The online community is one of the biggest forces behind bourbon growth. This is where people go to learn more, ask questions, make connections, and find new and interesting bourbons to try. Reddit has been a platform for those conversations for a long long time. The popularity of the /r/bourbon subreddit has now eclipsed over 109,000 members and it’s continually growing. We sit down with T8ke, one of the moderators of the /r/bourbon subreddit, to get a glimpse into a moderator’s daily life. We look into the type of content that gets upvotes, how the AMAs work, and how being anonymous plays a role vs Facebook where it’s your actual name and profile. Join the sub https://www.reddit.com/r/bourbon/.

Show Notes:

• Whiskey Advocate Top 20: http://whiskyadvocate.com/top20/
• This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about whiskey marketing.
• Tell us how you got into bourbon?
• What led you to discover more?
• What type of content do you see on Reddit?
• Is there a newbie factor?
• Do people really like the reviews?
• Who is the typical person checking out these reviews?
• What does AMA stand for?
• What were the top AMAs?
• Tell us about the Reddit culture.
• Talk about the anonymous factor.
• Are there any issues since it is anonymous?
• Are there sales in the forums?
• What kind of growth are you seeing in the forum?
• What topics are popular?
• Why do so many people on Reddit hate Fred Minnick?
• Have bourbon posts ever been on the front page of Reddit?
• How much time do you spend moderating?
• How many posts do you get during release season?
• When people post do you have to approve it?
• Who has it worse, Facebook or Reddit mods?

Transcription:

0:00
200 episodes in I’d have it you know, it’s process down, but

0:03
we’ll get it man I still got my shit together so it’s fine.

0:08
Sounds good.

0:20
Welcome back everybody it is Episode 230 of bourbon pursuit. I’m Kenny and I hope that you and everyone out there had a great Thanksgiving. And now you’re preparing for the holiday rush. I put my visa and my American Express card to work this past week. And I know that there were a lot of bourbon Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals out there too. So I hope you all got something good and you have something to sip on for the rest of the month leading into 2020. Now, let’s hit a little bit the news. Whiskey advocate has released their top 20 whiskies of 2019 and I’m pleased to say that five of the top 10 are bourbon, including old Ezra seven Woodford reserves master collection batch proof, the New Heaven Hill bottled and bond seven year for rose a small batch select and topping it off at the number one spot, which is kind of surprising to a lot of people is George Nichols bottled and bond.

1:15
Now we’re big fans of dickhole over here but

1:18
it didn’t win our whiskey of the year. Nor was it our favorite in the bottle and bond blind we did back on episode 224. We’re going to be releasing our results on December 26. For our end of the year podcast, you can get the link to whiskey advocates top 20 within our show notes for gate whiskey company is releasing a new expression in collaboration with Kelvin cooperage called split Steve bourbon. The name comes from three different barrels that Kelvin deconstructed and built new casks. These barrels included number four and number two char barrels in a series of medium toast finishes. They took these barrels and rebuilt the cask and almost like a zebra like pattern. The whiskey however, is a A five and a half year in 12 year Kentucky Bourbons bottled at barrel strength of 115.6 proof with a total of this release with 2700 bottles. They will only be available on shelves in Kentucky and Tennessee. And they have a suggested retail price of $175. And bourbon is all about community and the online community is one of the biggest forces behind its growth. This is where people go to learn more ask questions and make connections and also find out new and interesting Bourbons to try off other people’s recommendations and read it has been a platform for those conversations for a long time. The popularity of bourbon subreddit has now eclipsed over 109,000 members, and it’s continually growing. On today’s episode I sit down with take he’s one of the moderators of the bourbon forum on Reddit. And we get a glimpse into a daily life of a bourbon subreddit moderator we look into the type of the content gets a lot of uploads, how ama’s or ask me any things work, how being anonymous plays a role versus Facebook where it’s your actual name and profile in the mind, plus a few other goodies that are kind of surprises. I’m going to keep in there for you as well. All right, now let’s get on with the show. Let’s hear from Joe over a barrel bourbon. And then you’ve got Fred minich, with above the char.

3:23
It’s Joe from barrell bourbon. Our Bourbons have won a few medals at some of the most prestigious spirits competitions out there. But don’t take their word for it. Find out for yourself. lift your spirits with barrell bourbon.

3:35
I’m Fred MiniK. And this is above the char. I want you to take a moment and think for yourself. What if you are starting a new bourbon? Would you start with the whiskey? Go to distilleries foreign wine across this country? pick out a flavor profile said that’s what I want to get. Would you buy barrels? Would you comment? tractus still and sit on them for a few years? Or heck would you try to get a whole bunch of money together? And by someone like I say, I don’t know, four roses, not saying they’re for sale. But if I had a whole lot of money, I tried to buy four roses. Is that what you do? See? If that’s the case, then you’re a lot like me, in that you think about the whiskey. You think about the whiskey and what it tastes like how it will mix who you want to drink it with. But that’s not how a lot of new players coming into the game. Thank you see, what they do is is they get in a boardroom with all these fancy MBAs and all these marketers who have experience with Porsche or Colgate or who the hell ever, and they say it all depends on packaging. It all depends on the name, the brand and the messaging. Some of these new companies getting into the game of spirits will have 35 conversations before they ever get to the quality or taste of the product, it’s phenomenal. These companies will burn a quarter of a million dollars to like $2 million on something like, what it should be called, or what the bottle should look like. And all they do is a fascinated with the one aspect that they can actually can control. And that’s the creation and the marketing of it. And that’s the beauty of American whiskey is that all these people who are trying to enter the game, never understand that it’s not about what the bottle looks like. It’s about the quality, the flavor, and whether or not that I want to buy the bottle, not a first time. But the second time. You see marketing and branding is absolutely important. But it only gets you to buy that first bottle of bourbon better be good Get me to buy the second one. And that’s this week’s above the char pay. Speaking of good Bourbons, I just announced my American whiskey of the year contenders. You can go check them out on my YouTube just search Fred MiniK American whiskey of the year contenders, and I’ll be doing a live tasting for those on December 20. So market the new calendar December 20. At 9pm we’re going to pick out my favorite whiskey for 2019. Until next week, cheers

6:39
everyone welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon, just Kenny here today but this is going to be an exciting topic as we look into the realm of bourbon culture, and really what it means to be involved in an online community. You know, we’ve talked about having, you know, different places where you go To find information, there’s then for the longest time, if you’re an O g in the realm, there were straight bourbon.com. If you’re pretty new into the world there is you kind of just figure out these ways of getting into these secret groups that are on Facebook. But there’s one form and one board that’s been around for a long time. And that’s Reddit. And they’ve had multiple types of different boards. There is our bourbon, they’ve heard Scott swap back in the day, there’s been all kinds of changes that have gone down in the history. And so today, we’re going to kind of be looking exactly it. Really, what is the community on Reddit all about? You know, is there is there a sense of, you know, belonging, is there a sense of attacking Is there a lot of anonymous factors that play into it that people don’t want to really reveal who they are, but they’ll they’ll want to say things behind an alias. And so we’re going to kind of talk about that today because it’s it’s always good to really figuring out what’s happening inside the bourbon culture and really the people that are in charge of Making sure that these forums don’t get out of control. And that’s what mods or moderators are there for. So today on the show, we have one of the moderators of the slash are slash bourbon forum of Reddit. He goes by the handle t eight ke or take. So take Welcome to the show.

8:19
Hey, thanks for having me.

