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ReddXit Part 3: Reddit Revolt
22 Plays2 years ago
Reddit Moderators are revolting against new rules imposed by CEO Steve Huffman. We told y'all so.
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Transcript
Introduction to FDS Podcast
00:00:06
Speaker
What's up, queens?
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to the Female Dating Strategy Podcast.
00:00:11
Speaker
The meanest female-only podcast on the internet, cause I'm real.
00:00:15
Speaker
And I'm Savannah.
00:00:16
Speaker
And today, I just want to say... We told y'all so!
00:00:21
Speaker
Listen, listen, just say it.
00:00:23
Speaker
We told y'all so.
00:00:25
Speaker
We did.
00:00:26
Speaker
We said it.
00:00:27
Speaker
We already said it.
00:00:28
Speaker
We already said this is a problem.
Challenges in Tech Platforms
00:00:30
Speaker
This is an unsustainable model.
00:00:32
Speaker
Yes.
00:00:33
Speaker
This is about the shit show that is happening down at Reddit, if you hadn't known.
00:00:37
Speaker
I don't really know why all of these major tech social media sites like Twitter and like Reddit are just suddenly going down the shit up.
00:00:44
Speaker
But yeah.
00:00:45
Speaker
Have you ever heard of the phrase in shitification?
00:00:49
Speaker
No.
00:00:51
Speaker
So I don't know who came up with this term, but it's basically, in a nutshell, the idea that all of these tech companies, at the beginning, they were trying to make all of these products they thought would make everyone's lives better.
00:01:04
Speaker
But over time, that became less profitable.
00:01:07
Speaker
And given that they're mostly public companies, they have to figure out a way to keep making money.
00:01:12
Speaker
So then they start to make the apps worse.
00:01:14
Speaker
And they start to make the use, like anything that's tech, so search engines, apps, whatever,
00:01:19
Speaker
have you social media becomes worse because they try to increasingly monetize it by extension, make it less user friendly.
00:01:25
Speaker
So you can see this and things like YouTube, like on the YouTube app, they've hidden the ability to sort videos by oldest to newest.
00:01:34
Speaker
So like now if you find a creator, you like you can't go search their oldest videos.
00:01:37
Speaker
And a couple of months ago, when Instagram tried to become TikTok, and we started like forcing people to watch like endless videos, and then
00:01:46
Speaker
That one was actually unsuccessful and everybody basically revolted and they had to go back to their old model.
FDS's Reddit Moderation Challenges
00:01:51
Speaker
It's just a lot of these tech companies trying to figure out a way how to squeeze additional dollars out of everybody.
00:01:57
Speaker
And in the process, making all of their apps less user-friendly, more frustrating to use, etc.
00:02:02
Speaker
But since they have basically monopolies at this point, because there's not really too many competitors in the market, they can do that.
00:02:09
Speaker
I'm really hoping that a lot of these
00:02:11
Speaker
tech companies are not too big to fail and that they'll eventually go the way of like a MySpace or a dig where they got too big for their britches.
00:02:18
Speaker
They've started making the user experience really shitty.
00:02:21
Speaker
And therefore, a competitor emerged on the market.
00:02:23
Speaker
People went over to that and they were very, very quickly left to the dustbin of tech history.
00:02:30
Speaker
So in light of that discussion, Reddit is on its way there.
00:02:34
Speaker
Should I start with a story right now?
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah, we should start with the story as to why FDS, we bailed on Reddit back in May 2020.
00:02:43
Speaker
I think it's important to put the reason why we're saying we told you so into context, especially for our new listeners who may not have found us through the Reddit, but...
00:02:54
Speaker
Basically, the FDS moderators decided to withdraw from Reddit back in May 2022, for which was a highly, highly, highly controversial decision.
00:03:06
Speaker
Because a lot of our current listeners and viewers, they found us through the Reddit.
00:03:10
Speaker
And to be honest, I found FDS through Reddit.
00:03:12
Speaker
And that's one of the good things about Reddit in general is that if you Google anything and put Reddit in, you usually get a response that's tailored to what you want very, very quickly.
00:03:22
Speaker
And so a lot of people came to find us through Reddit.
00:03:25
Speaker
I'm not trying to say this diplomatically, so I won't see anything at all.
00:03:29
Speaker
But the subreddit was basically becoming a beast to moderate.
Migration and Internal Conflicts at FDS
00:03:33
Speaker
And, you know, what happens on any social media website is that
00:03:37
Speaker
The lower quality content tends to be upvoted and given more traffic than the content that is actually higher quality.
00:03:45
Speaker
And this is what we were seeing with the subreddit as well.
00:03:47
Speaker
So things like memes and sort of, you know, posts that weren't really the essence of FDS.
00:03:54
Speaker
They were getting the most upvotes and attention.
00:03:57
Speaker
But the issue with something like FDS is that it relies on women who are strategic and have a lot of insight to take the time to write a strategy post.
00:04:07
Speaker
Now, if you've ever written a strategy post, either for FDS or elsewhere, you'll know that writing such posts can take an awful, awful lot of time.
00:04:16
Speaker
It does.
00:04:17
Speaker
It does.
00:04:18
Speaker
I mean, you can read it.
00:04:19
Speaker
If you think about the average strategy post, you can read it in maybe less than five minutes, but a lot of thought and effort has gone into creating that post.
00:04:27
Speaker
And the moderators just didn't have the time to do it anymore.
00:04:31
Speaker
And we found that the user base on the subreddit, the number of users who would contribute the FDS style sort of strategy was extremely small.
00:04:41
Speaker
And they were often being drowned out by the post that were more low effort.
00:04:45
Speaker
Another issue we had with the subreddit was that FDS somehow survived a ban wave of a lot of the female-only subreddits, I think, towards the tail end of 2021.
00:04:55
Speaker
So a lot of the pink pill and the black pill subreddits just got randomly banned from Reddit.
00:05:00
Speaker
So a lot of them came over to FDS because FDS was still, I guess...
00:05:05
Speaker
We were the only ones that survived that quote purge, right?
00:05:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:09
Speaker
I don't know how we did that.
00:05:10
Speaker
It was when they like, they purged all the subreddits with a bunch of like, like I said, I think first of all, our moderating was really intense compared to a lot of other
00:05:21
Speaker
a lot of the other subreddits because of the fact that we had so many users and so many people that we would try to volunteer to be mods.
00:05:27
Speaker
Now, because of that, there was high levels of mod burnout, both from the type of content they would see and just the amount of work it took to keep the community relatively within Reddit's guidelines so that we wouldn't get put off.
00:05:41
Speaker
That took a lot of man hours.
00:05:43
Speaker
So two things happened.
00:05:44
Speaker
Mods either got burnt out or quit.
00:05:46
Speaker
Even when you would try to add mods, they would just be like, they would do it for a little while, get burnt out and quit.
00:05:50
Speaker
Or...
00:05:51
Speaker
Reddit started strategically banning some of our mods, meaning site-wide bans, IP bans.
00:05:56
Speaker
So not just like, you can't log into just this account, meaning you cannot log into Reddit period.
00:06:02
Speaker
We don't really know why, first of all.
00:06:04
Speaker
We think it's just...
00:06:06
Speaker
Sometimes it would just be like bullshit violations from like years ago or something like somebody would just, it could just be scrotes going back to their post history and reporting literally everything that looks like it might fall within a questionable guideline.
