Introduction and Guest Background

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 783

John Dehlin [00:00:02] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking the Donate button on the top right side of the page. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support. Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. I'm very excited to have you with us today for another one of our live streamed episodes. It's August 17, 2017. We have a really cool topic in store for you today. Today we're going to be talking to someone who I've been interacting with at least for 10 years, if not a little bit more, and he's someone whose name won't be familiar to many of you, or maybe it will be. His name is Jason Echols. And Jason, on the ex Mormon subreddit you're known as what?

Jason Echols [00:01:17] Chinoblanco.

John Dehlin [00:01:18] Chinoblanco. And that was your handle back in the forum days as well, sadly. And we're going to be talking about the phenomenon that is ex Mormon Reddit. Now. We interviewed Mithryn a while back and for some reason I don't even know why, that interview was never published. So we need to go back and interview him. We've also interviewed Ryan McKnight, we've talked about Reddit there, but if I'm not mistaken, this is the first time we've sort of talked about ex Mormon Reddit as its own phenomenon. And I just want to make sure everyone over on the ExMormon Reddit knows that. I'm completely willing to do other episodes to include other voices, but I've been wanting to interview Jason for a long time and this is just one way to do it. And Jason's been a leader pioneer in ex Mormon Reddit and Mormonism on Reddit for many years and so in many ways this makes sense. Before we jump into the interview, we always have a few announcements. I want to encourage people to follow the Mormon Stories podcast account on Instagram if you're not already. We're trying to beef up our Instagram presence. We also have a Twitter account, ormistories Please like us on Facebook the Mormon Stories podcast if you're joining us through the Mormon Stories Podcast page if you like us there. Or give us a positive review on The Mormon Stories podcast page. That's a way you can support us and help us grow if you're not in a position to support us financially. So please consider that also giving us a positive review on itunes. If you'll open up itunes, log into itunes, give Mormon Stories a positive review. All those sorts of things really help grow our presence. So please support us. Just want to announce really briefly. We've got several events coming up. Seattle, Washington, September 14th and 15th. We're doing a Mormon Transitions workshop. We're going hopefully to Sydney, Australia, October 20th through 22nd. That retreat is in question because we've only got about 11 people who have signed up. And we did the numbers and we needed at least 20 to justify that event. So that's up in the air. But the Bay area, San Francisco, November 9th through 10th is definitely still on. That won't change, so plan for that. And we're looking for your nominations for 2018 events. Houston has shown a lot of interest. We've had interest shown from other areas, but if you want us to bring a workshop or retreat to your area where we talk about mixed faith marriages, Mormon transitions, secular or alternative spirituality, mental health education, those sorts of things, just. Just email us@mormonstoriesmail.com and let us know you want us to bring an event to your area. And then finally, fall, October 24 through 28, 2018, we're doing a Mormon Stories cruise to the Bahamas. Several people have signed up. A few slots are left or slots are left. If you want to join us, please sign up. You can go to mormonstories.org events for all these activities, and those are the announcements. So without any further ado, I'm really excited to introduce our guest, Jason Echols. Again. Today's topic is the ex Mormon subreddit. And, Jason, why don't we begin with, first of all, welcoming you to Mormon Stories Podcast. Is this your first time to appear?

Jason Echols [00:04:54] Yeah. You know, John, this may very well be my last time to appear. If you call me a leader at Rex Mormon, you're going to ruin my street cred. Okay, I don't mind pioneer because I think Exmoor sort of embodied the pioneer spirit, but, yeah, no leader.

John Dehlin [00:05:09] Okay, Pioneer. Pioneer. Jason Echols. And why your last time to appear? Because you don't want to be called a leader.

Jason Echols [00:05:15] Oh, I'm giving you a hard time. Just don't call me a leader. I'll get zero karma.

John Dehlin [00:05:21] All right, we'll get into what karma is. So, Jason, let's. Before we jump into Reddit, let's Just jump into your story a little bit. Just tell us about your history as a Mormon, as an ex Mormon, as a post Mormon, and let's even talk about what made you want to become an activist after the church didn't work out for you. Let's talk about some of your early involvement in some of the other online offerings where you and I first met, like the forums and the blogs, and then we'll jump into Reddit. Is that all right?

Jason Echols [00:05:56] That's fine, as long as you help me keep my train of thought. You just kind of went through a long list.

John Dehlin [00:06:00] Yeah. Okay, well, let's start with your just Mormon background.

Jason Echols [00:06:04] Oh, I mean, pretty. Pretty traditional, I think. Grew up in the mission field. Great fam. Went to BYU my freshman year and then went off to a mission to Brazil. You know, when I got back from the mission, this is early 90s, and I think a word. How do you say it? Retrenchment.

John Dehlin [00:06:23] Sure.

Jason Echols [00:06:23] Yeah. And I think the early 90s. So I was a freshman in what, late 80s, went off for a mission, came back early 90s, and it felt like things were kind of clamping, tightening up a bit. You know, I was in the Honors Colloquium my freshman year. Maeser Building.

John Dehlin [00:06:37] What year is that? What year was that?

Jason Echols [00:06:39] So this is what I graduated 85 in high school. So it would have been like 85, 86, 87. I would have been around campus and just loved the Maeser Building. Loved the crowd there, loved the professors. I mean. Okay, wait a second. You did a Mormon Stories with Ted Lyon, right?

John Dehlin [00:06:54] Yeah, yeah.

Jason Echols [00:06:55] Fantastic guy. I mean, just. Just real. Just a beautiful man, a beautiful person. That was my first exposure to byu, was that freshman year with guys like Ted.

John Dehlin [00:07:06] So you did that. You did the Shaping the Modern Mind Colloquium with.

Jason Echols [00:07:09] Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:07:11] Clayton White and Lynn England. Is that right?

Jason Echols [00:07:13] Oh, and Lynn England. Another great guy. But yeah, yeah. And so that was my. That was my first impression of byu, was going through that experience. My roommates were great. Helaman hall was just a blast. I was having a good time.

John Dehlin [00:07:26] Was it you? Did you say you were in Chipman Helaman? But were you in the Honors Storm?

Jason Echols [00:07:33] Pardon?

John Dehlin [00:07:33] The Honors Storm. Was Chipman back then? Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:07:36] Okay, cool.

John Dehlin [00:07:38] So Healman Halls. Yeah, I loved it.

Jason Echols [00:07:41] Yeah. And ended up going on my mission. Had a. I'd call it. I'd call it a fairly successful mission and got back and they had instituted this thing where you were required to attend church every Sunday. And that didn't sit right with me as an rm.

John Dehlin [00:07:59] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:08:00] And I think at that point I was like, I'm going to. I'm going to transfer out. And I just started looking at options for getting out of byu. And that just sort of started my whole. Really, well, okay. My personality type. And I think, you know, there's a. If we're getting started talking about Rex Mormon and this whole mix of different. What ex Mormons, what motivates them to leave the church. I've always not responded well to coercion.

John Dehlin [00:08:25] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:08:25] And I think that was pretty much what turned me off, was coming back. And in the early 90s, it's probably a camp. The campus was changing. It felt like. It felt coercive to tell an RM I was, you know, you leave a. You leave a fairly. You're a teenager and you come back a young man, and they're still expecting you to live by these Sunday school rules from pre mission.

John Dehlin [00:08:48] Right.

Jason Echols [00:08:50] That was pretty much it. I mean, it was just sort of bridling at the sense on campus that things were just tightening up and.

John Dehlin [00:08:58] Yeah. And after you left, I mean, as things advanced into the late late 80s, early 90s, you've got the September 6th excommunications, you've got all the academic freedom stuff that happened at BYU with Gale Houston and David Knowlton and all that stuff. Were you there for all that?

Jason Echols [00:09:17] Well, this is. So this is what 91, you could sense. You know, this is 1991. I think you could sense that that was coming around the pike.

John Dehlin [00:09:27] Yeah, right. When did you leave BYU?

Jason Echols [00:09:30] That would have been 90.

John Dehlin [00:09:33] Okay, so you left before the stuff really got bad?

Jason Echols [00:09:36] Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I transferred out to nyu.

John Dehlin [00:09:39] Oh, wow. Okay.

Jason Echols [00:09:42] Speaking of those professors from my freshman year, though, going and talking to them and saying, hey, this is how I'm feeling about how, you know, my experience is now compared to freshman year. And they're like, if you're planning to go to New York to have an experience, just go, you know, do it. You deserve. You know, you deserve it if that's what you want.

John Dehlin [00:09:58] So that's so cool. Okay. So would you say when you left BYU you kind of lost your testimony and left the church?

Early Doubts and Reasons for Leaving the Church

Jason Echols [00:10:09] Well, I'd always had doubts. I think. I think I'm one of those. I'd always had doubts. For me, the question of whether or not the church is true, I mean, by 14 or 15, I pretty much knew that objectively, it's not what I would put in the true category. But if you're talking about an institution that has the capacity to do good in the world. I was always a joiner. I wanted to join something that put you on a mission. I enjoyed the mission. I enjoyed having goals and objectives and achieving those and feeling like I'm Facebook friends with some of the kids I baptized in Brazil. And I have no apologies for that. And I love the fact that they've actually gone on and gone to BYU and have great lives, I think because of what we were doing down there.

John Dehlin [00:10:57] But cool. But you definitely, you're saying from a young age you kind of knew the church wasn't what it claimed to be, but you still served a mission.

Jason Echols [00:11:07] Right? The truth claims were never really the. That wasn't what sort of pushed me away.

John Dehlin [00:11:14] Was it hard to serve a mission when you were really believing the truth claims?

Jason Echols [00:11:19] I think if you like people, if you enjoy working with people and the mission, sort of like as long as I got really lucky though, I have to sort of caveat this because I got put in a place that was 24 hours away from the mission office. I had a really great mission president who just, yeah, he's not one of the horror stories, he's one of the good guys. So I just got lucky all around in terms of my mission and being posted far away, being given responsibility fairly early on to be branch president to sort of do things that weren't tracking 24 7. That was. And my frustration on the mission was mostly we had a area authority come down and as a branch president I had sort of the opportunity to see what I thought would work in my corner of the world. And we did make it work. And we had, we ended up with a vibrant branch. And I thought that just we were doing great stuff for people, providing it, you know, a structure for people to improve their lives, make new friendships, learn some good things on a Sunday. And I just didn't get the sense that the guys that I was reporting to above our mission president, like once you got above that level that they had any real interest in figuring it out, like how can we do better? How can we apply some of this, get away from the whole idea of knocking doors and just the terrible. Well, I was in South America, so, you know, it's terrible retention. Animosity builds up between the missionaries and the old time local leadership. There's just all these dysfunctional things going on within the system. But then nobody was addressing sort of the systemic issues. And at the same time the, the new evangelical movements in Brazil were taking off. I mean we're getting our asses handed to us on a plate. If you look at it competitively, but

John Dehlin [00:12:59] you still had the numbers is the thing the numbers were.

Jason Echols [00:13:02] But they were illusory. I mean, it was completely illusory. It was, it was outside of my work that I did as a branch president, which was the best part of my mission. Everything else was just generating numbers that were not going to pan out because the retention rate was so poor.

John Dehlin [00:13:17] Did you guys have the same kind of fraudulent baptism tactics that I had in Guatemala and that Elder Holland and Ted Lyon talked about in Chile?

Jason Echols [00:13:27] It had gotten better than in those times. And this goes to our mission president. His approach was, was he was not putting huge pressure on us, but there it was still definitely numbers oriented. And like my path to being assistant was definitely founded on doing things like baptizing five weeks out of a five week month. Right. Getting a baptism every week in a five week month, that would give you the golden eagle. And that's what was driving.

John Dehlin [00:13:53] Were you, were you an assistant?

Jason Echols [00:13:56] Yeah, sure.

John Dehlin [00:13:56] So you made it. You got the numbers and you made assistant?

Jason Echols [00:14:00] Oh, yeah. I mean, that was.

John Dehlin [00:14:02] Yeah, yeah.

Jason Echols [00:14:03] I mean, the mission to me was a world that I feel comfortable in. I mean, I've been doing sales ever since I got. I basically left university because I enjoyed. I would rather be in business and be out in the world, just basically dealing with people.

John Dehlin [00:14:17] Yeah, sure.

Jason Echols [00:14:18] And not stuck in it. I loved my professors. I did comparative literature. I'm someone who thought, hey, I'm gonna just be an egghead and spend the rest of my life teaching and reading and having a cubicle in a small school somewhere. But once I saw what that life was, I realized I've got to either really love this and I don't, I don't love it enough to devote myself to that. So I went back to my other love, which is basically just traveling the world selling stuff.

John Dehlin [00:14:45] Got it. Just a few comments from our listeners. David writes, he had a terrible mission. Tamara writes, I love my mission, but experienced the stress of numbers and saw many others engage in kitty baptisms. She writes, we did in 1992 in Brazil. Numbers, numbers, numbers is what Tamara writes. David writes, that was the first thing I realized, admission was about numbers. Anyway, a lot of people had that experience and of course we love that. Kimberly Anderson has joined us and she writes, our ex Mormon, we have no leader. Beep, boop, bop.

Jason Echols [00:15:24] Like I said, you're getting me in hot water, John.

John Dehlin [00:15:27] No leaders. All right. And shout out to Wayne, who's joining us from Denver, Logan from Salt Lake, Gina Colvin's joining us from New Zealand. Lots of cool people have joined. Welcome to all our listeners who have joined us from all over the world. We have close to 100 people already joining us.

Jason Echols [00:15:46] All right, so, Jason, Gina, but I'll tell you what, this is your chance. Take your best shot.

John Dehlin [00:15:51] Take your shot at him, Gina. Take your shot at Jason. He's ready for you. All right, so, Jason, so you go to byu, you don't like the requirement that BYU people, what, you know, attend church, you bail, and you pretty much leave the church behind by then when you go to New York.

Life After BYU and Early Online Mormon Activism

Jason Echols [00:16:10] Yeah, I mean, I graduated from nyu, worked a year in a law office in la, and then I actually just bailed on the country and went to Asia.

John Dehlin [00:16:19] Okay, and so that's. So that was the end of your active membership in the church.

Jason Echols [00:16:27] Right. And I didn't spend a whole time, a whole lot of time thinking about it, to be honest, after those few years.

John Dehlin [00:16:33] So what are your earliest memories of sort of being engaged in online Mormonism or post Mormonism? Do you remember the years or the websites or the ways that you got engaged that way?

Jason Echols [00:16:46] I don't.

John Dehlin [00:16:47] You know, like, was it. Was it forums? I know that I met you first on Flack Further Light Knowledge, which was an Internet forum where, where before Facebook, before blogs, you know, questioning Mormons, liberal Mormons, post Mormons could all.

Jason Echols [00:17:05] This is the way I remember it.

