TL;DR: More Flair/Dedicated Threads, Fewer Subreddits


Let me try and categorize some of the types of user-submitted posts we see on MRP.

  • A. Questions seeking help. A guy posting about his personal circumstances and marriage, and seeking insight or advice from the MRP community at-large. This is further sub-categorized as:

  • A1. The full victim-puke. A guy stumbles in here, no sidebar reading, barely any clue about TRP, dumping his entire life story and wondering why his wife stopped fucking his beta ass.

  • A2. The misguided approach. A guy part-way through unplugging, hits some roadblock in his marriage. Such as self-improvement isn't yielding more sex, or he's struggling to determine Shit vs Comfort Tests, or there's some family logistical problem is making it especially hard to maintain frame. There is an understanding of fundamental Red Pill principles, but the OP can't quite figure out how to apply them to his own circumstances.

  • A3. The legitimate conundrum. A fully unplugged guy with a pretty unique scenario, almost presented as a thought exercise. A good recent example is /u/TrainingTheBrain's recent issues in his marriage.

Then we have...

  • B. Field reports. Pretty self-explanatory, but further sub-categorized as:

  • B1. The e-peen flex. This usually is some form of a guy describing, in stupidly useless language, some application of Red Pill and how his wife fucked him even though she was acting shitty earlier." But it's probably cathartic on some level, and any indications Red Pill are working, even if lacking useful introspection, aren't entirely pointless.

  • B2. Victory battle review. Basically B1, but more introspection given to why what he did worked, and perhaps may be useful to other MRP members, especially if they have logistical similarities.

  • B3. The success saga. A guy, usually a long-time lurker, describes in some detail the circumstances in his life and his marriage, and how a gradual and deliberate Red Pill approach has improved his life, wife, and family.

Lastly, there are...

  • C. Theory of Red Pill. Generally presented by guys like Ian Ironwood, Rollo, or BluePillProfessor. These guys try and aggregate their observed experiences into an analysis that can be digested for broader community consumption.

AskMRP is hurting MarriedRedPill.

In short, because you chase away all the "A2" posts to a most less populated subreddit, but you still get all your "A1" posts. The A1 guys won't know about /r/askmrp. There's no link in the sidebar. There are no instructions that would indicate which questions are appropriate for AskMRP. The mods aren't jumping in to direct posts accordingly.

My understanding was AskMRP was intended to be a response to A1. From /u/SorcererKing's post:

This where guys can victim puke, ask stupid questions, and get the soft support they want.

Guys should be referred there if they come here spouting weaksauce bullshit, and we will graduate them back to over here when they're ready.

911 emergency about to file for divorce guys who just found MRP from /r/deadbedrooms can feel "safe" to post their story.

The value of having an interactive format like Reddit is in being interactive. If all there is is high level theory with restrained golf claps in the background, new guys get lost. askMRP will shepherd them.

But take a look at /r/askmrp right now. They are almost all A2 posts. I see very few posts that would have been inappropriate to post in marriedredpill. The guys have shown some investment into learning about Red Pill. At most, some of them are validation-seeking, but this is why they are "unplugging" and not "unplugged." Red Pill will often make your marriage seem cosmetically worse before it improves. It's scary.

Meanwhile, look at the marriedredpill subreddit. There's weak sauce bullshit like this guy. There are 40+ fucking comments on this guy's thread. Nothing on /r/askmrp has more than 20 comments. /u/TheAccidentOf85 is a guy who literally discovered r/seduction (hahahaha) like a week ago, then stumbled into MRP, and gifts us with a 2000 word victim puke that pretty much comes down to, "my feely-feels got sad because of my job so I spent a year behaving in a way that would ensure my wife's complete and utter destruction of any attraction she ever had for me."

I don't mean to entirely shit on TheAccidentOf85, but... what the fuck is this shit? Why have AskMRP if this doesn't get moderated? If there really was a concern about too many A1 questions, then why the fuck is this shit still on marriedredpill?