00:06:18
Speaker
And then tripping one of Reddit's
00:06:21
Speaker
algorithms to put that person in an IP ban.
00:06:24
Speaker
We know that there were mass-coordinated attacks by these losers on Discord and stuff.
00:06:29
Speaker
And then we had created alternative subreddits just for the purposes of mass-reporting FDS mods and FDS users.
00:06:36
Speaker
The thing about it was like, it was hard to keep mods.
00:06:39
Speaker
Mods had high turnover rate.
00:06:41
Speaker
The mods who were there were getting burnt out both from the amount of work and the kind of content they were seeing.
00:06:46
Speaker
And then after all of that, they were getting their accounts mass banned by either coordinated attacks or from choice by Reddit.
00:06:52
Speaker
We don't know.
00:06:53
Speaker
So it's just one of those things where essentially like being on Reddit became kind of an unsustainable model given that pretty much all of the other like quote based female subreddits had already been banned or had been tripped.
00:07:07
Speaker
They'd either been banned or all of their mods had been kicked off Reddit.
00:07:10
Speaker
So then all the users tried to migrate to FDS which only created that much more work for FDS to try to stay like within Reddit's guidelines to stay on there.
00:07:18
Speaker
And eventually it just was like, why are we doing this?
00:07:21
Speaker
Like they hate us.
00:07:22
Speaker
We can't keep our content.
00:07:23
Speaker
Anytime anybody writes like a really great strategy post, it gets drowned out in the shit posts.
00:07:28
Speaker
And then furthermore, the women who were writing the great strategy posts don't want to write anymore because they don't like the harassment.
00:07:34
Speaker
And then furthermore, like some of the femcels from other communities who just were like, wanted to perch on FDS to be like, we're not going to date ever.
00:07:43
Speaker
Kind of ruined the vibe, right?
00:07:44
Speaker
Like, so like women who fuck don't want to like listen to like your femcel rant.
00:07:47
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:07:48
Speaker
I don't mean to be rude.
00:07:49
Speaker
It's just like, dude.
00:07:50
Speaker
It's true.
00:07:53
Speaker
It wasn't even a case of because, you know, at first we sort of tolerated almost the migration from other subreddits, understanding that, OK, yeah, we're the last, you know, female only space.
00:08:03
Speaker
We're happy to have you here, you know, growing the subreddit.
00:08:06
Speaker
But what really got the mods backs up was that they would then try to turn FDS into a fem cell sub.
00:08:12
Speaker
It was the user base kind of turning against the mods.
00:08:15
Speaker
I'm not sure if it was like the original FDS user base, though.
00:08:18
Speaker
I think it was the migration that was turning against the moderators, which is weird because they would get so offended.
00:08:24
Speaker
Like when we did, for example, Fine Ass Fridays, they got so viscerally offended that there are women out there who want to find men attractive.
00:08:32
Speaker
Like it was very bizarre to me.
00:08:34
Speaker
And it wasn't even like they would just stop my thing.
00:08:36
Speaker
They would just get viscerally offended by that.
00:08:39
Speaker
Exactly.
00:08:39
Speaker
So it was like, the thing is, all of the other communities got banned, right?
00:08:42
Speaker
So then the fem cells migrated to FDS, gender critical, migrated FDS, 2X chromosomes.
00:08:48
Speaker
There's a couple other ones, and now the name escapes me, but like the fair sex.
00:08:53
Speaker
And it was a bunch of them that were just like run, and they were pretty based, but a lot of them were just hardcore sex.
00:09:00
Speaker
either radical feminists or fem cells or just, I don't know what they would, what you would call them.
00:09:06
Speaker
Some of them weren't even fem cells or radical feminists.
00:09:08
Speaker
They were just like, I think they were just a straight up like kind of like male hate group, which listen, I think the balance of the universe necessitates that, but you know, just kind of restoring the balance, but like,
00:09:19
Speaker
it kind of just wasn't what FDS was supposed to be.
00:09:22
Speaker
FDS was supposed to be a dating strategy.
00:09:23
Speaker
And like, we find a lot of issues with men and we drag the fuck out of them constantly.
00:09:29
Speaker
But it is sort of like, you know, it becomes like a little bit counterproductive when it's just like nothing, but I'm never going to date because I'm a femme cell.
00:09:38
Speaker
Don't wear makeup because you're a radical feminist and little boys should be drowned at birth because I'm like,
00:09:46
Speaker
because I hate men.
00:09:47
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:09:48
Speaker
Listen, I'm not even saying that any of these people are wrong for whatever they want to make their subreddit about because God knows there's plenty of that on the opposite side of Reddit that Reddit does not police
Reddit's Monetization and Mod Challenges
00:10:00
Speaker
at all.
00:10:00
Speaker
And it was pretty fucked up that once again, I think the female subreddits got excavated because of the mass coordinated attacks.
00:10:07
Speaker
Literally, you have to understand on Reddit...
00:10:10
Speaker
We don't have the numbers and our backs are against the wall because there's just infinitely more incels and they have all the time in the world to just report everybody, create bots that just mass report accounts and stuff like that, or shitpost a lot of rule violating content using bots.
00:10:25
Speaker
And then like the only thing that can be done is for somebody to manually review all that stuff or use a counter bot, which there were bots that were doing that, but even the bots couldn't keep after a while or...
00:10:36
Speaker
it caught so many users in the bot bands, meaning like the bots aren't perfect either.
00:10:40
Speaker
So there was a lot of like legit FDS users.
00:10:42
Speaker
And then like the mod inbox overflowed with like, why did I get banned?
00:10:45
Speaker
It's like, well, there's not shit we can do about it.
00:10:47
Speaker
Cause like, honestly, it's too much work to go through the inbox at this point.
00:10:50
Speaker
It's messed up.
00:10:52
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:10:53
Speaker
Exactly.
00:10:54
Speaker
So we basically noped the fuck out in 2022.
00:10:58
Speaker
And that didn't go down very well for reasons I sort of understand.
00:11:03
Speaker
Like, again, like, even though Reddit has its problems, it's very accessible, it was open, people could find us more easily.
00:11:10
Speaker
So we migrated to a tiny website.
00:11:12
Speaker
Bearing in mind though, we understand that the website is a big shift, but one of the main reasons why we chose to leave was so that A, our content wasn't controlled by Reddit.
00:11:23
Speaker
So if you look at the discourse that's on the website, it's very, like we wouldn't be able to say most of that on the subreddit.
00:11:30
Speaker
We either would have been banned by now or, you know, it'd be mass reported.
00:11:35
Speaker
So it's a much, much safer space for women.
00:11:37
Speaker
Secondly, it's just the principle of giving a site like Reddit
00:11:42
Speaker
unpaid labour and this is what the mods who stuck around are now finding out ultimately Reddit is an organisation that is happy to profit off the backs of unpaid moderators and not only profit but when you know the moderators are
00:11:57
Speaker
you know, want to actually be able to do their job of moderating, Reddit will make it very, very difficult for them and even try to remove them if they don't comply.
00:12:06
Speaker
So Reddit is an organization that just doesn't give a shit about all the hours that the moderators put in to building Reddit, because if it wasn't for the individual mods of the communities, Reddit would be nothing.
00:12:17
Speaker
It's the individual communities that make Reddit what it is.
00:12:20
Speaker
And, you know, we saw the clear disregard they had for FDS in the sense that when we would report the vile abuse that the mods were getting, they did absolutely nothing about it.