John Dehlin [00:17:06] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:17:07] The way I remember it is Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo used to run something called TPM Cafe. And there was a group of some fairly smart political commentators who unpaid similar to what we have now. But this is years ago, sort of really doing a great job of going behind the story, explaining everything was a nice place to hang out, and you just rub shoulders with some fairly with diplomats and guys who are in the foreign policy world. Anyway, I liked hanging out there. And then Prop 8 hit, and all of a sudden all this Mormon stuff was coming up. And I'm going, you know what? I think I've probably got something of an inside handle on what's driving Mormon involvement in this issue and how it's going to play out and how they're going to structure the campaign and all of that. So that's, for me, that was kind of the beginning, I think prior to June of 2008, I think it would be. I'm not sure that I was aware of.

John Dehlin [00:18:07] So you weren't listening to podcasts, like Mormon stories podcasts from the beginning, like 2005, and you weren't. You weren't like, paying attention to, you know, times of Seasons and by Common Consent and feminist Mormon Housewives blogs. 2004, 2005.

Jason Echols [00:18:21] I'm happily married in Taiwan, getting on with my. Getting on with my life. And then that hit when Prop 8, when that started bubbling up, I thought, you know, some of my interest in politics generally sort of segues.

Prop 8 and Re-Engaging with Mormon Online Communities

John Dehlin [00:18:35] What was it about Prop 8 that was personally interesting for you? Enough to bring you back into online Mormon activism, so to speak?

Jason Echols [00:18:44] Well, okay, so I'd had friends come out to me while I was at byu, and, you know, This is the main issue with Mormonism. With me. The thing that rubs me the wrong way is that there has been a history since, I would say, Post World War II, where the leadership has had, every decade they've had to identify sort of an enemy to motivate the troops. And whether it's the 70s with Era, whether it's now with the LGBT community,

John Dehlin [00:19:25] intellectuals in the 80s and 90s.

Jason Echols [00:19:28] Yeah, I mean, it's.

John Dehlin [00:19:29] It's the whole sort of gays, gays, feminist intellectuals.

Jason Echols [00:19:31] Right, There you go. It's that Boyd K. Packer, you know, summary of, you know, the boogeymen that are out there. Yeah. I have some pretty strong personal feelings about how that plays out and sort of the damage it does. So.

John Dehlin [00:19:50] Okay, so you just. You've seen it hurt people. The LGBT issue was one you were very sensitive about. And just structurally, you don't like the LDS Church always picking on vulnerable populations as enemies?

Jason Echols [00:20:04] Yeah, pretty much.

John Dehlin [00:20:06] Okay, so you join. You join in on some of those online discussions. And what are. What are your memories of sort of how your involvement progressed, which sites you spent time on, and how, you know, how effective you thought they were, what you thought they missed. And then what led to your involvement in Reddit?

Jason Echols [00:20:29] Well, I was, and I wasn't initially involved with anything like a. A Mormon site. Most of the sites I was involved with, with politics, a lot of just the LGBT activists and the Democratic activists in California. I was pumping information about what I saw coming out of the Prop 8 campaign to them saying, you know, there's some. There's some serious LDS involvement at the nuts and bolts level of these. Of this campaign that you need to be aware of. And that's. I did that for a few months. I mean. I mean, one of the feathers in my cap. I can't say any names, but early on, I mean, this is like June, July. The initial. I think the initial strategy with Prop 8 was to run it the same way it had always been run, where the Mormons would be in the background funding, getting the ground game in place, all of that. And then letting sort of the focus on the family Christian groups sort of be the public face of it. And sort of the first step in sort of pulling the curtain back was got in touch with some guys, started looking at who was running that, the Christian face of it, and realized, you know, these guys, it. It didn't take much to get. Go to the Orange County Register and say, here's the piece already written where you can talk about, these guys are fairly dirty. They don't report their. Their contributions right way.

John Dehlin [00:21:47] Meaning the Mormon Church. When you say, no, no, the Christian.

Jason Echols [00:21:51] Okay, the Christian groups that were tasked with being the public face.

John Dehlin [00:21:54] Got it.

Jason Echols [00:21:55] And, you know, these guys are a lot more loosey goosey than the lds. Like, as Mormons, we tend to be fairly efficient, fairly. You know, we dot our I's, cross our T's, you know, and when you get more into, say, these dispersed Christian congregations where you have pastors that rally their troops around something, they may not pay as much attention to where the money's going, they may not pay attention to, like election reporting laws, those kinds of things. And that was just sort of the first salvo was to look at who's fronting this so the Mormons don't have to be up front and kind of getting them out of the picture because they couldn't do it anymore because they were tainted. There were news stories coming out, and so then the Mormons had to step up.

John Dehlin [00:22:35] But also the church, The Mormon Church was hiding its involvement in Proposition 8.

Jason Echols [00:22:40] That's what I'm saying. Like they were hiding it. And you had to sort of get that evangelical Christian element sort of out of the way so you could peer in and see, here's who's really doing it. I mean, if you look at the actors in the TV ads, if you look at the communication, communications director, all of the names we could run through, they're all Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:22:56] Like Matt Holland, Jeff Holland's son and all that stuff, right?

Jason Echols [00:23:00] Oh, it goes all the way down

John Dehlin [00:23:01] to Whitman Ballard, who was the student

Jason Echols [00:23:05] president of the University of Utah. Yeah, his wife. I mean, she was. She was the communications director. You had. The guy in the first, very first TV ad was a professor at. What's. Was it Pepperdine? He's a Mormon guy. I mean, it was Mormon through and through.

John Dehlin [00:23:18] Right. And so you helped sort of gather that information and coordinate with reporters to help shine a spotlight on the Mormon involvement in Prop 8.

Jason Echols [00:23:29] It's a kind of volunteer opposition research is how I'd put it. And I mean I was in debate in high school and so sort of had had the skill set that I don't get to use very often. And it was fun to sort of go back and use that again.

John Dehlin [00:23:43] Okay. And so Prop 8 happens. And you know, speaking about the platforms, I know you, you commented a lot on like by Common Consent and season blogs back in the day.

Jason Echols [00:23:59] Sorry to interject. Yeah, that's when Prop 8 happened. And all of a sudden, John, it was amazing. Every member there was this thing called blogs. And I think members had just become aware that there were actually like personal blogs. There were thousands of family blogs and personal blogs that Mormons were posting these sort of yes on eight type messages online. But I don't think they had any concept of how the platform actually works. So you'd show up and comment on their blog and they'd be like, what are you doing here? Why are you showing up on my blog? With a contrary view, I said, well, because you guys are geniuses, basically. Because they really hadn't trained the membership on how to use the Internet other than saying, you know, get online and take this message out there and do this. They created this matrix that was very easy to track and find all of the information about how the campaign was running and that all got combed. That was all taken from members blogs. They would say, oh, I'm going to this rally this Friday. Oh, we've got a thousand yard signs showing up Thursday. This is going on. That's going on. This is who we're talking to. And you just get, you basically piece it all together and then all of a sudden you have their game plan right there in front of you. And so you've got the story written and you send it over to the media.

John Dehlin [00:25:09] But you were also commenting on substantive conversations on bicommon consent, feminist Mormon housewives, etc. You are part of the intellectual community of conversants around Mormon themed topics.

Jason Echols [00:25:23] I mean, I can do intellectual. Yeah, it gets a bit tiresome in the Mormon context, doing it for very long.

John Dehlin [00:25:29] Sure.

Jason Echols [00:25:30] Because you get through sort of the issues and.

John Dehlin [00:25:35] Yeah, totally. So can you remember, you know, the platforms you in just a high level quick. The platforms you got involved with, including like Recovery for Mormonism and others, the blogs, Recovery for Mormonism and what your experiences were that led you to think Reddit might be a platform worth investing in.

Jason Echols [00:26:01] So in terms of evolution, I mean, yeah, there was a period where I was definitely by Common consent times and season. I had actually one of the Mods either at TNS or at BCC had noticed one of my TPM Cafe posts that I'd gone off on Mormon involvement in Prop 8 and they were taking it apart. And so I came over and said, well, if we're gonna start this conversation, let's do this. And so, and then once I saw it, I got hooked on sort of that community. And to be honest, to be fair, the kind of folks who are commenting at times and seasons and by common consent, if the Mormon Church were by and large populated by people who were talking about it at that level, I probably wouldn't even be here having this discussion with you because it would be doing fine. I mean.

John Dehlin [00:26:46] Right.

Jason Echols [00:26:47] And then after that, in the wake of Prop 8, there was this place called, I call it Flack Further Light Knowledge. I think you call it the foyer.

John Dehlin [00:26:56] Yeah, yeah.

Jason Echols [00:26:57] And then I saw these guys and I'm going, oh my gosh, they know everything about like the in and out of what's going on with, with the church. And I don't know if you know, the Prop 8 documentary.

John Dehlin [00:27:10] Yeah, of course, yeah. The Mormon proposition. Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:27:14] A lot of, sort of, A lot of that information for that was being sort of spoon fed to the folks who needed information on how, you know, so what's, what's the content that's going into this? Well, you could go to these guys and say, well, where can I get this audio? Where can I get this transcript? Where can I get, you know, just the materials that we need to put together something, you know, so if you look at the producer for Prop 8 for that documentary, he relied a lot on the folks at Flack who will never get any acknowledgement.

John Dehlin [00:27:40] That was Reed, that was Reed Cowan. Right.

Jason Echols [00:27:43] Well, Reed was sort of the, I would say, the beautiful face of it, you know, and, but if you look, Stephen Greenstreet was the producer, right. And he was, he was the one, and he's got a history of doing some really nice documentary work and I think he's the one who really pulled it off.

John Dehlin [00:27:59] Okay, so Flack was helpful, very helpful. And then what other platforms did you engage in before you went.

Jason Echols [00:28:07] That's pretty much it. I was, I was in Flack sort of having this back and forth with some of the regulars there about, you know, content. And then Measure Set, this, this user called measure76 pops up and says, you know what, there's this new platform called Reddit. I'm inviting folks to come over and give this a go.

John Dehlin [00:28:27] Okay. Before we do that though, I think Recovery for Mormonism was a major platform for you. Right.

Jason Echols [00:28:33] I'm trying to think if I ever posted that.

John Dehlin [00:28:36] I mean, that was a juggernaut. There was a time when all the blogs paled in comparison to the volume and traffic of recovery for Mormonism. So were you. Did you know. Did you never. One, did you never participate there? And two, did you have any experiences there that made you feel like something else was needed?

Jason Echols [00:28:58] No. I mean, I probably got a few dozen posts that were there in terms of popping by and I mean, there was a. There was a point in my life where I was probably posting at, you know, 50 different sites in dealing with the whole Prop 8 thing. Yeah. So I'm probably. I've probably got. Does.

Origins of the r/exmormon Subreddit

John Dehlin [00:29:17] Was there any experience you had with RFM that made you feel like something else was needed? I seem to remember you basically saying we need to ditch RFM and go to Reddit. That's my memory. Maybe you did.

Jason Echols [00:29:28] No, you're absolutely right. I mean, the fact is it's. It's. The whole coding for the platform is stuck in, you know, decades ago. I mean, it's just. It's a. It's ancient history in terms of how the site is actually coded. It looks like 1990s HTML, so it didn't look great.

John Dehlin [00:29:43] Were there any other good.

Jason Echols [00:29:45] You've got. Site management is a huge over. It's a huge burden for anyone who's going to run a site like that. Right. So I'm not dissing the guys who are trying to run that platform, but I think they were burdened by the fact that they had to own the management of that site while they're also trying to moderate the site. And they also had a few celebrities involved in the site who they couldn't really. You couldn't allow a completely open discussion because it would get very cantankerous. And there was a lot of. I would say there was a surfeit of incrimination and just a negative vibe that I didn't like.

John Dehlin [00:30:19] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:30:21] But I think a lot of times it's just because of the platform itself and just sort of the system itself was not conducive to moderating that out. They were kind of stuck with it.

John Dehlin [00:30:31] And we should just say it's an amazing platform, it's still got a community. I don't go there anymore, but it's still got a community going. It's not like we're saying they sucked or they were awesome and they played a really important role for a long, long time, and they're still playing a role. But Obviously, there was something wanting that left a door open for Ex Mormon Reddit. Right?

Jason Echols [00:30:54] Yeah. I mean, there were a couple of. There's been, you know, multiple discussions with those, with that crew over there saying, hey, you know what, if we put together, you know, X amount of dollars, would you let us, like, help you bring your site up to speed? I mean, as an ex Mormon, that site is not representative of sort of where the younger generation of exmos are at. I mean, just in terms of like, the technical aspect of it, with not a lot of money, we could help them have a site that would be easier to use, look nicer, just sort of represent us better.

John Dehlin [00:31:25] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:31:26] And for whatever reasons that was not interesting. And that's okay. That's fine.

John Dehlin [00:31:32] And so there was this platform called. Well, a long time ago, you had to create your own aggregator. There would be these programs where you could put a bunch of RSS feeds in it and have them aggregate various Mormon news sources, the blogs and the podcasts into an aggregator. But that sucked. And then you had sites like Digg come online where Digg tried to allow you to be able to post links to news stories and have people upvote and down vote. Slashdot was a big deal back then, and I think Digg was trying to build off of Slashdot Spark, farc dot com.

Jason Echols [00:32:05] I mean, there's just. There's a hall of fame of like, sort of early adopters of the aggregation game and how to do it. And Reddit just sort of won that contest.

John Dehlin [00:32:16] Yeah. So Reddit. Okay, so tell us when you remember Reddit coming on the scene and how you got involved.

Jason Echols [00:32:22] Well, it was that invitation from measure 76. And so we come over and we. I think we literally started with like, six people.

John Dehlin [00:32:29] Okay. It's kind of like, Kind of like the LDS Church in 1830.

Jason Echols [00:32:32] Exactly. You know, until today. Well, we'll get into our current stats later, but yeah, the growth has been really amazing. But, yeah, six people, and you're just. You're constantly thinking about, well, how do you. How do you draw attention to the subreddit? What do you do? You go into larger subreddits and say, hey, there's some really. There's this really cool story over in this little subreddit called ExMormon. Come check it out. And that, yeah, the early years was definitely about a few people posting content at a fairly rapid clip to get people interested in the platform.

John Dehlin [00:33:02] Okay. And do you know around what year the Ex Mormon subreddit began?

Jason Echols [00:33:08] It was, what, 2009.

John Dehlin [00:33:10] 2009.

Jason Echols [00:33:11] Yeah, it's posted, right. Actually, if I just look at the subreddit itself.

John Dehlin [00:33:19] So I'll go ahead and pull it up. And what I want to do now is talk about. Okay, so you talked about. We talked about this before we started the show. Some of the concerns about these sites, and this is true with the blogs, the podcasts, the forums, you know, RFM there. Let's go through the list of concerns that make a forum like Reddit, Ex Mormon subreddit, really valuable. So the first thing you mentioned was just technology, right? That it looks good, that it's got current code. And I think you've already expressed that concern. Talk about the importance of ownership and management as it relates to these communities. What you want, what you don't want.

