Anonymous people over the web have become guides to personal finance, reddit just facilitates that. The same advice was available during the "blogging/RSS era".
Yes, the advantage of Reddit is that you can more easily see the group consensus on an issue, as well as differing opinions (as long as those differing opinions aren't considered so extreme/wrong that they get heavily downvoted, which is certainly possible).
The group consensus seems to be to get the largest mortgage your bank will give you, buy an oversized car on a 7 year contract plan and fritter the rest on beer and takeaways. The best financial advice is usually drowned out by the consensus.
I think tonyedgecombe is pointing out that relying on 'group consensus' is not a golden bullet, as the consensus revealed preference of the national population conflicts with the consensus advice of subreddits' self-selected populations
Bit of a useless point then, isn't it? Of course group consensus of people who care about finance is going to be more useful to finance discussions than group consensus of the general population. And it's the former that we were discussing anyway.
Not to mention what they're describing isn't a group consensus on financial advice, it's just the stereotype of lowest common denominator behavior. It's like suggesting that there's a group consensus that playing the lotto is sound financial wisdom just because a large number of people do participate in it.
It's basically the word for word consensus advice of decades past. At least two generations grew up in a world where "take out the biggest mortgage you can" was considered good advice by default. As history has proven that is not a consistently successful approach for individuals and has some pretty severe trade-offs at the societal level. I'm not sure if it was the point he was trying to make but in any case it should probably serve as cautionary tale that consensus is not necessarily correctness.
But we're discussing the group consensus of a self-selected group of people interested in finance, who are nerding out about it on the internet, not the group consensus of the general population.
"Take the biggest mortgage you can" became known by the general population because it was repeated again and again by every financial literacy magazine, talk show and newspaper advice column back in its day. If anything that is an even more refined interest group than Reddit because you needed more than an internet connection and an interest to get into it.
However the group of all people in society and group of people interested in personal finance proactively finding and using these subreddits are different.
This is true of all subbredits. Basically the best way to use Reddit if you get into a hobby is to go to that hobby's sub, meticulously read the sidebar and leave the site without ever posting.
You can see group consensus even when it doesn't exist. Reddit's upvote/downvote system does a very good job of fudging consensus on issues where you've got 49.9 one way and 50.1 the other.
> Anonymous people over the web have become guides to personal finance, reddit just facilitates that. The same advice was available during the "blogging/RSS era".
Every generation needs their own form. Before blogging/RSS it was cable financial news on TV, before that magazines, and before that I don't know.
Basic financial literacy (creating a budget, tracking it, adjusting) is sorely lacking.
Today, you may be adept at trading $10k of stocks on Robinhood using money that you're parents gave you hoping over the year for a big 20% win, but you'll equally forget that you have $10k of credit card debt with interest accruing at 30%.
There is whole generation of people who were reading goldbug blogs and absorbed investment advice from iconoclastic bloggers. They also read Mises and Larry Kudlow's articles to learn economics.
You can still see the result. The most common response to any bad economic news is short 1-4 sentence outburst about how Fed is printing money, no matter how irrelevant it is to discussion.
And the responses about the responses about how the Fed is printing money. And the response about the response about the response, no matter how irrelevant it is to discussion :)
Yes! I have learned tremendously about personal finance from ukpersonalfinance.
For anyone based in the UK, please go and read the content at https://ukpersonal.finance/, it is invaluable for your future. Financial literacy for the millennial generation is my #1 recommendation for general life improvement. It doesn't matter what situation you are in: in debt; with lots of savings; lack of credit options; etc... You will learn tremendously and can genuinely improve so many aspects of your life.
Seconded. You get generally quite well-informed discussion on /r/UKPersonalFinance, no pushing products or shallow reviews which is what you get if you try to Google same type of content.
Also the discussion is two way, so you get to ask questions without paying hundreds to an IFA. In some instances you probably should speak to an IFA (or an accountant) for a holistic overview of your particular situation, but redditers are quite quick to point that out too.
One of the most valuable things I've seen is that the users on UKPersonalFinance are also not afraid to tell people when they're doing (or planning to do) a stupid thing.