00:12:30
Speaker
Even when it was a clear violation of their policies, you know, we'd always get the message saying, yeah, basically this doesn't violate our policy, you know, carry on sort of thing.
00:12:39
Speaker
But now it's all kicking off again with, you know, I guess like Reddit's financial trajectory.
00:12:47
Speaker
So now like the shit's kind of hit the fan about like just about the reality of Reddit burning through their free gas workforce.
00:12:54
Speaker
And it's all in response to Reddit's IPO, which if you listen to a couple of our Brexit episodes, if you listen to both our Brexit episodes, I think basically wished a pox on that IPO that like anybody who buys stock in Reddit deserves the fact that it might tank immediately after their IPO.
00:13:11
Speaker
And we hope we've prayed for this.
00:13:13
Speaker
We've prayed for Reddit's downfall.
00:13:17
Speaker
I mean, it's one of those things where it was first in its kind.
00:13:21
Speaker
And so and it created a monopoly.
00:13:23
Speaker
And there really just needs to be at minimum a viable competitor for it.
00:13:29
Speaker
And there isn't right now.
00:13:31
Speaker
And so they've basically been able to exercise this monopoly on the internet.
00:13:34
Speaker
And they're highly dependent on Google search, etc.
00:13:37
Speaker
So the long and short of what happened is essentially Reddit's going through this IPO.
00:13:43
Speaker
And in response to that, they're trying to find a bunch of additional monetization strategies to inflate the value of their company so that they can get a higher IPO.
00:13:52
Speaker
More than likely because all of the private owners or private investors want to take their money out as soon as that IPO hits, meaning once they can get people to buy a bunch of stock.
00:14:01
Speaker
people can make much money, leave the company.
00:14:04
Speaker
I would not be surprised if Steve Huffman, who's the CEO of Reddit, wants to get all of his money out of the company and bounce, right?
00:14:11
Speaker
So like he's probably aggressively pushing this IPO so he can get a bunch of people to buy stock.
00:14:16
Speaker
He can make some money.
00:14:18
Speaker
make like a flat sum of money and then bounce.
00:14:20
Speaker
Okay, so how do you do that?
00:14:22
Speaker
Well, you basically have to do the thing we were talking about, which is in Shittify It.
00:14:26
Speaker
Meaning it has to be shittier so that it can make more money.
00:14:30
Speaker
And so one of the ways that they're doing that is trying to get rid of a lot of the third-party apps that Reddit has historically relied on, stuff like Imgur,
00:14:37
Speaker
stuff like GiphyCat and making some alternatives on their site.
00:14:42
Speaker
Some of them are better, some of them are far worse.
00:14:44
Speaker
And then another thing they're doing is trying to charge third-party apps to use their data.
00:14:50
Speaker
So Elon Musk basically kicked off that trend on Twitter, which said that, okay, third-party apps and applications can no longer access their API anymore.
00:14:59
Speaker
So API stands for Application Programming Interface for people to know.
00:15:03
Speaker
It's basically their software code.
00:15:06
Speaker
It's like a contract of service between two applications.
00:15:09
Speaker
The contract defines how the two communicate with each other using requests and responses.
00:15:12
Speaker
So basically, you can build an app that interfaces with another app.
00:15:16
Speaker
And in the best of worlds, these two things work in tandem to make each other better.
00:15:21
Speaker
And Twitter has a ton of these, especially for people who make media content.
00:15:25
Speaker
Basically, you can use a third-party app to program your posts, program links being sent out.
00:15:31
Speaker
Now there's a lot of bots.
00:15:32
Speaker
Some of them are highly fucking obnoxious.
00:15:34
Speaker
Like I told you guys before, a lot of you guys who sent me messages on Twitter, since the Elon Muskification of Twitter took over, my inbox is just full of fucking spam.
00:15:44
Speaker
So I can't find anything anymore.
00:15:46
Speaker
So half the time, I'm just deleting a bunch of people trying to spam me with crypto scams and porn.
00:15:51
Speaker
So it's just like, that's what it is.
00:15:53
Speaker
So now Reddit wants to charge all those people when it used to be very mutually beneficial because like these third party apps would drive traffic to both Twitter and Reddit.
00:16:03
Speaker
Now, a lot of people who have historically used these and who are kind of seeing the entire app become and shitified so that they can get more money, so that Reddit can get more money, are excited to protest, especially longtime mods, right?
00:16:15
Speaker
So mods who have been now rocking with Reddit for maybe like,
00:16:19
Speaker
I don't know how long Reddit's been around, but at least like 15 years, right?
00:16:22
Speaker
15 to 20 years?
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah, for a long time.
00:16:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:26
Speaker
So some of these mods have been around since like literally day one.
00:16:29
Speaker
And a lot of people are seeing the writing on the wall with Reddit's IPO, which is that, okay, when your IPO, you're going to have shares.
00:16:36
Speaker
And with those shares, it's required pretty much in order to keep your job anyways.
00:16:42
Speaker
that you track a path forward to make all of the investors' money back.
00:16:46
Speaker
So increasing your earnings per share.
00:16:47
Speaker
And that's going to make Reddit crappier, more or less.
00:16:51
Speaker
It's reached its pinnacle of usefulness.
00:16:53
Speaker
And now it's going to probably start to be a lot more paid ads, a lot more paid posts, a lot more monetization of third-party apps so that people can't use them.
00:17:01
Speaker
And so you have to be on the Reddit app and basically just make it worse overall.
00:17:05
Speaker
So in response to that, a lot of moderators decided to protest by taking their subreddit private.
00:17:11
Speaker
Now, does that sound familiar to you?
00:17:12
Speaker
Does that sound like a familiar thing?
00:17:17
Speaker
Yeah, pretty much.
00:17:19
Speaker
Because you can't delete your sub.
00:17:21
Speaker
Yeah, they make it really difficult to like delete subreddits.
Reddit Mod Protests and Community Solidarity
00:17:25
Speaker
They make it so difficult.
00:17:27
Speaker
That's just me thinking out loud.
00:17:28
Speaker
But yeah, it's like almost impossible to delete a subreddit.
00:17:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
00:17:32
Speaker
So and that was a bunch of extremely popular subreddits that went dark.
00:17:36
Speaker
So it went private.
00:17:37
Speaker
So our music, our videos are mildly interesting.
00:17:41
Speaker
a lot of the big ones yeah was just going blackout and it seemed like the blackouts were getting a lot of support from the user bases because i know a lot of the subreddits explain the situation and users were actually in support of it as well so it was almost like you know that solidarity do you remember when amy talena it got out that amy talena had been hired by reddit and like all the subreddits were
00:18:10
Speaker
A beautiful act of unity.
00:18:12
Speaker
Like everyone shut.
00:18:14
Speaker
It was literally a beautiful moment of solidarity between all of the moderators on Reddit when we were all just like, what the unholy fuck is happening?
00:18:22
Speaker
And I don't even know if it was all for the same reasons.
00:18:24
Speaker
Like, obviously we are like grossed out and disgusted by the fact that everything that happened with Amy Chandler and their father being part of a bunch of pedophilia, like basically a prolific pedophile.
00:18:38
Speaker
It's honestly horrific, trigger warning if you Google it.
00:18:41
Speaker
And then for that person to be a public figure, have all of this on their public record and still be hired by Reddit.
00:18:47
Speaker
And then have a husband, Amy Chandler, married a person who openly posts child erotica, right?