8:20
Absolutely very happy to have you today. So anybody that is watching this live or they’re not just riding in their car, they’ll notice that you’re not showing your camera kind of not showing your face. And that’s kind of one of the things that is is a little bit different in the, the Reddit world that there’s this whole like, anonymous factor to it. And so before we kind of get there, you know, because I always want to kind of start the show and kind of figure out and learn more about our guests. Tell us a little bit about how you started really getting into bourbon.

8:54
Yeah, no problem. So um, so I’ve been in a bourbon for some time. Now. Unfortunately, I didn’t start back and what People would consider the you know, the glory days you know, I didn’t swimming pools it’s a Weller and stuff like Pappy wasn’t $29 at CVS like everyone seems to think it was, you know, 20 years ago, but I came to it as someone in college who didn’t love crushin you know, Keystone is or Keystone light out of a washing machine. And I started coincidentally enough without any sponsorship, wild turkey What I wanted was my go to at the time. bourbon was inexpensive bourbon was cheap, you could buy bourbon everywhere bourbon tastes good bourbon tastes good and everything which is exactly what college people like. And that was a time when I thought you know, how am I God? You know, how can people pay $70 for 25 year buena hobbiton, only to realize, you know, 10 years later what what what a what a monstrosity that would be that’s the value of the century so bourbon was what kind of got me into you know, enjoying drinks with some friends and it kind of works for everything and you can take it anywhere and you know, have it on a weeknight and have another weekend and that kind of fostered my love of you know, drinking things to taste tastes Things, say, you know, drinking things to wake up two days later and, you know, kind of Hope you pass them exams and stuff. So that’s kind of what got me interested in, you know, alcohol that could taste good.

10:09
Yeah. And so kind of talk about, like, What led you into trying to figure out how you wanted to discover more? And and what were those pads of really learning for you? Because podcasts really weren’t, weren’t around. So,

10:25
no, they were, it was kind of interesting, because, you know, back then a little bit, you know, Reddit was, was one of the biggest resources, if you if you google the bourbon, you’d probably find the manufacturer. And then boom, you’d see this Reddit thing and at the time, and as someone who’s always been in it in technology and software, you know, read it’s kind of the gold standard for sharing good information. So it was only natural to say, you know, I’m on Reddit all the time because of X, Y, and Z and I like bourbon. So I know there’s going to be a bourbon subreddit and no, Looky there, you know, it’s right there and it’s well moderated. There’s good content and kind of is my crews always taken me, I think the best way to learn about something is to think about it and write about it and try and tell other people about it because it kind of helps you gauge your own understanding. And that’s the point where I decided that, you know, if I really enjoy drinking bourbon, you know, pretty frequently it’s my go to beverage, you know, why shouldn’t I try and learn more about the origin and the procedure? And as someone who likes chemistry, you know, why do things taste the way they do, and the best way to, you know, talk to people about that, that I don’t necessarily see every day is to write about it. And that’s kind of I challenged myself to, to try and write one review a week and I thought, Oh, God, if I keep this up for a couple weeks, you know, I’ll be golden. Which, you know, now I try and get one a day which I think is fun. So it’s definitely grown from you know, kind of a starting spot to just wanting to know more and hoping that other people would teach me by calling out mistakes in my writing and, and kind of sitting down and just trying to think about, you know, what, what was in the glass.

11:51
You know, so for myself, you know, I started really trying to focus a little bit more on the on the bourbon subreddit over there. Just to See if we have any kind of presence and stuff like that. But the one thing that I noticed when I when I go over there is that the type of information is is exactly what you said, it’s a lot of reviews. There’s a lot of people that are always kind of like constantly spitting out reviews kind of talk about what that what the content us is what you normally see over there.

12:21
So I would say, you know, our bourbon is part of what we call the whiskey network. And in the whiskey network, we try and have subreddits that are very specific to very specific things because some people might only care about serious bourbon information or some people might only care about horsing around or some people might say, you know, bourbon is, is well, you know, I’m a scotch guy and so is part of the whiskey network. Our bourbon really fits to try and provide concrete, accurate information to people who are seeking information about brands, or you know, reviews from users who’ve taken the time to sit down and write about a very specific products. That’s why things like, like means we kind of put in whiskey porn, which is where We’re like, show us your collection or like, you know, give us you know, give us whatever whiskey meme you get. So our bourbon seeks to satisfy kind of the serious bourbon person who’s looking for not only concrete information, but reliable information, and that’s, that’s something we try and uphold. So that’s why you see a lot of reviews because people, you know, sit down and say, you know, this is my review, and these are the notes I get, and then hopefully, I can find other people who have similar palates who either agree with things that I like or disagree with things I like, and that really helps to start a lot of conversations.

13:29
Yeah, I think you kind of hit them on there. So when you talk about like the agree and disagree, you know, somebody just writes me because I’ve been on there like there’s people that are going to say like oh, like I’m going to go ahead and write a review on Weller gold vein, and then somebody’s like, I’m just gonna do one on Eagle rare. So like, is there is there like a, I want to say like, like a learning curve, but like a, like a newbie factor, like, Is anybody shame for bringing in something that’s just like basic everyday stuff? Or like, I mean, how does that work? work.

14:00
I mean, so like, like with everything in life and I see a lot, you know, because I have to kind of sift through the post and I see a lot of people who start and say, like, Man, this is my first review and it’s gonna suck. And, you know, they’re like, I can’t taste anything. And I’m like, you know what, I agree with you, I couldn’t taste that much the beginning either. And, like, you know, your palate is like every other skill in life, like some people have strengths and weaknesses. like nobody comes out of the womb, like an Olympic runner, like, you got to do some running to get to Olympic runner status. And, you know, I’m, you know, reviewing is definitely not an Olympic sport, at least not my opinion. Otherwise, that’d be awesome. But, you know, reviewing things and thinking about things really takes time and practice and it’s really super fun to see people at different points of their journeys is like, you know, this is review one and oh my god, it tastes like ethanol, like back again tomorrow. Hope it’s better. And then some people you know, who after just five or six reviews are like, yo, like, I get it, or like, you know, I think I taste these things. What do you guys think? Like, yeah, you know, those are all things that I would think come out of that as well. So there’s really no expectation that like a good review is like, I don’t know, like stitz a while or from like the 60s or the 70s, or the 80s. Or it’s got to be unattainable and expensive. Because, you know, we can all afford to drink that every day. And honestly, if you find someone who likes the day to day stuff you like, and then you see him, you know, taste gold vein and say, Well, you know, I thought it was good, but I honestly like some other stuff better than you can kind of take it you know, in stride that, you know, if you’re going to spend 100 bucks an ounce on something, maybe you want it to be something else.

15:27
And so I guess the you know, when you think about the reviews is that do people like really find that something that they’re they’re really attracted that they want to go they want to comment they want to upvote or downvote or something like that, because it seems like there’s just, you know, if there’s a I mean, every day, there’s probably what 30 or 40 new ones that get posted something like that. Definitely.

15:48
Yeah, so it’s actually the communities both that are bourbon or scotch and especially our bourbon or, as far as I can tell our super welcoming and in fact knowing very rarely do I post review or see other people post reviews. and be like, Man, you wasted your time like, Man, this is garbage. There’s tons of people. I mean, we get thousands and thousands of people a day from all over the internet that just come to read. And, and it’s kind of interesting to see, you know, for the 10s of thousands of people you might see show up on a weekend day, you know, posts only have like, 15 or 20 upvotes. But the people who upload and take the comment, you know, take the time to comment are actually really kind of on the inner circle of people who come to the subreddit to engage. So we have the vast majority of our, you know, subreddit is probably lurkers and people who just, you know, want to Google, you know, hey, I’m sick of fireball, I want to try this. And then they read a bunch of reviews and either decide to buy it or don’t and we never hear from them

16:36
ever. And what would you kind of categorize as the? I mean, I guess it’s, it’s kind of hard to figure it out. But maybe the typical person that is attracted to reading on Reddit, because it you know, if you can figure out is there an age, age range or demographic, that people would be more inclined to go There versus other forums.