Jason Echols [00:34:03] Right. Well, I mean, it offloads that whole headache of having one group or one person who owns the site who basically you're accountable to, that you know, the forum has to sort of pass muster with them, so that sets something there.

John Dehlin [00:34:18] And if they get sick or if they die or if they get mad, they could just.

Jason Echols [00:34:22] And if you're ex Mormoning in a way that's different from their approach to ex Mormoning, then you know, there's going to be endless meta discussions about that.

John Dehlin [00:34:31] Or like. Or like. Or like New Order Mormon. The whole site could disappear. Like New Order Mormon was this instrumental, pivotal site for well over a decade, and now it's been taken down and no one knows where it is, and all that old content's just disappeared. Right?

Jason Echols [00:34:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:34:47] That's a disaster. It's a huge loss. Right? Sure, yeah. Any other things about ownership and management or does that. Is that.

Jason Echols [00:34:56] That's about it. I mean, I. One of the things that's happened as we've. As we've reached sort of a critical mass is we've just gotten away from in the past. I think every blog, every sort of place had its own feeling and personality. Right?

John Dehlin [00:35:11] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:35:11] So you'd have bcc, you'd have tns, you'd have fmh, and they all had kind of their own thing going on. And there was always sort of a leadership level that was sort of guiding the tone of the discussion.

John Dehlin [00:35:23] Editorial, Editorializing.

Jason Echols [00:35:24] Editorial. Right, right. So there's editorial leadership. And at Rex Mormon, that's really. That's. That's gone.

John Dehlin [00:35:33] So anything goes, right.

Jason Echols [00:35:34] And it's. The user base is going to drive, and that's. We get into what karma is and uploading, but the user base sort of drives what's interesting to this forum today. It May be something completely different than what was interesting a week ago.

John Dehlin [00:35:45] Okay, so in terms of principles, we've got ownership, management, we've got moderation, we've got the lessening of dominant personalities as sort of this critical, you know, component of the site's success. Although there are personalities on Ex Mormon Reddit, but you don't get the sense that everybody's scared about offending one dominant personality or.

Jason Echols [00:36:07] Right, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I could be taken to tasks just as much as the guy who joined Reddit yesterday.

John Dehlin [00:36:13] Right. Okay. Then there's this idea of voting, which helps with content quality. Right. You want, you want some way to kind of have the good stuff float to the top and the lame stuff go to the bottom. Right. And then you want some type of filtering where if you want to look at information from different slices or views, you can do that. So those are some of the features or themes that I think led to Ex Mormon Reddit's sort of success. Is that true?

Jason Echols [00:36:44] True. And I think if you look at. Okay, so look at the blogosphere or the blogger, Naco, whatever you want to call it.

John Dehlin [00:36:49] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:36:49] And didn't they used to have like, they had annual awards that they would do?

John Dehlin [00:36:53] Right, yeah, the Brody Awards.

Jason Echols [00:36:55] Right, well, the Brody Awards is. That's, that's from our, our world. That's, that's.

John Dehlin [00:36:59] Oh, but they used to have, they used to have their own awards. Yeah, that's right.

Jason Echols [00:37:03] Yeah. Whatever they called them, you know, BCC would always rig it so they'd win every year. Year. But I had to get that in.

John Dehlin [00:37:10] But not just that, but there was a, there was an aggregator called Mormon

Jason Echols [00:37:13] Archipelago and it's still there. LDSblogs.org and you could only get on

John Dehlin [00:37:17] it if you were faithful enough. So they would.

Jason Echols [00:37:19] There's a whole litmus test to see which blogs could be included. And it was like it was, it's actually a well done aggregator. But just the hoops and the drama involved in getting your blog and included in that and then having these annual awards that are sort of like creating this hierarchy of. Anyway, the gals at FMH would be much more aware of sort of that drama than I would. They always got treated terribly by the patriarchy.

John Dehlin [00:37:46] Yeah. And if you go to ldsblogs.org, no one knows about it anymore. It's never mentioned.

Jason Echols [00:37:52] I think. Aren't the awards that the blogger natural used to give out? I think they've gone away.

John Dehlin [00:37:57] Yeah, they have. But just that whole culture, these, these faithful intellectual Mormons like Steve Evans and, and, you know, artist Prashal and Kevin Barney and whoever else that they would. They were gatekeepers. And if you, and if you did, if you weren't faithful enough, if you weren't their type of intellectual enough, they could just cut you out and you were out of the conversation. They ban you from their blogs and then you're done. Right.

Jason Echols [00:38:23] Well, and I think now at this point, it's kind of, that approach has sort of played itself out. And the amount of traffic they get now and their relevance, they've sort of. They've earned that.

John Dehlin [00:38:35] Yeah, yeah. Even the blogs, Even the blogs. BCC still exists. Times of season still exists, but they're. The percentage or the level of their relative influence is dwarfed by podcasts, by ex Mormon Reddit, by other influences. Right?

Jason Echols [00:38:53] Yeah. And I think we sort of took over the idea of setting the agenda of topics and sort of saying what's popular and what's not popular. You know, all apologies, but I think Rex Mormon sort of drives that. Now people are looking at that and saying, well, what are people talking about? Whether you're, you're whatever. At whatever sort of level you are faithfully in the church, I think we're sort of driving that agenda.

John Dehlin [00:39:13] And then you, and then you mentioned that you just, you know, this is going back to your introduction, but you don't love a coercive style, the way the LDS Church uses temples and ecclesiastical endorsements. And that fed your interest in ex Mormon Reddit. Right?

Jason Echols [00:39:29] Yeah. And that's actually what you were talking about when you said if you go to BCC and you look at. It's sort of the same faces, the same group. After how many years? After a decade. Yeah. The thing I really, really.

John Dehlin [00:39:40] They have turnover.

Jason Echols [00:39:41] They have turnover. I'm not dissing that. I'm saying, but I would say that Rex Mormon, the thing I really, really like about it is that it's liminal. And that's the word that I love to use with regards to Rex Mormon. It's this liminal community where you're allowed to wander in, use it for a week, use it for a day, use it for a year, use it for 10 years, and you're allowed to wander out and nobody's sort of keeping tabs on you. And in fact, it's one of the few places where people will say, Someone will pop up and say, hey, I had a great time here at Rex Mormon. I'm done. I have no more complaints about my life, but thanks for, you know, the conversation. I'm out of here. And people are like, high five. Thank you. You're on your way.

John Dehlin [00:40:18] Right, Right. Even people create fake accounts. We'll talk about that. And then you really. You talk. I really like what you wrote about the tendency towards cult of personality and leadership worship. Talk about that as a principle that sort of. You didn't like about the blogger Naco, but then informed your interest in Reddit.

Jason Echols [00:40:38] Well. And maybe, you know, I don't know if I want to beat up on the. Beat a dead horse and beat up the blogger knackle too much.

John Dehlin [00:40:45] Sure.

Jason Echols [00:40:45] Maybe we could take it over to Facebook and maybe use Facebook as sort of the comparison to Rex Mormon. Because I think that the difference I see with, and I think you've probably seen me online at Rex Mormon kind of bemoaning some of the aspects of Facebook and how it. The way it shapes how conversations unfold and how communities, you know, develop. There's a premium, I think, in Facebook communities for leading personalities to be right or not. Maybe a premium. There's a sort of a pressure that if you're the person who's seen as sort of the founding member of this. Of this community, we're all using our real names. We're all sort of like getting together and mulling out these ideas. But if you're just. If you're wrong about something and you don't want to sort of. If you're not able to deal with that, well, Facebook can be sort of a cruel.

John Dehlin [00:41:36] Yeah, you can get banned. You get people.

Jason Echols [00:41:37] It's unforgiving. It's unforgiving.

John Dehlin [00:41:39] And I can be kicked out of a group for disagreeing. There's groupthink. There's everybody being scared or worshipping heroes or whatever. Right.

Jason Echols [00:41:46] And I think our little forum at Rex Mormon maybe handles that in a little bit healthier way in the sense that you really can't come in with and use anything like your history outside of the forum as leverage to say, here's the consensus view that I'm trying to build here. A consensus view is going to emerge based on just tons of collective input.

John Dehlin [00:42:12] It's kind of more democratic. Right? It's a little bit more democratic.

Jason Echols [00:42:14] It's messier. It's more democratic. I think it can go wrong. I mean, the consensus can go off in ways that are not healthy and kind of scary, but at least you know that there's always a chance to argue that back to something else.

John Dehlin [00:42:30] Right. Okay. So I think it'd be cool now to kind of share the screen and to talk through the Anatomy of Reddit, the basic mechanics of the site, and for those of you who are joining us either on Facebook, Facebook Live, if those who watch it on YouTube, you can actually see these different features visibly and we'll do our best to describe them for those who have joined us by audio. But I think it's important either for people who don't know Reddit or people who use Reddit but don't really understand all the features that Reddit offers or what's making Reddit successful. Is it okay if we go through the mechanics of Reddit and you talk about how these things make Reddit successful? Is that all right?

How Reddit Works: A Walkthrough

Jason Echols [00:43:11] Sure, yeah, that's fine.

John Dehlin [00:43:12] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:43:14] I'm just looking at the front page right now.

John Dehlin [00:43:16] Yeah. So I will pull up, I will pull up the front page and then we'll talk about it, we'll share the screen and we'll talk about it. So really quickly. Let me just make sure the users can see. Okay, we've got the.

Jason Echols [00:43:33] You're showing the Google Docs.

John Dehlin [00:43:35] Okay, let me just see here. Your screen sharing is paused. Resume share. That's not what I'm trying to show.

Jason Echols [00:43:44] Yeah, I think you're trying to show.

John Dehlin [00:43:47] Okay, let me try one more time. Share screen. There we go. Ex Mormon, Reddit. All right, so we've got exmorm and Reddit now being shared. Right.

Jason Echols [00:43:56] You're going to do the clicking and I'll just do the talking.

John Dehlin [00:43:58] Yep, I will do the clicking and you, you do the talking.

Jason Echols [00:44:02] All right. First thing I wanted to say is that we're looking at the desktop view.

John Dehlin [00:44:05] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:44:06] And I think we actually have many more mobile users now than we do desktop users.

John Dehlin [00:44:10] Right.

Jason Echols [00:44:11] But when you're using the mobile platform, it kind of comes a little less adorned. So you're not going to see the sidebar, you're not going to see a lot of these options, you're just going to see the conversations. And so I would encourage people as sort of a first thing. If you're new to it, especially if you're new to Rex Mormon, start with the desktop view. So you're able to see sort of what the entire site has to offer.

John Dehlin [00:44:31] Right. And I think, I think listeners can see that. I think viewers can see that now, right? They can, yeah. Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:44:40] Alright, so we're looking at the hot page. So you sort of your default is you're looking at the hot page and it's giving you the top post based on an algorithm that uses upvotes and down votes to tell us what's the most Popular content in the last 24 hours.

John Dehlin [00:44:53] Okay, so let's start with what a post is and how people can make a post and what the post, what the types of posts are. Because that's the basic. Isn't that the basic component or brick of Reddit?

Jason Echols [00:45:05] Sure. And I'm looking. So I'm just gonna start with the first one.

John Dehlin [00:45:08] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:45:08] It looks like we've got something like a captioned graphic or what some people might call a meme. There's an argument about what the right terminology is there. But in any case, so this is a bit of, you know, graphic content, and someone's done that by creating a link to that content. Actually, now with red dot, I think you actually, you can upload that content directly to the post. And then I look below that and it says, update, here's my story. And if you look to the right, it says self exmormon. Okay, So a self post is basically a text post. So you see the two options there where it says submit a new link.

John Dehlin [00:45:42] Submit a new link or submit a new text post. Right.

Jason Echols [00:45:44] So either gonna, you're gonna link to content to pre existing content, like a news article or a news article, you

John Dehlin [00:45:51] know, a church press, Church press release or whatever, a podcast episode, whatever.

Jason Echols [00:45:57] You're gonna drive traffic to an external site through that.

John Dehlin [00:46:00] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:46:01] And then below that you've got a text post, which is going to be your opportunity to tell a story, which

John Dehlin [00:46:05] is like, my bishop, my bishop was mean to me or my wife just Left me, or BYU's cup of coffee. A selfie. BYU's honor code office is doing bad things. Right, Those sorts of stories. Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:46:22] For selfie, I think you actually go to submit a new link and they allow you to upload the graphic.

John Dehlin [00:46:26] Okay, cool.

Jason Echols [00:46:27] But in any case, all right, so

John Dehlin [00:46:29] you've got, you can either do links or text posts or photos. Right? Yeah, memes. All right, so we've got that. What about identity? Talk about the role of identity. So Facebook, Facebook. Facebook requires you to be a real person, right? Ex Mormon. Reddit doesn't. My guess is there's pros and cons to that. Talk about the pros and cons.

Anonymity, Karma, and Community Norms on Reddit

Jason Echols [00:46:51] Well, I was anonymous on Reddit for, for what, seven years? Up until just this past year, I've been using Chino Blanco, this silly name, to operate anonymously on the site. And I would say 99% of the users on the site are anonymous.

John Dehlin [00:47:06] What are the pros and cons of that?

Jason Echols [00:47:09] Well, it allows you to speak openly about your experience without worrying about Any sort of blowback in your real life. And there's a huge emphasis among the moderators and among the user base. I mean, privacy is very important. The worst thing you can do on Rex Mormon is dox someone, which means

John Dehlin [00:47:26] talk about what docs means. What does docs mean?

Jason Echols [00:47:28] Well, it means. It means providing any kind of document that would out a user of the forum or out an average citizen in a way that's undeserved or uncalled for,

John Dehlin [00:47:37] to tie their real identity to their. To their anonymous sort of Facebook name, their alias.

Jason Echols [00:47:43] Right, right. We don't. We don't even for non users. I mean, just doxing is something we don't want to be in the business of outing people. Okay, so.

John Dehlin [00:47:52] Okay, and what's the pro and the con of people being able to have anonymous identities in terms of dialogue and discourse?

Jason Echols [00:48:02] Well, I think the pro is the. Is sort of the freedom to have unrestrained, you know, confessional type posts and, you know, commentary that the con is that you're on the Internet. You don't know. You never know who's a dog.

John Dehlin [00:48:19] I mean, people can lie, but either way. But it's harder when. It's easier to lie, when you have no identity, you're not accountable for anything you say. And you can be mean and nasty. Right. You could be rude.

Jason Echols [00:48:32] I think there's. There's actually a pro there in the sense that very quickly you have to develop a sense of a level of skepticism about what you're reading.

John Dehlin [00:48:39] Right.