00:18:55
Speaker
Yes, pedophile, open pedophile again, yeah.
00:18:59
Speaker
It's a lot, right?
00:19:00
Speaker
So then there was the people that were mad, obviously, about the pedophilia.
00:19:04
Speaker
And then what Amy Challener did was block and delete and ban anyone's accounts.
00:19:08
Speaker
We talked about Amy's... I hate to use the, like, pronoun.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I think that's what...
00:19:15
Speaker
Did people in.
00:19:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:17
Speaker
Talked about Amy's pedophilic past.
00:19:19
Speaker
So basically there was the free speech people and also the anti-pedophile people that had a moment of solidarity in that moment.
00:19:28
Speaker
Like Reddit censoring anybody who talks about this raging pedophile, disgusting, gross person and their husband.
00:19:36
Speaker
But a common theme with these blackouts is that Reddit doesn't really expect, they tend to not expect the blackouts.
00:19:43
Speaker
If I go back to the Amy Chandler situation, they very, very quickly backpedal.
00:19:47
Speaker
They very, very quickly threw Amy under the bus, pretended that there's no way they could have known.
00:19:52
Speaker
Google search, you know, would have, you know, brought up all of that information and more.
00:19:57
Speaker
There's no way that Reddit didn't have any clue who they were hiring.
00:20:01
Speaker
They just hoped that people wouldn't care.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's bizarre to me.
00:20:04
Speaker
I have no idea how that person passed the background check.
00:20:07
Speaker
Maybe they don't run.
00:20:08
Speaker
I mean, it's a private company.
00:20:09
Speaker
So the thing about private companies is they're kind of wild, wild west.
00:20:13
Speaker
But Reddit said they do.
00:20:14
Speaker
They said they do run background checks.
00:20:16
Speaker
So that's the thing.
00:20:17
Speaker
They said that they do.
00:20:19
Speaker
So yeah, more question marks than answers on that one then.
00:20:22
Speaker
You could just Google this person and it was very obvious.
00:20:26
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, just like the blackout recently, it united, you know, the biggest, and you know, that was what really sort of, you know, made me think, oh shit, yeah, Reddit has gone way too far now because it was like the biggest subreddits, the ones that had like millions of subscribers, you know, they were the ones leading this.
00:20:44
Speaker
And I guess it makes sense because those large subreddits,
00:20:48
Speaker
As much as, you know, I wish that FDS grew to have 20 million subscribers, but I'm glad it didn't because I think, like, Ro, the tipping point got to, like, around 150,000.
00:20:58
Speaker
That's when it became unmanageable.
00:21:02
Speaker
In terms of moderation, there's definitely a tipping point from where it becomes doable to when it becomes unmanageable.
00:21:09
Speaker
And that number is about the 150 to the 200,000 mark.
00:21:11
Speaker
After that, it's just...
00:21:14
Speaker
It's like trying to bail water out of the Titanic, basically.
00:21:18
Speaker
You just feel like you're drowning every day.
00:21:21
Speaker
But yeah, it becomes impossible.
00:21:23
Speaker
And I think in particular, because I mean, if you have a subreddit, that's relatively innocuous, even that, for example, are mildly interesting.
00:21:33
Speaker
So at first they went private, and then Reddit threatened all the moderators that went private and said, okay, if you don't reopen your subreddit, we're going to remove you from your mob position.
00:21:42
Speaker
So then they reopened.
00:21:43
Speaker
And then they basically just stopped moderating and let people post porn.
00:21:47
Speaker
And here's the thing.
00:21:48
Speaker
If you're not actively moderating your subreddit, even if you have a fairly innocuous subreddit, there's just so many kumar-y scrotes and OnlyFans girls on Reddit that they're constantly trying to drive traffic to their OnlyFans or there's just like perverts that just want you to see their dick.
00:22:02
Speaker
If you're not constantly moderating, that stuff just overtakes your subreddit.
00:22:06
Speaker
Like at minimum, it'll just be like creepy porn people, right?
00:22:09
Speaker
So yeah, mildly interesting started just letting it happen because of the fact that if you have a pornographic subreddit, then Reddit can't advertise on that because a lot of advertisers don't want
00:22:18
Speaker
their product to be on pornographic subreddit.
00:22:21
Speaker
So it's a huge subreddit, it has a lot of traffic, and suddenly Reddit can't run ads on it because whatever their algorithm is doesn't run ads on the porn subreddits.
00:22:29
Speaker
So it's one of those things where it was malicious compliance, but at the same time, moderators are a completely free workforce, right?
00:22:37
Speaker
Like,
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:38
Speaker
And to be fair, it wasn't just the big subreddits that were threatened, all the other subreddits, because some decided to remain private.
00:22:46
Speaker
And I think a lot of subreddits are still private of all sizes.
00:22:50
Speaker
And so what Reddit did to get around it was they basically said that anyone...
00:22:56
Speaker
can request a subreddit now.
00:22:57
Speaker
So if you go to the Reddit, there's a special subreddit where people can request subreddits.
00:23:02
Speaker
Usually that was a process.
00:23:04
Speaker
So the subreddit had to have been abandoned and the, you know, they would reach out to the existing moderators first.
00:23:11
Speaker
But Reddit basically said you can request any subreddit now.
00:23:14
Speaker
So you can imagine that it's going to be possibly the bad faith actors who are going to end up in control of some of the biggest subreddits on the site.
00:23:24
Speaker
And, you know, Reddit is cool with that as long as they do what they want.
00:23:28
Speaker
And it's like, if you're looking for a site that is championing free speech or the ability to shape your community, like Reddit always said they would like, you know, you can shape your community, you can have your rules, you can do it your way almost.
00:23:40
Speaker
It's just completely decimated now.
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, and the argument has been made on one hand that like, and this is basically what Steve Hoffman has suddenly decided that all of the power mods are too much of a problem.
00:23:52
Speaker
They have too much power on the Reddit, which a lot of people have been arguing for a while because of the fact that like, hey, it's weird that you have one or two people who are in the mod of like 500 subreddits.
00:24:01
Speaker
They can't possibly be modeling them all effectively, especially if they're the main mod, but they got in early.
00:24:06
Speaker
And some of these are scrotes.
00:24:07
Speaker
And we've talked about that where a lot of the feminists, all of them,
00:24:11
Speaker
Actually, all of them were scrotes.
00:24:12
Speaker
I'm sorry, my bad.
00:24:13
Speaker
Every single one.
00:24:14
Speaker
And a lot of them squatted on female-led subreddits or female topical subreddits like Small Brew Problems, Our Lesbians, which is pretty much porn now, so you can't actually be a lesbian.
00:24:24
Speaker
And even Our Abortion was modded by a man for the longest time.
00:24:29
Speaker
Our Abortion, can you imagine?
00:24:30
Speaker
And when the women, they found out, they were hand over the subreddit to women, he just refused to do it.
00:24:36
Speaker
And so even Our Feminism, 2x Chromosomes,
00:24:40
Speaker
It was a whole controversy and they went private and protested that too.
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:46
Speaker
But basically, if you're a woman on a subreddit and you're following a female only subreddit, generally speaking, apart from FDS, it's like 90% likely that at least one of the moderators on there is a man.
00:24:57
Speaker
Yeah, our feminism too.
00:24:59
Speaker
And that's part of why for the longest time, Reddit was Scroat Central because any of the major subreddits that existed, men would infiltrate it if they hadn't already, and then they would control the narrative a certain way.
