seemed very similar.
00:04:46
Speaker
Right.
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, I agree.
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that.
00:04:50
Speaker
It felt the same.
00:04:51
Speaker
Okay, so the first element in our analysis of the reaction to us leaving was, of course, the Scrotts, who immediately tried to rewrite history.
00:04:59
Speaker
Immediately rewrite the narrative.
00:05:01
Speaker
Rewrite a narrative, which I thought was frustrating and amusing, but predictable.
00:05:06
Speaker
Exactly.
00:05:06
Speaker
So we left Reddit.
00:05:08
Speaker
We produced an episode with explicit reasons why.
00:05:11
Speaker
We made posts on the website with explicit reasons why.
00:05:16
Speaker
And still, the popular narrative on Reddit was like, oh, female dating strategy got banned.
00:05:22
Speaker
And it got like 30,000 upvotes and it's like, if you go to the subreddit, you can see we're not banned.
00:05:27
Speaker
Like, it says this subreddit is private.
00:05:29
Speaker
So we weren't, it's just clearly not true and it's just like typical Scrope behaviour to rewrite the narrative even though it's blatantly false.
00:05:38
Speaker
Provably false.
00:05:40
Speaker
Or they'll say like, oh, they must have gotten a warning from admins.
00:05:43
Speaker
That's still not the same as being banned.
00:05:45
Speaker
Like, it's still not the same thing.
00:05:47
Speaker
Again, like rewriting the narrative to make themselves look less guilty because they're the reason why we went private, right?
00:05:52
Speaker
It's because they're fucking shitty and they are misogynistic and abusive to a female only space.
00:05:58
Speaker
And immediately they're like, oh, you were banned because of transphobia.
00:06:01
Speaker
Or, oh, you were banned because of misandry or something like that to make themselves look less guilty.
00:06:07
Speaker
And it's also rewriting the narrative to be their Reddit wet dream.
00:06:11
Speaker
Like they wanted the subreddit to be banned.
00:06:13
Speaker
They wish that was true and it just wasn't.
00:06:15
Speaker
So... And they've tried everything in their power to get it banned.
00:06:19
Speaker
They've been trying for years trying to get us banned.
00:06:21
Speaker
And here's why I'm glad that we went private instead of getting banned or allowing ourselves to get banned was because I don't want these motherfuckers to have the satisfaction of being like, I helped FDS get banned.
00:06:32
Speaker
banned.
00:06:32
Speaker
Like I saw all these comments being like, not ready to break out the crabs yet.
00:06:36
Speaker
Or, you know, like saying that this isn't as satisfying to them.
00:06:38
Speaker
Right.
00:06:39
Speaker
I'm like, yeah, that's right.
00:06:40
Speaker
Motherfucker.
00:06:40
Speaker
Like, I don't want this to be satisfying for you.
00:06:43
Speaker
Exactly.
00:06:43
Speaker
So yeah.
00:06:44
Speaker
And it wasn't just the Reddit's growth too.
00:06:46
Speaker
There's a lot of people that follow us on YouTube and on Twitter and that just stalk our page and stalk our podcast just to convince
00:06:52
Speaker
continuously critique it and they kept saying that we were banned and I'm like but did you listen to the podcast like it's just really confusing to me how this narrative that was like almost unilaterally coming out of people who were critical of us is that we were banned despite that clearly not being the case and you can go to the subreddit and see it's private it's wishful thinking and the biggest joke is it was the parody subs that ended up being banned yeah
00:07:19
Speaker
Addressing that, like suddenly Reddit's concerned and wants to actually address our like myriad of reports against all of these like subreddits that were just stalking and harassing our sub.
00:07:29
Speaker
There were all of these subreddits that existed solely to coordinate attacks on us and to slander us.
00:07:36
Speaker
And we've been complaining about them for the longest time.
00:07:38
Speaker
And suddenly they don't ban them until we decide to go private.
00:07:41
Speaker
Wow.
00:07:41
Speaker
Too little, too late, Reddit.
00:07:42
Speaker
Do you think we're just going to come crawling back?
00:07:44
Speaker
Fuck off.
00:07:45
Speaker
Oh, that was funny.
00:07:46
Speaker
It was actually their subreddit that they set up to troll, harass, just like Lilith said, basically to slander us.
00:07:51
Speaker
Those were the ones that got banned.
00:07:53
Speaker
Like, Female Dating Strategy Pros, that got banned the day we went private.
00:07:56
Speaker
Femdatstratprose, I think that was the one that was like the satire sub that had really extreme stuff.
00:08:02
Speaker
I think they got banned, literally.
00:08:04
Speaker
They literally got banned the day we went private.
00:08:06
Speaker
They got banned.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:08:07
Speaker
Weird.
00:08:08
Speaker
What is the point of banning them after we've gone private, right?
00:08:11
Speaker
Like when we're private, they don't have any more content for them to troll, right?
00:08:14
Speaker
Again, it's too little too late.
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah, Reddit doesn't do anything unless it starts to affect their bottom line.
00:08:19
Speaker
That's hilarious.
00:08:20
Speaker
I'm still glad they got banned though.
00:08:22
Speaker
But I thought this is really indicative of how when you try to leave a situation that's toxic, the people who are invested in maintaining that toxic situation will recreate whatever narrative it is to make it your fault, right?
00:08:33
Speaker
Like, I mean, this is exactly how it is when you try to leave an abusive situation.
00:08:37
Speaker
Or they try to make like a Hail Mary, like, oh, I promise I'll stop cheating on you.
00:08:41
Speaker
I promise I'll stop hitting you.
00:08:42
Speaker
I promise I'll stop doing this.
00:08:44
Speaker
Like all of the things that you had a problem with right up until the moment you decided to leave, they didn't stop doing those things until you decide to leave.
00:08:51
Speaker
Again, like these are all just empty promises.
00:08:53
Speaker
If a man, once you're ready to walk out the door, if that is the moment where he decides, OK, now I'm going to start treating you right.
00:08:59
Speaker
He's not telling the truth.
00:09:00
Speaker
That's just manipulation.
00:09:02
Speaker
Exactly.
00:09:02
Speaker
Hysterical bonding, they call it.
00:09:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, oh, I promise to change kind of thing.
00:09:06
Speaker
No, it's still the same fucking website.
00:09:09
Speaker
You know, it's too little too late.
00:09:10
Speaker
Like, I'm glad those subreddits got banned, but it did feel like really manipulative on Reddit's part that they would do that.
00:09:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:16
Speaker
Furthermore, they're still not going to address the myriad of abuse porn that we've been talking about forever and all the men who are gloating about us being banned and then saying you're banned because you're toxic.
00:09:25
Speaker
Somehow never seem to observe all of the rest of the toxic subreddits we've talked about.
00:09:30
Speaker
Reddit co-sponsored female violence, right?
00:09:33
Speaker
Like, and just completely normalized.
00:09:35
Speaker
Violence against women, yeah.
00:09:36
Speaker
Yeah, violence against women and sexualized violence against women specifically as well.
00:09:40
Speaker
The fact that they've like all decided to unilaterally ignore that as part of our reasoning and then just go immediately like you were banned from misandry and like now this website's less toxic and like female dating strategy was the most toxic subreddit on Reddit.
00:09:53
Speaker
Despite all of these other things that we've tried to bring attention to is like a deliberate force of ignorance coming from men as well as Reddit.
00:10:00
Speaker
The next thing that the scrotes did was obviously follow stalk and harass us on the new website because of course they don't want to, but they don't want you to leave.
00:10:11
Speaker
I mean, their needs, like, that's the reason why I was pro getting off Reddit anyway.
00:10:15
Speaker
Like, these needs will have to find something else to do.
00:10:17
Speaker
And I remember seeing a post, a couple of them, you know, they came over to Twitter, they found our personal accounts, the Female Dating Strategy account, and they said, oh, well, guess I'll just have to sign up to the website to get more content.
00:10:29
Speaker
But you hate us!
00:10:31
Speaker
allegedly allegedly but they hate it so why do they want more content yeah allegedly but yeah it's a very very sick form of entertainment and it's like if that's what makes them happy then you know whatever but i mean ultimately they're not anti-fds because you know what we're saying is wrong they just feel personally triggered by it that's why they want to take it down exactly so it wasn't enough for us to leave the actual reddit now they want to follow and stalk and harass us on other platforms so and they listen to the podcast as well so hey got our listeners up
00:11:03
Speaker
I'm like laughing at the idea of like all these men who hate us listening to us on the podcast.
00:11:07
Speaker
I'm like, what are they thinking?
00:11:09
Speaker
Bizarre obsessive behavior, gentlemen.
00:11:11
Speaker
It's just to get some intel and some gossip.
00:11:13
Speaker
It's so funny.
00:11:14
Speaker
The crazy thing is like they've been, you know, harassing us all these years.
00:11:18
Speaker
They've been saying how much they want us to get banned.
00:11:20
Speaker
Finally, we leave of our own volition and that's not acceptable to them.
00:11:23
Speaker
Hmm.
00:11:24
Speaker
No.
00:11:24
Speaker
Again, like how an abusive man, you know, he'll treat you like shit, tell you you're worthless, tell you like, oh, I could get other women, you know, who are better than you.
00:11:32
Speaker
You know, you're lucky to have me.
00:11:35
Speaker
And then as soon as you actually try to leave, that's when he starts going like harassing you, stalking you, doing all this kinds of fucked up shit to like punish you for leaving.
00:11:43
Speaker
Right.
00:11:43
Speaker
And that's like the fucked up thing.
00:11:44
Speaker
Like the way that these men are acting is exactly the same as how an abusive man would act if his girlfriend left him.
00:11:51
Speaker
Exactly.
00:11:51
Speaker
And the other thing too, is that it's not like they were going to ever stop at female dating strategy.
00:11:55
Speaker
One of the things I saw in a lot of the threads where they were celebrating female dating strategy being gone was like, okay, well now let's go focus on fourth wave women, right?
00:12:04
Speaker
Or 2X is another one as well.
00:12:06
Speaker
Exactly.
00:12:06
Speaker
So 2x is a default sub, so it's not likely to go anywhere, even though its engagement is surprisingly very low for a default sub.
00:12:13
Speaker
But even the other subreddits, they've decided to shift their attention to getting those banned, right?
00:12:19
Speaker
So now that we're not there to be the punching bags and be the sole focus of all their ire and hate, they're just going to disperse and try to attack every other female subreddit on Reddit.
00:12:28
Speaker
So all I'm going to say is to the ladies that are still on there, you know, if you're on the fourth wave, you know why I still read it, but honestly, good luck out there because I think they will realize in time why we left Reddit.
00:12:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:41
Speaker
I feel a little conflicted here because it's like, you know, I wouldn't want another woman to experience what we experienced.
00:12:47
Speaker
Right.
00:12:47
Speaker
And, you know, there are a lot of women when we decided to leave Reddit, there are a lot of women being like, okay, well, we're just going to make our own subreddit.