Jason Echols [00:48:40] And so I think if you look at the regular users at Rex Mormon, they will very quickly, if something doesn't sound quite right, if it sounds like someone's using it, anonymous, especially if they're using a throwaway, what we call a throwaway account, where they create a temporary account to say something that they wouldn't normally say under their own. Their own username. You have to look at that and just see, just judging by tone and by the information on offer, and just be skeptical about it.

John Dehlin [00:49:05] Right.

Jason Echols [00:49:06] Nobody's saying you have to believe everything you read on Rex Mormon. If anything, you should be skeptical of everything you read.

John Dehlin [00:49:11] But would you say the conversations are meaner, less enlightened than Facebook because people don't have to be responsible for what they say relative to their identity or not.

Jason Echols [00:49:24] I mean, on balance, I would say the conversations at Rex Mormon, to my mind, are friendlier in a lot of ways than the conversations I saw on the blogger nacl or even in Facebook confrontations. I think there's less at stake in These conversations because everyone is anonymous. When you sort of reduce those stakes, then there's less of a tendency to have to defend that to the last, you know, to make a final stand on any. On any issue.

John Dehlin [00:49:55] So, okay, so next to my name up Here, it says 23,465. It's got post karma and comment karma. What is that? Why is that important relative to identity

Jason Echols [00:50:08] in aggregate? All of the posts that you've put on Ex Mormon to date, you've had 23,000 some upvotes. And then in terms of the comments that you've made, I mean, it looks like your posting is quite successful, but people aren't real big fans of your commentary, so might want to work on that.

John Dehlin [00:50:27] Should I feel bad about that?

Jason Echols [00:50:28] Oh, totally. She felt terrible.

John Dehlin [00:50:31] Could that also be I don't comment a lot, but I post a lot? Is that also.

Jason Echols [00:50:34] Exactly. Well, you're basically. You're basically. Yeah. And that gets into another thing called blog spam.

John Dehlin [00:50:39] Right.

Jason Echols [00:50:39] Which of course, you're guilty of that.

John Dehlin [00:50:41] Well, yeah, no talk about that. No one's ever talked to me about that before.

Jason Echols [00:50:44] Okay, so what's called blog spam is another. No, no. I mean, it's something that's sort of looked down on in the community. Sort of. The way around that is if you're going to post your own content, like, you're basically saying, hey, I'm here promoting my own blog, I'm here promoting my own podcast. I'm here promoting my own material, you can get away with it to the extent that you show up and interact with the community. Show that.

John Dehlin [00:51:10] This is great. Yeah. So you're.

Jason Echols [00:51:12] You're saying that's why you get away with it, John, because you're good about that. You don't just put something up and then as the comments pour in, you don't just stand off and say, hey, I'm busy doing something else. I'm gonna let these comments unroll. If you're gonna post your own comment, your own content at Rex Mormon, just the polite thing to do is to show up and interact with the users.

John Dehlin [00:51:30] Okay. And you know what? No one's ever told me this before, and it makes sense to me. And I think on some level, maybe even subconsciously, I knew it. But this is a conversation I've never had with anyone before, never heard, so it's cool. I believe it or not, I'm kind of hearing this a bit for the first time. So. So generally. Okay, so just going back, I just want to kind of process this a little. Bit we're acknowledging that, that, you know, one of the main purposes or values of ex Mormon Reddit is that people can post links. Right. I mean, that's one of the main components of its success. And yet there's this notion of blog spamming, which is don't just post a link to promote whatever you want to promote and then not interact with the content. Did I capture that right?

Jason Echols [00:52:16] Exactly. Because people could tell the difference between say, I'm posting to a Salt Lake trip article or I'm posting to my personal blog. There's a differentiation there. Okay, okay.

John Dehlin [00:52:28] And are there any other norms like that that are worth mentioning so that people can know what's polite and what's impolite? And it may be obvious to you guys, but I bet to a lot of people it's not obvious.

Jason Echols [00:52:42] Well, direct fundraising is something that is not allowed.

John Dehlin [00:52:46] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:52:47] And that's a site wide thing. That's for understandable reasons. People would be selling T shirts and CTR rings, CTL rings, WTF rings every day if there wasn't this rule against, you know, hawking EXMO swag in the forum. Okay, so you're gonna run up against that? You know, it gets into gray areas. I'll be honest. I mean, we love Sunstone and there's just some really great voices involved with that community, with that project. But we know those people are, you know, they're salaried. It costs money to go. There's a certain, you know, so there's gray areas. But if you, if you, I think to the extent that you interact with, with Rex Mormon and it's obvious to folks that you're showing up in good faith to have a conversation, you're okay.

John Dehlin [00:53:33] Okay. And there's also, don't post the same link twice. That's kind of a, you know, it even has mechanisms to prevent that. But we, but it's important that once it gets posted, you don't post it.

Jason Echols [00:53:45] And that should. Yeah, there's an automatic mechanism that if it is the same URL, that once you post it'll say, hey, this has already been posted. It'll warn you. So that really hasn't been much of an issue in our forum. There are some forums like, in some of, like the really large communities where people will say, hey, you know what? I can get a lot of karma posting to this particular content. And people will come in and just dogpile on that content looking for that pay off.

John Dehlin [00:54:13] Got it. And that's, that's not cool.

Jason Echols [00:54:15] That's not cool.

John Dehlin [00:54:16] And then what about personal attacks? That on the one hand, I know that people have been personally attacked before, but on the other hand, I like Reddit because it generally has that policy of no personal attack. So talk about that.

Jason Echols [00:54:29] I think it's, you know, I think it's working. I think it's worked. I think it's going to continue to work in terms of where that line is drawn between, you know, an aggressive discussion, you know, characterizing someone's choices, and then when that sort of veers into a personal attack, it's hard to say. I would encourage people to use the forum and get a sense for how that plays out, but definitely anything where I'm just saying, you know, John, you're an idiot. That's not gonna pass muster. People, you know, even though it's anonymous, you're not going to wander in under your anonymous handle and if have people just coming in and saying, oh, lobbing those kinds of attacks at you.

John Dehlin [00:55:07] What about, you know, what about like, so and so's personal life? Like so and so's had an affair, so and so, you know, got divorced or whatever. When I know. I'm asking you what the policy.

Jason Echols [00:55:22] Read about this. Let me check the front page. Hang on.

John Dehlin [00:55:23] What I mean is, what's the, what's the policy on things like that?

Jason Echols [00:55:28] The policy is to be careful not to involve people who we have no business exposing their private lives.

John Dehlin [00:55:36] Okay, all right, cool.

Jason Echols [00:55:38] That if it gets. And if I don't want it, I'm not a current mod, so I don't want to speak for the current mod team.

John Dehlin [00:55:44] Oh, sure. No, no, no.

Jason Echols [00:55:45] But during the periods of time that I have been on the mod team, I like the policy that they say, if this hasn't been reported in the news, if this is not content that you can draw from an outside source. This is. Rex Mormon is not a platform for like, big reveals on people's personal life.

John Dehlin [00:56:02] And then how do you, how do you handle, like a post. How traditionally is a post like John Dehlin's a dumbass or I hate Mormon stories and John Dehlin, and I'm just using me as one example. How do you handle this issue of public figures? Because oftentimes in the broader world, sometimes a public figure is kind of fair game. How do you navigate that with Kate Kelly, with Lindsay Hansen park, with me? With people that kind of are public figures in some way?

Jason Echols [00:56:33] Yeah, I think with public figures, there's much more leeway given to sort of the kind of commentary that can take place where that gets nipped in the bud is when it starts descending into acrimonious interpersonal arguments that aren't native to the forum between different figures. So I think once the argument between a public figure and someone else becomes personal, acrimonious and basically stirring up drama in the forum, there's going to be moves to sort of get that out as quickly as possible. But if it's just someone inveighing on whether or not they like Mormon stories versus Mormon matters versus Mormon expression, those kinds of conversations, there's no way that's going to be moderated. You know, folks are going to be free to have whatever the opinion they want to have.

John Dehlin [00:57:16] Okay, got it. Any other just before we keep talking about sort of the mechanisms and anatomy of Reddit, any other huge pet peeves on the part of mods, things not to do, things that really get on the nerves of mods that you can think of or do we cover the big ones?

Moderation, Self-Promotion, and Upvoting

Jason Echols [00:57:35] Well, I think sort of the number one, if there was no moderation in this forum, what it would look like would be something very different than what it looks like now. Because it's just a lot of. It's the Internet, it is, you know, Rex Mormon has gotten to, it's scaled up to a point where what the mods are dealing with is really a lot of garbage. It's not worth talking about. It just has to get cleaned up on a regular basis. And so there's trolling. There will be, there will be people

John Dehlin [00:58:00] making what's trolling for those who don't know what's trolling.

Jason Echols [00:58:03] Yeah, well trolling is basically someone who is leaving commentary designed solely to evoke an emotional reaction on the part of users in the forum. Non constructive, simply looking to stir up some kind of reaction on the part of the user. And I would say that the forums largely free of that. But, but that's because the mods are in the behind the scenes pulling that stuff down and issuing warnings, banning users. But that's, that's really the dregs of

John Dehlin [00:58:33] okay, so don't be a troll, don't be a troll.

Jason Echols [00:58:36] Don't, don't, don't come in looking to just push buttons.

John Dehlin [00:58:42] Would it be better so we talked about self promotion. Would it be better like let's say I do a new podcast episode not to post that, let someone else post it. Is it better if someone else posts a content generators content than themselves? Would that be preferred?

Jason Echols [00:58:59] Well, I think what you have going for you is that you've been upfront about the fact that you're posting your own content and you've engaged with the users. I mean, if you were to, okay, I'll give you an example. If you were to have a new user account called Mormon Stories Reddit Interface Robot. So it's, hey, it's not me doing this, it's this other user who's going to help me upload the content. I think people would see, you know, if you try to automate uploading the content to the forum, you don't want to do that. I mean, you don't want to pass it off to someone else and say, hey, you're going to be the account that's in charge of, you know, basically taking care of this feed to Reddit. It needs as long as it feels organic.

John Dehlin [00:59:38] Right.

Jason Echols [00:59:39] I would say just as long as whatever process you're using is organic and you've got a real life person that's responding to the post, whether it's you or someone else, I think that's probably a moot.

John Dehlin [00:59:49] What about just this idea that let someone else post it. If it's worthy content, let someone else post it. Content generators should just never self promote their own content. Is that, do you think that's the ideal?

Jason Echols [01:00:05] It's, yeah, I think maybe that's the ideal. I think one of the problems you run into is if you look at the volume of posts that go up every day at Rex Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:00:17] Now

Jason Echols [01:00:19] I was previously pretty much aware of what was going on every single day in that forum during the last year. It's grown so quickly and gotten so big, there's no way I can keep up with what's being discussed.

John Dehlin [01:00:30] Right.

Jason Echols [01:00:30] And I would say that if you're generating content that requires this kind of, you know, time involvement, time investment, whatever, it's, there's a good chance it might get missed. I mean, if I were content, if I were you, if I were a content generator, I would probably figure out a way to get my content posted one way or another. Otherwise everyone else, there's so much other content swirling around, it's going to get lost in the mix.

John Dehlin [01:00:55] Sure. Okay, cool. So just trying to help people understand etiquette and, you know, good, good community involvement. That's that, that's why I'm asking these questions.

Jason Echols [01:01:07] One thing I would say is I don't actually go online and look for ex Mormon content anywhere other than just at Rex Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:01:14] Sure.

Jason Echols [01:01:15] Like a lot, I think a lot of people who basically don't have a lot of time in their lives to devote to this topic, this is why it's so great is because you've got this aggregator that you can pop on. It takes you 20 minutes. You can see what everybody's talking about today and pop off. And sad to say, I wouldn't go to Mormon stories if I didn't see it on Rex Mormon saying, hey, this is a podcast that's topical for ex Mormons.

John Dehlin [01:01:41] Got it. Okay. What's the role? I'm going to share again so that people can see what we're talking about. What's the role of upvoting and how does that, how does that sort of impact things? Okay, so we've got these little up and down voting. Right. How does that affect anything on Reddit?

Jason Echols [01:02:00] Well, this is good. This is going to determine the position of the link or the content on the page. And as you get closer to the top of the page, just people are. More eyeballs are going to see it.

John Dehlin [01:02:13] Right.

Jason Echols [01:02:13] So you know, your job as a user, should you choose to accept it, is to upvote good, worthy content and

John Dehlin [01:02:23] to downvote crappy content.

Jason Echols [01:02:24] And generally speaking, you're gonna want to use the downvote button sparingly because content that you're simply not interested in is really not worthy of a down vote, to my mind. And there's actually a whole section on Reddit for those who are new. You can go through and just read through what's called redicate and you know, the site will tell you this is what's considered good etiquette or poor etiquette as a user. But generally speaking, using the downvote button as a disagree button is inappropriate.

John Dehlin [01:02:57] Okay, that's good to know now.

Jason Echols [01:02:59] Yeah, you don't. Just because you disagree with an opinion that's been voiced, you know, is no reason to downvote someone. I think where you get into

John Dehlin [01:03:10] an

Jason Echols [01:03:10] opinion that you find is not adding to the conversation. That's what the downvote buttons for.

John Dehlin [01:03:15] Got it. For just not for things you disagree with, but for just bad actors.

Jason Echols [01:03:20] Oh, and see, so that screen you just pulled up, I mean, there's just, it's. Yeah, there we go. More subreddit policies. They've got a link to what's called redicate and it just goes on and on and on. I mean.

John Dehlin [01:03:34] Got it. No advertising.

Jason Echols [01:03:37] Yeah, no, we don't. We don't use the site as our own personal army.

John Dehlin [01:03:44] Right. Okay. No doxing, no personal attacks. All right, Got it. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber at mormonstorm. Thank you very much.

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 784

John Dehlin [00:00:02] Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners to help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community. Please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking the donate button on the top right side of the page. All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support. Okay, so I think we've. We've covered a lot of etiquette. Etiquette. We've talked about it. Voting and down voting. What is. Why. Why do you say Rex Mormon instead of ex Mormon? Tell it. Talk about what subreddits are and why. There are.

Subreddits, the Front Page, and Community Growth

Jason Echols [00:00:55] Why. Why do I say Rex Mormon instead

John Dehlin [00:00:57] of ex Mormon Reddit or something like that?

Jason Echols [00:00:59] Well, because I asked Mithran how to pronounce it, and that's what he told me.

John Dehlin [00:01:03] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:01:04] I mean, I asked the other mods, I've been here forever, and I had to ask them, how do you actually pronounce our subreddit?

John Dehlin [00:01:10] They call it R. They call it Rex Mormon instead of.

Jason Echols [00:01:13] Apparently the cool kids call it Rex Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:01:15] Okay, all right. Or the ex Mormon subreddit. So these subreddits, what is the subreddit? Just tell our listeners really quick.

Jason Echols [00:01:21] So a subreddit is Reddit divided up into forums by topic.