On the flip side of that, you'll generally get a good response if you are planning to do a stupid (within reason) thing but have yourself sorted out, followed the flowchart, got your emergency fund sorted and are paying off your dept.
It's a good place for balance between getting yourself financially stable and enjoying the money you have.
>Yes! I have learned tremendously about personal finance from ukpersonalfinance.
I would not be so vigorous in endorsing any subreddit, especially not one that is related to financial matters. I will attempt to frame my salvo, with the express intent to inform. No money was lost.
After trying to subscribe to Freetrade and Trading212 (Robinhood equivalents). I was unable to register with the former ─ a bug they mention regarding deep links in their FAQ, referencing an older version of iOS. I followed their instructions on troubleshooting, without any success ─ found an arcane way to get to the chat session (really hard, without being subscribed to the service), which resulted in no action. However, it was really surprising to find out that asking for help in this subreddit, where this app is held in high regard, elicited no response and only downvotes. Always assume some inherent bias, where money is concerned; don't follow blindly and stumble across problems, after the event.
What's wrong with that? I find many people are more comfortable to share private information and seek advice anonymously on the internet than face to face.
And in this anonymous stranger setting, many people are actually more inclined to give a good/harsh/honest advice than in face-to-face conversations.
I wish I had known about r/vosfinances sooner. As an American I tried to approach my finances from that perspective and encountered lots of roadblocks. Something like ETrade didn’t exist. My bank wanted to handle my money for me and pushing too hard for me to hire their investment team. It was way less friction to open a investment account back int the US and wire money to it. No pushy up sell
Won't you have difficulties in general with all money-related things in Europe as an US American? I've heard stories of banks refusing to create an account for you because it's too much bureacracy... What solution did you eventually find?
People incentivised by karma systems seem to create better information sources than when they’re incentivised by money. Think about how often you turn to Stack Overflow, Reddit, forums (Whirlpool in Australia) over AdSense/affiliate blogs. The latter are almost always biased and essentially misleading.
Albeit probably only because they aren't yet being exploited by companies to the extent that search engines are. I don't expect it to last. Googling used to find you this level of grassroots enthusiast information but now is mostly content farms.
I am usually searching it for Australian-specific house-related info (sealing concrete was a recent search). I don't know many other Australian sources that have a broad range of content. There are some reno forums which have solid subject matter experts too.
Well; more than anything else the incentives around financial advice are so terrible that it almost can't be paid for.
The financial advisers are dealing with people who are so bad with money that they don't see problems with spending more than they earn or taking on debt for things they don't need. The incentives for anyone profit motivated is to take their money and move on. No point offering any useful advice; it just cuts into the margins. Ideally, sell the client complicated financial products.
The typical person paying for financial advice is basically putting a sticker on themselves that says "I'll buy anything; try and sell me a bridge!".
>People incentivised by karma systems seem to create better information sources than when they’re incentivised by money.
People are incentivized by karma to create popular advice. Sometimes this overlaps with good or better advice but not always.
Anyone who's got in depth knowledge of any particular field has probably seen this in action when that field comes up.
In my observation detail/nuance and ability to accurately handle non-typical situations tend to promptly go out the window when you try to start making advice on anything complex popular.
To be fair I think detail and nuance aren't generally well transmitted period. Like the proverbial lie getting halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. Say for a given chemical Y "Y is harmless." and "Y is responsible for all diseases in modern society!" are both way faster than "Y has a biological halflife of two weeks and is safe below certain thresholds. Spray it on crops but wash it off before consuming to avoid problems." regardless of the truth of any of the three statements.
In the case of Stack Overflow, I would argue its gamification creates a lot of low-quality answers. Many reeks of someone who knew nothing about the question but did some hasty googling to score points. Now they propagate misinformed/wrong, and outdated information.
You get quickly muted on SO if most of your answers aren't upvoted.
Make it actually kinda frustrating to start helping over there. You basically can't answer a beginner question, because they probably have a new account and can't vote yet, so your (possibly good) answer gets 0 likes... Do that a few times and you get banned from answering.