00:12:54
Speaker
And it's like,
00:12:54
Speaker
Good luck to you.
00:12:55
Speaker
You know, I find it very weird, actually, if some of these women are like, I'd rather support this like misogynistic, pedo-enabling subreddit over the female dating strategy website.
00:13:03
Speaker
They're like, oh yeah, FDS, they're bitches, power hungry.
00:13:06
Speaker
They're, you know, those evil women at FDS, they're too ban happy.
00:13:09
Speaker
You know, they hate us, but they love Reddit, but they claim to be feminists.
00:13:12
Speaker
So yeah, we'll get to the criticisms of the mod team.
00:13:15
Speaker
To move along to some of the fallout and the reaction that we got from women, both people who were, I guess, solely subreddit users, as well as like people who were more invested in like general brand things, either via Patreon or who liked the website or like the blog, et cetera.
00:13:27
Speaker
So one of the things that was actually frustrating was like seeing the level of women who got angry that we didn't want to continue to subject ourselves to like the depraved shit and abuse we were seeing on Reddit, that they were like entitled to that labor.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, that was actually kind of frustrating and disappointing to me because it definitely reeks of the same kind of thing that happens.
00:13:47
Speaker
So a lot of times when women try to leave a situation where like other people are benefiting from their sacrifice and their martyrdom and their continued abuse.
00:13:55
Speaker
And then when they try to set boundaries, everyone attacks them like they're entitled to that free emotional labor.
00:14:00
Speaker
And like they're the evil one for having boundaries and not wanting to put up with it anymore.
00:14:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:06
Speaker
I mean, once again, we started to feel both for ourselves, but also any future mods that we might bring on that like, is it ethical to keep subjecting them to abuse?
00:14:16
Speaker
And is it actually prohibiting us from writing about the things and making the content we actually wanted to write?
00:14:21
Speaker
We'll get into the logistics of that in a little bit later in the episode, but I just wanted people to be aware of if you're making a judgment on someone else setting a boundary against a toxic situation about how it benefits you and how it's going to affect you, especially if it's not like something that's like you've invested in yourself or like you've actually put forth the effort and labor to do it yourself.
00:14:41
Speaker
It seems like very toxic and entitled.
00:14:44
Speaker
And on that note as well, it's very easy to, you know, to criticize the decision and the mod team, you know, when, you know, you're not part of it.
00:14:52
Speaker
Like how many people, you know, when it was open, Pinfini moderators, how many people actually stepped up and actually put in the time commitment?
00:15:00
Speaker
Because it wasn't, you know, one to two hours a week.
00:15:02
Speaker
Keeping FDS, completely female only, you know, moderating the comments, you know, moderating the users, the posts.
00:15:11
Speaker
It literally, it was a full-time job at one point.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's an unpaid full-time job.
00:15:16
Speaker
I spent hours, hours on Reddit.
00:15:18
Speaker
It was like literally, I probably spent more on it at one point than my actual full-time job.
00:15:23
Speaker
Once I was realized that I spent doing the equivalent of like a part-time job to, you know, maybe 20 to 30 hours a week on Reddit, you know, flaring people, you know, approving posts, you know, banning people and so on.
00:15:34
Speaker
Once I realized this is like a, almost like a full-time job.
00:15:37
Speaker
And I'm not even getting paid for it.
00:15:39
Speaker
And I'm dealing with all this abuse.
00:15:40
Speaker
It's not like a normal job where like, you know, if you were to get harassed or something, or if someone was like sending you death, like if one of your coworkers, for example, is like sending you death threats or whatever, they'd probably get fired.
00:15:49
Speaker
You know, there's an HR, you know, there's company policies to protect workers from harassment and abuse.
00:15:54
Speaker
Reddit moderation is not like that is unpaid labor.
00:15:57
Speaker
And there's no protections for the workers from abuse.
00:16:00
Speaker
And so that's why, again, another reason why we left.
00:16:03
Speaker
And I think it's deeply unethical to expect other women to sacrifice themselves.
00:16:08
Speaker
It's one thing to be willing to put yourself forward, but it's another to expect other women to just take it on the chin and put up with it.
00:16:15
Speaker
I don't think that's fair.
00:16:16
Speaker
All of the like armchair quarterbacking.
00:16:19
Speaker
It's like very annoying too.
00:16:21
Speaker
Like you guys should have tried harder to keep it open or you should have just like added more mods.
00:16:26
Speaker
Or you should have done this differently or whatever.
00:16:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:28
Speaker
Yes.
00:16:28
Speaker
We tried all of those ideas that you guys are saying.
00:16:31
Speaker
And it didn't work.
00:16:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:33
Speaker
It didn't work and ultimately realized it was futile.
00:16:34
Speaker
And we'll again, go into greater detail about that in a few minutes.
00:16:38
Speaker
Always.
00:16:39
Speaker
We wish people had a little bit more faith in what we're saying rather than like knee jerk disrespect because it's not available for you
Challenges of Reddit and Strategic Shift
00:16:45
Speaker
anymore.
00:16:45
Speaker
It's not that we want people to not have help.
00:16:47
Speaker
We just have to do it in a way that's more, we actually think is going to be more expansive.
00:16:51
Speaker
And sustainable.
00:16:52
Speaker
Exactly.
00:16:53
Speaker
Sustainability is key.
00:16:55
Speaker
Ultimately, like it was essentially rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
00:16:59
Speaker
It might have been, you know, keeping the subreddit open it, you know, might be seen to be doing something for women.
00:17:04
Speaker
But in the long run, the SIP was going to sink.
00:17:06
Speaker
We were either going to get banned or the subreddit would have died.
00:17:10
Speaker
There's no end point.
00:17:11
Speaker
This is the thing with like, this is what we said in the first episode is that people, I think, take Reddit maybe a bit too seriously in that there's no end game on Reddit.
00:17:18
Speaker
What's the end game?
00:17:19
Speaker
Like, you can't make money from it.
00:17:20
Speaker
You're very restricted.
00:17:22
Speaker
The Reddit admins have you buy the balls or the vagina.
00:17:25
Speaker
They can ban you at any time.
00:17:26
Speaker
There's no longevity ultimately to Reddit.
00:17:28
Speaker
There's no recourse if they make a decision that's unfair.
00:17:31
Speaker
There's no recourse.
00:17:32
Speaker
And I think over time, and we'll get to this in a moment, but the subreddit, you know, trying to keep men out of the subreddit was almost like, again, you know, like being on the Titanic that's sinking and the Atlantic Ocean is trying to drag you to the bottom.
00:17:45
Speaker
Or like trying to use a sippy cup, like one little cup to like bail out all the water from like a sinking ship, right?
00:17:51
Speaker
It's just, there's only so much that you as an individual person can do against such a large website with such a large hostile male user base.
00:17:59
Speaker
It felt like truly like a David and Goliath situation, but like in a way that's not going to end.
00:18:04
Speaker
But God is not on your side.
00:18:07
Speaker
But it's not going to end like it did for David kind of thing, right?
00:18:10
Speaker
Yeah, God is not on your side here.
00:18:13
Speaker
God's not on your side here, right?
00:18:14
Speaker
That's the thing.
00:18:15
Speaker
The Reddit admins are not on your side.
00:18:16
Speaker
They're on the side of the misogynists, right?
00:18:18
Speaker
Imagine being in a David and Goliath situation, but God is on Goliath's side, right?
00:18:23
Speaker
That's what it's like being a woman on Reddit.
00:18:25
Speaker
Yeah, the needs, like, they're completely in control of that website.
00:18:28
Speaker
And it's hard for us to compete with them.
00:18:30
Speaker
We talked about that in the last episode.
00:18:31
Speaker
It's not worth competing with.
00:18:33
Speaker
That's the other thing is like, not only is it hard to compete with them, but the amount of effort for us to win against them is just not worth it.
00:18:40
Speaker
Like it takes so much work, so many hours a day, hours that we could have spent doing something else.
00:18:45
Speaker
Exactly.
00:18:45
Speaker
So we ghosted, blocked and deleted this toxic ass relationship, which is extremely on brand for us, which is why I'm so surprised at the backlash to a certain extent.
00:18:55
Speaker
I'm like, what part of like extricate yourself from relationships that don't benefit you is confusing to the people there.
00:19:01
Speaker
part of FDS because I feel like you must have missed, like you have to have missed the memo if you're surprised that we ghosted, blocked and deleted Reddit.
00:19:08
Speaker
That's exactly the type of thing we would do.
00:19:11
Speaker
What you said brings up an interesting point because I feel like a lot of the women who criticize the decision are the ones who don't get FDS or even, you know, some of our own like moderators criticize the decision and their reasons for it did not seem very FDS aligned.
00:19:25
Speaker
Like they would be like, we need to save as many women as possible from
00:19:28
Speaker
you know, bad relationships.
00:19:29
Speaker
And you know, this idea that women should like endlessly martyr themselves and do, there was one line that was like, feminism should be free and available for all.
00:19:36
Speaker
And it's like this idea that women are free public.
00:19:39
Speaker
First of all, feminism is free and available for all our podcasts.
00:19:43
Speaker
Like we have the Patreon exclusive content, but the podcast is still free.
00:19:46
Speaker
The website is still free.
00:19:47
Speaker
And the forum's free.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:49
Speaker
You know, there's lots of stuff that we have here at FDS that's still free, right?
00:19:52
Speaker
But this idea that women should be willing to provide endless labor, emotional labor, and so on, and subject themselves to bad treatment for the benefit of others is not FDS aligned, right?
00:20:03
Speaker
And so women who believe that, who think that we should martyr ourselves, or that we should, you know, stay in a bad relationship and just suffer, and you know, for the benefit of others, that's not what FDS is about anyway.
00:20:13
Speaker
So you can go, you can kick rocks.
00:20:14
Speaker
I don't care what those women think.
00:20:16
Speaker
And even more so, we actually think the pivot that we're making is ultimately going to make us more expansive than if we were on Reddit.
00:20:23
Speaker
Like Reddit obviously is really great for free marketing.
00:20:25
Speaker
But truthfully, if you look at things like subreddit stats, etc., the comment quality and like amount has been going down for quite some time.
00:20:33
Speaker
And we've been picking up an audience outside of Reddit.
00:20:35
Speaker
So we're not relying on Reddit anymore anyways.
00:20:38
Speaker
Exactly.
00:20:39
Speaker
And even though we're not on the platform, like firstly, people are still talking about FDS, even though we left a month ago.
00:20:44
Speaker
But secondly, FDS is, and I think this perhaps come from a failure to see the bigger picture.
00:20:50
Speaker
You know, Reddit is not the be all and end all of the world.
00:20:53
Speaker
Like when I first came across FDS, I didn't have a Reddit account.
00:20:56
Speaker
I didn't really know what Reddit was.
00:20:57
Speaker
I came across it in a Google search.