17:02
Surprisingly, we see we see a pretty significant kind of blend in and we don’t get that kind of specifics and that’s not something we’re really even interested in as mods is there’s not a lot of at least that Reddit would share with us because Reddit ones add money, we just want to talk about bourbon. But I’m, for sure. I mean, I will admit the female population is a little bit on the low side, at least from self identifying people. As far as I can tell people that are between you know, hey, I want to buy my first bottle to I’ve been drinking for 40 years and I think most people fall somewhere in the middle of that. And just kind of you know, some people I talked to every single day and you get a feel, which is kind of a cool thing even though you don’t know what they look like and you don’t know how many kids they are and they don’t know what their illnesses, you you know, you get a sense of people of who they are through the bourbon they like and through what they comment and what you comment on their stuff and, and getting a sense for that you kind of meet people individually, but we I’d have to imagine that our key demographic is probably like 27 to 55 and mostly dudes.

17:58
Yeah, I mean, I come from a Tech background. Most of the listeners probably know that and so Reddit is always seems like a place that you go for a lot of stuff, at least in tech where things get posted. People ask a lot of questions. There’s the ama’s of it. And I guess for for anybody that’s not familiar with Reddit, you want to explain what an AMA is?

18:19
Oh, yeah, so an AMA is just short. It’s, it’s a TLA, or a three letter acronym for asked me anything. And that’s usually when we have a person in the industry, or we have a prolific individual, whether they’re a writer, author, you know, something like that. And they basically say, Hey, I’m gonna dedicate the next x hours of my life to sit here and answer questions from random people like you on the internet. And then we all we screech internally and we all get really excited. And we ask them all sorts of crazy questions, at least hopefully, you know, Master distillers are super awesome. We’ve had people like Russell’s and, you know, distillers, the master distillers and brand ambassadors from a lot of majors still resolve come up and say, Hey, we’d like to dedicate some time just to talk to you guys.

18:59
Yeah, it’s like I know That I think I think Danny Potter did one a little while ago. But I mean, can you recall like some of your like your top one or top two or three that you’ve had in regards of ama’s.

19:11
So, for me, the four roses and wild turkey ones have been awesome. I’ve really enjoyed also high West was interesting, but I’ve kind of, you know, as I go through things I identify a little less with the way the high West is doing. But you know, is for as much love as wild turkey gets, they certainly deserve it. Because, you know, they were willing to sit down and just give us huge long responses to really technical questions and just kind of show us that you know, that they care about the people who buy all their Bourbons, not just the expensive ones are, you know, not just the people that buy 10 cases at a time.

19:43
What’s the over under on if it was Jimmy or Eddie actually sitting there and typing it or if he was just talking to somebody and having somebody else type it up the answers.

19:51
We got the impression it was Jimmy, he said it was Jimmy so you know knowing Jimmy in the Russell’s I’m inclined to believe it was Jimmy.

19:58
That said if it wasn’t Came party person, they did a great job of acting like a human being and stepping up. Yeah, yeah, it’s got I’m sure. I don’t know, it’d be kind of funny. I’ve never seen Jimmy in front of a computer before. So I don’t I don’t know how what is kind of like words per minute is that he can crank out to answer because I’m sure that the form was just blasting at that point. Yeah,

20:18
well, the nice thing is the way the way we do ama is because we understand that, you know, Jimmy probably is not a lightning typer. And you know, he’s a busy guy. So we like to field questions in advance. And we like to say, you know, for a week, we’re going to take questions, and then we compile them in a Google Doc, and we send it to them, and then they get to kind of sit down and think about it and give us, you know, really meaty answers, and then they send it back to us when we post them so that that kind of helps us a lot of forums do it live, which is great for people who love computers and just want to sit and type all day but for master distillers who have 10,001 things to do in a single day. It works really well for us to field questions, then we get to, you know, there’s always like, would you rather fight like 100 duck sized horses or a horse sized duck and like, okay, that’s fun, but you know, We’ve got bigger questions. So it kind of helps us give them good information and show respect for their time. And then in turn, they do the same for us. Oh, for sure.

21:07
So, you know, you kind of ask that you kind of put that in there as a typical question, talk more about like, a little bit of the culture, when people ask these type of questions, or when people are giving responses, like, Is it a, you’d mentioned that it’s pretty pretty welcoming? And I’m sure you got there’s always a few bad apples in the bunch, but kind of talk about the culture and what it is to make sure that you can kind of skirt a little bit of that behavior that that doesn’t actually provide any real you know, good meat to the subject. Yeah, so

21:40
the, the Reddit, you know, the Reddit culture is, is probably I like to think of it as a little more serious than Facebook. I think Facebook, you know, no fault of Facebook is a little more casual and people, you know, love to post their jobs and stuff. Reddit really focuses on being kind of a more technical area, and we see that a lot in the kind of people in the posts we get. Because, you know, moderators aren’t responsible for making the majority of the content, we just kind of see what goes on. And, and really, as long as people seem to know what they want out of the subreddit, and don’t just show up and say, like, recommend me a bourbon, you know, that’s not going to get good answers. In fact, you know, I would probably prepare a little snark on the side for that, too. But, you know, the the subreddit itself is really good at you know, saying, hey, person, you know, whether you’re here to write a review, whether you’re here to ask a well informed question, you know, by the way, here’s the search bar, we’ve probably answered this 100 times. You know, the first time you’re asking this is probably the hundred and first time that we’re hearing this. So, you know, we go through the work to make really nice posts, like, you know, why don’t we just, we’ll just nudge over the search bar, and hopefully, you’ll find what you want, and if not, then post a question. But the subreddit overall I think, is pretty wholesome. You know, we have our own little flame wars and people getting Spats because, you know, ultimately, bourbon is a hobby of passion. You know, you spend a lot of money on a product that you know, is made by a huge commercial company for the most part, and everyone’s got their tastes and you know, after two or three dreams, everyone’s fired up. About usually nothing so, but on the whole, in whole, the, you know, the subreddit as a whole is very welcoming and very valuable and I think seeks to really spend a lot of time to make sure that people get good information as long as they put an effort to receive

23:12
it. You know, you hit the topic on the search bar and some stuff. You know, there’s, there’s a very valuable document that you all have that I tend to share with people a lot, because there’s one thing that having this podcast, we get emails all the time and, and I’m sure that anybody is looking and really getting the bourbon, and they’re planning the next vacation. The first thing they ask is, what should I do on the bourbon trail? Oh, my God. And I’m sure that you all had so many of those questions that you just said, screw it. We’re going to make a sticky we’ve got a we’ve got a living Word document and that’s what people can point people to.

23:49
Yeah, and it’s is it crazy to I got to point out one user, I can always, every time you know, I scroll through new I hit New and I see new posts. It’s like we’re going to the bourbon trail and I’m like, I know that if I open this up refractions going to have you know, a comment with 100 posts that link to you know, hey people that have been the bourbon trail and also here’s a document you know, that’s a hugely routine thing again and it is nice being able to have a document that we update to point people to because ultimately you know everyone forgets to stop or two as opinions but you know, here’s all the information Google Doc printed out stick on your dashboard and go

24:21
Yeah, I mean, I’ve I’ve used that as for people that are asking for recommendations, I’m just like, Listen, I don’t have time to sit here write it all out, go check out this document and then ask me any further questions if you need some help narrowing it down because it’s it’s got a lot of information there about places you know, basically what you can expect to get and every visitor experience you know, just a lot of really good information that was baked into it.

