As a long time lurker, I have seen my fair share of complaints regarding this sub. Despite our fantastic MODs best efforts, of course they cannot please everyone. One concern that has proved to be consistent and held by a vocal minority is that because the sub has been growing like never before, the quality of the sub is lowering. More specifically, people have complained that at times the sub focuses too much on bashing women (ranting about their hypergamous nature). Oftentimes posts of that nature seem to attract circlejerks about how untrustworthy/devious/deceptive women are, with everyone adding in their own personal anecdotes to validate the message.

While I’m not trying to take sides here, it’s clear that the true issue is that as the sub receives an influx of new users, the de facto direction of the subreddit shifts to bitter phase TRP. For anyone unfamiliar, people often compare accepting TRP’s principles to the 5 stages of grievance, with the bitter/anger phase and the acceptance phase being the two most important phases in the metaphor. Newer users are finally realizing how they had been influenced by the world around them to behave and believe in ways that are counterintuitive to their goals, which undoubtedly frustrates them as much as TRP veterans had been when they unplugged.

Clearly one function of this sub is to act as a haven for people to go through accepting TRP (especially through the bitter phase) and begin bettering their lives, so the problem isn’t that these posts exist; in my opinion the problem is that the current way that posts are filtered (the “flairs”) is inefficient at grouping such posts together. In sum, I argue that any post that is primarily inspired by the bitter phase of TRP should be categorized in the same way, instead of allowing for even more specific categorization. It would be more useful for the sub to be able to easily recognize posts as they relate to the bitter phase than for the sub-filters that we currently have (which I argue are primarily ‘Blue Pill Example’, ‘Rant/Venting’, and ‘Men’s Rights’).

For instance, a lot of blue pill examples will attract a lot of discussion that will frustrate people in the bitter phase (either by causing them to remember how they used to behave like the BP example, or by angering them in regards to the nature of women that they still don’t wish to accept). But almost all rant/venting posts will obviously be submitted by users inspired by the bitter phase, as well. Additionally, mens rights posts will also easily attract bitter discussion by exposing injustices.

Two potential solutions:

(1): Combine Blue Pill Example and/or Rant/Venting and/or Mens Rights into “Bitter Phase”, “Bitter Phase Example”, “Bitter/Ranting”, etc/it doesn’t fucking matter

  • would allow for easy filtering to either find or hide negative bitter phase posts

  • would serve as an efficient way to communicate to readers what to expect before clicking the link

  • would not allow for the current level of filter customization (would give up the ability to post something specifically under a ‘Men’s Rights‘ filter)

OR

(2): Allow MODs/potentially TRP-Endorsed contributors to tag posts with “bitter phase” after they are already posted. By tag I mean the box that becomes attached to the title when on a sub’s front page (not extremely common, but fairly typical of default subreddits)

  • Would not decrease the current level of filter customization

  • Would still serve as a means to communicate to the front page which posts are essentially bitter

  • Could encourage tags to be used in other ways to improve the sub in the future

  • Would not be as effective a means to filter to/from bitter posts