John Dehlin [00:01:27] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:01:27] And it's. The platform makes it very simple for someone to get on and create a new forum, a new subreddit, basically all the tools that you need to create a new forum. You can create a new form. I could do one right now, in 30 seconds.

John Dehlin [00:01:39] Call it Gardening in Utah. And yeah, it would be your own little subreddit. Right, sure. And then there are mods and rules for each subreddit.

Jason Echols [00:01:47] Right, Right.

John Dehlin [00:01:48] Okay, cool. Talk about the front page of Reddit and how that's significant, what that means.

Jason Echols [00:01:56] Well,

John Dehlin [00:01:59] so I've just clicked on it.

Jason Echols [00:02:00] It's significant in the sense that Reddit is, what, the number four most viewed website in the US And I think number nine in the world. Okay. So this real estate on the front page of Reddit is extremely valuable for anyone looking to have their content seen.

John Dehlin [00:02:18] It's like a newspaper, Right. It's like the New York Times or,

Jason Echols [00:02:21] you know, and I'm pretty sure the readership of the front page of Reddit out strips the New York Times subscriber base by several orders of magnitude. So this is sort of, what would the term be the golden.

John Dehlin [00:02:38] The Holy Grail.

Jason Echols [00:02:39] The Holy Grail for anyone looking to get their content seen on Reddit. And one of the exciting things at rxmormon@rex mormon is the way the algorithm works. Now because we're such an active site, our content actually sort of gets piped to the front page more easily than say, just a standard subreddit.

John Dehlin [00:02:59] What's the process of someone's post in Exmoor Rex Mormon actually making the front page?

Jason Echols [00:03:05] There needs to be an initial burst of upvotes. So there's a threshold for a lot of this. I mean, there's algorithms at work. But if you've got a post that within the space of a few minutes at RexMorman has logged 2,000, 3,000 upvotes, then things start to happen in the background that gets pumped out to pages that Reddit is saying, hey, this looks like popular content on Rex Mormon. We want other users on Reddit to see it. And then they'll judge. You know, these are non subscribers, just random Reddit users. And if they judge that as interesting to them, they're going to upvote that as well. And that's, I would say in the last six months, that's what's been really exciting, is having all of these people coming in from what's called All R A L L, which is sort of the bucket for the front page of Reddit. And they're saying, well, I just wandered in here from the front page and you exmos really have some crazy stories to tell or some, you know, and that's gratifying. It's, it's all, it's. For some reason this little subreddit has now risen to be what number 220 at this point in the rank of subreddits on Reddit.

John Dehlin [00:04:14] Right. So it's like it's in the top 250 subreddits in the world.

Jason Echols [00:04:19] Right, exactly. And that translates to millions of page views, hundreds of thousands of unique views every month. It's, it's a substantial portal.

John Dehlin [00:04:32] Okay. And I'm on our all for those who are watching. I'm okay.

Jason Echols [00:04:36] So you got a chance to look here? Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:04:38] So these are just a bit, you know, injuries as van hits crowd in

Jason Echols [00:04:42] Barcelona and you look at sort of the upvote counts there, it's like 35,000, 36,000. These are the.

John Dehlin [00:04:51] Got it. Okay, cool. So that's what the front page is. You subscribe to subreddits, you know, if you want to, you don't have to subscribe. To a subreddit. Right.

Jason Echols [00:05:02] You don't have to subscribe, but if

John Dehlin [00:05:04] you do, what does it mean to subscribe to?

Jason Echols [00:05:07] Just means when. So when you go to your front. So the subreddits that you're subscribed to, when you go to your front page, that's going to be a customized front page for you based on your subscriptions.

John Dehlin [00:05:18] So here I've got, you know, politics news today I learned movies, WTF technology, Mormons gone wild.

Jason Echols [00:05:26] What's this? Okay, no, sorry,

John Dehlin [00:05:30] atheism, whatever.

Jason Echols [00:05:31] Right. So that's, that's sort of your toolbar. And these are sort of the subreddits that will pop up on your front page based on algorithms that will rank that, you know, they're trying to guess on what kind of content you're interested in looking at. So as a subscriber of Rex Mormon, I'm constantly seeing ex Mormon content on my front page, but for a non subscriber, they're not going to see that unless it gets enough upvotes that it makes its way to all on its own steam.

John Dehlin [00:06:00] So if I have my own account when I log in and if I subscribe to a bunch of forums, my homepage for Reddit and is an aggregate of the top posts in all the subreddits I'm subscribed to. Is that right?

Jason Echols [00:06:11] Exactly. And with a number of. Let's see what we're looking at.

John Dehlin [00:06:17] So this is my homepage. So it's got ima and I'm not

Jason Echols [00:06:21] sure what the default subreddits are now. I think you end up with a mix of like default subreddits and your own subreddits, sort of creating this custom front page experience for you, right?

John Dehlin [00:06:32] Yeah. But in mine it's got Mormon, Latter Day Saints, Ex Mormon, explain like I'm five Ask Science.

Jason Echols [00:06:38] Well, thank you for subscribing to R. Mormon. That's been. That started at the same time as Rex Mormon and it's just been. I was a mod there for years, as a year. You. I never asked you about this. You were a mod at R. Mormon for a short while.

John Dehlin [00:06:51] Yeah, I didn't know what it meant. I got just too involved.

Jason Echols [00:06:55] I don't know, it's kind of. There's some good mods there, but with such a quiet forum, there's not a whole lot to do, to be honest.

John Dehlin [00:07:02] Yeah. And I don't think I fully understood what Reddit was either when I agreed to do that. Yeah. Okay. So you can report a post if you don't like it. You can report it and mods can respond. Right.

Jason Echols [00:07:17] You can report a post. Please don't report it. If you just simply disagree with the sentiment.

John Dehlin [00:07:21] Right.

Jason Echols [00:07:22] Unless it's. Unless it's something ugly.

John Dehlin [00:07:24] Right. So there's a little report thing here that you can click on and report it. You can hide stuff, share stuff, save stuff. Right. I think it's cool that it tells you statistics. Right. So if you go to Exmorm and you can see that 51,960 people have subscribed to it, but that's not how many people view it.

Jason Echols [00:07:46] Right, Right. This is subscribers.

John Dehlin [00:07:49] And some of those are going to be, you know, dual accounts. People who have their primary account, but then secondary accounts. Right. So it's not necessarily representing the total number of people who view the site. Right.

Jason Echols [00:08:04] Yeah. I think this is marginally more reliable than some of the LDS membership statistics. Maybe not by much. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:08:12] And it shows how many people are currently viewing it. So a thousand people.

Jason Echols [00:08:15] This is actually a more interesting metric. I mean, what makes the forum interesting is really how many people are online at any one moment.

John Dehlin [00:08:23] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:08:24] Which it's fairly. It's fairly interesting. You get a thousand people at any one moment. And in the last six months, I would say it's been fairly constant that the average has been around a thousand two at any. any one time. And it'll bump up to 8 or 9,000 when something really big hits.

John Dehlin [00:08:38] And just to give context, you know, politics has 3.5 million subscribers and 40,000 people online.

Jason Echols [00:08:45] Yeah. So like 1 40th of whatever.

John Dehlin [00:08:47] Of Politics. Yeah, yeah. Okay. That's cool to know. And also post, you can see how many people have viewed a given post. Right. So if I click on this post

Jason Echols [00:08:57] and you're looking at. You've got.

John Dehlin [00:08:58] It's got 328 points, which 96% of the people have upvoted it.

Jason Echols [00:09:04] Wait a second. There were 4% of the people downvoted this.

John Dehlin [00:09:08] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:09:08] Okay, I need to write a comment calling out the people who downvoted this. Hang on a second.

John Dehlin [00:09:12] No, don't do that. That'll waste.

Jason Echols [00:09:15] That's kind of how that metric ends up working. Like people say, how did we get so many downvotes on this post? The tpms are like brigading our forum and coming in and down, voting worthy content. One thing to keep in mind, there's some fuzzy algorithms going on that no matter what you post in this forum, there's going to be down votes.

John Dehlin [00:09:33] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:09:35] Reddit will come in and just behind the scenes, throw in some down votes so that nobody's going to sit on 100% upvoted.

John Dehlin [00:09:44] And then sometimes it shows you how many people have viewed the post. Right?

Jason Echols [00:09:49] Well, I think you can see it, can't you? Well, I don't know what you just clicked on, so. Oh, wait, you've got that. Yeah, let me.

John Dehlin [00:09:56] I don't see how many people have viewed this post particularly, but sometimes I see that and I don't know why. That's just on your own post, I think.

Jason Echols [00:10:03] Yeah, I think it's because that's your own post. I think I'm in the same.

John Dehlin [00:10:06] No, that's not. That's not my own post. This would be my own post. Final Evening with Grant Palmer. But that is actually. That's on a link. But if I click.

Jason Echols [00:10:17] Okay, so now go into comments. Go into full comments. Just hit full comments down here.

John Dehlin [00:10:22] Full comments, right?

Jason Echols [00:10:23] Yeah. And then fingers, if you could see me.

John Dehlin [00:10:25] Okay, so 846views.

Jason Echols [00:10:28] So that's something that the owner of the content can see that.

John Dehlin [00:10:31] Okay, got it. That's. That's what I was. So you can see how many people see your stuff. That's nice. All right, so. And then finally, talk about the role of this little filter. The tabs on top.

Jason Echols [00:10:41] Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a fun thing at the top.

John Dehlin [00:10:44] So hot. New.

Jason Echols [00:10:45] So hot is. That's the hot topics of the day. If you go to new, I don't really use rising or controversial too much, but if you go to new, this is almost a different. Oh, see? So, John, this is great. Did you read the third one down?

John Dehlin [00:11:01] Yeah. John de Lisa, dumbass. And I hate more of his stories. I love it. I expected that. I absolutely expected that.

Jason Echols [00:11:09] That's what I was. So the new tab, to the point regarding the new tab, is where you can see a lot of funny stuff.

John Dehlin [00:11:16] I'm upvoting it, by the way.

Jason Echols [00:11:17] Exactly.

John Dehlin [00:11:18] Do it.

Jason Echols [00:11:19] I doubt this will make the front page. Maybe it will. I don't know.

John Dehlin [00:11:25] Yeah, but people tried to actually link to this, this Facebook podcast.

Jason Echols [00:11:30] Oh. And they got. Yeah. So we don't.

John Dehlin [00:11:33] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:11:33] Well, let's see what it says. Let's see what it says.

John Dehlin [00:11:35] It says links to Facebook are disallowed. And it's a bot. It's a bot. Basically saying, yeah, people can't link to it, but people are having conversations about this current live podcast and they're making jokes about it. Right.

Jason Echols [00:11:48] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:11:49] Yeah. What were you going to say? Go ahead.

Jason Echols [00:11:53] I lost my train of thought. Yeah, I was going to say that's that post. Assuming it doesn't make the front page because it's just kind of a funny throwaway post. Yeah, that's the kind of thing you can see on New. That's why I like to use the new tab, because there's just so much content coming in every day now that if you only see the top posts on the front page, you're going to miss a lot of just the edgier, sillier content that's here. Oh, see, like here's someone saying hi.

John Dehlin [00:12:21] Hi, John Delino, Jason Echols. Yeah, shout out to John. Whatever.

Jason Echols [00:12:25] Yeah, yeah, it's. So later on we get done here, I'll pop in and say thank you to whoever that op was. And then an op is an original poster. Anyone who bothers to post content or post a text post, that's an op. So I'll drop in and say, hey, thanks for. Thanks for the shout out.

John Dehlin [00:12:43] Got it. Okay.

Jason Echols [00:12:45] We've only got 3 comments on this one. And so another thing that happened. So if I look at this, we gave the Mods@REX Mormon0 Heads up that we were going to do this chat, right? So they didn't sticky the post, which is going to be something for people to know if you've got something important like an ama.

John Dehlin [00:13:02] Ask me, Ask me any. Ask me anything. Right.

Jason Echols [00:13:05] It's a scheduled event. You're someone of note who's going to talk about some topic at length and you want to invite the entire community to come in and ask you questions. That's an ama. And the mods at Rex Mormon are generally really, really good about. Yeah, let's sticky that. They'll put a green sticky on that. It'll sit at the top of the page and draw. It'll drive attention to that.

John Dehlin [00:13:24] Right, so like the Bill Real or the Lindsay Hanson park ama.

Jason Echols [00:13:29] Right.

John Dehlin [00:13:31] All right. Is gold relevant? Reddit gold? Is that even interesting or is it not really used?

Jason Echols [00:13:37] It's a nice token. If you really, really like a comment and you want to throw something to the, like the corporate owners of Reddit to show appreciative appreciation for the platform. Yeah, sure.

John Dehlin [00:13:47] You click on Give Gold. And what does that do?

Jason Echols [00:13:49] Hit Give Gold. And it's. It's an anonymous way, or it can be. You can let them know who you are, but it just distinguishes that comment.

John Dehlin [00:13:58] But it's a way. So it's actual money and it's a way to.

Jason Echols [00:14:02] But the money goes to the owners of Reddit, of the platform.

John Dehlin [00:14:04] It's a way to help Reddit be sustainable.

Jason Echols [00:14:07] Yeah. And I certainly would not suggest they need much help at this point, but.

John Dehlin [00:14:12] Okay, that was a way back then. All right, so let's just quickly talk about ex Mormon Reddit's growth, Talk about its growth over time, how it started and where it is now.

Jason Echols [00:14:23] Well, okay, I mean, I think you have some thoughts on that. Let me pull up.

John Dehlin [00:14:28] Yeah, so when you said it started, it started with six people back in 2009, you said. Right. And over.

Jason Echols [00:14:36] And there's. And there's, you know, if you go onto the forum, generally every time we tick up 1000 users, like in the last. Recently, we've been adding more than 1,000 users, 1,000 subscribers per month. And so, like, when we hit 50,000 subscribers, those are the numbers. Not your thing.

John Dehlin [00:14:54] Yeah, no, that was a big thing. No, that was.

Jason Echols [00:14:57] Yeah, we hit 50. It's numbers. So we hit 50,000. Everybody's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, like a user, like, I think his name is 4Blockhead, he's one of our regulars. Just like, just a machine in terms of, like, putting content into the site. He'll give, like, a statistical rundown and it'll show how we've built up steam, built up momentum. I think we've, like, rolled over almost at 52,000 now, and 50,000 was just weeks ago.

John Dehlin [00:15:24] Right.

Jason Echols [00:15:25] So there's that I wanted to pull up.

John Dehlin [00:15:30] So you said 3 million page views per month, 50,000 subscribers, 220,000 monthly unique visitors.

Jason Echols [00:15:38] And the thing is, those are already stale statistics, because when I, when I pulled those up to have this conversation with you, I hadn't taken into account mobile users.

John Dehlin [00:15:47] Right.