24:44
Oh, good. Well, I’m glad it’s useful. Yeah, we it really is a joy to just see posts and be like all right, we got a document we know you’re going to love it. We know you probably didn’t look at the sidebar because nobody looks at the sidebar. So

24:54
it’s so you know, another thing about the you know, as we’re touching the culture here, and I mentioned it At the top of the show was the whole, like anonymous factor, it’s, it’s a little bit different when you go to Facebook and you have to have a profile. Most of the time, people are only allowed into groups when they have been on Facebook for X amount of months or X amount of years. So there’s not a whole lot of like, fake profiles in there that are, you know, either spamming or they’re trying to trade crap or anything like that. However, it’s a little bit different on the on the Reddit side, so kind of talk about the the idea of wanting to continue to stay anonymous and not really be really forthcoming with with who you are in this type of form.

25:43
Oh, sure. So one of the benefits on you know, you know, Reddit is almost completely the opposite of Facebook in that respect you on Facebook, you can find out, you know, where someone went to second grade if you care enough and the person’s care was enough and I think that’s great for people who want to connect and be friends and You know, you don’t care where your information goes and read it on the other side, you know, you’re on Facebook, because you want to be on Facebook. And while you’re on Facebook, you find things that interest you and read, it’s kind of the opposite you go to read it because you want a specific thing, unless you’re bored and drunk on a Saturday night, and you go to random and just find random subreddits. But typically, if you’re going to read it, and you’re not just trying to burn some time, like if I have a question, you know, you know, a Linux question I’m going to go to sent us if I’ve got a question about cars, I’m going to go to our cars. You know, if I got a question about bourbon, boom, I’m in our bourbon. And so that’s kind of our identifying factors that everyone is here at have some interest in bourbon. And we get to bond over that. And people get to, you know, kind of push out things, you know, you can’t tell a person’s political views and you can’t tell you know, where they work or if you dislike the way they look, or if you know, you’re tired of seeing, you know, 100 pictures of their kids every day because they have a new toddler and they just can’t stop posting photos. You know, read it really cuts out everything that isn’t, hey, I’m here because I care about this topic. And that’s kind of where we all linked from, and that’s something I think is valuable because people Feel for better and for worse and certainly, I think mostly for the better, but certainly for the worst of times that you know, you can be free and open and you can have people in the industry who maybe don’t want you to know that they’re in the industry but have something really valuable to contribute because they don’t have to say, you know, you know, hey, I’m chip Tate, like and everyone’s gonna go who you know about down Wayne’s World, you know, we’re not worthy. You know, you can just be an honest human being and I think that’s huge for Reddit, especially since there’s all these reviews and, you know, sure, you can have some biagio shell, you know, right and stuff, but people pick up on that really well. And, you know, you can tell that the guy that sat down and written 100 reviews cares about bourbon, if you’re going to talk to him, you know, he’s going to care about bourbon, I want to talk to you. And that’s one of the biggest things I think that we gained from kind of the Reddit anonymity is the fact that, you know, we all show up because we want to talk about bourbon or Oh, you know, I run into this guy in our sandwiches, okay, we like sandwiches in bourbon, you know, you know, stuff like that, but

27:55
there really is a subreddit for anything that isn’t there.

27:57
Oh my God every day like I found one it was called critters Cappy buyers and I was like, Oh my God, who knew that was the thing. And sure enough, you know, we got ducks and chickens and stuff like sitting on top of caffee bio. So there’s truly is a subreddit and if you can’t think of it, The fun thing about Reddit is you get to start your own, you know, my buddy Tex, Tex a sir who’s another mod, you know, said, you know, there’s, there’s a subreddit called shower thoughts, but what about those thoughts you had after you had, you know, a couple extra Bourbons. So he created drunk genius and just like that, you’ve created a whole area that people can come and find stuff that you have in common with them. So I think that’s probably one of reddits greatest assets, especially in terms of anonymity is you know, that whoever showed up wants to show it because they want to talk about the thing that you, you know, you want to talk about and not because you have the same alumni or you know, stuff like that.

28:41
Do you think that it ever plays a role in in kind of being the bad side of being anonymous because whether it’s somebody that posts a review, or whether there’s a news story, and people can they can be downright cruel, right? It’s the internet And so are there times when like, that just doesn’t play in the favor of what you’re all trying to do.

29:06
Yeah, that’s definitely a thing because everyone feels empowered when they’re anonymous. And we hope that people feel empowered for the better. But we all have bad days, we all have a little too much to drink sometimes, or some of us are just really nasty people. So it’s very simple for people to take advantage of a hugely powerful tool, which is anonymity and just being upright, you know, just be rude about and be mean about it. And I have to commend my film on we do a really good job of staying on top of people like that, and we kind of know over time that, you know, hey, I think this guy’s just here to cause trouble or, you know, this thirds gotten that and like, let’s we need to shut that down because it is easy to get off topic and people are passionate about a lot of things besides bourbon and bourbon can often connect people who have other mutual likes or dislikes and sometimes they like to duke it out on a thread about, I don’t know Buffalo Trace where it makes no sense at all. So there are definitely cases where anonymity serves us for the worst. And that’s people who, you know, people who just who just want to tear down anybody’s day and they choose our corner of the internet to do it and we don’t see it a lot and we get trolls from time to time and we get members from other forums who maybe disagree with the way the sub is run, but for the most part, I’d say you know, 90% of interaction is overwhelmingly positive.

30:18
Mm hmm. And, you know, the one thing that that I do see that happens in the Reddit world that is different than Facebook, is that it’s kind of like a like a no bullshit mentality that goes into it. You know, if I if I think of like one of the first forums that I joined back on Facebook, you know, Wade Woodard was the mod for it and it was it was buy sell trade, no discussion, no, nothing like if you messed up like you’re booted. And, and so the one thing that we kind of see that happens in a lot of the Facebook forums now is that in most of these are there in the discussion forums. Sometimes they’re in the foresail forums. They’ll post a picture of a gun next to it. And then everybody just goes eight shit, right? Like, yeah, yeah, in. I mean, do you all have those problems to where people like they post something like that and then all of a sudden it just it’s a spew of like a political battle underneath of it?

31:18
Yeah, we get stuff like that pretty frequently, especially in recent times, you know, there was a President Trump’s, you know, tariff wars and bourbon is affected, you know, and I get it, you know, it’s a political thing. You know, a politician has said, I’m going to weaponize tariffs, and then boom, you know, Bourbons effect and suddenly everybody in their mother is forgotten that we’re here because of bourbon and talking about how bad politics are. And we and we get that we understand there’s often overlap, but yeah, sometimes spreads like that we get a lot of, you know, appears by DRAM and in the background or 900 guns like okay, you know, maybe some thought should have gone into composing a picture and we do get people that like to show off stuff like that, and that’s a prime candidate for whiskey porn, which is kind of a post all you know, maybe not A big discussion and I’m a mod there too. So I get to strike down some of the, you know, people who get really, really angry there as well. But there’s definitely a lot of overlap. And we get a lot of posts like that or you know, or even like one of the commenters, you know, Kendrick Pennington has said, you know, people who just want to show up and trade off the the, you know, antique collection they got last year, and we have to kind of, you know, kill that too, because some things we’re just not allowed to have on the site. And some of the things we deem don’t fit within kind of the spectrum of what the subs trying to do. So, there’s there’s a lot of objective rules we found, and there’s some subjective ones as well, that we as mods kind of to say, you know, I don’t think this fits a serious bourbon, you know, subreddit and we have to yank it.