00:25:11
Speaker
So on one hand, I kind of understand where they're saying like the mods have too much power, but it's only now because it's affecting Reddit monetarily that they suddenly care.
00:25:20
Speaker
They were totally fine, like exploiting the free label of these like crazy perpetually online
00:25:25
Speaker
nutcases when it means that they would spend like all of their waking hours accumulating power on Reddit because they're probably some stringy-haired greasy loser and doing it for free.
00:25:35
Speaker
Honestly, like slash sugarcoat and doing it for free.
00:25:40
Speaker
And then...
00:25:41
Speaker
Now that it's going to cost Reddit probably money, suddenly it's like, oh, the mods have too much power.
00:25:45
Speaker
But a lot of people were saying that because... I mean, we were saying that when all the women were getting banned off our relationships or other major subreddits for saying like, hey, maybe the porn is a problem in the relationship.
00:25:55
Speaker
And that was a thing.
00:25:56
Speaker
And the only thing that's kind of pushed it back now is because of things like FDS.
00:26:00
Speaker
Now...
00:26:01
Speaker
sure what happened.
00:26:02
Speaker
But for whatever reason, again, I think it's because of the pandemic.
00:26:06
Speaker
I really feel like FDS happened in the perfect storm of Reddit of like there needing to be more female content.
00:26:11
Speaker
A lot of women who maybe would not have been engaged on Reddit regularly were on Reddit because there wasn't shit to do because it was in the pandemic and people were scared and constantly updating, checking social media and didn't have anything to do.
FDS's Cultural Influence on Reddit
00:26:23
Speaker
And suddenly we had this community of like regular women.
00:26:26
Speaker
not women who were necessarily like Redditors before that.
00:26:30
Speaker
Some of them, sure, but not exclusively Redditors or the more extremist wings of like femcellism and stuff.
00:26:38
Speaker
Like the type of women who are probably very casual users were suddenly very engaged.
00:26:44
Speaker
And so FDS is kind of boring.
00:26:45
Speaker
Now the problem with that is we're still in the cesspool of a scrote environment.
00:26:49
Speaker
So when you look at that, it's like...
00:26:51
Speaker
The fact that FDS kind of broke through in some ways is a little bit of a miracle because of the fact that men on Reddit have been so able to successfully shut down any type of female descent on all of the other subreddits before that.
00:27:05
Speaker
But to be honest, so bro, like a big part of FDS's success was the Scroats being mad about it and reposted and being, I was saying like a big part of FDS's success was partly it's in spite of the Scroats, but also because of the Scroats.
00:27:18
Speaker
Like it would be the Scroats who'd be reposting it
00:27:21
Speaker
outraged about what we were saying as well it would be like you know there would be like you know posts on our dating that had nothing to do with FDS exactly so that's the other thing they were paying so much attention during the pandemic but yeah and then some scurvy just mentioned FDS
00:27:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:39
Speaker
And then reposted everywhere.
00:27:40
Speaker
And so it just got a lot of attention.
00:27:42
Speaker
So on one hand, it's like, I totally get what they're saying about moderators having so much power, especially over subreddit where they can just control a narrative a certain way.
00:27:50
Speaker
And it can really, really ruin that subreddit because if you're going to like try to find out abortion care or you want to talk about like endometriosis and everybody spends like 70 minutes like banning anybody who fucks up someone's pronouns, it's
00:28:04
Speaker
or spends a lot of time like trying to infiltrate pervert shit in there covertly.
00:28:09
Speaker
I mean, I totally agree.
00:28:10
Speaker
Like in a perfect world, there would be some kind of verification system of the moderators there such that you know that you're talking to women about women's issues in particular.
00:28:20
Speaker
And I feel like FDS actually had female mods, which is actually even among Reddit and the female-focused subreddit was actually a unique thing.
00:28:27
Speaker
Maybe outside of like our makeup or something that's like pretty, like mostly doesn't attract the attention of the scrotier members of Reddit.
00:28:36
Speaker
Like even Ask Women, for example, like Ask Women...
00:28:39
Speaker
occasionally could be very suspect in some of the moderator decisions on there, but they were just hardcore libfems as well.
00:28:47
Speaker
So even that just didn't blow up.
00:28:49
Speaker
2X, we know, was like hardcore libfem central.
00:28:52
Speaker
Also had a lot of male moderators and trans women moderators, even though they don't have 2X chromosomes.
00:28:59
Speaker
So the irony was just weird.
00:29:01
Speaker
That's like, why are we allowing people who don't have 2X chromosomes?
00:29:04
Speaker
It's like, we have to be inclusive.
00:29:05
Speaker
I'm like, yeah, I would see that if it was like...
00:29:08
Speaker
I mean, okay, it's like if it was called something else besides 2X chromosomes, I'm like, I feel like that's pretty specific and that's a pretty specific experience.
00:29:16
Speaker
Exactly, exactly.
00:29:17
Speaker
That's why it just makes me, it makes me show a lot.
00:29:20
Speaker
I'm more for diversity and inclusivity, but ultimately there are some
00:29:25
Speaker
experiences and some commonalities that can only be shared between certain groups of people.
00:29:32
Speaker
And it's weird to want to be inclusive to men on Reddit when, you know, Reddit is a very, very male dominated site.
00:29:38
Speaker
It doesn't make any sense to me.
00:29:40
Speaker
I'm like, subreddits by nature are exclusive, aren't they?
00:29:43
Speaker
I mean, they're about a specific topic and a specific experience.
00:29:47
Speaker
Exactly, they should be.
00:29:48
Speaker
And this is why these female-only subreddits have absolutely no teeth, because they will be bending over backwards to include everyone and their dog in the room of the subreddit when it's like that sort of defeats the point of having a subreddit.
00:30:00
Speaker
It's meant to be about a specific interest.
00:30:04
Speaker
Right.
00:30:04
Speaker
So in protest, people have also been deleting a lot of their quality content.
00:30:09
Speaker
So people who had highly upvoted and golded posts as well as comments have deleted them because they just don't want to have their free content on Reddit anymore.
00:30:18
Speaker
It's an interesting thing because it's both like a user and a mod revolt.
00:30:22
Speaker
A lot of users also just don't want Reddit to become inshittified, which it's going to be because again, it seems like Steve Huffman is just done and just basically wants to get his money back.
00:30:31
Speaker
out of Reddit by any means necessary.
00:30:33
Speaker
That's my guess.
00:30:34
Speaker
That's my conjecture.
00:30:34
Speaker
I don't have any information outside of just watching his behavior and the commentary.
00:30:39
Speaker
It's like either they're really deep in debt and some investors like you need to pay up real quick or they're with this IPO, like Steve is just kind of done.
00:30:47
Speaker
Probably.
00:30:48
Speaker
I mean, look, given the way Twitter's going, I wouldn't be surprised.
00:30:51
Speaker
I don't know if Reddit's balance sheet, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were in the red.
00:30:54
Speaker
It would not surprise me at all.
00:30:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's been the rumor that they haven't actually ever turned a profit.
00:30:59
Speaker
But it's such a weird thing with Silicon Valley because not turning a profit's not a problem.
00:31:05
Speaker
Here's the other thing.
00:31:06
Speaker
Okay, so this is like the long financial view.
00:31:08
Speaker
When interest rates are cheap...
00:31:10
Speaker
meaning like the federal interest rate was basically zero for a long time.
00:31:13
Speaker
You could get a lot more money through private equity, etc.