Jason Echols [00:15:48] And there's another post that one of the mods made explaining just the incredible numbers we're getting from mobile users. But in terms of stats, that's something that people, if they go onto the forum and just do a quick search, there's just multiple posts talking about our statistics, because, go figure, as ex Mormons, we're kind of fascinated by the numbers we can crank out.

John Dehlin [00:16:08] Sure.

Jason Echols [00:16:09] That's being. Being. Anyway, it goes back to the old mission experience and just kind of the way we use numbers as metrics to, you know, pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves that we're doing a great job. So. But statistically, actually, we are doing a great job. And I just wanted to pull up.

John Dehlin [00:16:28] No, I mean, it's the biggest site in Mormonism, probably. Right.

Jason Echols [00:16:33] Well, and that's, you know, five months ago when you said, hey, who are the dominant forces Right now, in the ex. Mo discussion, is there anyone bigger?

John Dehlin [00:16:45] I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, I don't.

Jason Echols [00:16:48] And I think the nice thing about it is we don't spend a lot of time talking about how big we are.

John Dehlin [00:16:51] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:16:52] I mean, this is the first time we've actually had this conversation with Mormon stories. Right.

John Dehlin [00:16:56] Yeah, sure.

Jason Echols [00:16:57] Publicly. In terms of. In terms of like patting ourselves on the back and saying, you know, look at this thing. And that's. That's what I really like about it. If I'm pretty sure if there was a single blog in the blogger NACL that was posting even a tenth of these kinds of numbers, we'd never hear the end of it.

John Dehlin [00:17:12] Yeah. Right.

Jason Echols [00:17:13] You know, and that's, you know.

John Dehlin [00:17:17] Totally. So it's a juggernaut now. Ex Mormon, like RFM has faded. The blogs have certainly faded. I can't say the podcasts have faded, because Mormon Stories, we're on track to have like 6. More than 6 million downloads and views this year, and it was only 4.7 last year. So, I mean, we're growing still, but.

Jason Echols [00:17:42] Well, and I would say the consensus that I see just from browsing Rex Morriman is that people are always hungry for new podcast content. It's a completely different animal if you can put out an interesting podcast. That's just. There's synergy there between a podcast and what Rex Mormon does.

John Dehlin [00:17:57] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:17:58] And I think Rex Mormon is almost a perfect platform for sort of promoting whatever podcast you're doing, because it's the one digital media that we can't really. You can't enjoy that through. Through Rex Mormon, you've kind of get on the podcast and, you know, go hit the treadmill or whatever.

John Dehlin [00:18:13] Yeah. Because when people are biking or commuting or driving or mowing their lawn, they can't read Ex Mormon Reddit. So they.

Jason Echols [00:18:20] Yeah, I mean, that's. It kind of fills that gap between leaving the house and driving to work and getting to your job. So you get off for Ex Mormon at home, get in the car and go. That's your 20 minutes for John. And then you get to the office and you hide the screen behind all of your.

John Dehlin [00:18:34] And you're on Rex Mormon all day,

Jason Echols [00:18:36] basically through your work day.

John Dehlin [00:18:38] And then on your drive back, you

Jason Echols [00:18:39] listen your drive back. You know, maybe it's John. It could be some other podcast at that point.

John Dehlin [00:18:43] Right.

Jason Echols [00:18:44] Depending on how your day went.

John Dehlin [00:18:45] Yeah. And then rinse and repeat. Now, if you're exercising, riding your bike, mowing your lawn Doing the dishes. Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:18:52] That demand is not going away, I think for podcasts and I think it's only getting, it's only increasing. I mean, if Rex Mormon's numbers are any indication, the audience is just grow. It's still growing.

John Dehlin [00:19:01] Yeah. Okay, so I think it'd be cool to just talk about some of the biggest stories ever, some of the biggest developments or stories that have come out of Rex Mormon. And so you asked me to put kind of top stories of all time. Right. And maybe to talk about.

Jason Echols [00:19:21] Well, and that's something that's always available for a user anytime. Yeah. So if you just hit the top

John Dehlin [00:19:26] tab, it's their top all time.

Jason Echols [00:19:28] And then you have the pull down menu on the. You have the pull down menu on the left top that allows you to choose between this year, this month, this week, all time. So now we're looking at the all time tab. Right.

John Dehlin [00:19:40] And this is purely based on upvotes.

Jason Echols [00:19:42] This is based, based on accrued upvotes.

John Dehlin [00:19:45] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:19:45] And this is going to give you the rank. And so let's go in and see what we've got here. So you've got. Alright, so this is a post, for example, that has big crossover appeal. Obviously you've got Penn and Teller, right?

John Dehlin [00:19:58] Yep.

Jason Echols [00:19:59] Being applied, a quote from Penn and Teller being applied to the ex Mormon experience. Right. Talking about, hey, I've left the church and all that bad stuff that I'm supposed to want to do. Guess what? I could do it, but I don't want to because we're all basically good people.

John Dehlin [00:20:13] And the post says I do rape all I want and the amount I want is zero. That's the name of the post.

Jason Echols [00:20:18] That's the most take home. Right.

John Dehlin [00:20:20] That's the most popular ex Mormon subreddit post ever, Right?

Jason Echols [00:20:24] Yeah. And there were probably, probably 80%. I would just go out on a limb and say 80% of those upvotes were probably once this had hit the front page of Reddit and everyone's looking at that and saying, yes, I agree with this sentiment.

John Dehlin [00:20:35] And there's 703 comments, which is a lot.

Jason Echols [00:20:37] It's a lot. And oh, that's maybe, maybe this is a good time to talk about this. Just writing titles, writing headlines is a huge aspect of success in the business of reaping karma, reaping up votes on Reddit. If you can write a com, if you can write a headline that draws people in or allows them to have sort of an immediate reaction to the content that's gonna, you're gonna benefit from that.

John Dehlin [00:21:01] Okay, any, any of these other stories catch your eye that you want to comment about?

Jason Echols [00:21:08] We can go one by one. We can go one by one. And actually, can we stop for. Please take a time out for a second.

John Dehlin [00:21:14] Well, we're live so I can take questions or comments from listeners.

Jason Echols [00:21:17] Do you take a break, I mean a timeout from this topic? Just give me one second. I want to put a coda in here about. We're talking about podcast, right?

John Dehlin [00:21:25] Yeah, sure, whatever.

Jason Echols [00:21:26] I honestly, John, I sincerely believe that someone could do a weekly podcast that was little more than taking the top Reddit post of the week, talking through the podcasters reaction to each of those posts. Just because when I talk about those 20 minutes between when you're at home having breakfast and grabbing your coffee and then driving the car to work, you're missing out on Rex Mormon for those 20 minutes. This would fill that gap and you'd be able to say, hey, guess what, you can't read this, but I'm going to read. We're going to talk through the top posts.

John Dehlin [00:21:58] Yeah, I'd be willing to sponsor something like that with the Open Stories Foundation. I don't know if it's in Rex Mormon sort of code or ethics or vibes to want to partner with us, but I can say I'd love that.

Jason Echols [00:22:10] Well, I don't think you'd. The thing is, this is all. You wouldn't have to partner with anyone to do it if you had some. I'm just, if you had someone who wanted to generate that kind of content, it would, it would simply be someone sitting down and saying let's read through the top 10 posts this week and then just have, have a little chat about what each one of those mean. It's pretty easy.

John Dehlin [00:22:27] So here's the deal. I own mormonnews.com if anybody wanted to start a podcast called Mormon News Podcast, I would lend my Mormon News Podcast domain to it. And it could be something that showcases the top stories on Reddit. They just need to come to me and show an interest and an aptitude and ability to do this and maybe it'll be born from today's discussion. Jason?

Jason Echols [00:22:52] Well, you know where I got this idea originally? This is years ago, but when I was in Italy and I was watching their daily news and it was attractive newscasters basically sitting at a desk picking up the morning papers and they would literally pick up the morning paper and read through the headlines and have this little casual chat about what the papers were saying. And I thought that is about the easiest content Generation possible. And it's fun because you're basically just watching too well spoken people. Go through the morning's headline and this is basically what Rex Mormon does now is give us very quick access to a bunch of headlines.

John Dehlin [00:23:32] Right? So there's several people who responded. Melissa wants to, wants to help out with that. Hannah says that's a great idea. Logan says he's willing to do it, but he doesn't know how. So if any of you guys really seriously want to do this and think you'd be good, you know, reach out. Okay, what else did you want to say about that, Jason?

Browsing Top Posts on r/exmormon Live

Jason Echols [00:23:52] Well, so let's segue from that going to let's do it. Let's do a dry run and talk as if we were doing like the top 10 posts from Rex Mormon. Okay.

John Dehlin [00:24:00] Okay, let's do it.

Jason Echols [00:24:01] So Penn and Teller, that's a no brainer. And probably my throwaway side comment if I was reading this would be like, you know, Rex Mormon is dominated by what I would call the New atheist. The vibe is younger, sort of an aggressive younger atheism that's skeptical of any religious claims. It's not limited to Mormonism. So you know, that's sort of the dominant vibe. And this is a perfect sort of quote that these are the folks who would be part of the New Atheist pantheon of heroes. Number two, this gets into the selfiegeddon.

John Dehlin [00:24:36] Oh really? So there's a selfie of a husband and I presume a wife. I'm presuming hugging each other on a beach and the caption is I don't give this marriage three years quote unquote. That's what I overheard from two of my closest TBMs shortly after we announced that our marriage would not take place in a temple. Today is our three year anniversary. We've never been happier.

Jason Echols [00:24:56] Right.

John Dehlin [00:24:57] So it's got 12.4 thousand upvotes, 608 comments posted four months ago.

Jason Echols [00:25:03] And that's fairly self explanatory why that's so popular, right? I mean you're giving people validation for a sentiment that we all have. I mean I've, I've been married 20 years to a Nevermo. I think I have great kids, great family. But we see so many stories on the site of people who don't get that validation from their Mormon families when they make choices that don't line up with sort of the Mormon game plan. Right.

John Dehlin [00:25:27] And ex Mormon redditors like to see things like that. It's kind of validating. It makes us feel good, it makes us it dispels myths and stereotypes, et cetera.

Jason Echols [00:25:36] Exactly. So that's what's going on there. And I think if you just, if you scroll down and you look at, you know, the selfies that probably dominate a lot of these.

John Dehlin [00:25:46] Let's keep going, let's keep going.

Jason Echols [00:25:47] So the next one is down here. Right down here. So here we've got, you know, all in for 61 years. Shelf crashed three years ago. People know what a shelf is. You know, that's where you keep all your doubts.

John Dehlin [00:25:57] Right.

Jason Echols [00:25:57] And then, you know, when that finally breaks and you have to face the, you know, the question of, hey, would I want to know if it's not true? Do I want to actually, you know, research. Yeah. And she's just saying, look, did my reservation, my resignation late to the party and that's it. Nobody expected this to happen. No, this was not planned. I don't think any of the mods or anyone thought it would happen. Actually. Quite a few of us are ambivalent about this whole phenomenon.

John Dehlin [00:26:26] Right. But just people doing their selfies and then giving a little bio of their

Jason Echols [00:26:31] life in a bio and say, hey, look at me. You know, I've been out since 2016 and I'm happy. Started XJW, the Jehovah's Witness site.

John Dehlin [00:26:42] Right.

Jason Echols [00:26:43] That's where, that's where this thing started. Was actually on the Jehovah's Witness subreddit and some, some Exmos saw it said, wow, that's fun, and it just took off.

John Dehlin [00:26:51] Okay. Number four is this one. It's. It's basically like a. It's a little picture of a little sign that says the best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible. Mark Twain. It looks like it's on a chimney or a porch or something like that. It's just a. Basically an image and it's.

Jason Echols [00:27:08] And it's one of the, I would call that one of the familiar new atheist messages. Mark Twain's always going to be popular here, Doc.

John Dehlin [00:27:18] You know, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris.

Jason Echols [00:27:21] Right, that's.

John Dehlin [00:27:21] And then the title was this Christian bookstore missed the point.

Jason Echols [00:27:25] Okay, so,

John Dehlin [00:27:29] yeah. Oh, missed the point of Mark Twain's coat. Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:27:32] Pardon?

John Dehlin [00:27:33] They missed the point of Mark Twain's coat. Of Mark Twain's quote.

Jason Echols [00:27:37] Yeah. I think it's the tension between that and the fish open sign.

John Dehlin [00:27:41] Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, then there's, then there's a meme. Memes are very popular. The meme has a couple in front of the Salt Lake Temple and it says, I don't support same sex marriage because Marriage is sacred. This is my wife. We met two months ago at byu. And the caption is, I have so many friends from high school who are in the same kind of situation. It's ridiculous. And that has 8,000 upvotes.

Jason Echols [00:28:04] Well, and I think this is a cultural reality in the landscape in Mormonism. Right. We all know so many folks who've gotten married after a week, two months, quite young.

John Dehlin [00:28:20] Yeah, totally.

Jason Echols [00:28:21] I don't need to explain these, but I explained why this would be so popular. It's just this touches a chord.

John Dehlin [00:28:28] Now, this one, six is. I wanted. I want to talk a tiny bit about this. Right. It's got. It's got a selfie of a woman in a. Let's just say a more revealing dress.

Jason Echols [00:28:40] Going back to the Mormons Gone Wild tab that you're hiding.

John Dehlin [00:28:44] I'm hiding it.

Jason Echols [00:28:45] No, I'm kidding. I'm saying,

John Dehlin [00:28:48] is there really a Mormons Gone Wild?

Jason Echols [00:28:51] I don't know. I just made that up because.

John Dehlin [00:28:54] So it's showing a bit of a skimpier dress. She's got a tattoo. It's showing some cleavage. It doesn't show her face. And it says, finally told my mom I would not allow her modesty shaming me. It's 90 effing degrees out. I will wear the clothes I want to wear. This is the mo. You know, the number six most popular Reddit, exmoron Reddit post of all time.

Jason Echols [00:29:19] Do you want me to explain it to you or do you want me to mansplain it to you?

John Dehlin [00:29:22] Both,

Jason Echols [00:29:25] I think what's going on here, at least for me, and I don't think I probably commented on this particular post, assuming this is the op. Assuming this is the original poster.

John Dehlin [00:29:36] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:29:37] Just going to take the sentiment expressed in the title at face value.

John Dehlin [00:29:41] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:29:43] Because there's all. There's all other. There are plenty of other ways you could take it and you could ask yourself, well, why is this popular at Rex Mormon? Does that say something about the flavor of the community? Probably. I think if we went down into comments, there's probably a whole discussion about that.

John Dehlin [00:30:02] Right. Okay. So, I mean, do.

Jason Echols [00:30:07] So what's on your mind, John? I think. What's your sense when you see that?

John Dehlin [00:30:10] I think. What? Well, like talk about Reddit and women. Rex. Sorry, the ex Mormon, Reddit and women, about objectification, about these memes, about the selfies, about the treatment of women. Is that a topic we're talking about?