32:38
Yeah. And I guess kind of, kind of expand on that, too, because there was at one point, I believe there were sales that you could do in some of the the forums. I know, somebody talked about scotch swap. I’m sure there was a bourbon swap, but kind of talked about, you know, what crackdown happen if you were around at that time?

32:57
Yeah. So um, so Buying and selling was always a no go. That was always a you can’t trade money for alcohol. And that was a Reddit rule. And it was also kind of a, you know, hey, what we do on scotch swap is kind of already in the gray area, right? Like it’s not, you know, it’s probably wrong. It’s probably not right. But it’s small scale, and we all trust each other and it’s friendly things. So we let it slide and, and that works great. Scott swap was for bourbon, it was for you know, it was for scotch to a lot of people, you know, rums and a GAVI and mezcal and back canara and stuff like that, and you could find some really fun stuff and, you know, we do giveaways and we’d have people sign up for you know, like a round robin like blind Easter thing, right arranged, you know, 300 people would sign up and they’d send a mystery to a partner that didn’t know they were getting stuff and it was a super fun thing, but right as Reddit got bought, I want to say it was last April, maybe late March, they decided that it was against their terms of service, and quite frankly, and we’re still pretty salty about it, but they they decided that they just had to shut it down and they gave nobody any notice. One day, I remember I was in a meeting because I went from no PMS and I have a smartwatch to getting like, I got like 75 pounds in like 10 minutes. And I was like, Oh my god, and then I logged on to see that Yeah, they just did band scottsbluff. And they said, Hey, guys, you know, we’re we don’t care to tell you why. And we can’t tell you the rules about it. And actually, not not Can’t we just won’t like we’re not going to give you the time of day but it’s against the rules now. So we banned it so sorry, you know, screw you get out of here. And then it was kind of obsessed after that to interpret what the rules meant. Like because we sold whiskey inventory would people would post other bottles and people would pm each other. And since then we figured out that Reddit has bots, the crawls through people’s inboxes so they are reading your mail. So if you’re asking people about swaps privately, you’re going to get the hammer and it took me probably eight months until I posted no getting ready to do this here is bourbon, a single barrel at New riff, you know, I actually got banned for three days because he said whoa, you know, we thought your China private, you know, even though I had all the information that said hey, here’s a retail They’re licensed, here’s our distiller their license, you know, we’re not handling any sales, we’re not handling any swaps we’re going to let people buy from an approved retailer. I mean, it took probably a whole week I was offline, just trying to get an admin to talk to me to give me information and say, like, Hey, we jumped through all the hoops you gave us like, why Sue? Can’t you do your job. So that was a hugely turbulent time, too, because a lot of people only came to read it to try and you know, trade bottles, and some of them still come back to do that. And we have to say, you know, new, new, new, new, new, new, new new, you know, those are the old days, and we get why they had to do it, you know, you got venture capitalists and you want to make ad money and you want to make money and, you know, adult sending each other booze probably isn’t good for you know, whatever brand is trying to give you millions of dollars. So, stuff like that. So it’s, it was definitely an interesting time. And it’s something that we still real from because, you know, sometimes users just get banned and we have to like figure out why and, you know, I have to poke an admin and be like, Hey, buddy, like, like, can you like at least explain it because like, we got 90,000 people like we just want them to be well informed. I want to give them good information I want to know for myself because last thing I want to do is get banned for trying to help the community by doing, you know, single barrels for you know, subreddits stuff. So that was definitely a there was some lost sleep on that one. Yeah, it

36:12
sounds like it that was lost sleep or do you finally get some sleep because you’re like a I got seven days off.

36:17
It was it was weird because I was like, um, you know, and the other thing is once you’re banned, right, like, you can’t talk to moderators. So I can’t be like, Hey, guys, I was banned, but I’m working on it, you know, you’re just kind of like gone, which is, you know, for something kind of a bad you know, kind of backfires a little bit when you don’t know anything about anybody else. You just know that you like to moderate bourbon together, it makes it hard to kind of keep things together and be like, you know, I wasn’t trying to do something illegal. It’s just nobody knows why I got banned. So you know, there was some relaxing, it’s always good to get away from the internet. I try and take a week or two each year to just you know, know reviews, do some computing on my own, go to a lake drink a couple beers and stuff like that. But yeah, that was an interesting time.

36:57
Yeah, in you. You just mentioned something as well. So Like how big this community is, I’m looking at it right now. It’s creeping up on as the date of this recording 93,000 members. We’re talking at 5:34pm on a on a Wednesday afternoon and there’s 478 people online. So that looks

37:16
that looks right. I see. 92 449

37:18
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39:49
that. So just just because everybody needed one more source to tell them Bourbons definitely a hot thing right now. We’re seeing bigger growth, especially in the last couple of years. Since hopped on the Help mode. We’re growing faster than any other alcohol subreddit right now we’re growing faster than our scotch, which was previously were like, Whoa, this the scotch thing, gangbusters. You know, people people really like it. Our bourbon is screaming past that right now. And I think you mentioned it by the time this hits the air, we will be well over 100,000 subscribers. And we’ve got some fun stuff lined up. I won’t talk about it, because it’ll already have come to fruition. But, uh, yeah, we get about 100 subs a day right now.

40:28
That’s, that’s impressive. That’s a lot. That’s a lot going on for people that are just trying to tune in and, and be a part of it. And I would kind of imagine that there’s, it’s like any form, there’s, there’s probably more lurkers than there are people that are actually contributing. So, I mean, what’s the it’s probably it’s probably a smaller percentage. But I guess when we start thinking about let’s let’s kind of change the topic because we talked about reviews a little bit. What are some of those topics that that sort of come out that really get a lot of upvotes? A lot of comments. stuff like that, that really kind of spark a conversation.

41:04
So I found that there’s, there’s, there’s four posts that really, if you if you see a high karma post, it either fits into one of four categories, I think it’s the first category is it as a review of some hyper expensive unicorn or just really super rare product which, which kind of makes sense? like everyone’s like, Oh, you know, on the total opposite and you got reviews of like, the absolute worst whiskey that has ever existed and people gotta feel bad taken out, which, which is fun, because, like, you know, do you truly know what the best bourbon is until you’ve tried some really bad ones? And a lot of people are kind of agree with that. And, you know, we’ll try stuff like, you know, like, there was a bacon flavored bourbon that, you know, shouldn’t have been called the bourbon, whatever. But you know, bacon flavored whiskey and everyone’s like, that is truly terrible, and you’ve confirmed our suspicions like, here’s enough. The third category of posts is like, hey, we’ve got a lot of dedicated people who love to watch the TTP website. And those people you know whether they follow skew on Twitter or whether they’re just kind of trolling through the website and they say hey, here’s the post, this new label was just approved and you know, and the label being approved isn’t a guarantee that the project will come to fruition but you know that a brand is thinking about that product you know, we get the inclination that brands actually watch our bourbon from time to time and sometimes, you know, if people react well we see those products and people react viciously you know, either we still see those products and then we laugh at them or we don’t see those products at all. And you know, we don’t know how untangle that is but people love to see you know, what may be coming down the pipe which is super fun too, because, you know, products every day need release new products and we want to know when we can buy them and the first step to buying them as thing that they’ve been approved. And finally, the fourth post is kind of just discussion posts or people who take a lot of time like, like wild bird one on ones, you know, his or so I remember one one, Wild Turkey, you know, his exhaustive timeline on you know, wild turkey or we have posts from people like koumori or some chemists who like you know, step up to talk about Things like, you know, chemical compositions of bourbon over time, or lead into cancers or people that really show that like, Hey, I think Bourbons cool but like, let’s delve into some super niche topic. And I’m going to give you a hugely vetted, well sourced, you know, document about this phase of bourbon and we try and gather a lot of those, whether it’s through one of the moderators, you know, posts of the month, or we killed them, or they end up on the sidebar, but those are kind of the four big posts that make up the majority of really popular posts. And in between, we have people who want to know where they can find blends every single day, you know, people who, you know, you know, you see a lot of reviews that are, you know, that aren’t poorly received, you know, they don’t get a million upvotes but people you know, you’ll see that they have 30 or 40 comments where people are just saying you know, Hey, thanks for for reviewing and I like this too. What do you think about this other project now this other product or expression line and then people talk about that? So