00:31:18
Speaker
And or low interest rate loans.
00:31:20
Speaker
And so money was very cheap.
00:31:21
Speaker
So you could just run in the red forever, right?
00:31:23
Speaker
With ever having turned a profit.
00:31:25
Speaker
And in that environment, there were a lot of startups.
00:31:28
Speaker
And there's a lot of like,
00:31:29
Speaker
apps and companies like Uber, a lot of tech startups when money was cheap because like now, hey, you can basically just like value your company based on nothing and then raise like $100 million because essentially there was no cost to a lot of these investors for investing you because interest rates are cheap.
00:31:45
Speaker
Now that interest rates have gone up, you're starting to see people want returns on their money real quick.
00:31:50
Speaker
And so I would not be surprised if part of this pressure is just that because money is more expensive to hold on now, Reddit, Steve wants to pull out.
00:31:57
Speaker
Or there's pressure either from outside investors or for himself to actually make Reddit profitable and or pull out, allow these people who invested early when money was cheap to get their money out.
00:32:07
Speaker
Reddit.
00:32:08
Speaker
So all of this is just, again, it's all, it's just capitalism.
00:32:11
Speaker
The question for us is just like, okay, I don't think the mods are wrong to feel the way that they feel.
00:32:17
Speaker
Like any type of demands that Reddit makes on them is pretty like outrageous considering once again, they're a free workforce.
00:32:23
Speaker
And yeah, Reddit's increasingly like trying to make all these standards of like how you have to be as a moderator and like basically making them like an employee.
00:32:30
Speaker
Right.
00:32:31
Speaker
And at that point it's like, fuck you, you're an employee.
00:32:33
Speaker
Employee.
00:32:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:32:38
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:32:38
Speaker
Like if it's fine, if it's like a low effort job, but like I said, it totally made sense when it was like, okay, people moderate because it's a cool community.
00:32:47
Speaker
It's something they find interesting.
00:32:49
Speaker
But then like what happened is like Reddit got huge.
00:32:52
Speaker
They kept trying to draw traffic to Reddit.
00:32:54
Speaker
Reddit doesn't support your moderators.
00:32:56
Speaker
We basically get traumatized from both the workload and the amount of like fucked up things you have to see.
00:33:01
Speaker
And they weren't very good at like responding to any of our reports and
00:33:05
Speaker
Like they don't support like it would be one thing if it was like a mostly pleasant experience to be a moderator with like an occasional shitty thing.
00:33:12
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:33:13
Speaker
And like mostly you could run your community the way you saw fit within guidelines.
00:33:18
Speaker
But then it just it sort of got to the point where it's like, okay, we can only do things that help Reddit make money.
00:33:25
Speaker
And then it's like they won't help you at all if anything happens to you while you're moderating, right?
00:33:30
Speaker
You know, they don't build like a ton of support tools.
00:33:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:32
Speaker
And so that's why some of these people too, by the way, were using these third-party apps because there's third-party apps that were built that were a lot more supportive of moderators, apparently, like giving moderators additional tools that Reddit didn't have.
00:33:43
Speaker
So now like that's part of why they're kind of revolting because they're like, we don't want to like use Reddit's shitty app because it's crappy.
00:33:49
Speaker
It's hard for us to moderate on it.
00:33:51
Speaker
Yeah, Scroat Steve, just driving decent concept.
00:33:56
Speaker
I still think that Reddit, it was very, like the whole setup of it was very, very exploitative looking back because they do have paid moderators, the site-wide moderators, but they are in the minority.
00:34:10
Speaker
Like majority of the output that you see on Reddit is because of the volunteer moderators who get absolutely fuck all for their contributions.
00:34:19
Speaker
They were trying to make the argument that like, oh, a lot of these APIs are not used by most of the users.
00:34:25
Speaker
But it's like most Reddit users are casual users.
00:34:27
Speaker
And the people who use API the most are generally moderators because they're using the moderate tools.
00:34:33
Speaker
It's usually the highly engaged, most valuable users.
00:34:36
Speaker
That's partially why they all took their subreddits private because they're all pissed off because like we put in a lot of work and you're making it actively harder for us.
00:34:43
Speaker
And then just like basically disrespecting us and telling us about online.
00:34:46
Speaker
And most of what we have on Reddit is stuff we contributed to, meaning like they're a moderator.
00:34:50
Speaker
A lot of times people became mods because they were high value contributors to whatever community they're in if they didn't start themselves.
00:34:56
Speaker
And they spent hours like cultivating and curating it.
00:34:59
Speaker
So to me, it's like, I would just be like, fuck Reddit, take your community off Reddit.
FDS's Transition Off Reddit
00:35:03
Speaker
That's basically what we did when we realized it was a losing proposition.
00:35:07
Speaker
And I think maybe we were more incentivized because we saw them basically nuke all of the subreddits like us.
00:35:12
Speaker
And then the subreddit slowly becoming more toxic because all of the other female groups who we were not wanted to hijack FDS for their own agenda.
00:35:23
Speaker
Right.
00:35:23
Speaker
And like, we still don't encourage all the fem cells or all that kind of stuff.
00:35:27
Speaker
But at the same time, like there's no risk if there's like fem cell posts that get through or like, or wig tau stuff or even turfy stuff that gets through that like the entire subreddit is going to, or the entire forum is going to be banned because it won't.
00:35:38
Speaker
Right.
00:35:38
Speaker
Versus like on Facebook,
00:35:40
Speaker
FDS, any Turfee posts, any FemCell posts, anything that was like against now Reddit's content policy, any of that stuff gets posted, you run the risk of having the entire sub band, right?
00:35:53
Speaker
So like it doesn't have to be a stringent in moderation off the subreddit, off Reddit, as well as like there's different...
00:36:00
Speaker
places now to quarantine that type of talk.
00:36:02
Speaker
So if you wanted like wallow in your fem cell them, which most of the FDS users are not going to let you do to be blunt, like there's people that complain because some of the FDS users, like if you keep shit posting, you keep posting every day about how your life's horrible and all the men hate you.
00:36:16
Speaker
Eventually, like FDS is not the place to be like, to be emotionally coddled forever.
00:36:20
Speaker
They're going to be like, you need to take steps to make your life better.
00:36:23
Speaker
Like that's part of the ruthless part of who we are.
00:36:25
Speaker
It's OG FDS.
00:36:27
Speaker
And it is refreshing because just over time, yeah, the subreddit just had to be watered down just so we didn't get banned.
00:36:33
Speaker
And it didn't even have to technically violate their content policy.
00:36:37
Speaker
It just, if it had a certain number of ports, which again, we had literally subreddits that were dedicated to reporting every single post.
00:36:45
Speaker
Like you should see, you should have seen like the report log.
00:36:48
Speaker
So if somebody posted saying like, you know, all men should wash their ass, you wouldn't.
00:36:54
Speaker
I see like 50 reports saying like this is targeted harassment at me.
00:37:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:02
Speaker
From men.
00:37:05
Speaker
Just shit like that.
00:37:06
Speaker
Because even if the whole subreddit didn't get banned, they were slowly but surely taking out all the high quality contributors.
00:37:12
Speaker
So the mods who had written a lot of stuff as well as contributors who had written a lot of stuff.
00:37:16
Speaker
So it was kind of tough because people were like, oh, there's not as much strategy, there's not as much content.
00:37:21
Speaker
FDS has become mostly shitposting.