00:20:59
Speaker
Like all my friends who know about FDS, it's because I've told them about it.
00:21:03
Speaker
Like, you know, the word can and it will still spread through other platforms such as word of mouth.
00:21:08
Speaker
Like we don't have to cling on to Reddit as, you know, being the only way to get the message out because it's not true.
00:21:14
Speaker
And again, it goes back to that sort of mentality you develop in an abusive relationship where you think you need the abuser to get anywhere and to achieve anything.
00:21:22
Speaker
And it's not true.
00:21:23
Speaker
That's what they want you to believe.
00:21:24
Speaker
They want you to believe that, oh my gosh, FDS is done because of Reddit.
00:21:27
Speaker
And it's just not true.
00:21:29
Speaker
It's like, oh, you know, that abused woman, she's done now because she left her abuser kind of thing, right?
00:21:33
Speaker
Nobody would say that to them.
00:21:34
Speaker
They'd be like, yeah, your life's just beginning.
00:21:36
Speaker
Like, you've got so many more opportunities.
00:21:38
Speaker
You'll meet so many, you know, better people.
00:21:40
Speaker
You'll meet someone better.
00:21:41
Speaker
You'll have a better life.
00:21:42
Speaker
Like, it's not like FDS is beyond Reddit now.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah, thankfully.
00:21:46
Speaker
Okay.
00:21:46
Speaker
So that's like a brief discussion of the fallout and the reaction and we drew some parallels.
00:21:52
Speaker
So sorry, one last thing, Ro.
00:21:53
Speaker
I want to say some people might be complaining our website is a little glitchy.
00:21:56
Speaker
And I just want to say, yeah, our website might not be as like user-friendly quite yet as Reddit, but at least we don't fucking enable pedophiles.
00:22:03
Speaker
At least we're not like openly misogynistic.
00:22:05
Speaker
I don't understand how you as a woman can claim to be a feminist and still be completely invested in staying on Reddit.
00:22:11
Speaker
Oh,
00:22:12
Speaker
we're going to make enough of their subreddit.
00:22:13
Speaker
We're going to force FDS to open up their subreddit.
00:22:15
Speaker
Why are you supporting this like misogynistic abuse enabling platform?
00:22:20
Speaker
And giving them your time, your labor and your content.
00:22:22
Speaker
Like, why would you do that?
00:22:24
Speaker
And when your main reason for wanting to stay on Reddit is because it's more convenient.
00:22:27
Speaker
And the main reason to not like you cannot call yourself a fucking feminist if you're like, no, I don't want to support this female owned business because it's slightly inconvenient.
00:22:35
Speaker
I'd much rather support this male owned, extremely abusive business because it's slightly more convenient.
00:22:40
Speaker
That's some libfem shit because that's like, oh, this is more personally convenient to me rather than like about, you know, your principles of being pro-female, right?
00:22:48
Speaker
So a lot of these women who were criticizing us were calling us libfems.
00:22:51
Speaker
And I'm like, you're the ones prioritizing your own personal convenience over women, period.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't think I actually think I'd see the day where women who followed FDS, who called themselves like feminists, would actually almost be defending a platform like Reddit, even though they also complain about Reddit all the time.
00:23:07
Speaker
But when we set boundaries, like we're stupid, we're evil for leaving.
00:23:11
Speaker
And it's like, why would you defend Reddit in this situation?
00:23:14
Speaker
Even if you don't agree with the decision.
00:23:16
Speaker
And I saw some comments saying, you know, I don't agree, but I understand why you've done it.
00:23:20
Speaker
From some feminists, there was no understanding or consideration as to why we would leave, which is very bizarre to me because they have exactly the same complaints that we have, but they don't want to move off it because I'm going to say they're still stuck in the mentality that they need to be on Reddit, you know, to mean anything.
00:23:36
Speaker
And that's not true.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:37
Speaker
People have been organizing, like, long before Reddit was a thing.
00:23:40
Speaker
How do you think the suffragettes managed to achieve anything?
00:23:43
Speaker
Well, they didn't have Reddit, so, you know, how are they able to get the right to vote?
00:23:48
Speaker
You know, yeah, there's ways of organizing outside of Reddit.
00:23:50
Speaker
There's so many, like, the world, like, how many in comparison to the rest of the world?
00:23:55
Speaker
Like, you know, Reddit is literally just a drop in the ocean compared to the reach of the entire world.
00:24:00
Speaker
It's not the be all and end all.
00:24:01
Speaker
And honestly, if the suffragettes were dependent on Reddit to get the right to vote, they would have fucking lost because...
00:24:07
Speaker
Imagine if Reddit existed 100 years ago, like that show would have gotten buried so fast, right?
00:24:11
Speaker
I actually think it is counterproductive to the feminist movement to be reliant on Reddit because Reddit actively censors female speech all the time, right?
00:24:20
Speaker
And so to put yourself in a situation where you're making yourself reliant on Reddit or trying to cling to Reddit or trying to get Reddit to pick you, so to speak, or whatever, to stay in Reddit's good graces, it's just not worth it.
00:24:29
Speaker
And it's not just the admins.
00:24:30
Speaker
It's also that the fact that when Reddit started, a lot of the power mods squatted on female subreddits from the beginning.
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:38
Speaker
So you have a lot of guys who like created our abortion ironically.
00:24:42
Speaker
You know what I'm saying?
00:24:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:43
Speaker
So like there's stuff like that.
00:24:44
Speaker
where they're so entrenched in the ecosystem of the subreddits, even the female subreddits to create a narrative that benefits them that like, there's no competing with that.
00:24:54
Speaker
Like we can't compete with someone who started a female subreddit 15 years ago for like this express purpose of masturbating and women's pain.
00:25:00
Speaker
That's what do we do with that?
00:25:01
Speaker
Yeah, you can't organize a feminist movement on a website that exists to help men masturbate to female pain.
00:25:08
Speaker
Like the medium is the message and all that.
00:25:10
Speaker
That's a medium that's not beneficial to that message, let's just say.
00:25:14
Speaker
And Reddit knows that they scare women off because someone sent to us an ad that has been running on Instagram trying to direct women towards like the more, quote, positive aspects of
00:25:25
Speaker
Reddit.
00:25:26
Speaker
Again, it's very manipulative and mirrors the way that abusive men will be like, oh, you know, the way that people will be abuse apologizers like, oh, he's such a nice guy.
00:25:35
Speaker
Oh, he volunteers at the animal shelter.
00:25:36
Speaker
Oh, he visits his grandma every Sunday or something like that.
00:25:39
Speaker
Meanwhile, he beats the shit out of his wife, right?
00:25:41
Speaker
You know, you can't just like redirect someone to or like a magician being like, look over here.
00:25:45
Speaker
Don't look over there.
00:25:46
Speaker
Don't look at the bad stuff over there.
00:25:47
Speaker
Look at the nice stuff.
00:25:48
Speaker
Look at the pretty like RR or whatever.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, they're running ads to target women.
00:25:52
Speaker
And I mean, of course, they need more female users.
00:25:54
Speaker
And especially if they move towards an IPO, they don't want to be known as like the terrorist grooming website.
00:25:59
Speaker
You know, you can't really get... Exactly.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah, our bad for letting terrorists harbor on our website for over a decade and like expanding the sexualized abuse of you guys to the point where it had real world consequences.
00:26:11
Speaker
But, you know, here, look at some pictures of kittens we have.
00:26:13
Speaker
Like, fuck you, Reddit.
Addressing Criticisms and Moderator Challenges
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's so condescending, honestly.
00:26:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:17
Speaker
So, all right.
00:26:18
Speaker
For moving on from that section, addressing the fallout and the reaction to the fallout, I thought we would go through some of the common comments and criticisms that we were seeing.
00:26:26
Speaker
So one of the reasons we want to address these criticisms is because we want to show that like we were hearing the criticisms and that we think that we can actually better serve the people that want to be part of FDS and address those criticisms by moving off Reddit into the website and to other types of media.
00:26:42
Speaker
So this next section, we're going to talk about the criticisms we got and then how we're moving forward to address them.
00:26:48
Speaker
OK, so the first one that we got was FDS mods were ban happy.
00:26:53
Speaker
Meaning that we banned people, you know.
00:26:55
Speaker
I'll be honest, yeah, when I was in FDS mod, my finger on that ban button was like really trigger happy.
00:26:59
Speaker
Not gonna lie.
00:27:02
Speaker
It was like, you know the start of Lord of the Rings?
00:27:04
Speaker
This is always what I think of when I think of like the banning meme is like, you know, it's not Lord of the Rings when Lord Sauron comes out to fight in the first battle and he has his mace and then just starts crushing skulls and like swiping people.
00:27:17
Speaker
That's what I think of when being... Because, I mean, to be fair, that is honestly what it was like.
00:27:22
Speaker
When you have, like, 3,000 people and it's just you with your, you know, with armies of scrubs, you just have to swing the mace and just, and, like, ban people.
00:27:30
Speaker
And unfortunately, and this is honestly the biggest, like, regret, and this is what, like, still makes me sad to this day, is unfortunately, you know, well-meaning and well-intentioned women ended up being caught in the crossfire of that because there was just no other way to do it.
00:27:44
Speaker
Yes, this was a really challenging thing, actually, as an FDS moderator.
00:27:47
Speaker
I find this parallels a lot of challenges that I have as a woman in a leadership role in a male-dominated industry, where if you're too harsh, then people will criticize you for being too harsh.
00:27:57
Speaker
But if you're too soft or if you let things slide, then people will just walk all over you.
00:28:01
Speaker
If you give people an inch, they take a mile, right?
00:28:03
Speaker
So it's a really fine line to balance.
00:28:05
Speaker
And the other female subreddits that are still around, they get criticized all the time for allowing men in or for not removing this or for not removing that.
00:28:14
Speaker
But then when I see it, I'm just like, when FDS had these controls, you guys still complained.
00:28:18
Speaker
So logistically, we had auto-ban bots that helped to cut down the work.
00:28:23
Speaker
So meaning we had bots that would ban people that came from subreddits that we know were known for brigading.
00:28:29
Speaker
Like Cringetopia or... Exactly.
00:28:31
Speaker
So there are sometimes women that commented on these subs and would get caught up in the ban and then they'd like want to message the inbox and be like, hey, I shouldn't have been banned.
00:28:38
Speaker
But the problem is, is like, there's just too many.
00:28:40
Speaker
I feel like at some point and probably even now there's like no mods at all who are going through the mod inbox to actually unban people.
00:28:46
Speaker
No, the ban appeals, that was actually the most toxic folder of the mod mail, like by far.
00:28:51
Speaker
There were some women in there that were like, hey, I got accidentally caught up in, you know, auto ban.
00:28:56
Speaker
Like, can I be on ban kind of thing?
00:28:57
Speaker
And I feel sorry for those women, but they were maybe 10% of the messages that we got in...