43:53
yeah, I mean, I think that we see, we see kind of a difference in the the Facebook and the Reddit world like in the Facebook world. Nobody posts the reviews. And if you do, there’s usually as you mentioned earlier, like 5050 chips underneath it, and everybody’s just either making fun of them or tell them they don’t know crap or whatever, right. So there’s, there’s definitely like a difference in the culture there were like, reviews and Facebook, like people just don’t want to read them there. Whereas in Reddit world, it’s very encouraged. And so it’s, it’s, it’s fun to kind of see that however, you know, me just lurking, I always see the ones that have the most karma the most comments or anything like that. Definitely those discussion posts. The ones that really kind of, like, you know, archit somebody or the ama’s or something like that, too. Yeah, but there is one thing that I always find what find funny, and I’ll ask you, maybe you don’t have a good answer, but it seems like a lot of people on Reddit, they really hate Fred MiniK. What’s, what’s up with that?

44:54
Ah,

44:55
um, it’s funny. You mentioned that and I think Fred’s a good guy, but um, I think that I can understand why a lot of people dislike him and, and I’ll try and give a voice to that. And I understand that I definitely won’t embody what most people have an issue with Fred and you know, and people have a lot of different reasons. Maybe some people just don’t like his Ascot and I get that some people just aren’t asked got people, you know, I’m more of a necktie guy, but, you know, MiniK has done a lot of work for the bourbon world. And I think that, you know, while he deserves a lot of credit for that, I think he also gives himself a little, little extra credit on the side as being you know, hey, I’m the voice of bourbon, you know, bourbon isn’t, you know, hey, the voice of millions of people who like this drink, but I am the voice of bourbon and it is it is my bourbon given duty that I should convert everybody that doesn’t like bourbon. And if they don’t like bourbon, I should tell them about this other project I love called rum because I also want to be the face of rum. And I think that’s good. You know, you got to make money and you got to write books. And it’s good to have things to write books about the people also, like you know, because if you read a book that people don’t care about them, they don’t buy the book and you don’t have a house. So it’s a complex issue because it’s a passion and some of us choose, you know, like Mr. That, you know, Bourbons passion, I want to keep it a passion. So, you know, no money, no Patreon, you know, here’s all the info for free. And I’ll just give it to you how it is. And I think that a lot of people while they respect that, you know, he’s an author kind of seemed taken advantage of the landscape a little bit, and I would probably agree with them and whether whether it’s founded or not, books take a ton of effort, and I respect people that have the attention span to write books, you know, I write white papers for work all the time. And, you know, that’s about as far as I get. That’s, you know, that’s enough attention for one day. But uh, you know, I think a lot of it comes down to kind of casually using the spirit and just saying, you know, hey, drink what you like, which is great, that’s exactly how you should drink it. But these are the brands I think your best. And I think some of these articles kind of trivialize stuff by saying, you know, these are the best experts or these are the, you know, this is now the Pappy of rum, which like good. Yeah, you know, if I hear the Pappy of anything anymore, someone the other day told me this was the Pappy of servers and I just wanted to punch them to like HR was right there. I can understand it because a lot of people spend a lot of time on Reddit saying, if you come to me with an informed question, I will give you an informed answer. And I will respond to every question you have, simply because I love bourbon. And I get that and I feel that and I know that bourbon is always for a lot of people, and it’s a career for Fred and so I can kind of understand that the people who like to rip on Fred probably don’t align in perspective with what they’re trying to accomplish with bourbon, you know, the people who relax with bourbon, it’s their passion, probably won’t see it with a guy who makes all of his money on bourbon. So that that’s kind of my read on why people hate them. And, you know, I won’t say they hate them. But, you know, he is an easy target. And I don’t know if it’s because he’s, you know, he’s, he’s pretty, he’s pretty available. You see him on Twitter, you know, you see him on Facebook, you see him, you know, across the Internet, and so, people always attack and easy target and I think that he’s an incredibly easy target because he is sort of the face of bourbon, whether we like it or not, and the face of bourbon makes it easy to punch. So it’s for better for worse. I think it’s kind of a product popularity but I think there’s also drawbacks with kind of taking something that can be so complex and boiling it down and saying, hey, these three brands are the pappi of X, Y, and Z because on the backside that threw me some dollars.

48:13
I can’t get speak for the dollars part. But you know, I think we always try to tell for it because, you know, he’s, he’s, he’s got his thick skin now he’s, he’s kind of immune to it. But he, he works on Reddit every single day. So he pays attention to a lot of stuff and, and we always send them things, you know, and, and we always, we always tell them because we’ll send them things and we get people bashing them, or making fun of them or something like that. But we always were always like, hey, Fred, you see this? And he’s like, thanks, guys. No, I didn’t but now I know. I did. Yeah, yeah. But we always tell them like it’s a good thing, man. Like that means you made it like if Yeah, really hating what you do. It’s because you know, you hustled your ass off, and you’re trying to make this happen, right like nobody else. Literally, there’s nobody else in bourbon that’s doing what you’re doing. And it’s not like you’re a distiller, you can’t pump out a product, you got to figure out the ecosystem around it.

49:07
Yep. And honestly, you know, people you know, there’s almost seven circles of bourbon hell and I think Fred MiniK exists in one but like, I don’t know, like, last spirits guy and course their distillery in garrison brothers and brands like terapy are in total line, they exist in a completely different one. And I think that if you’re going to live in a you know, circle of bourbon now, it’s better to be in the one that Fred’s and then the one that, you know, we would consider like, you know, the lowest of the low and the garbage producers and people who just you know, don’t give a shit. So, you know, it’s a product of success. And I think that if you can find funding that, you know, that’s absolutely what you got to do, otherwise, you’re going to be miserable. And, you know, it’s not about being miserable.

49:45
Absolutely. I think it also shows a lot of restraint from Fred to actually not get on there and like say anything to anybody because I know I know he’s on there versus You know, when somebody ever says anything, it has something about bourbon pursuit. I’m always either respond like Hey, like we tried doing this or blah blah blah like trying to justify my existence there. So the he definitely does a good job resisting that.

50:07
Yeah, I’d agree and just like anything else, you know, you know, once you put a lot of time and then you’re going to meet people that like what you do and you’re going to meet just as many or more people that hate what you do and honestly if the people that hate what you do make you stop doing what you like to do, then you’ve only made the people hate what you do happy so

50:23
it’s so the the whiskey category in Reddit is is pretty large. And we just mentioned earlier, you know, creeping up right now this 93,000 members with inside of the bourbon subreddit, but you know, there’s one thing that if anybody that’s kind of like unfamiliar with Reddit like there’s, there’s this the front page of Reddit like that’s where like the top news and everything happens. Has there ever been anything in the whiskey category, even our bourbon that has ever been in like front page of Reddit?