00:37:23
Speaker
And part of that is because two reasons.
00:37:26
Speaker
The women who spend a lot of time cultivating the community, adding their content to the community,
00:37:30
Speaker
were banned, right?
00:37:31
Speaker
Like a lot of them just got site-wide bans randomly for no reason, which we don't know why.
00:37:35
Speaker
And then again, we think it's coordinated attacks by Scroats and then their posts would be removed.
00:37:40
Speaker
And then the other reason we think is that like after a while, because the subreddit itself became kind of toxic,
00:37:47
Speaker
When all the other like femcelly types were like on other subreddits, we could focus everything, but then it got really toxic.
00:37:53
Speaker
So if you're a woman that has like shit going for herself and can write strategy because you understand it because you're living it, why would you want to like sit around and listen and like basically contribute to a community that's going to be toxic towards you, right?
00:38:06
Speaker
The comments just started to turn that way constantly.
00:38:09
Speaker
And like a lot of the...
00:38:10
Speaker
users to even turn on the mods when they were like, you need to like calm the fem cell shit down.
00:38:14
Speaker
Like this isn't fem cells.
00:38:16
Speaker
And they're like, this needs to be inclusive.
00:38:17
Speaker
I'm like, no, no, no, that's not what FDS was.
00:38:19
Speaker
And it's not why it was popular.
00:38:21
Speaker
Like there was plenty of fem cell subreddits before FDS got there.
00:38:25
Speaker
Well, yeah.
00:38:26
Speaker
And it's like, if you want to be a fem cell and, you know, hang on FDS, that is absolutely fine.
00:38:30
Speaker
I will never tell a woman that she has to date men or has to want to be around men.
00:38:35
Speaker
But what isn't fine is to repurpose a subreddit that is for something else to fit that personal agenda.
00:38:43
Speaker
Like you need to create your own space if you want to take over that, if you want to push that particular narrative.
00:38:49
Speaker
This is what's happened since FDS left.
00:38:51
Speaker
A lot of the based opinions from FDS have now infiltrated other subreddits, which we're super happy about because you've seen a lot of people who were FDS dedicated people go on like FOMO or pop culture chat, even 2X and even our relationships.
00:39:06
Speaker
And you're starting to see the entire narrative on certain things completely change because there is a definite difference in the tone of the female led subs and the relationship subs and the dating subs that was...
00:39:18
Speaker
post FDS versus pre FDS.
00:39:21
Speaker
It got way more base and less libfemi.
00:39:23
Speaker
So one thing that's happened is that Reddit as a whole has become probably a lot more healthier for female users in the vacuum of FDS not being there anymore.
00:39:32
Speaker
Because now the women that were there basically took all of what they were saying to different subreddits.
00:39:37
Speaker
And like now you're seeing a lot more women knee jerk fight back against bullshit when people are trying to give women shitty toxic advice.
00:39:45
Speaker
That was not the case before FDS got there.
00:39:47
Speaker
So that's a net positive, I guess.
00:39:49
Speaker
It's net positive on that end.
00:39:51
Speaker
The second thing that's happened is like there hasn't really been an FDS equivalent that's risen in the time that we've been gone.
00:39:57
Speaker
And to me, there's a very clear reason for that is that all the things already lined before, it's too hard to keep Scroats out of the subreddit.
00:40:06
Speaker
And then two, it's too hard to do it within the community guidelines of Reddit.
00:40:11
Speaker
It's too hard to keep your account if you fuck it up once or twice because...
00:40:15
Speaker
All the scrotes do is like mass report your account.
00:40:17
Speaker
And then three, the women who could give high quality contributions don't want to spend time on Reddit.
00:40:23
Speaker
And it's just kind of a tough double.
00:40:25
Speaker
So because like there's stuff like Diablo and all these other like dating subreddits that just never really took off anywhere or like quote unquote based dating subreddits.
00:40:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:33
Speaker
Because I think Diabla especially had a lot, and like Vindicta, they had a lot of FDS exodus.
00:40:40
Speaker
But even that, like firstly, they've had to go private permanently because the Scroats, they found out about them and they were given the FDS treatment.
00:40:49
Speaker
But secondly, again, it goes back to what made FDS unique in this space, and that's the strategy.
00:40:56
Speaker
They just don't have people writing strategy.
00:40:58
Speaker
At best, they might have people copy and pasting from...
00:41:02
Speaker
you know, popular books, but that's not really the same as writing organic strategy from somebody who's got life experience and can articulate that in the way that the FDS contributors can.
00:41:14
Speaker
I think that's something that is very, very unique and what's missing.
00:41:17
Speaker
A lot of times these subreddits, and because they lack the strategy and the life experience, like a lot of these like female only subreddits, you know, what ends up happening is that
00:41:27
Speaker
It just ends up being the blind leading the blind ultimately, because they don't have strategy.
Critique of Current Dating Subreddits
00:41:32
Speaker
They don't really know what they're talking about, especially when it comes to chasing rich men, because a lot of them are poor themselves.
00:41:38
Speaker
And this is no shade, but ultimately if you come from poverty, I'm sorry, you're in no position to be telling other women how to bag a rich guy because you just won't know.
00:41:48
Speaker
I could do a whole episode on that really, but you know, you don't know what you don't know in this space.
00:41:53
Speaker
Yeah, I'm like, these guys didn't get to be rich because they're naive, right?
00:41:57
Speaker
You're naive because you're young and you think you can take on an institution designed to exploit you.
00:42:03
Speaker
And this is like the fundamental flaw of stuff like Diablo, etc.
00:42:06
Speaker
that's all about.
00:42:07
Speaker
Exactly.
00:42:08
Speaker
It's just the blind leading the blind, ultimately.
00:42:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see how it played out.
00:42:13
Speaker
So, so far, a few of the subreddits where the mods were all removed, like are mildly interesting, have not had any new posts for now, like 10, 11, 12 days.
00:42:21
Speaker
So basically, these subreddits, even though we're forced to go public again, they're forced out of private and then forced to go public.
00:42:28
Speaker
And then
00:42:29
Speaker
People were shitposting pictures of John Oliver and just a bunch of other stuff in order to maliciously comply.
00:42:35
Speaker
And rather than posting on topic for their subreddit, Reddit removed those moderators.
00:42:40
Speaker
And now those communities are basically just unmoderated.
00:42:43
Speaker
No one's really stepped up or they haven't added any new people into those subreddits to moderate them now.
00:42:48
Speaker
So...
00:42:48
Speaker
It's interesting because it's like, yeah, Reddit has gotten rid of their workforce if they don't comply.
00:42:53
Speaker
But then the only people who are willing to moderate are people who are actually passionate about the community and don't like to be, I guess, made to feel like they're unpaid employees, right?
00:43:05
Speaker
So that's the tale of woe from Reddit.
00:43:07
Speaker
And honestly, I wouldn't be that upset if like Reddit crashes.
00:43:11
Speaker
But however, I will say though that, you know, the old Reddit, I guess...
00:43:16
Speaker
it was a really, really good resource to find communities and also just to find like that personalized question.
00:43:23
Speaker
Like if you had a question about something and you added, you know, Reddit, I think there is something about getting a response from somebody, an actual person, as opposed to just Google chucking you a bunch of stuff.
00:43:34
Speaker
I mean, that's how I came to find FDS was I literally Googled how to get over this guy, like Reddit and FDS came up with a really, really good post.