Jason Echols [00:30:28] It's definitely a topic that gets talked about on the site and for good reason, obviously. I mean, this is, this is kind of. I've seen the accusation leveled, I've heard the accusation leveled in various podcasts in various venues saying, you know, Rex Mormon is a, you know, it's basically a pit of misogyny. And I think if you actually read through the site and you keep up with the conversations, that's not particularly the case. Those conversations tend to be addressed almost as they're happening. People who will say, hey, you know, that's. You don't bring that here. That gets addressed fairly quickly. I also think we're all coming out of Mormonism, which has got to be one of the most patriarchal institutions in the world, to think that there wouldn't be some leftover issues. And I think it's a pro. I think it's a, it's a, it's a, it's good that the forum is open enough that allows people to wander in and maybe say things that they need to be. They need to learn that that's not how it works in the grown up world.

John Dehlin [00:31:34] So if men say objectifying comments about women, like, how about, you know, if

Jason Echols [00:31:38] you get, if you get commenters who start objectifying women, if they start objectifying the users in the forum, those get, those get addressed.

John Dehlin [00:31:46] They don't just, you know, do they get deleted? Do they get downvoted? Do they get.

Jason Echols [00:31:52] That's what the mods are there for? I mean, that's that call that gets made. I would say that as a forum, it doesn't operate in what would be called a safe space. It's more of a free for all than how that would operate. Right, but not by much. I mean, I think when it comes to misogynistic comments, when it comes to objectification, those kinds of things that's getting talked about. And the mods have a handle on that.

John Dehlin [00:32:24] Yeah, totally cool. All right.

Jason Echols [00:32:26] Well, yeah, I think in terms of like, with that selfie, that is where I would say that, like for myself or some of the mods, you know, I'm more in the free for all camp as far as my personal inclinations go. But others will look at that and say, you know, what we don't want the site to become is a beauty contest. And they'll look at the, at the selfies and say, at what point does it end up being people are getting upvoted because they're able to like, put together the most compelling selfie as opposed to validating their ex Mormon experience.

John Dehlin [00:33:00] Got it.

Jason Echols [00:33:00] Is that.

John Dehlin [00:33:01] Yeah, that's great.

Jason Echols [00:33:02] Yeah.

MormonLeaks and the Community's Role in Transparency

John Dehlin [00:33:05] All right. I think the listeners have have a sense for the types of posts that we've been talking about. I want to shift slightly to the role that Rex Mormon has played, particularly in breaking news. And so as I scroll down, I see 21 leaked video of closed door meetings with Quorum of Twelve Apostles. If you think about many of the big stories that have hit the church in the past few years, Whether it's the 2015 November policy, the leaking of the content with church leaders that led to the creation of Mormon Leaks, it seems like these days when the AP or Salt Lake Trib wants to write a story, often it was Rex Mormon that broke the story. And I would even go as far to say that many of the sources or information that gets used in these news stories oftentimes is at least originally pulled from Rex Mormon. Talk about that, if you don't mind.

Jason Echols [00:34:18] Well, I mean, I think if you look at what Mormon leaks. I mean, the fact that Mormon leaks works, I think, is really, it's an outgrowth of what Rex Mormon made possible as a platform in terms of, you know, there's a lot of angles to this in terms of writing a story for a paper. There's a, there's a lot of pieces that you have to pull together in one place so that the reporter can then write up an actual story. And I think the way that Rex Mormon crowdsources a lot of those pieces and puts them all in one place, if I were a journalist would use Rex Mormon as a resource to basically scroll through the comments section and I'm gonna get my who, what, where, when, why, all right there. And see what further research needs to be done. But it's very quickly gonna pull together the threads that I need to write a story.

John Dehlin [00:35:11] Right. And it's being used that way, wouldn't you say?

Jason Echols [00:35:14] My sense is it's being used that way. And we definitely, we definitely need the paid journalists, we need the professionals to write the stories in a way. How can I say this? The thing that I'm grateful for with Rex Moorman is that prior to this phenomenon, prior to what we have access to now, the institution was able to write the story. One side got told. And there really wasn't a mechanism for those of us who wanted to say, tell a different narrative to get that out there.

John Dehlin [00:35:51] And now, and now, now maybe there is a little bit more.

Jason Echols [00:35:54] And I think we can kind of strip that alternative narrative from the overtones in the past of, oh, this isn't, this is an angry ex Mormon narrative. Who's giving you this story? Well, no, he's like, no, here's the story. You. You look through it, you see what the. You know, it gets vetted on the site before a reporter would even have to touch it.

John Dehlin [00:36:15] Yeah, yeah. And it's playing an important role in the news. Is it fair to say that things like CES letter or Mormon Leaks wouldn't even, you know, oh, in large part their success to Rex Mormon? Is that fair to say? What do you think?

Jason Echols [00:36:36] No, I think the platform has made things possible that weren't possible before. It's a collective victory for the users of the platform. I mean, it's. This is something that no one can take. I don't think there's any one person who can take credit for where we've wound up with Rex Mormon. I think it's an expression of something that was needed, perhaps in the Mormon community, the ex Mormon community, as a place to process a documents, things that we have known about, but no one was ever really able to put in front of a knife, eyeballs. I mean, the stuff that Jeremy's talking about, the CES letter, we all know the bulk of that information was available, right?

John Dehlin [00:37:15] Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:37:15] But all of a sudden he puts all of this information in one place and then you have a platform to say, yes, here it is. You know, if he could get feedback,

John Dehlin [00:37:24] he can share it. Like, as I understand it, early versions of the letter, he could share, he got feedback, he could make additions and corrections that Rex Mormon. And it's a way that it gets promoted and shared outward more broadly.

Jason Echols [00:37:40] If someone were to ask me, well, why are you a fan of the CES letter? I would say primarily because I don't really want to have this conversation with anyone in my family who may want to look into these issues. I would much rather say, you know what, if this is something you want to research, just go follow this link, read through a few pages, come back and let me know if you have any thoughts on it. I don't want to be generating original content to bring to my friends or families who are in the church. I have no interest in challenging their beliefs or their views. But if that conversation were to come up, I would love to say, hey, go follow this link. Go check it out. It's a really quick summary of a lot of different issues. It's a convenience. Yeah, that's my view.

John Dehlin [00:38:27] But I also think it's a mechanism for crowdsourcing, and there's a lot of crowdsourcing that goes on from Rex Mormon. True.

Jason Echols [00:38:37] Yeah. And you know what? I think you probably know the CES letter much better than I do. Do you get a sense that that's why it's. Why it's such a nice fit, because the CES letter almost feels like a crowdsourced product of every. Just so many different issues all summarized and laid out.

John Dehlin [00:38:53] I don't know how Jeremy wrote it. I just got the sense that he was on Rex Mormon as he was writing became a way that he could find out about the difficult things and even potentially find collaborators and get feedback. I just, I feel like it was in at least some ways a collaborative, synergistic, crowd sourced effort. Jeremy will have to tell me if I'm wrong, but that's my sense and this certainly for the promotion of it. Rex Mormons played a really important role, as has Mormon Stories and other venues. Yeah. And I think the same thing is true with Mormon leaks that Ryan McKnight and, you know, his partners, you know, many of the ideas came from early activities in Rex Mormon. And then whatever participation, collaboration, promotion happens, it's synergistic between Rex Mormon and Mormon Leaks and vice versa.

Jason Echols [00:39:50] Mm.

John Dehlin [00:39:51] It's just kind of. It's kind of an ecosystem in some ways.

Jason Echols [00:39:56] Sure. And it goes back to that thing of Rex Mormon being sort of a neutral ground because no one owns the platform other than the. The corporate Reddit ownership. We people can, you know, people don't have to be concerned about using that platform to make those kinds of connections with each other.

John Dehlin [00:40:15] Yeah. All right. Well, I think we've given listeners a good sense for the context that led to Rex Mormon, the basic features of the site and its growth and success and some of the main projects that it spawned or supported. Talk just really quickly about the life of Ahmad. You talked in your notes about the 15 mods and what they do, and I, you know, it's probably a hard job. It's probably a thankless job.

Jason Echols [00:40:54] It's largely thankless. And I will tell you that like the Q15 that we've got, moderating. Hey, you got to catch that bit of blasphemy.

John Dehlin [00:41:03] I love it. Q15, 15 mods.

Jason Echols [00:41:06] But there's a real mix in that group of 15 people. They run. They run the gamut in terms of political outlook. You know, it goes from left to right. They run the gamut in terms of orientation, gender. It's all there. It's all in the mix. And a lot of what that group has to do is just make these judgment calls. If you see a comment we were talking about, you know, is this an objectifying comment? Is this post Objectifying women. Well, you've got 15 people coming from all different kinds of perspectives saying here's the judgment call.

John Dehlin [00:41:42] Right.

Jason Echols [00:41:43] And that's, and that's really, that's, that's kind of, that's the main importance of what they do is keeping it on an even keel.

John Dehlin [00:41:49] Do they sometimes get worn out? Do they sometimes have fights? Are there political. Oh yeah.

Jason Echols [00:41:55] I mean, sure.

John Dehlin [00:41:56] Talk a bit about the internal dynamics of being a mod and collaborating with other mods and trying to make decisions

Jason Echols [00:42:02] and you're always going to have the mods who are more active on a day to day basis. There's going to be priority given probably to their views because they're the ones who are taking on the most work. So it's a very sort of natural flow of. Well, here's the group that's being particularly active in moderating the site and their POV may take some may come to the front for a period of time. You know, where you get dust ups is sometimes, yeah, there's going to be dust ups where someone has a very strong position on a particular issue and if they can't get in sync with the rest of the group, they'll probably just choose to either be asked to leave or they'll step away. You know, in my, in my own case, it just gets. When the work is. There's too much work to fit into the rest of one's life and you're like, time to step out, let others take over. Generally speaking, over the last. I think it's what's been eight years, nine years. However long this thing's been going, there haven't been any dust ups that have really been a hit on the community. It's. I mean you've been involved in probably some of the bigger dust ups just with some of what you've brought to the site with.

John Dehlin [00:43:08] Are you comfortable? Would it be inappropriate for you to talk about some of the biggest dust ups just so that we can get a sense for.

Jason Echols [00:43:15] You can't have. Okay. Privacy is a preeminent concern. You know, we all deal with each other anonymously. The mods are anonymous to each other

John Dehlin [00:43:26] for the most part. They don't know each other well, not

Jason Echols [00:43:33] officially. You know, I mean the way the day to day gets handled is you're not addressing each other on a first name basis. You run it like the business of moderating the forum. Obviously there's, there's phone calls and there's personal connections that get made there, but those don't. Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:43:49] Are there any mods where no one knows the mods identity in real life or are they all known to each other?

Jason Echols [00:43:55] With 15 people you get this overlay of hey, here's four or five people who know each other quite well and they have one or two that know this other group quite well. I mean there's going to be lines.

John Dehlin [00:44:05] Yeah, yeah.

Jason Echols [00:44:06] You know, with 15 people you're gonna have different levels of familiarity with each other.

John Dehlin [00:44:11] I think it's coalitions, probably coalitions that build and stuff.

Jason Echols [00:44:15] Yeah, you know, where people are coming. You could, you could have an expectation that oh, this, this group's gonna have a certain take on this, you know, predictably. And you manage those. The one big no, no is anything that crosses the line of privacy. Because the biggest job for a mod at RX Mormon is to safeguard the privacy of the users.

John Dehlin [00:44:34] I love that.

Jason Echols [00:44:35] And well, Reddit has built in safeguards. Like as a user you would have to give away that information unilaterally from your side before anyone would become aware of it. But once you've given away that information, you want to make sure that the people you're talking to are going to hold that in confidence. Anything that smacks of divulging private information is something that's, you'll be immediately released as a mod, potentially banned from the site. That's the one serious. A bridge too far. And you know, we've had a couple of instances of that. We've had people. The only thing that happens, you'll have a person in a peak of, you know, they'll be chagrined at a particular issue and will do something that requires them to be let go.

John Dehlin [00:45:23] And that's a mod or just a user.

Jason Echols [00:45:28] What happens with users, you know, it will happen once every blue moon with a mod who forgets that privacy is king and that's just. None of us are allowed to circumvent that.

Moderator Challenges and Notable Community Conflicts

John Dehlin [00:45:39] Okay, so is it productive or interesting or worthwhile to mention three or five of the biggest dust ups that, that the mods got really taxed over? Is that even worth mentioning?

Jason Echols [00:45:52] You know, I would, I would say that it's easy to go into the forum and do a search for those and do like if you, if you were to type in mod drama, you would, you probably get some insight. It really is. As far as I know that's pretty much been the problem most of the time is folks getting upset and then all of a sudden you get some personal information leaking out in ways that are unacceptable and you just, then, you know, the ban hammer has to come down that's when, I mean, there is so the founder of the subreddit, several of us who have been there over the long term, if something serious were to happen, that's, that's why I came back in a few years ago. Just because there was concern that there had been some, some things happened that maybe we need to come in and start again building a crew and keeping an eye on that kind of thing. But the fact of the matter is, and those folks that were involved with it, they're some of the best contributors on the sub and to this day, they make some amazing contributions. It's just a line that none of us can cross in terms of protecting confidentiality.

John Dehlin [00:46:57] So some mods had to be let go because they had violated confidentiality.

Jason Echols [00:47:00] Right. That's really the main.

John Dehlin [00:47:04] Yeah, but I haven't seen a lot of like, I'm an ex mod and I'm mad and this forum sucks. And I mean, I guess that would be modded out if that happened.

Jason Echols [00:47:14] Well, I mean, the thing about the platform, and you're aware of this and familiar with it, I think it's so easy to say, you know what, I'm fed up with you guys, I'm gonna go start my own forum. Yeah, it literally takes 30 seconds to go start another subreddit and say, hey, I just created a subreddit about why I think Chino's doing a really poor job on this Mormon Stories interview. No, they could literally do that in the course of this discussion. Someone could set up a subreddit that's all about Chino being a disappointment in real life. And they could, you know, assemble it, a crew of three or four, call in their friends and have a knockout drag out discussion. And that's, that's why it doesn't really happen that often because it's so easy to do. I think what happened before, if you look at some. Okay, I'll just as an example, I haven't participated there, I don't think. But let's take Mormon discussions. Isn't there a place called Mormon Discussions online?

John Dehlin [00:48:03] Yeah, there is. Yeah.

Jason Echols [00:48:05] And some of the, some of the conversations I see going on there just seem so. They just, they go down these rabbit holes and they're so bizarre and they're so invested in their participation in that forum that it's almost like they're speaking another language that would be inscrutable to outsiders.

John Dehlin [00:48:22] Right.

