So I have something of a sad announcement to make today, one that I’ve been putting off posting. I’m not going to be able to continue with this blog. I need to make a living and unfortunately the level of engagement with my latest posts has not been enough to make that possible.
I intend to maintain the blog as a We Hunted the Mammoth archive, and will periodically put up posts highlighting some of the best stuff that has appeared here over the many years of Mammoth’s existence. And I plan on dropping in from time to time with brief commentaries and pointers to other pieces I write, but this will be more occasional than regular.
I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this blog over the course of its run. And not just those who have donated money (but huge thanks to all of you!) but also those who’ve contributed with artistic and technical help and by making the comments here so vibrant. In case you’re wondering, you all have posted more than 800,000 (!) comments here over the years.
I’m proud of this blog, which began chronicling and mocking the growing manosphere long before most people had any idea what it was, and which helped to shape the discourse about it as it metastasized into the monster it is today. When I began I really had no idea what I was getting into, much less that the blog would last as long or get as much attention as it did. I’ve learned a lot doing Mammoth, and a lot of that I learned from you all, especially those regular posters whose comments further illuminated the issues under discussion, and who were willing to call me out when I went wrong. I’m glad I got to know you.
I’m grateful to those who have continued to donate even while I wasn’t putting up new material, and I hope that some of you will keep on donating to help pay for the not inconsiderable costs of hosting the blog and its massive database of posts and comments.
Again, thanks to all of you; you were the ones who made this blog possible.
David Futrelle
–
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon.
Contact me at dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth depends on support from you to remain online. So please donate here if you can, or on Venmo!
An initial half-hour writing consultation is FREE. Click for details.
Love you, David. Thanks for being you and for doing so much good work for so long.
You’ve got my e-mail and my BSky. If you ever need anything from me, just ask.
Sorry to hear this David. Hope things get better for you. You will be missed
Damnit. Right when you came back. Anyone got any alternatives? Which as many commenters?
Just want to say THANK YOU for creating this site and everything in it – so much that is informative, funny, supportive, illuminating and of course fulminating where appropriate. Thank you for making it possible for people to contribute and exchange thoughts here too. Wishing you all the best, and many happy cats.
Sorry to see you go.
So sorry to hear this; but I totally understand and wish you all the best with your future endeavours!
And thank you to all the lovely people I’ve met on here for the fantastic contributions. I learned so much about all sorts of stuff!
Thank you so much for all of your hard work!
We’ll be here should you ever reconsider.
Best of luck with your future endeavors.
Thank you very much for all the time and effort you’ve spent staring at and describing the void in a way that doesn’t drive you or your readers to numbness. Good luck with your future endeavours.
David, I’m sorry to see this post, but I’m grateful for the space you created here. Thank you, and I hope it goes well for you.
It’s shameful that you are quitting right when things are getting worse for women.
It’s really not.
This blog’s bread and butter is trudging through certain forums and subreddits, as well as blogs by once-prominent misogynists. These people, these spaces, just aren’t relevant anymore for the most part. The machine has moved on to places like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The format is streams lasting hours at a time. Andrew Tate didn’t show up on this blog until teachers went viral with what their students were saying, and he’s just one of a who’s-who of manospherians who are popular today. WHTM’s YouTube pivot was, I’m sure, an attempt to adapt to the new climate. Evidently it didn’t work out.
*Even if* David managed to adapt successfully, a big part of WHTM’s legacy is in being the first, sometimes only, outlet actually talking about this stuff. Doing this now, he’s competing with many other creators for attention, people who are already used to the game that’s being played these days. Maybe off the top of my head I could suggest the next blog post should be about Charlie Kirk and the difference between the groypers and the Christian nationalists, and why someone in the former would want to kill someone in the latter. Well there’s already a video about that and it has six-figure views:
All this is to say, it would be great if he could find a way to continue the blog sustainably, but if he can’t, it’s not really the end of the world. Given that, I honestly hate this tendency of online “progressives/leftists” to shame individuals for not fighting the fight in a sufficiently visible way. It’s been happening for years. A lot of people seem to have the impression that it takes very little effort to put out this kind of stuff, whether in video or blog form, and since Hasan owns a mansion, everyone else must be similarly wealthy. Apparently, to be in the good graces of certain people, you have to take a vow of poverty and do a drastic pivot like Noah Samsen, and then they can glance through your catalogue and conclude whether or not you’re a grifter who deserves harassment.
