Please be mindful of the tone of your posts, and avoid using tone that might be perceived as aggressive, confrontational, or dismissive. Instead, try to use a tone that is respectful, friendly, and supportive.
- Manlobbi
Personal Finance Topics / Macroeconomic Trends and Risks
No. of Recommendations: 4
METAR is an investment board. But it's hard to keep the focus on Macroeconomics and investment.
As some may know, I policed the METAR Board for over 15 years to remove political partisanship and insist that OT posts be marked OT. (Interesting OT posts have always been a feature, not a bug, of METAR.)
I still do this on TMF. Any post that is purely partisan with no economic/ investing theme is reported and removed.
This policy has not made me popular among some people who want total freedom in what they write. But the majority agreed that it was for the good of the board. The policy kept the focus on investing and reduced unproductive political bickering.
Sometimes when I returned from vacation I needed rubber gloves to clean up the board.
A couple of people have complained about the METAR board on Shrewd'm.
Who is willing to step up as board monitor? I'm not going to do it. I only post a fraction of my posts onto Shrewd'm -- the most important ones, such as the Control Panel. I post mostly on METAR on TMF. I have acquiesced to Manlobbi's request that I post the Control Panel on Shrewd'm first so the links will work here. I don't like doing this because the "Send" button doesn't always work and I'm afraid that I will lose a post. But I do it to make Manlobbi happy.
The board monitor is responsible for maintaining the focus of the board on Macroeconomics and investing. It's not easy. The other members also have to cooperate. It's even more difficult these days since the government is constantly meddling in economic issues that directly impact our investments so distinguishing investment impact from pure partisanship becomes even harder.
If you are not satisfied with METAR on Shrewd'm step up to the plate, collect opinions for cooperation, and become the board monitor.
Wendy
No. of Recommendations: 10
I have acquiesced to Manlobbi's request that I post the Control Panel on Shrewd'm first so the links will work here. I don't like doing this because the "Send" button doesn't always work and I'm afraid that I will lose a post. But I do it to make Manlobbi happy.
That used to happen to me all the time on the old Fool. It has never happened to me here at Shrewdm. But if it’s a problem for you, here’s what I used to do. Before I sent a post, I command-A (select All) and command-C (copy all) and then hit send. If it’s collapses, well the post is in the computer clipboard, and it’s trivial to open another application with a window - I would use my e-mail and send it to myself, but there are other places too.
I didn’t trust the old spaghetti code Fool to work right after it already collapsed on me once, so I put the words elsewhere. Then I could retrieve them later.
Two key presses. Insurance.
As I say, it’s never happened to me here, but YMMV, as always.
and become the board monitor
I have not found the signal-to-noise ratio particularly galling here, with one or two exceptions (who seem to have taken the hint). But I don’t think Manlobbi wants to get in the business of playing relay-boy for some other board monitor. (Could be mistaken.) Anyway, it’s mostly pretty-free rein around these parts. Once in a great while he’ll move a thread on the Berkshire board to US Policy or something, but otherwise the place runs pretty well.
No. of Recommendations: 3
I agree with keeping politics off of this board. I admit to slipping at times, and slurring
Trump when he does idiotic stuff. But on Shrewd'm, there is the no holds barred political
board, so it is very easy to just take the political opinions over to that board. I am not
anti Republican, and I am not leaning 100% Left, so I can show respect to rational views from each side. But I agree to restrain the urge to post it here, rather than on US Policy.
But to honest, I see virtually everybody posting with a little bit of politics thrown in,
even on this board. This METAR board is much, much cleaner ( sans politics ) than the
US Policy board. So I will restrain myself on this board. Not saying I'm not calling Trump
or JD out by name in a post, if it deals with their economic views/policies.
But it should be pretty easy for all posters to self-restrain on this board, when there is
a no holds barred board within easy access.