Jason Echols [00:48:23] But I think that's because you can't just pick up that platform and move it somewhere else. They have to stay inside that, you know, padded room and have that conversation. Whereas with Rex Mormon, if you feel like you're constrained by the limits of that forum, you could just start another subreddit. Probably the mods would even say, you know what, if it's topical to this subreddit, we'll just link to it for a while and let people know that they can go over there and talk about it. Generally speaking, we're in favor of having open conversations about almost anything as long as they follow basic rules.

John Dehlin [00:48:52] Got it.

Jason Echols [00:48:53] So. So yeah, I would, I would say one of the nice things over the, over the, over this first decade of the forum is there has not been the kind of drama that you would expect would throw things off kilter or threaten to disrupt the entire project.

John Dehlin [00:49:07] Yeah, and that's, that's good. That's to its credit. That's. That's to the credit of the mods. Right.

Jason Echols [00:49:13] It's just to the credit of the user base. I mean, that's. I would say this ex Mormon user base is also a Mormon user base, and they're reflecting some of the values that they learned growing up.

John Dehlin [00:49:25] Right.

Jason Echols [00:49:26] I mean, I think it shields us from some of the. If you look at Reddit generally, it can be very. Even for myself, who I'm not afraid to, you know, I speak in a salty way. You know, I see some of the subreddits, I don't like them, and there's just like dark corners of the Internet that are available that I wouldn't want to go to, and we avoid all of that. I don't see a lot of that creepiness or sort of. Do you know what I'm referring to? Sure. I think everyone's always probably been freaked out when they wander into a subreddit and go, what the heck is this? I mean, you know, this doesn't seem healthy. This doesn't seem right. And I've never had that sense at Rex Mormon that that's been the case.

John Dehlin [00:50:09] Right. So let's conclude. Just talking about your hopes for the future, do you have any aspirations for Rex Moorman? What does the future hold?

The Future of r/exmormon and Advice for New Users

Jason Echols [00:50:20] Well, we always need content and we need folks who can generate in depth discussions. You know, I tend to be someone at this point, I'm not that invested in it. So my conversations tend to sort of skim along the surface, my hopes. The things I enjoy personally at Rex Mormon are things like AMAs. All right? I enjoy getting someone like a Bill Real, who, even though I may disagree with him in terms of his approach, I'm happy to see those kinds of AMAs where folks, there's a good banter, there's good back and forth, there's a good open discussion about, hey, how do you know what's the healthiest way to leave the church, deal with these issues, blah, blah, blah. I think that's nice. And I think to the extent that we can have people who generate good podcasts, good discussion, that's all healthy. I'm a little bit older than the. I would think the demographic price skews to 20 and 30 somethings, that would be my guess.

John Dehlin [00:51:18] Right.

Jason Echols [00:51:19] So to the extent that we can have content that maybe appeals to folks who have been in the church longer or want to go more in depth or parenting, you know, I'm a parent, so I think for folks who are trying to raise kids in or out of the church, I'm always attract, you know, I'm always interested in those kinds of discussions, how to do a good job with your kids, whether you're in or out.

John Dehlin [00:51:39] Right.

Jason Echols [00:51:39] And so that would be my hope. Otherwise. If you look at Reddit, generally, if you go to the front page of Reddit, just stepping out of Rex Mormon and just look at the front page of Reddit, there's certainly themes and subcultures on Reddit that are completely there. It's a, it's a foreign country to me. If I were to look at Reddit as, you know, some of the cult, some of the cultures that exist there, if you talk about 4chan or any of these, I don't even know what they mean still at this point.

John Dehlin [00:52:03] Right.

Jason Echols [00:52:04] And memes and all of that, it just doesn't. I'm not someone who has my finger on the pulse of. Of what? Of those kinds of subcultures. I mean, my son has a little more of a sense of what those. He'll explain some of those to me, like, oh, that's, that's what that joke means. That's why they're saying that on the front page. It's referring to this other inside joke. I'm like, okay, but not particularly compelling to me as a user.

John Dehlin [00:52:27] Right. So good content is the first thing. And then we've got that now. So are you looking for anything different than what we have now? Podcast being generated? AMA is happening.

Jason Echols [00:52:39] I just, I think I would like to see more of an ongoing migration from some of the existing platforms. If I say that if I have any sort of disappointment to date, it would probably be that there hasn't been enough migration from existing platforms to Rex Mormon, because I think some of the folks who have like years of experience managing online communities and fostering discussions, if they were to come over, they could carve out their own niches within Rex Mormon. Rex Mormon has gotten so big that you could conceivably carve out a niche within that community and sort of run things according to your own. Are you catching what I'm saying?

John Dehlin [00:53:17] Yeah. Can you give an example of, of an opportunity or a few opportunities that might exist?

Jason Echols [00:53:23] Well, I think, I don't want to name names, but I think there are folks who have heard them be fairly dismissive of Reddit who I think would be interesting if they were actually to embrace the format and kind of understand that this is how rough and tumble it can get around the margins. But actually, the core feature set is really good for driving traffic to whether you're doing podcasts or writing blog posts. I mean, if I were blogging at Patheos, I think our subreddit has the potential to drive much more traffic to a Patheos blog than anything they're going to get organically out of that site.

John Dehlin [00:53:59] And what they would need to do is kind of the tax or the tactic is to not just post it and disappear.

Jason Echols [00:54:06] But yeah, they'd have to get a sense of how to ingratiate themselves with sort of the rabble at Rex Mormon. But, and I say rabble ironically because after a few attempts they would start to realize where are the voices inside Rex Mormon that sort of align with where I'm going content wise? And you'd pick those people up as your audience. I mean, people who don't can't be bothered with Mormon stories are not spending time on Rex Mormon following your content there. It's the people who find your content on Mormon stories compelling and that's who will form your sort of commentary. You know, your base of commenters on Rex Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:54:37] Right.

Jason Echols [00:54:38] And it may be what, maybe 15, 20% of the actual user base at Rex Mormon, but they're loyal followers of whatever content you're generating.

John Dehlin [00:54:47] So it sounds like you're talking about this virtuous cycle where content creators bring the conversation to Rex Mormon, they help Rex Mormon be a richer place for rich conversations that then helps promote both Rex Mormon to grow it and, and their own viewership or listenership in their own content.

Jason Echols [00:55:10] I mean, the biggest cautionary tale without naming names, I mean, the biggest cautionary tale that I've seen in terms of attempting to use the platform are folks who come in and expect to be able to say, dominate the front page from the get go. With whatever content or argument they're making, as opposed to allowing it to just develop organically and just accept the reality that, hey, even if you only get 20 or 30% of, of the user base getting interested in what you're offering, you don't have to be up at the top of the front page every time. You can get 40, 50, 100 upvotes. Be in the middle of the front page and it's going to generate interesting con. You know, it's going to generate interesting commentary. You're going to get comfortable with the vibe of the platform. And down the road, it's what you said in terms of, okay, so Ryan McKnight, be honest, has used that platform to a T. I mean, he's, he's shown how you can take that platform. I would say Kolobot CES letter has came in and had it understood how to use the platform in a way that developed a loyal readership. There are so many other projects that could be done that they would have their group of loyalty supporters at Rex Mormon who would kind of give them a baseline level of commentary every time they show up, but they're not going to, they're never going to be able to dominate the forum itself. It's just gotten too big at this point. We've scaled it up beyond that being able to happen. And I think that when I say cautionary tale is because I think there are people who. Why do they like the blog format? It's because you write a blog post. I own that blog post and everything that all the comments below that post are my little domain where I can sort of, you know, police what's going on. Even with Facebook, you know, you'll have a very popular Facebook, you know, figure who's done all kinds of great things for mo's and Ex mo's, but they'll have a policy that you're not allowed to use the word cult on my Facebook page. You know, so they'll post content and then everything gets policed according to their personal preferences. It's a completely different thing. When you get to Rex Mormon, you're not going to be able to sort of enforce your personal preferences for what language is used in comments discussing your content. That goes out the window, you know, and I, I think that's healthy in a way. I think it forces people who generate content to say, you know what? I'm in this more democratic relationship with my readers, and maybe that's good for me to learn to be comfortable with that. It's not, it's Definitely not at the level of, say, YouTube commentary, Yahoo. Comments, you know, sort of the, the real wild wild west online where it's just garbage commentary and you never want to wade into that, it's certainly a step above that.

John Dehlin [00:57:52] Right. And so for someone who, someone like a Jeremy or Ryan or some future, you know, content creator, slash Rex Mormon engager, what would you say kind of the top three to five golden rules are for successfully engaging Rex Mormon, for developing, you know, a base of engagement on Rex Mormon. What are kind of the rules?

Jason Echols [00:58:22] Well, okay, so first off, at the level of content creation, you kind of want to take a look at your content and be honest with yourself. Am I making content that would be interesting to ex Mormons?

John Dehlin [00:58:33] Okay.

Jason Echols [00:58:35] If you're generating content that's mostly interest to people who are navigating what's, you know, colloquially called a faith crisis. If you're still in that mindset where you think this is a debate about truth claims and trying probably not that interesting to the larger community, maybe you can get a niche at Rex Mormon that's going through that, but for the most part, people have kind of moved beyond that because it's Rex Mormon. It's not a nom site. If there's anything in your content that could be taken as maybe denigrating ex Mormons or casting the choice to be an ex Mormon or identifying as an ex Mormon as somehow a lesser right proposal making, making X Mormon sort of lesser than, you know, and that gets into why, for example, why wouldn't blogger nacl content ever be particularly popular at Rex Mormon? Well, you've got a whole entire history of that group of people describing, you know, exit narratives as cookie cutter. Describing ex Mormons as having, you know, sort of superficial. Yeah, we're just weak and superficial and our narratives are not interesting to anyone who's got, you know, serious intellectual chops. Well, you know, if that's kind of where you're coming from, you're not going to find a huge audience among ex Mormons. Go figure.

John Dehlin [00:59:50] Right?

Jason Echols [00:59:51] Then just third gets back to what we already talked about in terms of engaging with your audience, respecting the fact that the commenters you're going to find are going to be a class above, a grade above what would be available on a YouTube or Yahoo or just in general online. It's going to be a grade above that, but it's going to be less manageable than, say, what you get on your own blog. You're not going to be able to just include your closest 20 friends to provide commentary to Your content, it's going to be folks who you've never met before and you have no idea what their user handle means. So it's. Learning to engage the audience is a way to get popular. As soon as you start responding to some of these folks, that's going to develop warm feelings in the community. Because a lot of these folks just want to be acknowledged as having a voice to talk about Mormonism. That Rex Mormon may be the only place during their day that they can actually sit down and have a free discussion about Mormonism, because if they talk about it with their wife, she's going to threaten divorce. And, you know, this is their outlet. And respect that. Respect the fact that this is their outlet for being able to talk about Mormonism in a free and open way. Don't come in and say, I'm gonna police the way you talk about Mormonism. Look, most of these folks, they get that every day in terms of getting their language policed about how they talk about Mormonism. So don't do that. I mean, otherwise, that's it. I think generating content that would appeal to ex Mormons and not denigrating ex Mormons as a group or as people.

John Dehlin [01:01:26] I love it. All right, well, Jason, I'm so glad that we were able to have you on to talk about this important phenomenon. And I think it's one of the most important things to happen Definitely in 21st century Mormonism, and I think its influence is only going to continue to grow, and I can't see anything unseating it in the near future, so.

Jason Echols [01:01:49] Well, I hope you're a part of helping, sort of. Maybe there are folks in your. You know, I think this is more in your wheelhouse than it would be in mine in terms of having, you know, a network that you could help folks migrate into the platform and see how it plays out. I'd certainly enjoy it.

John Dehlin [01:02:03] Yeah. So if you or others have ideas on how to make that happen, I'm. I'm thrilled to see Rex Mormon's power and influence grow.

Jason Echols [01:02:13] Okay. All right, well, I feel like I've been really well behaved in this interview, which.

John Dehlin [01:02:18] You want to drop an F bomb or something?

Jason Echols [01:02:20] No, I think at this point we've gone this long with. With me keeping it clean and family friendly, we might as well just save it for another. Another opportunity.

John Dehlin [01:02:28] All right, well, I'm sorry to have downgraded your reputation.

Jason Echols [01:02:31] I know. Yeah. Right off the bat.

John Dehlin [01:02:35] All right. Our fearless leader. No, I mean our. All right, Jason, anything you want to share about your. You know, normally we end Mormon stories with people's beliefs or testimony, even if it's secular. Any sort of closing feelings or sentiments or values or closing statement you want to share with the listeners.

Personal Reflections on What r/exmormon Means

Jason Echols [01:03:00] On a personal level, probably my favorite aspect of Rex Mormon is the way I think it has helped some people learn to say no. And just going back to sort of the start of our discussion how my. The way I bridle at coercion. And I think that a lot of what passes for rites of passage and Mormonism are actually just various coercive moments as we grow up. And that's probably my favorite part of Red Smart is just watching people saying, you know what? I learned to say no. I learned to undo some of the learned helplessness that I picked up along the way as a Mormon, and things are getting better. That to me is the number one on a personal level. So that's my testimony that it's okay to say no. It's okay to get angry. Think. Probably the best lesson I've had going to Asia and just sort of getting as far away from any of this as possible is that it's okay to get really, really angry with the people you love and let them know your honest feelings about something. And it's easier to recover from that than it is to recover from years of resentment and blame and hiding because you're afraid to let people know what your true thoughts are on a topic, whether it be Mormonism or where the kids need to go to school. I mean, that's. That's my favorite part of Rex Mormon. It seems like it's giving us a chance to learn how to voice our opinions in assertive and healthy ways.

John Dehlin [01:04:20] I love it. All right, can I say Godspeed, Rex Moorman, or is that inappropriate?

Jason Echols [01:04:25] No, that's totally appropriate. Any blasphemy you could throw in as we. As we fade away would be perfect.

John Dehlin [01:04:30] Lucifer. Lucifer. Speed Satan. Speed Rex Mormon. How's that?

Jason Echols [01:04:35] You're a noob, man. You haven't been doing this very long, have you? You got to come up with some better blasphemy.

John Dehlin [01:04:41] Outdo me. I invite you.

Jason Echols [01:04:44] No, I'm as lost when it comes to that as anyone.

John Dehlin [01:04:48] All right, well, cool. Well, Jason Echols, thanks for joining us. Thanks to all the mods and participants of Rex Mormon that make it all possible. Check them out. I guess we should give the domain. It's Reddit.com that's 2D's r e d d I t.com r exmorman and check it out. Thanks to everyone who makes that possible. And just really briefly, thanks to all the listeners of Mormon Stories and the Open Stories Foundation. Your donations make all this possible. So thanks to everyone who supports us. Please check us out@mormonstories.org and we thank everyone for their support. All right, Jason, you're awesome. Don't be a stranger. All right, Stay in touch, brother.

Jason Echols [01:05:31] See you, man.

John Dehlin [01:05:31] All right, take care. Thanks to all our listeners. You guys take care. Thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us make more like it by becoming a monthly subscriber@mormonstories.org thank you very much.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.