Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dated a woman that had this job, but using Facebook (this was some years ago too). It was not just marketing, but PR too, for example she bragged about when Whirlpool had a serious problem with one of their washing machines in my country, and it was going viral, so Whirlpool paid the marketing agency to make all fake profiles (even ones not belonging to their campaigns) make other viral posts to drown out the washi…
The next logical step—as terrifying as it is—is automation. Generate those people with GANs, then you 1) don't have to pay the photo companies (and producing photos with real actors in real locations has MASSIVE overhead compared to just some compute time) and 2) the photos can't be found online. You can similarly generate the history and backstory of each fake person, complete with realistically banal social media p…
Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
241–250 of 417 posts
Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only a matter of time I think before subreddits and / or moderators are replaced by sales / marketing representatives. It's probably already the case in e.g. the political subreddits. Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another.
The political subreddits are mostly echo chambers of a single party that has taken over there especially in "nonpartisan" groups, especially in news subreddits like politics, news, and worldnews. Even moderates aren't really welcome and I've seen anyone who said something even slightly conservative get ripped to shreds and moderators are like "I'll allow it", pretty crazy. There are many, many good informational foru…
/r/moderatepolitics is my new /r/politics.
Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
#243I would personally advise against taking advice from Reddit beyond simply basic answers about various financial products and maths. My problem with larger communities on Reddit is that prevailing opinions seem to emerge, and anything that questions or disagrees with them gets downvoted to hell. On the personal finance subreddits these include ideas like "You should always have 18 months of expenses saved" and "Any mo…
> * I would personally advise against taking advice from Reddit beyond simply basic answers about various financial products and maths.*
A lot of people would do well to just get through the 'basic steps' (budget, emergency fund, empoyer-sponsored matching, high interest debt, etc):
* https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
> ... downvoted to hell.
I think if you're going to go against the conventional wisdom, then you have have some good justification for doing so. People who think they've found a 'clever' new way of doing something often (a) have not considered all the ramifications, and/or (b) got lucky with respect to the particular circumstances of their success (e.g., investing in TSLA instead of SPY).
> I still think having a relationship with a financial advisor you trust is better than taking advice from strangers on the internet.
Depending on the "advisor", the strangers may actually give you more objective advise.
Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno about the US, but in the UK there are a few wage points where a small rise can lead to a reduction in net income. Specifically moving into the higher tax bracket, which removes £200 off their personal allowance if they were using the pooling allowance option -- i.e. a £100 tax rise could lead to £46 extra income but £201 extra outgoing, a net reduction of £155 There are more perverse options with housing, child…
Does the US not have marginal tax brackets? That seems really odd and dumb. The benefit cliff you cite is real, but for actual income taxes, there's no such thing as a reduction in income from higher earnings. Going to a higher tax bracket just means you pay higher taxes on money over a certain threshold. So if bracket A is 20% under $50k, and bracket B is 30% over $50k, if you make $51k, you'll pay 20% of 50k, plus…
US does have marginal tax brackets. There is the benefit cliff. But there are also tax credits that phase out progressively with higher incomes. Though I doubt, but don't know, than any of those produce net negatives. They may be closer to net neutral.
The OP was describing the same thing as you. People don't understand marginal tax brackets and do silly things like not want raises for tax reasons.
Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been doing the exact same thing for quite some time now. Google is filled with so many garbage results. For most things I want to see short and sweet answers by real people. Just yesterday I searched for "index funds vs etf reddit", as I'm really new to any sort of investing. The first reddit result on google has a simplified response that is to the point. Now try searching google for "index funds vs etf" and th…
Google is filled with so many garbage results. In this case I would just replace 'Google' with 'the internet'. Switching search providers isn't going to make a marked difference the vast majority of the time, as at the end of the day, if the vast majority of the internet is filled with 'garbage' a search engine can only do so much to avoid it.
Stop trying to deflect blame from Google. They go out of their way to show garbage. They sacrifice their search results as much as they can get away with, in order to show more ads. Reddit does not do this nearly to the degree as Google. It’s not even close. There are ways to filter through the noise, it just doesn’t involve companies with financial conflicts of interest.
Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
#246As long as they're not taking advice from /r/WallStreetBets, this is a good thing. Financial advice from financial institutions is a plague on our society.
Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sub-reddit quality on Reddit has a high correlation with how actively the sub-reddit is moderated.
And the quality of that moderation. Any experience with heavy-handed moderation is incredibly frustrating. While I wouldn't call it a predictor because there are many many counter-examples, my favorite subreddits are generally between 10k and 100k subs. Much less and they are a ghost town, much more and you start getting too many drive-by assholes.
/r/askscience is a good example of where pretty heavy moderation has protected the high quality of the comments.
Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Financial literacy is pure garlic to every common vampire financial advisor. I have a couple friends right now that do not want wage raises because "it will knock them into the next tax bracket". Believe me, I've tried to explain how the simple concept of income and taxes work. I trusted my financial advisor years ago when I started my career. It took me a couple years to realize I was the product, not his client wit…
I feel like the widespread misunderstanding of tax brackets is used as a weapon. Candidate X wants to tax you 60%!
It absolutely is. See also: the "death tax" in the US. I 100% guarantee you that the number of people who think they're subject to it exceed the number who are by at the very least 10x.
Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno about the US, but in the UK there are a few wage points where a small rise can lead to a reduction in net income. Specifically moving into the higher tax bracket, which removes £200 off their personal allowance if they were using the pooling allowance option -- i.e. a £100 tax rise could lead to £46 extra income but £201 extra outgoing, a net reduction of £155 There are more perverse options with housing, child…
Does the US not have marginal tax brackets? That seems really odd and dumb. The benefit cliff you cite is real, but for actual income taxes, there's no such thing as a reduction in income from higher earnings. Going to a higher tax bracket just means you pay higher taxes on money over a certain threshold. So if bracket A is 20% under $50k, and bracket B is 30% over $50k, if you make $51k, you'll pay 20% of 50k, plus…
> It's never disadvantageous to make more money (except if you're on government benefits as mentioned, where there are some weird effects)
It's never disadvantageous except when it is? That sound like the classic anchorman citation: 60% of the time, it works every time
Sure your tax bracket won't directly means less returns, but switching from a tax bracket to another may means having access to less benefits, which may means a higher effective tax rates.
Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still for the most part would put site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com into the google search bar. Mostly out of muscle memory, habit, and speed. If I need to use other tools to find something, its because google has failed. On a similar note, Google deranking Wikipedia (which used to be the first result for like half of my searches) makes it so much less useful. I now need to add wikipedia to my searches.
With DuckDuckGo as your default search, you can use "!w" to direct a search to Wikipedia, "!g" to send it to google, "!gi" for google images, "!a" for amazon, "!ais" for archive.is, and a lot of other options. If you're using search as a shortcut to get to some other service, it can be nice to go straight there instead of sifting through whatever garbage has been SEOed to the top of Google.
Perhaps more relevant to the GP, you can use !r to search reddit and !hn to search HN:)