00:29:02
Speaker
lot in ban appeals the rest of it was like i hope you bitches get raped i hope somebody murders you i hope uh someone kills your whole family you bitches deserve to you know get fucking locked in a house and burned to death like you know the most horrifying shit and again i don't think it's ethical to ask a woman because you have to read all these messages to find out which you don't know which you're gonna get until you actually read it right it's unethical to force a woman or a mod team of women to read all these messages and honestly i
00:29:28
Speaker
We didn't have that many mods.
00:29:29
Speaker
And if you're thinking about like, what is the best investment of my time?
00:29:32
Speaker
Like given that we have limited staff to do this work, you have to sort of triage things into what are the high priority items?
00:29:37
Speaker
What are the low priority items?
00:29:38
Speaker
Ban appeals is one of those things that took a lot of time and had very little payoff because it was very time consuming, very emotionally traumatizing.
00:29:45
Speaker
And maybe less than 5% of the ban appeals that we got were actually good users.
00:29:51
Speaker
You know, we actually would want to participate on the FDS subreddit anyways.
00:29:54
Speaker
And here's the other thing is I used to do ban appeals a little bit here and there.
00:29:58
Speaker
What bothered me is sometimes there'd be women being like, oh, I got auto banned.
00:30:02
Speaker
You know, can you unban me?
00:30:03
Speaker
I'd go through the work of like looking at their post history.
00:30:05
Speaker
Oh yeah, this is a legit woman, not a man being a liar or whatever.
00:30:09
Speaker
I'd unban her.
00:30:09
Speaker
And then she'd go and
00:30:10
Speaker
comment in another subreddit and get banned again.
00:30:13
Speaker
And then she'd be like, hey, sorry, this happened again.
00:30:15
Speaker
Right.
00:30:15
Speaker
So it's like one of those things where, you know, you're spending a lot of time on it.
00:30:18
Speaker
And even for the, you know, success stories or the women where, you know, okay, I actually did the right thing, you know, unbanned, correctly unbanned woman.
00:30:25
Speaker
A lot of times they just go and get themselves banned anyways.
00:30:27
Speaker
It's like, okay, if you want to go participate in subreddits that are hostile to FDS, you do you, but you
00:30:31
Speaker
You know, we always say this is why you should have an alternate account where you only participate in FDS, you know, and then have a separate like account just for like general Reddit stuff.
00:30:39
Speaker
Because, yeah, like you'd get caught up in auto ban otherwise, like all the time.
00:30:43
Speaker
It's not worth the effort to go through all these abusive messages, find the one that's like an actual legitimate female user just for her to go and get herself banned again.
00:30:50
Speaker
It's like, I'm sorry, but that's just not a good use of moderator time.
00:30:53
Speaker
Right.
00:30:53
Speaker
So like I said, nobody was doing it towards the end.
00:30:56
Speaker
Because it wasn't worth it.
00:30:57
Speaker
It wasn't worth it.
00:30:58
Speaker
And we would bring on more mods.
00:30:59
Speaker
And then so I'd see other people in other subreddits like criticizing like, oh, they're banned happy over there.
00:31:03
Speaker
I got banned and I wasn't able to come back at it.
00:31:05
Speaker
And it's like, yeah, nobody has time or wants to look at that folder.
00:31:09
Speaker
So...
00:31:10
Speaker
That's like the most toxic folder.
00:31:12
Speaker
So there was a reason why we avoided it.
00:31:14
Speaker
And to be honest, like, like if you're complaining about the poor customer service, the sort of women who like complain about, oh, FDS is bad customer service.
00:31:20
Speaker
Like, well, we're not getting paid.
00:31:21
Speaker
And if you're going to be that entitled towards another woman, we don't want you here anyways.
00:31:23
Speaker
Bye.
00:31:24
Speaker
Some of the shift to the website.
00:31:25
Speaker
is because it makes the workload easier.
00:31:28
Speaker
And also, we don't have to be as strict with the moderating and banning.
00:31:33
Speaker
We had the ban bot because of the fact that there was so much brigading that it was impossible for all of the mods to be on there 24-7 catching it.
00:31:41
Speaker
But we can control the inflow of users on the website in a way that we can't on the subreddit.
00:31:47
Speaker
And so like, so women that are like complaining, like, oh, I've been commenting on FDS for months and I never got a flare or I was banned by the band bot, et cetera.
00:31:55
Speaker
And a lot of women just gave up and stopped participating because like it took forever for the mods to get to flare them or even see their flares or like even have the patients to go through their comment history to make sure they're a woman.
00:32:04
Speaker
Like all that's like extra labor.
00:32:06
Speaker
So with the website, you can pretty much comment within 24 to 48 hours.
00:32:09
Speaker
Right.
00:32:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:11
Speaker
So, you know, if you're a verified member, it could take longer, but like, otherwise, like you can still freely participate in the website and we can control the influx a lot more than we were on Reddit.
00:32:20
Speaker
So once again, a plug for the website.
00:32:22
Speaker
The other thing too, is like, we had to be so strict because of Reddit's particular rules and because like we were constantly getting report brigaded for everything.
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:32
Speaker
So anything that looked even a little bit like banal content or something that was going to be a problem later, we had to ban.
00:32:38
Speaker
We had to remove it.
00:32:38
Speaker
So like that lends itself to people being trigger happy because you don't have a choice.
00:32:42
Speaker
Whereas I feel like in a more free thinking and free discussion environment, we could let the conversations go a little bit more.
00:32:49
Speaker
And I know there were so many mods, you know, so many brilliant artists that they wanted to write so many good posts and contributions, but they just didn't want to put it on Reddit because firstly, Reddit would own it.
00:32:59
Speaker
And secondly, you know, it will be open to misinterpretation.
00:33:03
Speaker
The Scroats would brigade it.
00:33:04
Speaker
And also it's information that you're giving out, you know, to a platform like Reddit for free when your time is probably better served being on a platform that's actually pro-woman.
00:33:15
Speaker
One more comment about the bannable speech thing.
00:33:16
Speaker
There was this weird sort of thing and another catch-22 that as an FDS moderator was really challenging was there were men who would pretend to be women who would post bannable content, often, you know, related to trans issues.
00:33:30
Speaker
They would basically comment whatever they thought like would get us banned from Reddit, right?
00:33:34
Speaker
But then there were also...
00:33:36
Speaker
actual women like actual female women who would also want to post that kind of bannable content right and so it was really difficult sometimes to tell the difference between the incels like pretending to be women so that they could post bannable content versus like the fem cells who were posting bannable content and then like if we remove that kind of stuff they would just be like well fds is censoring women and then make themselves a martyr and make us a bad guy
00:33:59
Speaker
I'd also like to make the point as well that women would lie about why they were banned or why their comment didn't appear as well for some reason.
00:34:04
Speaker
Like they'd go to the dissent subs and just make up a story as to why they were banned and it just wasn't true.
00:34:10
Speaker
Yeah, like we can see these accounts, right?
00:34:12
Speaker
Like they'd be like, I was banned because I'm black.
00:34:14
Speaker
And then I'd look at their history and it's like, no, you made a really, really fucked up comment.
00:34:19
Speaker
And that was actually like deserving of being banned.
00:34:22
Speaker
Yeah, they would say like, oh, I, you know, my comments didn't appear because I criticized the podcast when their comments didn't appear because they didn't have a flair because they've been trying to comment for a while.
00:34:31
Speaker
It wasn't because we deleted it because, you know, they criticized the podcast.
00:34:35
Speaker
It was because they didn't have a flair.
00:34:37
Speaker
Yeah, that was another one that happened.
00:34:38
Speaker
Like, I got banned because I criticized FDS.
00:34:40
Speaker
OK, first of all, there's so many subreddits out there for criticizing FDS.
00:34:43
Speaker
Why don't you just go over there?
00:34:44
Speaker
This is another thing about boundaries.
00:34:46
Speaker
It's a waste of your time, by the way.
00:34:47
Speaker
But, you know, go off.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:50
Speaker
and this is just like a message for women in general you don't have to make space for people in your life who make you feel shitty who bring down the quality of your life who criticize you who harass you who say nasty things to you and so on like if someone's being an asshole to you you can just not talk to them you know you can just block and delete them you don't have to make space for them in your life you don't have to give them an audience right if they want to criticize you and talk shit like they can go do that somewhere else but you don't have to make space for people like that in your life and i don't know why people act like you know
00:35:17
Speaker
oh, FDS is against free speech because they don't let us criticize them on their own fucking subreddit.
00:35:21
Speaker
It's like, again, it's about the principle.
00:35:23
Speaker
Like, women don't have to make space for people who treat us badly.
00:35:26
Speaker
You can do that somewhere else.
00:35:28
Speaker
And the worst thing is as well, like, other subreddits operate exactly the same.
00:35:31
Speaker
If you were to go into the BDSM subreddit with an anti-kink stance,
00:35:34
Speaker
you would get booted out.
00:35:36
Speaker
If you were to go onto the vegan subreddit and start talking about, you know, I think everyone should eat meat because it's healthier, they would kick you out as well.
00:35:42
Speaker
So why would we get all the slack for, you know, enforcing our rules and boundaries when literally every subreddit operates by the same principle?
00:35:50
Speaker
So a lot of times people were just getting banned because they wanted to like bring a bunch of outside grievances to FDS that had nothing to do with FDS.
00:35:56
Speaker
And I think the frustration was from the mods.
00:35:59
Speaker
It was that like everybody went to FDS originally to talk about dating.
00:36:02
Speaker
And then every other person tried to like perch themselves, try to plant themselves on FDS to talk about personal issues and grievances that weren't really dating related and which created a lot of extra mod work, right?
00:36:13
Speaker
Because we're like, we want to talk about dating, but if like you want to talk about
00:36:16
Speaker
I don't know if you want to talk about Lucas and like all these like other pink pill, like fem cell issues.
00:36:21
Speaker
There was a lot of gender critical people.
00:36:23
Speaker
And again, you know, Wig Tao people like Wig Tao people, like people who want to talk about things that were not FDS.
00:36:29
Speaker
And it was like, we wanted to talk about dating strategies.
00:36:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:33
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of black pillars who kept trying to perch themselves on the subreddit and talking about how like men are evil and you shouldn't date them and stuff.
00:36:39
Speaker
And then we banned them and then they'd be like, oh my gosh, you're censoring women.
00:36:42
Speaker
Which is weird.
00:36:43
Speaker
I'm like, listen, it's about dating.
00:36:45
Speaker
If you don't want to date, then find another subreddit.
00:36:47
Speaker
Or make your own subreddit.
00:36:48
Speaker
Don't try to like...
00:36:49
Speaker
steal someone else's work or perch on something that some other women created that's already successful.
00:36:54
Speaker
Because honestly, like black players just bring the vibe down.
00:36:57
Speaker
Let's just be real.