AskMRP isn't just a net-zero entity. It's actively making the marriedredpill subreddit worse, because you're still getting A1 victim pukes because if they're too lazy to do the sidebar reading before they write anything, they're definitely too fucking lazy to find /r/askmrp. Normally, they'd just be downvoted, making way for A2/3 and B1/2/3 and C posts, if not moderated out of existence entirely. But we've decided to tell all the A2 guys to get their shit off /r/marriedredpill, and they're unplugged enough and give enough of a shit to actually follow those directions, even though it's really to their detriment because they'll have a much smaller community responding to them.

And this is bad for MRP overall, because I think in the process of commenting on those A2 posts, I think we come up with a lot of good theory on those A2 posts. The A2 posts often become the seeds for C posts. Here's an A2 post and /u/marxistbacon brought up a term he called "Vision," which /u/IanIronwood ended up fleshing out further here.

And to be honest, I don't even mind some of the A1 posts. Sometimes there's enough spewed out in their victim puke that makes it easy, at least for me, to point out some fundamental issues in their marriage and give them a starting point on a specific approach. I've put some of the most thought, and written some of my most detailed and lengthy replies, to A1 posts where the guy indicated at least some inkling he was capable of unplugging. Perhaps my favorite example is this one. /u/thisisme0007 literally had fucked his wife twice in five years. Now he's fucking her three times a week.

This is why I hate the idea of AskMRP, or really any other subreddit that fragments MRP like this. If you want AskMRP to be the destination for A1 posts, there needs to be a much bigger investment in moderation for it to actually work. What's likely to happen is the future A2 posters will realize they should still post on /r/marriedredpill anyway (since we apparently still indulge A1 posts like /u/TheAccidentOf85 and get more community response. And you'll still get the victim pukes and two week warriors that everyone finds so abhorrent.

Or even worse, if you moderate the A1 posts, and push A2 posts to /r/askmrp, then you just have B1/2/3 and C posts on /r/marriedredpill. Which means we'll probably end up looking a lot like the main TRP sub, where every other post is about how you told your wife to STFU and got a blow job, mixed in with some interesting but high-level theory from our resident "Manosphere Icons."


Jack's Solutions

So now that I've shat all over the idea of /r/askmrp or otherwise fragmenting MRP into more subreddits, what are my suggestions?

Dedicated Weekly Threads. We have "Own Your Shit." I don't see why we can't have other dedicated threads for "Success Stories" and "Victim Pukes" or whatever.

Topic Flair. The subreddit /r/relationships is some blue pill beta bullshit, obviously, but I really like how they organize that subreddit. You can filter by Dating, Relationships, Breakups, etc. Instead of just spawning a subreddit for every possible iteration of a Red Pill taxonomy, I don't see why we couldn't do this here. We could also consolidate subreddits like "Non-Monogamy" and "Parenting" this way.

More Visible Posting Guidelines in Post Submissions. If you go to /r/relationships or /r/RedPillWomen, for example, and go to submit a post, your text box is "pre-populated" with some instructions. I bet we could eliminate 80% of low-quality A1 posts by doing this.

I imagine some of these things aren't done purely because of moderator bandwidth. So I volunteer to personally assist with any of the above. I know enough Javascript/CSS/etc to implement something like Topic Flair on this /r/marriedredpill's theme.


Why do I give a shit?

I recognize my objection to AskMRP may be coming from something of a unique position. I've written tens of thousands of words in my various /r/marriedredpill comments, but I have all of two posts. So essentially my interaction with MRP is mainly commenting on A1/2/3 posts. Occasionally I comment on B2 or C posts. That's about it.

I've thought about sharing my own "how I discovered Red Pill" story at some point, but I think I'll skip it for now, since I do think it is a pretty cool story and worth saving for when I can do it justice. But I do get something out of this community, and contributing to it, in a way that you guys probably don't expect.

I'm saying all this as a caveat that I may be on the minority here. I'm essentially complaining that it's harder for guys to ask for help, and thus harder for me to give them in advice. I recognize that's kind of a silly complaint. I probably should have better things to do than complain about that. Perhaps I'll make an Own Your Shit comment about that. But at this rate, eventually I'll be posting to /r/askmarriedredpillownyourshit, and maybe that's a little ridiculous.