00:43:44
Speaker
So the Reddit-Google connection is also interesting too because Google reported that a lot of their revenue was down when all of the subreddits went private because people Google things and then Reddit comes up in the search results or answers from Reddit.
00:43:57
Speaker
And then when they click on it, it's in a private community that the public can't see, right?
00:44:02
Speaker
So Google and Reddit have worked in tandem to...
00:44:05
Speaker
draw traffic to each other for a very long time but again it's because like google's kind of shitty now where there's just so much seo and whatever garbage on it that people want to get answers from real people so they try to go to quora or go to reddit oh cool quora's clunky as hell
00:44:23
Speaker
Yeah, Quora's clunky and crappy too.
00:44:25
Speaker
And same thing, like you can read one post and then it makes you stop.
00:44:28
Speaker
And also you need an account.
00:44:31
Speaker
And also you need an account.
00:44:31
Speaker
With Reddit, you don't need an account as well.
00:44:34
Speaker
And also with Quora, you need an account to view it after a while.
00:44:37
Speaker
But Reddit, you don't need an account unless you want to look at the porn sites.
00:44:40
Speaker
But yeah, you can just peruse without an account, which is appealing to many people.
00:44:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:45
Speaker
And then Quora has become like less real people and more people trying to drive traffic to whatever website they have.
00:44:52
Speaker
Right.
00:44:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:53
Speaker
That's just kind of the crappy thing about the way that a lot of the internet's unfolded.
00:44:57
Speaker
Everybody's trying to make a dollar.
00:44:59
Speaker
You know, so in that regard, I did sort of understand why people were pissed at us for leaving Reddit, because it is quite user friendly, very accessible, quite easy to get the hang of.
00:45:09
Speaker
But yeah, you know, FDS likes to be somewhat ahead of the curve.
00:45:14
Speaker
And even though we didn't, you know, foresee Reddit doing over the moderators in this way, but we just knew that Reddit as a company were not on the side of the moderators.
00:45:24
Speaker
and by proxy on the side of its user base as
FDS's Strategic Resilience and Future Outlook
00:45:28
Speaker
well.
00:45:28
Speaker
Because if moderating becomes difficult, then it'll also be the users that suffer.
00:45:33
Speaker
And this is what we're seeing now when, you know, subreddits going private or, you know, big subreddits being unmoderated with nothing getting through.
00:45:42
Speaker
It's ultimately the end user that suffers.
00:45:44
Speaker
And not even just that.
00:45:45
Speaker
It's like on a very simple level, if we get banned, then we don't have anything on Reddit anymore.
00:45:51
Speaker
We don't have content.
00:45:52
Speaker
All the content's gone.
00:45:53
Speaker
So it was sort of a preemptive way to keep from the subreddit from actually being banned or for us losing control of it.
00:46:01
Speaker
And then it just becomes shitposting, bad advice, bad advice,
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah, and again, we learned that from the ban wave that was in around 2021, where a lot of the female subreddits were just banned out of nowhere.
00:46:14
Speaker
And to this day, many of them still haven't been able to regroup.
00:46:18
Speaker
A lot of them are gender critical, were highly influential, and they just haven't been able to regroup because the ban came out of nowhere and they had to scramble to find another community and
00:46:29
Speaker
It's tough because everything became so centralized in the internet.
00:46:32
Speaker
Everyone's so reliant on these big platforms.
00:46:34
Speaker
But it's not necessarily something that has to be anymore.
00:46:39
Speaker
And I'm hoping that all of these platforms crashing and burning means that competitors will start to pop up and hopefully incentivize people to have communities in a way that's not toxic to them.
00:46:51
Speaker
Not toxic to the people who run it.
00:46:53
Speaker
And you also, if you want to build any sort of movement or have a sort of community, it's a good idea to diversify anyway, to try and attract different types of people, new audiences.
00:47:04
Speaker
And also, so if you end up with, you know, let's say your main hoster becomes
00:47:11
Speaker
a scrow you can leave and your community won't be disintegrated exactly because really if fds had just gotten banned off reddit i feel like all of the archive posts wouldn't be available anymore at all the handbook would be gone handbook would be gone literally everything that everyone worked for for all that time would just be gone yep so once again for the people in the back who gave us shit for leaving we told you so
00:47:39
Speaker
Yeah, man.
00:47:40
Speaker
I don't know what's going to happen.
00:47:42
Speaker
So we're watching it.
00:47:43
Speaker
But it's just sort of like everyone on these other subreddits and all the mods and the other subreddits were coming to the same conclusion is kind of interesting.
00:47:51
Speaker
Maybe a year or two after we did.
00:47:54
Speaker
We feel vindicated.
00:47:57
Speaker
I mean, because basically at this point, it's just fight for control over or dying internet apps, I suppose.
00:48:03
Speaker
So anyways, let us know what you think.
00:48:05
Speaker
This is probably going to be yet another highly controversial episode because there's a lot of people like we need to bring the subreddit back.
00:48:10
Speaker
I'm like, good luck.
00:48:12
Speaker
Hell no.
00:48:13
Speaker
Hell no.
00:48:16
Speaker
I mean, we just don't want our work to be lost because the subreddit gets banned.
00:48:20
Speaker
So that's all it is.
00:48:21
Speaker
Like, the website is still up.
00:48:23
Speaker
So people are still exchanging ideas.
00:48:25
Speaker
Check it out at The Female Dating Strategy.
00:48:27
Speaker
Check us out on patreon.com forward slash female dating strategy on Twitter for as long as that lasts.
00:48:33
Speaker
For example, apparently that's, I think Elon Musk recently restricted the amount of posts a piercing can watch in a day.
00:48:39
Speaker
So who knows if that's going to be around for any longer.
00:48:41
Speaker
Instagram at underscore the female dating strategy.
00:48:45
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
00:48:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:47
Speaker
I mean, it's just, it's exhausting, right?
00:48:48
Speaker
Cause we're on all these platforms and like, it's all scrotified.
00:48:51
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
00:48:53
Speaker
Like we're trying to let, be less dependent on it.
00:48:55
Speaker
I mean, quite frankly, in shitification of Twitter is partially why I'm on it less because quite frankly, like it's just overwhelming bots.
00:49:01
Speaker
I'm being forced.
00:49:02
Speaker
The other thing I noticed too is like there's a bunch of people I don't follow that are showing up in my feed and it's just like nasty work, right?
00:49:08
Speaker
It doesn't even look like, oh, you follow a person that this person follows or something like that.
00:49:13
Speaker
It's just like a bunch of things I don't want to see that are kind of toxic as well.
00:49:17
Speaker
So now it's another situation where like, okay, Elon Musk made this app shitty.
00:49:21
Speaker
He's trying to force people see certain tweets, especially if you don't pay for the extra, you don't pay for Twitter blue.
00:49:27
Speaker
And if you don't pay for Twitter, bro, you're going to just be bombarded with bots all the time.
00:49:31
Speaker
It's just annoying.
00:49:32
Speaker
So whatever.
00:49:33
Speaker
The internet sucks now, which is fine.
00:49:37
Speaker
Go outside and touch grass.
00:49:38
Speaker
Like honestly, fuck all these social media apps to a certain extent.
00:49:44
Speaker
Thanks for listening, queens.
00:49:45
Speaker
And for all you scrotes out there, try to unshitify yourself.
00:49:49
Speaker
Die mad.
00:49:50
Speaker
See y'all next week.
00:49:51
Speaker
Bye.