00:36:57
Speaker
Like, you know, whenever black players join a space, like the whole vibe just gets brought down and they wanted to post on FDS because it had a pretty large community, almost 250,000 subscribers.
00:37:06
Speaker
They wanted that kind of message to reach a larger, larger audience.
00:37:09
Speaker
But it's
Maintaining Focus Amidst Negativity
00:37:10
Speaker
like, again, stop taking advantage of our creation to spread your fucking agenda.
00:37:14
Speaker
That's not the same as what we had intended.
00:37:17
Speaker
Especially it's not adding anything like, you know, people like posting pictures of girls that they thought were like attractive and it's like attacking them because they feel like, oh, they're over sexualized.
00:37:25
Speaker
They're doing so much for the male gaze, etc.
00:37:28
Speaker
I'm like, once again, we have like rad femme leanings, but like we're also not like going on this extreme, like every woman that does makeup or like takes a cute picture is like enemy number one and ball palming the patriarchy.
00:37:38
Speaker
Right.
00:37:39
Speaker
right?
00:37:39
Speaker
Like, it's just kind of ridiculous.
00:37:40
Speaker
Like we are a dating strategy.
00:37:42
Speaker
So yeah, like there were a few TikToks, you know, that would be women applying makeup while saying something, you know, based or FDS aligned and right.
00:37:49
Speaker
And so I'd like the audio that they were saying, but they were doing it while wearing makeup.
00:37:52
Speaker
And then all the comments, well, not all the comments, but like 30% of the comments would be from like the rad femme cells being like, anyone who wears makeup is performing for the male gaze.
00:37:59
Speaker
And like, why are you posting this on a feminist subreddit?
00:38:02
Speaker
You're performing for the male gaze.
00:38:03
Speaker
Like, and it's like, oh my God, shut up.
00:38:05
Speaker
Nobody wants to fucking hear it.
00:38:06
Speaker
Like you're bringing the vibe down.
00:38:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:08
Speaker
Once again, you know, we're about dating.
00:38:10
Speaker
So, and we're also like about strategies that are practical for the way women live.
00:38:15
Speaker
Like if you want to go in your soapbox about how women shouldn't wear makeup, like you're free to do that, but that's not FDS.
00:38:20
Speaker
Make a different subreddit for it, right?
00:38:22
Speaker
But stop coming to a subreddit about dating to push your fucking agenda.
00:38:26
Speaker
Like, no one likes that.
00:38:27
Speaker
That's just weird.
00:38:28
Speaker
Exactly.
00:38:29
Speaker
So that's addressing the criticism that we were banned happy.
00:38:31
Speaker
The other reason is just like, like we said, burnout and a lot of mods just like at some point being like, fuck you guys, you know, and then like just banning everybody because they were just sick of everyone's shit.
00:38:40
Speaker
And a few crazy ass mods.
00:38:42
Speaker
Yeah, we had a handful of crazy mods, but we loved them at the time.
00:38:44
Speaker
But now they kind of just like, you know, anyways.
00:38:47
Speaker
Okay.
00:38:47
Speaker
So the other criticism we wanted to address, and this is something that we noticed as well, was that FDS has gone downhill.
00:38:54
Speaker
A lot of people who were diehard FDS fans, especially at the beginning when we first started getting media attention and when like people were regularly posting really good strategy content, noticed that like the quality of the posts and the comments has gone down as well as the volume has gone down as well as like the momentum has died down in the subreddit.
00:39:13
Speaker
And I checked like stuff like subreddit stats just to kind of see if that was true.
00:39:17
Speaker
And like, it is true.
00:39:18
Speaker
And ironically, when the comments started to go, started to like decline, like the comments per day, you can look on subreddit stats and I'll leave it in the show notes.
00:39:25
Speaker
It was around March or so when we launched our podcast.
00:39:28
Speaker
And I think that's because there was like a massive brain drain of the original mods who basically quiet quit.
00:39:33
Speaker
from Reddit around Ben who were like, man, fuck Reddit.
00:39:36
Speaker
Like, let's work on this on the website.
00:39:38
Speaker
Let's work on the podcast.
00:39:39
Speaker
Let's work on, et cetera.
00:39:40
Speaker
So a lot of the like original mods of people that were responsible for crafting the narrative, as well as like curating a handbook, as well as writing a lot of their own posts decided I'm out.
00:39:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:50
Speaker
And honestly, fair.
00:39:51
Speaker
Like I'm one of them.
00:39:52
Speaker
After we launched the podcast, I pretty much stopped using Reddit because I was getting my FDS fix from making the podcast, you know?
00:39:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:58
Speaker
And you could see like literally that there's a massive decline in user engagement after that, which makes me feel like it wasn't just, it is a community and the people that are part of the community are important, but like there's a lopsided, a massively lopsided amount of people who consume content rather than create content.
00:40:13
Speaker
Most of the content that most people create is just screenshotting men being jackasses and occasionally putting on moving TikToks that are girl empowerment to the subreddit.
00:40:22
Speaker
Right.
00:40:22
Speaker
But like there was very few people who are regularly writing strategy.
00:40:25
Speaker
And if they're writing strategy, it wasn't like it wasn't getting that many upvotes or it wasn't engaging enough for people to want to keep reading it as like the original mods are really good at writing that kind of stuff.
00:40:34
Speaker
And this is also where, you know, being on Reddit was also a downside because I read it rewards like negativity.
00:40:41
Speaker
Just the algorithm.
00:40:42
Speaker
Yeah, just the algorithms.
00:40:43
Speaker
And so the negative posts that were talking about men being screenshot from other subreddits, you know, recounting, you know, tales of woe with dating, like they would always get upvoted.
00:40:52
Speaker
And it got to a point where like a TikTok would get over 1000 upvotes, but a good strategy post would maybe get 100, like maybe.
00:40:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:00
Speaker
And it's fine because I know people more prefer to like watch video content.
00:41:04
Speaker
I know especially Gen Z, like that's more their style.
00:41:07
Speaker
But I think the issue was that like on top of that, it was just like, it wasn't just the girl empowerment stuff.
00:41:12
Speaker
It was just constant, constant, nasty negativity of people like demanding, complaining, angry, and no strategy.
00:41:18
Speaker
Like the appeal of FDS uniquely over these other TikTok platforms or platforms where people would just complain about men is that there was women writing good strategy, right?
00:41:27
Speaker
That's what made us different from everybody else.
00:41:29
Speaker
And then it slowly stopped being that.
00:41:31
Speaker
And just like, there was way, way, way more women who came to consume and complain than women who wanted to write strategy.
00:41:37
Speaker
And it was both because of the moderators who didn't want to keep having their content be on Reddit, but also like individual women who had contributed really good posts, who got turned off by the negativity of the environment, like either both user-based or from men harassing them because they had stuff in the handbook and they just didn't want to be a part of it anymore.
00:41:53
Speaker
So like it was frustrating because we could see the brain drain continuously happening where
00:41:58
Speaker
We'd have good posters.
00:41:59
Speaker
We'd have regularly engaged posters.
00:42:01
Speaker
And then they would turn off like how nasty the environment was, or they would get tired of having their stuff plagiarized or being on Reddit.
00:42:06
Speaker
And then they'd want to leave.
00:42:07
Speaker
And then eventually all that's left is the women that are like looking for help and not enough women who can provide the help.
00:42:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:13
Speaker
And then the other thing with the brain drain is, you know, whenever they'd write a good strategy post, they wouldn't get that many upvotes.
00:42:19
Speaker
The other thing is, you know, Reddit rewarded the negativity.
00:42:22
Speaker
And if there was like a positive post, like whenever a woman said like, oh, I had a really good date, all the fucking negative Nancy Femme cells would come out being like, he's a man, he's probably a rapist.
00:42:30
Speaker
You know, you should be careful.
00:42:31
Speaker
He did this and this.
00:42:32
Speaker
You never know what that could mean.
00:42:33
Speaker
You know, and just creating unnecessary like fear and anxiety in a woman who's obviously just talking about like a positive experience.
00:42:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:40
Speaker
So then women don't want to post positive experience of things that happened to them because all they would get was criticism.
00:42:44
Speaker
Because they're going to get attacked.
00:42:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:46
Speaker
And it was kind of sad.
00:42:47
Speaker
They'll either be like, oh, your standards are too low or your standards are too high or like whatever.
00:42:51
Speaker
Right.
00:42:51
Speaker
Like a woman will just say, I had a really nice day with my boyfriend, really treated me.
00:42:54
Speaker
And they're like, and I get this too sometimes from the black pillars and the fem cells.
00:42:57
Speaker
Whenever I say something nice that my boyfriend did, they'll always be like, straight women's standards are so low where a man shows you basic human decency and you're like happy about it.
00:43:05
Speaker
And it's like, what?
00:43:06
Speaker
What?
00:43:07
Speaker
Like, you know, it's good to show gratitude when someone does something nice for you.
00:43:11
Speaker
That's how you incentivize more nice behavior, right?
00:43:13
Speaker
Like, you know, if someone does something nice for you and you yell at them, like they're not going to do that nice thing for you anymore.
00:43:18
Speaker
I don't know.
00:43:18
Speaker
And the posters won't post the nice things that happened to them.
00:43:21
Speaker
And so then it just becomes an echo chamber of negativity.
00:43:23
Speaker
And then, you know, that was another thing as well, is that people then started like projecting their own ideas of what FDS should be, even, you know, supposedly mods as well, and also the user base as to what FDS should be, even though it wasn't ever stated.
00:43:39
Speaker
So one of the biggest examples I can think of was when I saw a comment where it said, I don't ever say thank you to a man if he's done something nice to me.
00:43:47
Speaker
There's a difference between having standards and boundaries and, you know, keeping, again, also betting, and being an arsehole, right?
00:43:54
Speaker
Not saying thank you when someone's done something nice is an arsehole move, is a dick move.
00:43:57
Speaker
And this is a main gripe for me as well, is that complaining about low-value men isn't the same as strategising.
00:44:05
Speaker
on how to get a high value man they're not this it's just complaining and people conflated the two thinking that you know i know how low value men work i can suss them out i know how to deal with them i mean you can't deal with a high value man the same way you deal with a low value man because they have different attitudes so you know you're not saying thank you if a guy did something nice for you might have worked with a low value man but that's not going to fly with somebody who's high value because they'll just see you as rude
00:44:30
Speaker
Yeah, you'll end up turning off the very demographic you want to be a part of.
00:44:33
Speaker
That you're trying to attract.
00:44:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:44:37
Speaker
It started to get more and more of that and less and less strategy.
00:44:40
Speaker
I think a big reason why the whole FDS has gone downhill became a thing was because a lot of these women, they've never experienced a man treating them well.
00:44:48
Speaker
So they actually don't know what a high value man is like or how that would be.
00:44:52
Speaker
Or, you know, they've never experienced what it's like to be treated well by a high value man.
00:44:56
Speaker
They've only ever dated low value men.
00:44:58
Speaker
And so they become hopeless.
