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Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

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Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#31

Post by nabla9 »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #2

Anonymous people over the web have become guides to personal finance, reddit just facilitates that. The same advice was available during the "blogging/RSS era".

There is whole generation of people who were reading goldbug blogs and absorbed investment advice from iconoclastic bloggers. They also read Mises and Larry Kudlow's articles to learn economics.

You can still see the result. The most common response to any bad economic news is short 1-4 sentence outburst about how Fed is printing money, no matter how irrelevant it is to discussion.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#32

Post by atwork95 »

xelhark wrote: post #23

I think a much bigger point can be summarized with this sentence from the article: > Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which really makes you question the objectivity of the advice. This is true when searching for pretty much everything in Google nowadays, that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

I usually search for recommendation on reddit because they seems to be more legit and so far it has always worked

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#33

Post by tgb »

prawn wrote: post #22

People incentivised by karma systems seem to create better information sources than when they’re incentivised by money. Think about how often you turn to Stack Overflow, Reddit, forums (Whirlpool in Australia) over AdSense/affiliate blogs. The latter are almost always biased and essentially misleading.

Albeit probably only because they aren't yet being exploited by companies to the extent that search engines are. I don't expect it to last. Googling used to find you this level of grassroots enthusiast information but now is mostly content farms.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#34

Post by will_pseudonym »

nabla9 wrote: post #31
omarchowdhury wrote: post #2

Anonymous people over the web have become guides to personal finance, reddit just facilitates that. The same advice was available during the "blogging/RSS era".

There is whole generation of people who were reading goldbug blogs and absorbed investment advice from iconoclastic bloggers. They also read Mises and Larry Kudlow's articles to learn economics. You can still see the result. The most common response to any bad economic news is short 1-4 sentence outburst about how Fed is printing money, no matter how irrelevant it is to discussion.

And the responses about the responses about how the Fed is printing money. And the response about the response about the response, no matter how irrelevant it is to discussion :)

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#35

Post by disiplus »

xelhark wrote: post #23

I think a much bigger point can be summarized with this sentence from the article: > Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which really makes you question the objectivity of the advice. This is true when searching for pretty much everything in Google nowadays, that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

and that's mostly thanks to subreddit moderators, if they weren't that aggressive it would be full of spam. u can notice that on some subreddits when moderators are away or some that have lax rules.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#36

Post by np_tedious »

LatteLazy wrote: post #14

Reddit is a weird mix of mechanical-turk-search-engine and social media lite. It doesn't do anything except facilitate people doing things... To be clear, I'm not criticising reddit. I'm just saying, reddit isn't doing this, reddit is a tool for people to do this.

Reddit doesn't help people. People help people

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#37

Post by TulliusCicero »

LatteLazy wrote: post #14

Reddit is a weird mix of mechanical-turk-search-engine and social media lite. It doesn't do anything except facilitate people doing things... To be clear, I'm not criticising reddit. I'm just saying, reddit isn't doing this, reddit is a tool for people to do this.

This seems really pedantic, since you could apply this reasoning to basically any (volunteer) group effort.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#39

Post by rubidium »

Another great source I’ve enjoyed using is https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php .

This of course presupposes choosing that particular investment strategy, but the opportunity to ask anonymous, detailed financial questions and get thoughtful responses and ideas is great!

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#40

Post by girvo »

prawn wrote: post #22

People incentivised by karma systems seem to create better information sources than when they’re incentivised by money. Think about how often you turn to Stack Overflow, Reddit, forums (Whirlpool in Australia) over AdSense/affiliate blogs. The latter are almost always biased and essentially misleading.

Whingepool has its own set of biases of course, they’re just less obvious than those motivated by money. Perhaps better, though.
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