Six figure views? I’d love to know how they managed that with a video that won’t even embed properly. :3
At the same time, in giving reasons why you think this blog has become redundant you are overlooking something crucial this place has that Youtube, in particular, very definitely does not: our commenting community.
This was the first really progressive space I found my way to, and I think it helped me enormously to become a better person, perhaps even set me on the road to figuring out who I am (even if that road was then traveled rather slowly).
And even if there were other important stops along the way …
I did just say that he was probably going to be posting soon. I wasn’t expecting that post to be a farewell of sorts. Ah well. All things, good or bad, end eventually, and if you’re still there, you move on. Moving on has always been easy for me, and I’ve never been prone to nostalgia, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t still value the experiences. So once this thread dies down, this site is going in my links folder of places to maybe check back on every few months just in case something happens that I might want to notice (like I did with it during the longer hiatuses).
So, I’m moderately curious. Do any of the other Mammotheers have their own online spaces which they might want to share with the rest of us? I know Alan Robertshaw has a channel, I’ve seen a few episodes, though admittedly I don’t watch videos all that much. And Crip Dyke has a blog, which hasn’t been updated since June. (I’ll let them detail it further if they want to share it here themselves.) Don’t currently have anything myself (though I did have a linguistics blog on Livejournal from 2005-2007, it had like three readers), as I spend way too much time reading other people’s stuff and occasionally commenting. Not usually under this name, though.
@David
I’m adding my voice tot he chorus of “thank yous” for running this blog all these years; the information you provided was useful, and the community this blog fostered was a high point in my online excursions. I hope things go well for you, and thanks for all the fish.
Thanks for all the years of hard work.
Can we still natter on here amongst ourselves? Like @Sylvia, finding the gang here helped me a lot.
You have my email and Crip Dyke also knows how to contact me.
Regards to the cats.
@Alan: best wishes always to yourself, Lord Lovaduck, and Capybarrister. I will never see a capy without thinking of how they became our mascot.
@all: It’s been swell, it’s been great.
I don’t think the blog has become redundant. My comment was a response to the previous one, and was meant to illustrate how hard it is to run something like this for so long, and how hard it would be to keep running it. I just got annoyed at this decision being called shameful, something that’s so easy to say from this side of the relationship. The other thing was to point out that it’s silly to try to put so much responsibility on David, or any individual, really.
As for the community aspect, I think usually creators do stream chats and/or private chat servers (Discord) for people who contribute monetarily. It’s certainly not the most ideal format for everyone, but regardless it’s not like commenting communities don’t exist. Plus there are blogs still. Rebecca Watson for example does her entries in both blog and YouTube video form.
You aren’t seriously suggesting that it would be acceptable to replace this comment section with something paywalled?
I will point out that Rebecca “Skepchick” Watson’s blog also doesn’t have a comments section, and that’s probably because she’d draw way more hate than David does.
I can’t tell you how much this site has meant to me but with the world being the way it is I fully respect and understand why it’s time for you to call it a day.
I wish you nothing but success and happiness. x
LOL ~ Quit blogging. Yeah, uh-huh. See ya’ around …
Thanks, everyone for your comments! Well, maybe not that last one so much. It’s really gratifying to know that this blog really meant something to people, and I really wish I could keep it going but that’s just not possible for me right now. But, yeah, I’d be delighted if you kept posting comments here and no, they won’t go behind a paywall. Hopefully I’ll be able to set up a sort of landing page for the Mammoth archive reasonably soon, though my definition of “reasonably” might be sort of broad here. Keep in touch! And do your best to keep your spirits up in these rather dire times.
@ david
It took Michelangelo four years to paint a ceiling. Don’t worry about it.
(It would be helpful though if you could post any links to any extracurricular articles you do; just so we get the notifications)