00:44:59
Speaker
And then a lot of these women, they then see FDS as like a sort of recruitment platform for black pill type of stuff.
00:45:05
Speaker
Right.
00:45:06
Speaker
And...
00:45:07
Speaker
for fem cell shit right like looking at some of these comments from these women like they'll be like you know all men are evil all men are demonic pedophile rapists abusers and stuff and so they see fds is like oh this is a place where we can all share our trauma porn and talk about all the horrible ways that men have treated us in the past and you know then not date men kind of thing right and
00:45:25
Speaker
it's like, well, that's not what FDS is about.
00:45:27
Speaker
Again, if you want to create your own platform for that, you can, but I don't think it's fair to try to take a different platform and reappropriate it for a completely different agenda like that.
00:45:37
Speaker
And then abusing us and then creating these false narratives about us, smearing us, slandering us, that itself is also abusive.
00:45:42
Speaker
And so, and it's like, you're trying to take something that's not for you and trying to make it about yourself or about your agenda.
00:45:48
Speaker
And that's, again, that's not what FDS is about.
00:45:50
Speaker
We are allowed to set those kinds of boundaries.
00:45:52
Speaker
Later, I actually want to do an episode where we address fem cells a little bit more because there was a recent article in Atlantic that came out about like the fem cell revolution, etc.
00:46:01
Speaker
And they actually name dropped FDS about in the fact that FDS actually kicked the fem cells off.
00:46:06
Speaker
But part of it was like it went beyond just like saying, hey, I'm not, you know, attractive and men don't treat me well.
00:46:11
Speaker
And I've been bullied because I've been unattractive to like I'm going to hate on quote unquote Stacey's.
00:46:17
Speaker
That's exactly how it felt.
00:46:18
Speaker
All these fucking black pillars and fem cells, it just seems like they have unresolved trauma from high school, calling us mean girls, Regina George, whatever.
00:46:25
Speaker
It's like they just sort of get off on like hating the pretty girls.
00:46:28
Speaker
Like their feminism is about hating pretty girls, basically.
00:46:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think fem cells probably do need strategies or women who don't feel attractive if they're actually not attractive, which most of them are actually more than fine or average looking.
00:46:40
Speaker
They just have body dysmorphia is one of the things you learn.
00:46:43
Speaker
Extremely poor self-esteem.
00:46:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:45
Speaker
Or poor self-esteem, yeah.
00:46:46
Speaker
But it wasn't like they were asking for strategies to date with that situation.
00:46:51
Speaker
They were actively trying to discourage everyone else from participating in society because of that.
00:46:55
Speaker
And so that's where it starts to become a toxic echo chamber.
00:46:57
Speaker
So with that, because there was so much of this scope creep for these other groups, we can see, and we can see this, guys, from the separate stats that the amount of active users was dramatically dropping.
00:47:08
Speaker
Because again, the main draw, which was the women that were actually living the life and like had strategies, they started to leave because they didn't like being in the environment anymore, including us, which were like, and a lot of the original mod team.
00:47:20
Speaker
And so we started to dislike our own creation, but it's not even just like your own creation.
00:47:25
Speaker
Frankenstein.
00:47:28
Speaker
But by creation, I don't mean all of FDS.
00:47:30
Speaker
I mean, specifically the subreddit.
00:47:32
Speaker
Like part of the reason why we went private was because we looked at all of the things that we do.
00:47:35
Speaker
We have the podcast, we have the website, we have this, we have that, we have the Patreon, we have the subreddit.
00:47:40
Speaker
And we're really proud of all of the other things that we've created except for the subreddit.
00:47:43
Speaker
specifically the subreddit.
00:47:45
Speaker
For some reason, Reddit just attracts like the worst people.
00:47:48
Speaker
So we did a Twitter space like right after we closed the show better just to like get a feel for like how people were reacting to it.
00:47:54
Speaker
And a few women mentioned like, hey, you know, I really love what you guys have to say, but it's embarrassing as hell to like be sending my girlfriends a link to Reddit.
00:48:02
Speaker
Yeah, because Reddit has such a bad reputation for being anti-woman, right?
00:48:05
Speaker
As a bad reputation.
00:48:06
Speaker
And then also you can see like all of the crazy people commenting and being like, this is bad idea.
00:48:10
Speaker
Like we loved the strategies.
00:48:12
Speaker
They liked the original one.
00:48:13
Speaker
It was seemed like it was really regular women, women that they could relate to, that they understood that they were dating.
00:48:18
Speaker
Non-perpetually online women.
00:48:20
Speaker
Perpetually online, et cetera.
00:48:21
Speaker
Like that element took over.
00:48:23
Speaker
And then the other element of women who are like, you know, they're casual Reddit users or started to notice it.
00:48:28
Speaker
And we're saying like, it's embarrassing to send this to people.
00:48:30
Speaker
So we wanted to like professionalize the brand.
00:48:32
Speaker
So that we can still give the good strategy, the good content behind a brand that is still attractive to the audience of women who made the sub great.
00:48:41
Speaker
The audience of women who wanted to contribute and help people, who could relate to their experiences, who could come up with strategies.
00:48:48
Speaker
You have to make the environment hospitable
Transition to Website and Improved Engagement
00:48:50
Speaker
to them.
00:48:50
Speaker
And they don't want to be around FemCell whining.
00:48:53
Speaker
Right?
00:48:55
Speaker
And the numbers also spoke for themselves.
00:48:57
Speaker
I remember when I first joined FDS at the tail end of 2019, you would have like over 2000 people active on the subreddit at one time.
00:49:04
Speaker
Just before we closed it, you'd maybe get a couple of hundred.
00:49:07
Speaker
Like people say, oh, the subreddit is such a great resource, but the numbers like they dropped off like dramatically.
00:49:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:13
Speaker
Brain drain as well as like, because all the mods quiet quit, we couldn't flare people fast enough.
00:49:18
Speaker
So then people just gave up trying to comment too.
00:49:20
Speaker
And people unsubscribe because they didn't want the negativity on their feed.
00:49:23
Speaker
Like they would say, you know, I come here to discuss women's issues, but you know, post after post is about male depravity or another screw.
00:49:30
Speaker
And, you know, we initially tried to implement a rule where if you had a male depravity post, you'd have to provide the strategy, but that became so hard to police.
00:49:40
Speaker
And, you know, when one person doesn't follow it and then 10 more people again, you know, go back to your bucket in the Atlantic.
00:49:47
Speaker
Like there's just no point.
00:49:49
Speaker
So being on the website allows us to have a better handle on this type of content as well as like quarantine it off because you can follow, unfollow different categories as well as we can create badges and like quarantine off the like more toxic sections of the site.
00:50:03
Speaker
If you want to do like just male depravity posts, then like we can.
00:50:06
Speaker
If you want to duke it out over male depravity, you can do that.
00:50:08
Speaker
But in your section of the website.
00:50:10
Speaker
Exactly.
00:50:10
Speaker
So then like people who don't want to see that don't have to see that.
00:50:13
Speaker
Going off of the subreddit gave us greater ability to segment the toxic element from the women who like are less toxic or like the women that need help.
00:50:23
Speaker
They can be in one area versus like the women that like they maybe need help or like they want to discuss strategies, right?
00:50:27
Speaker
Like we can segment our audience a lot better than when they're all on Reddit.
00:50:31
Speaker
And then the only element that has the loudest voice of the angriest, bitterest, most like
00:50:35
Speaker
motivated to continuously rage post type of women.
00:50:39
Speaker
We need more diversity.
00:50:41
Speaker
I'm not completely saying you can't ever rage post because there are people that rage post on the website, but we'll have a better handle of how to quarantine that in a section in a way that it's not infecting the rest of FDS.
00:50:51
Speaker
Yeah, we can contain it.
00:50:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:53
Speaker
So one more plug for the website.
00:50:54
Speaker
We're adjusting these criticisms so we can tell, we can show people like we hear you, we understand what you're saying.
00:50:59
Speaker
This is what we're doing about it.
00:51:00
Speaker
And this is why we decided ultimately this is the best way to go.
00:51:03
Speaker
That's fine.
00:51:04
Speaker
We spent like 15 minutes just on like the first criticism, which was the FDS mods were ban happy.
00:51:09
Speaker
So let's push through.
00:51:10
Speaker
Yes.
00:51:11
Speaker
Okay.
00:51:11
Speaker
So another one is why don't you just get new mods?
00:51:13
Speaker
Okay.
00:51:14
Speaker
Let's talk about that.
00:51:14
Speaker
So the original mods, obviously they created a subreddit to create a bunch of strategy posts and share strategy to dating amongst them.
00:51:20
Speaker
As people were looking to add new mods, they had to go through everyone's post history and start like coaching people.
00:51:27
Speaker
And then also like observing who is making a lot of quality comments, who was helping women with their dating problems in a positive, constructive way, what kind of women were making consistent quality strategy posts, et cetera.
00:51:39
Speaker
So those women who were doing all of that, most of them became strategy coaches or mods, right?
00:51:43
Speaker
Like that's how people started to quote unquote, move up in the hierarchies.
00:51:46
Speaker
They were consistently posting and posting like really good content because then you start to realize, okay, we can trust this person.
00:51:51
Speaker
This person gets it.
00:51:52
Speaker
This person is like, you know, at least trying to act in good faith, FDS aligned, et cetera.
00:51:56
Speaker
The problem with that is like because they're spending so much time moderating, they weren't available to write all of the strategy anymore.
00:52:03
Speaker
And they would get burnt out from moderating.
00:52:05
Speaker
A lot of people like moderated for like two weeks and were like, oh, no, fuck this.
00:52:09
Speaker
And then left.
00:52:10
Speaker
And it made them not want to write anymore.
00:52:11
Speaker
Exactly.
00:52:12
Speaker
So it's actually, again, once again, hard to find new mods because most people are consumers and rage posters and not strategy writers.
00:52:18
Speaker
What made the mods special, quote unquote, from the general population of people that were coming is that they were actually like the brain architects around it.
00:52:27
Speaker
Right.
00:52:27
Speaker
Like the ability to look at a problem, analyze a problem, help people in a way that people liked.
00:52:31
Speaker
They were constantly getting gilded posts.
00:52:33
Speaker
They had a lot of upvotes.
00:52:34
Speaker
The community was positively responding to them, et cetera.
00:52:36
Speaker
So those are the people you obviously want to promote, right?
00:52:38
Speaker
The ones that had all the good contributions.
00:52:40
Speaker
The problem is if they're doing the mod work, they can't keep writing posts.
00:52:44
Speaker
But on the same time, if they start doing the mod work necessary, they get burnt out.
00:52:47
Speaker
So it's not easy, like people are saying, to just add a new mod.
00:52:50
Speaker
If like, quite frankly, like we said, some of the mods that were added were toxic, honestly.