50:53
Honestly, I can’t tell you that there’s been an hour bourbon post and most of that is because many years ago, it was very easy. Get to the front page of Reddit because Reddit restricted how many upvotes a post could actually get sued, see popular posts on Reddit top out at like 1500 or 2000 or 3000 votes. And since they lifted that restriction, it takes like 30 4050, you know, to hide 25,000 of votes to, to get to the front page of Reddit, that’s great for communities that have hundreds of thousands or you know, even millions of subscribers and, and honestly, 92,000 people isn’t the biggest separate in the world and the fact that, you know, we constantly don’t have content that people are going to post, you know, 1 million people aren’t going to post this to Facebook, you know, this link to this, this lady falling out of the bed of a truck because you know, this dog that looks real cute in a stroller. Those things just appeal, you know, and honestly, as a person who loves dogs, like, you know, give me a dog video and I guarantee you know, half the world loves dogs, but only one in every thousand people love bourbon. So it’s kind of expected and honestly, we I think that at least Personally, I enjoy that. We get people who want to come to us, you know, or people who find us through other Whiskey subreddits are people who find whiskey people, you know, people who are also into whiskey and say, hey, go check out this place on Reddit. Like I’m telling people all the time at work like, Oh, you live Reddit like, and you love whiskey, like, go check out these subs, but we don’t have the kind of reach where something’s gonna hit the front page. And then we’ll get a, you know, 30,000 subs in a day of people who are just kind of stopping by and I think that actually really helps bring up a lot of value in the subreddit because the people who come and find us are the people who wanted to find us. And that honestly keeps up more riffraff. And so talk about your life as a mod real quick, like the amount of time that you’re you’re pushing to actually take care of the discussions? Is it is there a fire drill every single day? Or is it like okay, like we can, you know, wait every other week, you know, what’s that kind of like? So I’m moderating. I moderate a lot of subreddit. So our Bourbons definitely one of the biggest if not the biggest, so it’s kind of hard to break our bourbon out separately. I think I moderate like 2021 subreddit. Some of them are smaller. Some of them nobody care about some of them are mine. That’s just like, hey, if you just want to review and no discussion, no bullshit, go to the sub, and you’ll just get one review a day, whatever, you know. But like our bourbon is actually pretty passive. I mean, I probably remove five to eight posts a day. I know that other moms probably removed the same and those are always like, like, Look, I found two bottles, the Blanton’s $400, you know, which just doesn’t fit through all the stuff. So it’s got to go or like, Hey, this is you know, this news article was posted seven times today and this, you know, the sixth the first one, they got to go, you know, and that’s just a rule thing. And sometimes I get like, Oh my god, that dude is being an asshole. Oh, he’s got to go, you know, and get to remove stuff like that. But overall, it’s, you know, I probably spend two to three hours a day moderating Reddit, probably, you know, 20 hours a week, it goes up and down, especially when the fall hunter comes. Oh, man, the fall hunt season, you know, takes a couple extra hours, but it’s certainly no full time job and it’s certainly one that, you know, I’m doing passively. I’m checking my phone, you know, before a meeting starts from in the hallway, I get to my desk and I see like Oh, you know, my toolboxes said, Hey 10 people reported this post once you go take a look at it and stuff like that. So it’s, you know, it’s certainly, it’s a lot of work, but it’s work I enjoy doing because I would already be on the subreddit anyways, so I may as well give back and help make it a better place. So that way other people come and find it like, Oh, you know, this is a cool place. I’m going to stick around.

54:18
Alright, so you intrigued me talk about fall like it because I guess I haven’t been paying attention to it and fall so what’s what’s the bad news that happens there? What’s the the influx of post like,

54:30
oh, man, so if there was a meme to describe it, it would definitely be that Game of Thrones meme. And it would say that Pepe is coming. And it starts like early August and like, because like, first off like we see the labels, so you know, like, who, who, you know, next round of Pappy it’s been approved or the next round of antique collection. And then like early September, everyone and their mother who has a blog that has more than a few followers gets their free samples, they post some stuff for their posts and stuff on Instagram and people repost that to bourbon. So then then, kind of the hype Comes that’s where we get lots of people you know like you know oh my god it’s going to be super expensive I won’t see any we get a bunch of posts that are kind of just you know kind of bothered like hey I love bourbon I think I deserve it but there’s only so much and I know I won’t get it so I’m gonna make a post to complain which is fine but you know we get probably 10 of those a day and then there’s the other like, like oh you know I have my stores that I went to but this year I don’t get any and then we kind of creep up to the point where like states start to get releases and then like, like, oh my god all hell breaks loose like you gotta keep posting like, Oh my god, I got one or like, Hey, I found in Arkansas, you know, and we have to remove stuff like that because it’s against the rules and like the other people you know, the people who don’t live you know, and live in any other state that’s not Arkansas, it doesn’t relevant you know, and then we get people who were complaining that you know, this guy got two bottles and I got no bottles and then it becomes bottle, bottle, bottle. Bottle porn or it’s just like, here’s all 99 bottles of antique collection I got this year because I know a guy and it kind of goes on until like, like Christmas and for like two days around Christmas. We say like Post what ever you want, because we know everybody got bourbon for Christmas, and they just want to tell everybody else about it.

56:06
So the floodgates just are just wide open.

56:08
And us as moderators, I’m kind of like, I just want to sit by a Christmas tree and like not remove every single post that comes in today. And we all like kind of like nod and agree and like, all right, you know, for two days, we’ll let people have their fun. And for the rest of the year, there’s whiskey porn, where we encourage all those posts. So, you know, we’re not really suppressing people, but around, you know, if we want to promote a subreddit that’s filled with good and concrete information that helps the majority of people on the internet, you know, telling us that you found you know, two bottles of Eagle rare at the little corner store behind a Dunkin Donuts and Arkansas just isn’t going to cut it. So that’s typically the majority of the information we see is just everyone losing their goddamn minds over Pappy and antique collection.

56:51
It’s funny that people like are so happy to like share their scores, like most of the time you think like don’t don’t don’t tell anybody about it right? Like, oh yeah, what you want to keep the some of your some of your secret’s safe. Because if soon as you started telling which retailers are selling it for which prices like it’s your honey halls god man, that’s just that’s just that’s just bourbon honey one on one there for you.

57:13
And that’s been the thing since like day one too and I’ve kind of never gotten it either and people and like, like there are generally people who just want like nothing but good and they’re like, Hey, there was 10 blends, and I got one and I save nine for all you know everyone else in the world because everyone deserves to get it. But I’m going to post on the internet. But there are 99,000 lurkers who just want to like take all my shit and like, buy it all and they want to buy all nine. And you know, and they just don’t understand that like, Hey, we know you tried to do an awesome thing and we super appreciate it. We we sure would like if you hung around because nice people are nice, but like, you know, if you if you actually post this, you’re not going to help anybody but the people who wouldn’t turn around and do the favor for you. And that’s kind of a tough lesson to teach me and be like, you know, cuz you never want to be like, hey, you were really nice. Now knock it off, you know, which is kind of a tough lesson. But yeah, it is interesting too, because some people just Like, Hey, I got 27 bottles of Pappy and we’re like, Yay, here’s an upvote. And then like, you know, it blends into the sea of everyone else that has too much money about 20,000 bottles of Pappy. And it goes up to say,

58:11
Well, I think if somebody posted 27 bottles they probably more downvotes and they get upvotes

58:18
it’s actually crazy. We got one guy on whiskey porn and the fun thing about whiskey porn is it’s kind of like, it’s like our bourbon, but completely opposite, like pretty much anything is allowed and, and you can post your stash and you can post fake recipes that you think are funny. And like there’s only two rules of whiskey part and the first rule is that the mods can do whatever they want. And the second rule is that there are no other rules so there’s like it shenanigans. It’s just straight up shenanigans all the time and we had one guy who posted the most beautiful whiskey library I’ve ever seen it yet every limited edition bottle that could possibly exist. And then he dropped one little simple sentence that like made the entire world tear itself to pieces and that was I bought this all but I don’t drink.