No. of Recommendations: 0
only asking, and maybe not needed :
a. if there is a relevant board, put effort into locating and posting there
b. reserve off-topic for ANY of the fine non-economic boards no matter how irrelevant
https://www.shrewdm.com/MB?outskirtsc. use an extra 1-2 sentences to explain how post is actually connected to macro, even when preferably linking to obvious macro related references. (i.e., make the connection to politics blatant, whether naming trump or still blaming biden)
thx
No. of Recommendations: 17
From the number of recommendations and general observations of your posts, Wendy, it’s obvious that many many people absolutely love your articles being posted here on Shrewd’m.
Thank you for posting the text in a pleasant format.
Regarding the “Send” button, it is now solid; there should be no worry. Shrewd’m has a 100% independent programming base to the former TMF boards. The “Send” button should only fail if your internet connection was disconnected (or wifi fails etc), and even then the “go back” button will redisplay the text.
(With the earlier TMF boards it is possible, I humbly speculate, that the “Go back button” would trigger url forwarding causing the text to go missing, so such memories of losing posts might still be in one’s trauma.)
Regarding intervention of content, the way I view it is as follows:
Every person has a different perspective so concensus about content is hard to agree on. Yet there is one consensus that all agree - people act as intelligently as they reasonably can, respect each other, and are furthermore nice.
That sounds idiotically simple, but often best ideas are simple.
The reason it works so well is that being kind, not just superficially but really in spirit, causes others to want to reciprocate goodwill. The content moderating then becomes adaptively self-organized.
Regarding deciding what content should or should not appear: I tend to assume no individual is reliably able to décidé censorship rules without profound bias, even if one sincerely views oneself as objective and highly immune to bias.
If one is to understand, censorship, one must definitely understand the following - which amazingly few understand: if you’re in favor of free speech, then you need to be in favor of free speech that you absolutely despise - as lots of people are in favor of free speech that they like, such as Hitler, etc., so if you want free speech then you need to be in favor of free speech of not just ideas you like but precisely for ideas that you completely detest. Now, if you’re not in favor of free speech for the particular views you strongly despise, then you need to accept that you’re not in favor of free speech at all.
So that is my views on censorship. But that doesn’t preclude questions about organizing contents, which can be done by moving posts from one board to another occasionally or reminding to stay on topic - if the board was losing focus badly. But I’m extremely careful to avoid deleting any content —- I have never deleted a post to date except if requested by the author, or a spam post or some obvious fraud.
Exactly because of the ease at which I could intervene with content, I thus hold over myself an extremely high hurdle that I have to jump over in order to control content.
I’m not close to Buffett’s discipline .. so in métaphore only, similar as how Buffett only swings when really really sure about an investment, I will only swing with some “moderating” when I’m extremely sure there’s good reason for it.
Fortunately that is close to never, thanks to unique culture here.
Once you start censoring, which means controlling what others can write, you are then - to a serious extent - also controlling peoples thoughts, which I find a horrid concept. I think very few appreciate the extent of this connection and it’s one of the reasons I’m glad Shrewd’m exists.
This philosophy wouldn’t succeed in some domains, but Shrewd’m isn’t an arbitrary community - it has a particular culture (inherited from the 1990s AOL days through the old TMF early 2000 days) with a special spirit of thorough joy in communication, learning, independent rational thinking, a nice dose of humor —- and as corollary to all the above, some nostaogia and some fun irreverence towards Wall Street. (And quite a number of insanely successful investors stemming from that magic sauce.)
- Manlobbi
No. of Recommendations: 8
A couple of people have complained about the METAR board on Shrewd'm.
Who is willing to step up as board monitor?
We all have the ability to control the content of our view of the board by using the frowny face button, without a board monitor approach and imposing our view of the world on others. I tend to use it when I find I am irritated by the high noise/low pertinent content from a poster. I find use of that button has made my experience here less frustrating. You can always go back and change your choice later, to see if the poster was just having a bad time of it, posting uncharacteristically at the time of the P-boxing. For some people, even negative attention is desired, and the best action is ignoring them. Of course you still have to deal with the pissed off replies to these people, but it at least helps, and the replies to actual content may clue you in to the fact that perhaps indeed they may occasionally have something to say.
IP
No. of Recommendations: 0
I am going to be using the frowny face on people who are arrogant instead of interesting.
