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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

#341

Post by fierarul »

0xffff2 wrote: post #274
fierarul wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must be in the bad A/B bucket because I see 'This community is available in the app' and haven't been able to use Reddit a lot on mobile for weeks / months? Google gives me this article about the new trend: https://reclaimthenet.org/this-community-is-available-in-the...

Based on that article, I'm guessing this is only a thing in the new mobile site. There are a somewhat ridiculous number of ways to browse reddit these days (desktop new/old, mobile new/old, app at least) and they all seem to offer a different set of features. I've used i.reddit.com on mobile for many years now and it hasn't been impacted by any of the nonsense that reddit has been pushing lately (yet).

I know that if I spend extra time I can edit the URL but honestly this reddit block has allowed me to just stop browsing reddit unless absolutely necessary. A positive thing in a way...

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#342

Post by waylandsmithers »

scarface74 wrote: post #337
take_a_breath wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

==in fairness we were in our mid 30s and on our second marriage== How much did you spend on the first marriage?

Not much. Much less than $10K. A family member gave us the pictures for free (professional photographer) and a friend of hers did the catering as a gift. But, my now wife and I met at work. The company shut down and we had to scramble to find jobs. She found a job with benefits that paid less and I got a contract that paid more from a firmer customer of the company we worked for. She suggested we get married four day…

Sure- but in plenty of communities the dress costs $10K.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#343

Post by speeder »

magduf wrote: post #180
speeder wrote: post #98

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…

How long did you date this sociopathic woman?

I will just say, you are not exactly wrong. No more details than that.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#344

Post by waylandsmithers »

mroche wrote: post #266
bootlooped wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the problems is that many reddit users deploy downvotes against people who have a different subjective opinion than them. That is the lever that drowns out dissent from the majority. I have been thinking about that for a while now, what is the proper time to use a downvote? My MO is that it is only to be deployed against those who are arguing in bad faith or being disrespectful. Differing opinions shou…

Reddit does have some informal guidelines (Reddiquette) on this: https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/reddit-101/reddit-b... Summary: DO: > - Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it. > - Consider posting constructive criticism / an explanation when you downvote s…

I would say hacker news abides by these rules, most in most subreddits people just downvote things they disagree with

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#345

Post by sli »

cookiengineer wrote: post #306
debaserab2 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again. I've witnessed this pattern in an array of subreddits spanning from…

> I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again. /r/programming in a nutshell.

/r/programming is not an anomaly. My experience is that programming-related discussion boards everywhere are like this, almost from day one. The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong, to the point where even typos can cause a relentless dogpile and accusations that said person "has clearly never written real software in their life." You simply cannot make even one mistake, no matter how minor.

Consequently, I haven't discussed programming on an open forum in over a decade, because I've never found a single programming forum that wasn't openly toxic in this way.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#346

Post by war1025 »

cheese4242 wrote: post #142
P_I_Staker wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What savings I did have where in a zero interest current account though! That's not great, but overall, I'm not making very much money from my "high-interest savings account". Maybe a grand or two over decades, but even that's generous. I don't know if it's worthy of an exclamation mark. The biggest losses are prevented by not overspending and some of the other things you mentioned.

Very true. Reminds me of this quote I had saved (I don't recall the source) "Personal-finance gurus obsess over buying coffee not because it is unsustainable, Vanderkam suggests, but because being a personal-finance guru is. “The strongest finance advice can be summed up in a couple sentences,” she explains. Maximize your income. Limit your big monthly expenses. But if your job depends on doling out financial wisdom,…

This is such a true sentiment and is actually true for a lot of advice.

I think it's why a lot of people end up switching to giving talks or some other repeatable income stream.

Once you've written a blog post, that info is out there.

But if you can make it an "event", you can give the same advice over and over again.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#347

Post by potatoz2 »

magduf wrote: post #294
P_I_Staker wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What savings I did have where in a zero interest current account though! That's not great, but overall, I'm not making very much money from my "high-interest savings account". Maybe a grand or two over decades, but even that's generous. I don't know if it's worthy of an exclamation mark. The biggest losses are prevented by not overspending and some of the other things you mentioned.

>my "high-interest savings account". Maybe a grand or two over decades Huh? Either you have very little savings for someone on this site, or your "high-interest" account isn't high-interest. Ally Bank currently has 1.6% interest on their savings account, so you'd make $1000 in interest in 1 year with a balance of about $62k. If your savings account doesn't have at least 1.5% interest, then why do you have it? There's…

It's unusual to have $62k or more in a savings account.

Either it's some sort of 6-month emergency fund and CDs typically make more sense (ladder or not) or it's money you want to grow, in which case investing in index funds is the better approach.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#348

Post by jbjohns »

semicolonandson wrote: post #52
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 just finished listening to an engaging series of podcasts by Michael Lewis (author of Flash Boys, The Big Short etc.) about the loss of referees in our society. It's called Against the Rules: https://atrpodcast.com/ Much of reddit still has functioning referees in the form of its moderators, but I'm seeing signs of it cracking — e.g. when I researched the backgrounds of certain moderators I found out that they prod…

I would expect the majority of the mods are actually advertising accounts of some form or another. The more popular the sub the more likely the mods are not acting in good faith.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#349

Post by waylandsmithers »

didip wrote: post #188
waylandsmithers wrote: post #161

I 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…

You disagree that more than $10,000 for wedding is a waste of money? That's $10k that could have gone to student loans.

I don't, and it is. This is coming from someone who spent a multiple of that amount on a wedding.

My issue though, is that you're attempting to apply logic to something driven almost entirely by emotions in the first place.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#350

Post by GFischer »

scarface74 wrote: post #176
sergiotapia wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is a tumor on society - god damn.

The best advertising I have ever found is in the Overcast podcast app. I’ve found a few interesting podcasts based on the ads. Marco Arment (the developer) created his own ad platform for his app so he would know who is advertising and he wouldn’t have any mystery meet third party binary blob in his code.

It´s very sad that Google basically has such a monopoly on online ads that people have to resort to creating their own ad platforms.

Maybe that's a space worth disrupting? Google is getting fat and lazy (but still has a scary warchest and resources).

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