58:55
Oh, wow.

58:56
And I have never seen an army of people act like Armageddon was was upon us and just like leave all shred of humanity behind them and just like be like, Oh, yes. And just like dive right in. I mean, we left it up for a long time because it was just so funny. But at the end, we’re like, like, what did this guy think was going to happen? Like, possibly like, What? What did you think was going to occur in this thread? So that’s a fun story from the other side of moderating.

59:20
Yeah, I mean, because you think about it from from an aspect of like, you’re here as a whiskey enthusiastic and you see it, you’re like, oh, wow, that’s incredible. This is amazing. And then this guy’s like, now this is this is an investment. I’m not touching. I’m not drinking any of this. Yeah, so of course, he’s gonna piss a lot of people off in the process because yeah, I mean, I know a lot of us we’d say like, yeah, let’s crack it open. whiskeys baby drink. And then well, those are like $3,000 bottles, this, you’re not drinking that. Unless you’re you’re really bankrolling it, that’s for sure.

59:50
Yeah, you know, there’s always some guy that rolls in with 10 bottles of custom Hibiki, 30 or whatever. And we’re like, well, this will end well but like, go ahead, you know, it So

1:00:00
I guess last question, you know, when when people are posting, like, is it is there? Is there a gate where you all actually have to prove things before they’re posted to the Reddit? Or are you mean? Or do you get a notification for every new post, and then you figure it out and you’re like, Okay, x, checkbox, whatever it’s going to be.

1:00:16
So it’s actually kind of interesting because Reddit, Reddit says, Hey, we love you moderators, we want to make your job super easy, because we don’t pay you and we make you do all this work for no reason at all. And then they give us the most garbage set of tools I’ve ever seen in my life to moderate so we literally, and I’ll give you a quick day in moderating. I wake up and I refresh Reddit, and I go to our bourbon, and I go, there’s a lot of new posts, and I looked at them individually and go, huh, that doesn’t block, right remove it, you know, that doesn’t want remove it. And sometimes, you know, if people report stuff and say, Hey, this breaks the rules, you should know about it, you know, I get a little flag, but, you know, I don’t get a push notification that says, hey, you know, nine people have said that this is a garbage thread, right? It kind of kind of assumes that you’ll see things as you prefer. Your subreddit, which is fine, but subreddits are popular and it takes work and, and honestly, we get most of our mod help from people who have been like, wow, right it is garbage and is broken half the time. So we’re going to make extra tools and make it better. Like, the Reddit mod toolbox is incredible. And I want to buy those people beers every day and the people that make Reddit enhancements sweet also deserve beers and cookies every day because those two extensions really filling all the missing holes. Like if someone reports x, you know, to reports on a post, it’ll send me a push notification or my computer will pick up a notification from Chrome that says, you know, people are angry and you should probably go take a look and stuff like that. But, you know, it’s free and open. We we want people as long as they don’t say, Hey, I’m 14 and I have nine bottles of Turkey Can I drink them all? You know, or people that say hey, I bought all this stuff in 1970 where can I sell it? You know, those posts are pretty automatic. You know, people are really good about reporting those but the rest is just kind of organic sifting and sorting by new and just kind of seeing what rolls in and that really helps us also stay in touch with you know Where’s the sub going? Is it going in a direction? We don’t like? Are we getting lots of low effort posts? And if they are, then we open a discussion about seeing if we need to tweak a rule or two.

1:02:08
Absolutely. It’s all kind of finishes on on one last question. Who do you think has it worse? You You all are Reddit or Facebook mods.

1:02:17
Oh, Facebook was 100%. Yeah. Why was that? Um, I don’t know, Facebook’s kind of lawless. And like, at least when I go to Reddit, I know that I’m going to see exactly what I want to see when I open up Facebook every single day. It is a Pandora’s box of like, you know, it probably helps because I have gold. So Reddit said, Hey, someone gave you enough gold or Hey, you use this app 10 years ago, and you still got gold. We’re not going to show you a bunch of ads, but at least they’re not in the middle. They’re not in my timeline. Like they’re not cluttering up you know, different mod toolbar type stuff, you know, and on Facebook, you get people who some people just want to talk and they just want to post comment after comment after comment and they can put in chips and videos and you know, likes and 900 different emojis and read it’s pretty comical. People like, Hey, if you’re in Reddit, you’re going to type in a paragraph. I think the just not the quality of people, but what people expect out of the different ecosystems is entirely different. And thankfully, what people expect out of Reddit, I think, puts a little more onus on the person to make an informed comment or post where Reddit in our Facebook is kind of like a free for all. Or, you know, it’s kind of hard to sort through a post when there’s 100 gifts in the middle, and I like Jeff, more than anyone else in my work. slack is filled with gifts, and I think it’s fun, but, you know, moderating that stuff is just gonna be terrible.

1:03:32
Yeah, that’s true. And it’s also one of those things where Facebook is not a tool that you can use for searching, or indexing or anything like that. Right? Yeah, it’s, it’s there for the hour. And then poof, like, you know, nobody you think about it again, unless you really, really remember it. You go to the search bar, and you try to find it.

1:03:49
And like heaven forbid, if you want to find like a really specific elect. And luckily, I mean, Reddit is indexed by Google like, don’t get me wrong, Reddit searches hot garbage. It’s the old Weller antique of Search bars. Like, if you go to Google and you say, Reddit space, I want to find this thing on this subreddit by this person, you can generally find it pretty quick. And that is kind of a lifesaver, even for me being like, Hey, I think I made a post five years ago that I didn’t archive that’s not on my site or like, not in the discord or we’ll chat all the time. Like, I got to Google it, but I can usually find it within two or three minutes.

1:04:22
Yeah, that’s good, at least, at least that’s a good that’s a good way to kind of end this now. We can try to give people a reason to go and really go check out Reddit if you’re not there already, you know, 93,000 members and growing continually, probably more about a time this is going to air. So take I want to say thank you again, for coming on the show today. It was a pleasure to really kind of talk about the culture, the online culture that, you know, Reddit is is really harvesting and it’s building and really what it’s trying to ultimately accomplish. At the end of its, you know, really the the enthusiastic people, the users, the people that really liked bourbon at the end of the day and and i know You mentioned already, you know, first off, I’m not I’m not a huge Reddit user, but I’m a lurker. I’m posting there every once in a while. But thank you so much for taking the time and moderating because I know that is a a think thankless and painless job. And it takes, as you’d mentioned, hours of your day away. So it’s thank you for doing that.

1:05:19
No problem. Thanks for having me on. And thanks for taking the time to talk. And for anyone that comes Tara, you know, don’t be afraid to post just maybe, maybe do us a favor and looked at the rules in the search bar. And we’d be happy to have you.

1:05:29
Just like any online forum, read the sticky first.

1:05:32
Yes, please. It’ll make me so happy. It’ll bring me so much joy.

1:05:36
Good deal. So let’s take thank you again, for coming on the show today. It was a pleasure having you and make sure that if you want to get into this, in fact, find a place that can be a home where you can express your own reviews if you want to find a place to be able to do that. So you don’t have to launch your own blog or anything like that. You can go to reddit.com slash are slash bourbon. And if you want to make sure that you’re following us Cuz a bourbon pursuit we’re on Reddit as well every once in a while you’ll see a comment from us. But make sure you also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. If you like the show you want to help support the show. You want to be able to be watching the show as it happens live, make sure you support [email protected] slash bourbon pursuit. With that take thank you once again for coming on here

1:06:23
and we’ll see everybody next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai