No. of Recommendations: 32
And one more contaminant: since TMF ruined its site, a potful of folks who used to frequent, and contribute to, a Mechanical Investing board have simply left, rather than follow over to this site and this Mechanical Investing board.
People were coming and going also earlier on. I can list quite a number of wonderful authors of the late 90s and early 2000s who had disappeared by 2010 or so, some earlier. Kuperman, moebruin, etc.
So to mitigate the above, that brings me to the vital 2 points:
1. Invite: Try to let others know about the excellent Mechanical Investing community here - along with the sister resource/tool sites. If inclined, don't be afraid to literally talk to your friends about the ideas here and provide a link. If you recall having a private email shared with an author you can't see now, look it up and let them know that Mechanical Investing board has been continued. Treat the board as your own - there is no funded body doing marketing, but if you view it as your own purposeful duty to get the word out, then with many authors/readers (*) the effect will be significant.
2. Post quality: Try to keep the posts friendly to beginners, even whilst not diluting the substance whatsoever. There is no contradiction between the two (avoiding unexplained jargon, and retaining substance). On the contrary, by emphasising clarity you may even find the regular audience can comprehend parts of your post that you thought were obvious, but were actually ambiguous. For example avoid too many abbreviations without ever explaining what the meaning is, be clear with your writing, re-read and if something sounds ambiguous then expand the sentence, if presenting some data provide a summary, and even more fun to read with analysis and/or conclusion. These are obviously not requirements but can be tendencies - in short, write in a manner that you would ideally want to read.
3. Not a problem here, but remember - be both kind, grateful to everyone else. Everyone likes love (even when they don't admit it!).
The recent posts by zeelotes and mungofitch are excellent in this regard - whilst filed with novel ideas and substance, they can also be read by someone with no, or almost no, knowledge of Mechanical Investing to start to make enquiries.
My wish was to allow the communities and friendships to endure, many of which go back more than 20 years, and I am working on the technology side. For the cultural side, if everyone can help with 1 and 2 above, though the culture will anyway be successful, this board will be in an even better state 10 years from that it otherwise will be. Seemingly small things have a large accumulative effect if repeated over time.
- Manlobbi
(*) You only see the authors, and not the pure readers (many also without being logged in) - so there are far more people here than you might think. The culture, in this way, is a little bit like an old fashioned community newspaper; the public contributed, but the overwhelming majority were reading. This contrasts social media where the ad revenue is in proportion only to observation time. The social media thus encourages shorter posts (even if mindless) to lower the effort-commitment-hurdle, which then hugely increases post volume. This is multiplied by maximising the notifications across the network. The goal, as with any company, is revenue, with aggregate cultural enlightenment a completely irrelevant secondary consequence. The goal here, by contrast, is purely cultural - and we can maximise this with 1-3 above.