00:52:54
Speaker
toxic right and people know that like there's certain mods that like they were constantly banning people being like kind of nasty to users for no reason or lashing out and posting publicly embarrassing comments that you know comments that would go viral on reddit that we'd be like girl like stop fucking saying that shit like keep that shit on lockdown like you know stop airing your personal grievances and embarrassing us some of them they didn't start out that way i think they became that way just getting frustrated with the user base right some of them like maybe they weren't vetted properly but other ones like i think they just got tired of everyone's shit
00:53:24
Speaker
And this is the difficult thing about Reddit moderation in general.
00:53:27
Speaker
Okay, so first of all, it was risky to take on new moderators who were not like FDS aligned.
00:53:32
Speaker
Like we had this problem in the early days where you'd take on a new moderator, you know, maybe they're active in FDS, but then they had some other agenda, like some other, you know, either gender critical mods or the fem cell mods or the pink pill mods or whatever.
00:53:45
Speaker
If they were associated with some other community on Reddit, as well as FDS, there was this problem where they'd use the FDS moderation position because that was the one that had the most
00:53:54
Speaker
subscribers to sort of like push their own whatever other agenda was going on right and it made it really difficult sometimes because these women you know if fds set any boundaries with them like no don't talk about this topic they would just go completely nuclear and try to like destroy us and this is the problem with reddit i feel like reddit specifically attracts a really toxic user base both men and women including some women who yeah if they don't get what they want they just go completely off the wall say that they're feminist they say that they're pro-women but the first thing they do if a woman sets a boundary with them is to try to destroy
00:54:24
Speaker
them.
00:54:24
Speaker
And that's what happened with pink pill feminism, right?
00:54:26
Speaker
Like that entire mod team imploded even before they got banned.
00:54:29
Speaker
It's really difficult to find women that we can trust to, you know, moderate in a way that's aligned with FDS and not abuse that power for some other non-FDS related kind of agenda.
00:54:41
Speaker
And at the same time, have them like the way that you find the women that you can trust is by looking at their post history, right?
00:54:47
Speaker
But then the women with the really good post history, you know, maybe Reddit moderation is not a good fit for them because it's like, this
00:54:53
Speaker
The sort of women who actually enjoyed moderation and were like on board with the actual grunt work of Reddit moderation, a lot of times they were not the same people who were writing quality strategy posts, let's just say.
00:55:04
Speaker
Like we said in the last Brexit episode, we started to feel like it was unethical to keep bringing women into this toxic environment.
00:55:11
Speaker
That's even more important, yeah.
00:55:12
Speaker
What are the ethics of like telling them like, please come to Reddit where you're going to get abused by the Reddit user base and our subreddit users occasionally.
00:55:22
Speaker
By our own user base.
00:55:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:24
Speaker
And expose yourself to like a lot of depraved things you probably wish didn't exist.
00:55:28
Speaker
Like again, and a lot of people maybe don't know this, but like as part of the mod team, you can see like what kinds of hits you're getting both from Reddit and then also from Google, et cetera.
00:55:35
Speaker
Like a lot of women like Savannah found us from Google search.
00:55:39
Speaker
So we were getting a lot of women who weren't like Reddit users who were just coming to get dating advice, et cetera.
00:55:44
Speaker
And then like.
00:55:45
Speaker
You know, we felt like continuing to expand the mod team and try to expand on Reddit was only helping Reddit's bottom line.
00:55:51
Speaker
So like, why should we keep adding moderators both to expose them to all this toxic shit, but also it's only going to actually enrich Reddit, right?
00:55:59
Speaker
Because like they're finding FDS through Google search and Reddit is getting all that SEO hit, right?
00:56:05
Speaker
And getting all of the compensation from that to support their rape and torture porn and female censorship.
00:56:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:11
Speaker
That's another reason why we just didn't want to keep adding new mods besides the reasons we just gave.
00:56:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:16
Speaker
So the main reason to the challenges with adding new mods is one, like it's difficult to find women that we can trust who are aligned with FDS in terms of their values.
00:56:23
Speaker
Two, work itself is unpaid and shitty.
00:56:27
Speaker
And, you know, we feel unethical exposing women to that.
00:56:30
Speaker
And three, the women who do write great strategy content are actively turned off by the work of Reddit moderation.
00:56:36
Speaker
The sort of people who are fine with doing the Reddit moderation are usually not actually aligned with FDS is what we're saying.
00:56:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:42
Speaker
Their burnout is high.
00:56:43
Speaker
And if they're not writing, how can we know if they're trustworthy?
00:56:45
Speaker
Right.
00:56:46
Speaker
Exactly.
00:56:46
Speaker
So it's double-edged sword here.
00:56:48
Speaker
So yeah, and we don't want to support Reddit as a site.
00:56:50
Speaker
It's like, once again, why are we recruiting their workforce?
00:56:53
Speaker
Fuck Reddit.
00:56:53
Speaker
This is the thing, like clinging on to Reddit and like, also no one's getting paid from this as well.
00:57:02
Speaker
Like, why are we doing all this work and we're not even getting paid?
00:57:06
Speaker
Like people might say, oh, we're grateful or whatever.
00:57:08
Speaker
You know, if you are doing, you know, voluntary work, that's often at the expense of doing work that you could be compensated for.
00:57:15
Speaker
So with that, by the way, I'm pleased to announce that we have and we do use our Patreon earnings to actually pay women to do some of the work on the website.
00:57:23
Speaker
Like one of the things we finally did is be free to buy time by paying someone to edit our podcast for us.
00:57:28
Speaker
But also like doing a lot of the like verified membership, some of the like backend web management and stuff like we've already spent some of our Patreon funds investing in women to do some of that work.
00:57:40
Speaker
So already we're better than Reddit because we pay women for their labor.
00:57:44
Speaker
So just by that, we're already better than them.
00:57:46
Speaker
Exactly.
00:57:47
Speaker
And we're paying, you know, women to do the work that Reddit would have had them do for free, basically.
00:57:52
Speaker
That also helps keep it sustainable.
00:57:54
Speaker
The other thing is a big part of the criticism we got was like, oh, yeah, like you're just money hungry, you're money grubbing.
00:57:59
Speaker
That's another thing where if a woman is accusing us of wanting money as if that's a bad thing.
00:58:04
Speaker
That's another sign that this person is not aligned with FDS because FDS, we've been very open about like, we think women should get paid.
00:58:11
Speaker
Women should not do unpaid labor.
00:58:12
Speaker
Men should pay for dates.
00:58:14
Speaker
Women should be paid more at their jobs, maximizing female benefit, right?
00:58:17
Speaker
So this idea that like, it's a bad thing for women to want to be compensated for their labor or, you know, women who want money are evil or bad.
00:58:26
Speaker
You're actually ideologically more similar to the scrotes who hate FDS than with FDS itself, right?
00:58:31
Speaker
So if you're accusing us of being, of wanting money and, oh,
00:58:34
Speaker
They have a Patreon.
00:58:35
Speaker
I also want to put it on the record, if it's okay, that we've not personally taken any money from it.
00:58:40
Speaker
So if we weren't out to scam people, then as like, it's like Lilith said, we would be shitty scammed.
00:58:47
Speaker
And if anything, because of the time that we will spend on it, it's actually cost us money.
00:58:51
Speaker
We've had to pay for our recording equipment and the opportunity cost as well.
00:58:55
Speaker
Like I said previously, if we are working on this...
00:58:58
Speaker
you know, for free, that's turning down other opportunities to do work where we would be paid.
00:59:02
Speaker
So this whole Greifter thing, and also even if we were getting paid, what is it?
00:59:06
Speaker
You know, $4,000 between three people?
00:59:09
Speaker
$4,000 a month between three people?
00:59:11
Speaker
That's like just over a thousand dollars a person.
00:59:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:14
Speaker
Ooh.
00:59:14
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:59:15
Speaker
Like, you know, we all come from very, very accomplished professional backgrounds.
00:59:18
Speaker
There are much easier ways to make that money than to do podcasting, but we've not personally seen a penny of any of the money
00:59:26
Speaker
Yeah, I actually find it insulting that people are like, oh, they make so much money from, you know, $4,000 a month on the Patreon.
00:59:32
Speaker
Like, this is making me sound really privileged, but $1,000 is not that much money to me, honestly.
00:59:36
Speaker
Like, $1,000 a month?
00:59:37
Speaker
I wouldn't pay my bills.
00:59:38
Speaker
Again, maybe that's going to sound classist of me or whatever, but I'm not that impressed by $1,000 a month.
00:59:43
Speaker
I do this because I love to, because I love every week recording with you ladies.
00:59:47
Speaker
I love...
00:59:47
Speaker
recording the podcast, you know, editing it, putting it out there, everything about making this podcast.
00:59:52
Speaker
I love it, right?
00:59:52
Speaker
FDS is like a hobby for me, right?
00:59:54
Speaker
But the idea that I'm doing this just purely to make money is offensive to me.
00:59:58
Speaker
And first of all, not true.
00:59:59
Speaker
Secondly, offensive.
01:00:00
Speaker
And thirdly, like if I wanted to make money, if I wanted to be a scammer, investing like 20 hours a week into something for a year and then getting no money at the end of that would make me a pretty fucking shitty scammer.
01:00:10
Speaker
Okay.
01:00:10
Speaker
Like just in terms of scamming skills, that's low skill scamming.
01:00:14
Speaker
That's very bad scamming in terms of like
01:00:17
Speaker
Scamming ability.
01:00:18
Speaker
It would be easy to say we have enemies and we need $50,000 to men then to do this.
01:00:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:24
Speaker
So all of the funds that we're making from FDS have been going to reinvest in the FDS brand with the hope of expansion, with the hope that we actually will create a sustainable business so that we can keep FDS going and incentivize both the content creators to keep creating good content, as well as the women that we need to do some of the more arduous tasks to keep doing the arduous tasks because they'll be compensated for it.
01:00:47
Speaker
So that is part of my
01:00:48
Speaker
making FDS sustainable because like we said, mod burnout is high.
01:00:51
Speaker
It's difficult to staff mods on the subreddit.
01:00:54
Speaker
And also we think Reddit sucks.
01:00:55
Speaker
And we think it's kind of unfair that they're getting all of a bunch of like new users and a bunch of SEO web hits from female dating strategy content.
01:01:03
Speaker
Nobody criticizes Reddit for being money hungry, right?
01:01:06
Speaker
Exactly.
01:01:06
Speaker
No one says Reddit's money when they clearly are.
01:01:08
Speaker
That's why they support all this rape porn because they know all these creeps will spend a shit ton of time on Reddit and purchase literally anything sexually depraved.
01:01:16
Speaker
So that's part of it.
01:01:17
Speaker
We think that we can redirect the traffic towards our website and also help them in that way as well as use the funds to reinvest on a business on a sustainable level.
01:01:26
Speaker
So trying to, like Savannah said, rearrange the chairs on Titanic and keep doing it for free is only eventually going to sink because
01:01:33
Speaker
Because if you want quality, you have to incentivize quality.
01:01:36
Speaker
Okay, moving along.
01:01:37
Speaker
So a couple of other quick hits.
01:01:39
Speaker
There was barely any engagement on female level up strategy and ask FDS.
01:01:43
Speaker
True.
01:01:43
Speaker
Nobody wanted to mod that shit.
01:01:44
Speaker
Again, we didn't have enough modding staff.
01:01:46
Speaker
There wasn't a lot of overlap between the two subs.
01:01:48
Speaker
There was a lot of great users on both.
01:01:50
Speaker
One of the things we think we're going to do, and once again, if those other subreddits are really popular, you'd have to deal with the mail element, which you can see is a full-time job, like we said, on FDS to keep them out.
01:01:59
Speaker
So the benefit of being on the website is that we have all of the categories that were on Feedback Level Up Strategy in a centralized location, so there'll be much more...
01:02:06
Speaker
user engagement and user overlap.
01:02:08
Speaker
Right.
01:02:09
Speaker
So like if you have dating questions, you know, dating questions got banned from the FDS subreddit because of the fact there were so many women that were like beginner level FDS people that had like, were more or less basic questions, not reading the handbook or had basic questions and they were clogging up the feed.
01:02:22
Speaker
And like people started to get annoyed with like not being able to see strategy because there were so many women asking dating questions, but then we put them on ask FDS.
01:02:28
Speaker
Yes.
01:02:29
Speaker
And then like no one had time to mod that and like answer all of their dating questions as well.
01:02:32
Speaker
And then there's an influx of men over there, et cetera.
01:02:34
Speaker
So what we're doing on the website is we can have, once again, a feed of women who are like beginner level.
01:02:38
Speaker
Cause like in any type of population, you're going to have women who are like strategy veterans.
01:02:42
Speaker
And then you're gonna have women who were like, damn, I just read this.
01:02:44
Speaker
And now my whole world's turned upside down and I don't know what to do.
01:02:47
Speaker
Right.
01:02:48
Speaker
So the idea is to like bring us all together again in a centralized location so we can talk about life coaching.
01:02:53
Speaker
You can talk about career, finance, spirituality, whatever else was on like female level up strategy and ask your dating questions if you're a newbie and you're just learning FDS in a centralized location and have a lot more overlap between the FDS user base and everybody else.
01:03:08
Speaker
Whereas like on Reddit, it was extremely segmented as well as like a bunch of work to mod separate sides.
01:03:13
Speaker
Whereas like on the website, it's all one thing, right?
01:03:16
Speaker
So again, like this is just like building efficiencies.
01:03:19
Speaker
We have, I think there's greater efficiency on the website as well as like giving more
01:03:23
Speaker
more overlap between our user base and also getting more engagement in these particular areas.
01:03:27
Speaker
So once again, a pitch for the website.
01:03:29
Speaker
And like we said, we know the UI isn't great.
01:03:30
Speaker
We're going to actually invest our Patreon earnings to get the website developed as much as it can.
01:03:35
Speaker
Obviously, we're on a Wix platform, we're on a Wix frame platform.
01:03:38
Speaker
It's not great, but also it helps us with security issues.
01:03:40
Speaker
We haven't had any of the security issues that other female-run websites have had because Wix's security has been really great.
01:03:46
Speaker
And also it's cheaper than a
01:03:47
Speaker
lot of other places.
01:03:47
Speaker
So there's benefits to us being on there.
01:03:50
Speaker
That's the direction we're going to go.
Exit from Reddit and Future Plans
01:03:51
Speaker
And to address that criticism that people were saying, like, why aren't people more engaged in female level up strategy?
01:03:55
Speaker
That's why.
01:03:56
Speaker
And this is what we're doing to address it.
01:03:58
Speaker
Okay.
01:03:58
Speaker
And the next piece of criticism, you didn't give us any warning or time to save our post.
01:04:02
Speaker
That's because you got a ghost up out of there.
01:04:04
Speaker
We weren't going to give Reddit like a heads up.
01:04:05
Speaker
We were leaving, right?
01:04:06
Speaker
When you're leaving an abusive relationship, you don't tell your abuser, hey, just so you know, I'm leaving in three weeks, like just FYI.
01:04:12
Speaker
Right.
01:04:12
Speaker
You don't give them time to prepare.
01:04:14
Speaker
But the reason why we did it suddenly was because we were afraid that the men on Reddit, that it would give them time to do something messed up.
01:04:20
Speaker
We didn't know what exactly they would or could do.
01:04:22
Speaker
But, you know, things like, yeah, screenshotting women's posts, you know,
01:04:25
Speaker
A lot of women are like, no, let me back in the subreddit so I can delete my posts.
01:04:28
Speaker
It's like when it's private, people can't see your posts, right?
01:04:30
Speaker
So by doing that, we're keeping our entire community safe.
01:04:33
Speaker
If we were to open the subreddit so that some individual women can delete their posts, that would give men time to screenshot things so that, you know, even if you delete it, it's irrelevant.
01:04:42
Speaker
It's been screenshotted.
01:04:42
Speaker
It's on the internet now forever.
01:04:44
Speaker
So we didn't want to give men, the shitty men on Reddit, any time to plan any shit.
01:04:48
Speaker
Okay, that's why we did it suddenly with no warning.
01:04:50
Speaker
It was to keep everyone safe and to not give them an opportunity.
01:04:53
Speaker
It's ghosting.
01:04:54
Speaker
And that's how you're supposed to ghost a bad relationship.
01:04:56
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:04:57
Speaker
Like you pack up all your shit and you leave.
01:05:00
Speaker
Just go.
01:05:00
Speaker
Yeah, just go.
01:05:02
Speaker
So we're going to try to do two things to address the fact that I guess a lot of people had saved posts that they wanted to keep.
01:05:06
Speaker
One, if you DM us like a save post that you like, then we will add it to the Instagram so that people can have it in a place that's off Reddit, but also we'll temporarily open the subreddit.
01:05:17
Speaker
We'll temporarily open the vault.
01:05:18
Speaker
We won't tell you when.
01:05:19
Speaker
We're opening the vault for a little while.
01:05:22
Speaker
It'll just happen randomly.
01:05:23
Speaker
We don't want to give the men any time to plan, basically.
01:05:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:27
Speaker
So just keep an eye on the subreddit.
01:05:28
Speaker
It will be reopened for a short time only at some point.
01:05:32
Speaker
Exactly.
01:05:33
Speaker
But keep an eye posted.
01:05:34
Speaker
So we'll try to let it open and close periodically so people can take whatever information they liked from the subreddit and keep it.
01:05:41
Speaker
Hashtag RobReddit.
01:05:47
Speaker
This is the equivalent of parking your moving truck outside the house of your ex-boyfriend and cleaning out all your shit while he's not there, right?
01:05:54
Speaker
Like get all your shit out of there when he's not there.
01:05:56
Speaker
We don't want to hear you complaining.
01:05:58
Speaker
The relationship's over.
01:05:59
Speaker
We're going to put all our stuff in our truck and drive off, you know, hashtag Beyonce to the left, et cetera.
01:06:04
Speaker
So.
01:06:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's how you break up with a man.
01:06:07
Speaker
If you're in an abusive relationship, you don't tell him, hey, I'm breaking up with you in three weeks, like just FYI, you know, that gives some time to like, I don't know, destroy property, like do other kinds of fucked up shit.
01:06:16
Speaker
This is very on brand for us the way that we did it, actually, whether you like it or not.
01:06:19
Speaker
Exactly.
01:06:20
Speaker
So this is part one of this discussion.
01:06:22
Speaker
We're actually going to continue this discussion on the Patreon.
01:06:25
Speaker
And a couple of questions we're going to address.
01:06:27
Speaker
One of the questions we were getting was a lot further.
01:06:29
Speaker
Fewer women will find you if you're not on Reddit and also address the FDS mods or power chipping, money hungry, grifters, etc.
01:06:36
Speaker
And give you some hope and discussion about the future of FDS, like the things we have in the works, the type of brand strategy we're doing going forward.
01:06:44
Speaker
Some of which we've already talked about on our Twitter spaces and with our Patreon users who we consider our startup investors.
01:06:50
Speaker
So if you'd like to invest in FDSs,
01:06:52
Speaker
FDS is a brand and the continued expansion of FDS is a brand, please sign up for our Patreon.
01:06:56
Speaker
We also have a PayPal donation link.
01:06:58
Speaker
If you're interested in just giving us some donations to further create content as well as, you know, maintain what we have.
01:07:04
Speaker
We also have merchandise on the website, which you might like.
01:07:07
Speaker
We have a scrote tears mug that was really popular as well as like we added Dirty Peaks.
01:07:13
Speaker
Can I just say my mom was so honored by that?
01:07:15
Speaker
Like I never thought like a phase that brought me so many tears as a child would be monotonized.
01:07:20
Speaker
So thank you.
01:07:24
Speaker
She was so honored.
01:07:25
Speaker
She didn't quite get it at first, but she was so honored.
01:07:29
Speaker
She's not in on the inside joke.
01:07:32
Speaker
Dirty peaks.
01:07:35
Speaker
We also have a Rose Disco apron that's pretty popular.
01:07:37
Speaker
So we're going to keep adding merchandise up there.
01:07:40
Speaker
And if you have any suggestions for merchandise, please let us know.
01:07:42
Speaker
We're always open to suggestions.
01:07:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:45
Speaker
And the website started to get popping.
01:07:46
Speaker
So we have a Wix app, by the way.
01:07:49
Speaker
So a lot of people, they don't necessarily like using the mobile site.
01:07:53
Speaker
We actually have an app.
01:07:54
Speaker
So if you go to the website, there's an icon there where you can click on the link and then download the Wix app and it'll give you a link to the FDS space on the Wix app.
01:08:02
Speaker
So if you prefer using the Reddit app and you want to keep using an app, you can use the Wix app to access the FDS website.
01:08:08
Speaker
So
01:08:08
Speaker
So that's it for right now.
01:08:10
Speaker
So join us in part two, where we talk about all of the happy, positive things that we're doing with FTS.
01:08:15
Speaker
But hopefully we adequately addressed your questions, concerns, criticisms, and gave you a little bit more insight into the reasoning behind us leaving.
01:08:22
Speaker
So check out our website, thefemaledatingstrategy.com and our Twitter at femdatstrat and our Instagram at underscore thefemaledatingstrategy.com.
01:08:32
Speaker
And our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy for bonus content.
01:08:37
Speaker
And I guess keep your eyes peeled for the subreddit and it being open.
01:08:40
Speaker
But other than that, fuck Reddit.
01:08:42
Speaker
So thanks for listening, queens.
01:08:44
Speaker
And for all you scrotes out there, to the left, to the left, everything you own in a box to the left.
01:08:51
Speaker
Die mad.
01:08:54
Speaker
See you next week.