No. of Recommendations: 17
luxmain, I have no obligation to reply to your aggressive post, but in respect to both yourself and others who may not understand the philosophy and purpose of this endeavour, I will give some background.
It's hardly more than a "SELECT ..." statement away.
If I programmed features here based on how "easy" they were to implement, the site would not only not have been built in the first place, but would have a lot of problems that you take for granted as not existing.
The reason it appears clean, and fast and has had practically no down time even as many features were being amended, is because aiming to add "easy" features was not, and won't be in the future, part of my mindset.
What I want to do is find *all* new interesting posts, regardless of where they are made, and quickly read the most interesting sounding ones, in a dense formatted list.
You can do this using the Best Of link.
I don't care what board the person chose to post it on.
You will care, if you think through the second-order effect. Many of these people would not have posted in the first place if they did not have a sense of community and relations on their respective board.
Go to a cafe with a particular group of colleagues with a common interest, and compare that to hanging out in a metro and talking to random people passing by. With the first version, you get better quality conversations (more focused posts).
You could be grateful that intelligent and interesting people have returned here and are now around you right now that you can engage with. They didn't appear by accident. They were slowly built up over 25 years with a particular platform. And my word "returning" is important here also. These wonderful people would not have returned if I went about creating some other platform trying to keep up with the latest trends, or adding the features at the new TMF boards that many authors here are precisely running away from.
With post yesterday on the Index Investing board, the wording was pretty strong: "I am running screaming from TMF's new website & service model. I feel incredibly blessed to have stumbled onto this place". The first sentence is the most striking - extreme detesting of the newer TMF platform - and I have had almost one hundred similar remarks by others between posts and emails.
I have added a some new features, such as search, and a better ignore user implementation. But I'm taking a lot of care preserve the culture.
I have no absolutely no interest in 'shrewdness factor', cute icons, finding 'new boards'.
The non-essential features such as the Shrewdness Factor are far more meaningful than the array of dozens of awards on both the new TMF boards and the previous TMF boards. Contrasting your disparagement, others have sent emails expressing how much they the elegance of Shrewdness Factor to motivate keeping the average quality/noise ratio higher.
This site is not trying to be like other sites, but preserving a platform culture built up slowly over 25 years. It is doing that reasonably successfully.
For example, I'll just pick a random page on Yahoo...
OK, I'll choose another site at random. WSJ.
When you cite other platforms having some feature that the platform missing, as if we need the platform to match up to them, to be honest I only feel pity. My life's composing output wouldn't have progressed very far before being ruined, and I don't think the greater endeavours of others would have come far, with such a such mindset. I encourage you especially to avoid succumbing to association by authority (if Yahoo, WSJ, and latest Fool board have feature X, and then we need it).
I'll repeat this again, as you may over time start to see it. The stronger board separation is what makes the idiosyncratic culture develop within each board, and what makes the platform better as a whole. High volume boards, which you have indicated as a virtue, you can find elsewhere (I don't mean to cause offence, but an example is the Yahoo message boards) is not the goal here. Higher volume was in the past, in a few cases, even associated with a lower, not higher, board value for the readers.
As for this particular board (Shrewdsmith) I did not have to include it, but added it on a temporary basis during the early rapid development. I'm glad I did add it as it has made the site better. But whilst I will give my time to keep the board running reliable, I won't give the same amount of time as I have the last few months.
In good faith.
- Manlobbi