Are you sure? I was talking about new users having very specific questions that nobody else is likely to have. They can't upvote, and nobody else will probably ever search for that specific thing. So it stays at 0 which harms your "score".
Many people post answers on StackOverflow in hope they'll get noticed by HR. Usually quality of such answers is very low. Many times they are entirely wrong.
Both are feedback but IIPs (Imaginary Internet Point) are more aligned in incentives even if they usually give less utility to the recipient. This may be a feature and not a bug as the utility can be used to distort incentives to their own favor.
I dont agree that AdSense/affiliate blogs dont have useful information. They have bias, but that doesnt mean they all need to be dismissed.
Consumer reports, popular mechanics, wirecutter, nerdwallet, valuepenguin, bankrate (the points guy, credotcards.com) bicycling.com The financial and mattress websites have gotten out of hand, but there still IS good information between the ads. Its probably almost time for an aggregation of the roundup sites, one that sorts and links back to all the best of articles on a given topic. Content ads can still be useful starting points for research - such as https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/food-drink/a28493008/b...
You do have to read, and the answer isnt always spelled out at the top of articles. For example, the Wells Fargo Propel card is way better than most card comparison sites give it credit for. They admit how good it is, and then suggest what may be a lesser card for some people (like Wirecutter recommeding the Costco card over it.)
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.
and that's mostly thanks to subreddit moderators, if they weren't that aggressive it would be full of spam.
u can notice that on some subreddits when moderators are away or some that have lax rules.
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.
If you are implying that it can be difficult to investigate a particular person like, say, a reddit mod with very little biographical information and no particular post history, then I'd suggest that finding that someone giving advice is not themselves investigatable is itself an answer. Yeah, that metric will have false positives, but, alas, fewer and fewer over time as a site grows.
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 forums though, like the article mentioned you just have to look out for marketeers and snake oil a bit.
> that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.
Agreed, I often default to Reddit or HN for a lot of stuff although there are an increasing number of obvious adverts disguised as genuine posts (see r/hailcorporate for some examples).
More difficult to spot are marketing firms who curate a bunch of fake accounts, make them seem like "real people" by posting random content but interspersing this with subtle ads. There was an AMA recently from someone working at a firm that does this, they even gave their accounts personalities by posting in specific related subs (e.g. hiking, outdoors) in order to advertise boots. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, but still my point is that even though Reddit generally leads to better advice take it with a grain of salt.
Although I don't see a reason not to trust this comment, the line about "we have seen great success with this method" had me wondering how they measure the impact of this strategy? It seems this would be quite time and effort intensive, therefore expensive. How do they know they can attribute sales to this since presumably they aren't providing affiliate links as that'd be too obvious?
Almost all of marketing statistics/metrics are correlation, not causation. They are mostly just looking at stats over time, trying only one new thing per quarter.
No way to know for sure if the new channel was actually the reason for success, but you can be fairly confident
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 washing machine one. She bragged about two things: 1. It worked, the "counter-viral" campaign successfully made people ignore the washing machine issue. 2. They got paid ludicrous amounts of money (she hinted that each account with 5000 followers, that was Facebook limit, was worth some thousands USD, and that they had many, many accounts, precisely to go around that 5000 follower limit, for example if a company ordered 50.000 followers from them, they would setup 10 fake accounts and try to attract 5000 real people in each, each account with different hobbies to try to attract different people).
EDIT: some other interesting info:
* They had a huge cache of personal photos, to make it look like the person was real, there are even stock photo agencies that create these photos, for example take a female and a male actor to tourist destinations and take pictures to make them look like a couple doing romantic things, then they would release the photos slowly, so people wouldn't notice it was fake, and to stretch their money for photo purchases.
* They would get sometimes employees with real hobbies, and have them take care of fake accounts with same hobbies, so a surfer for example would have some 8 accounts under her care, each for a different company, and write some surfing content that is real, but tweak and then repost on all 8, with differences, and adjusting to fit each profile.
* Another technique at the time was the sale of "instantaneous company profile", you made a fake profile, and made it get genuinely popular with a target demographic, then you sold it to someone, after the sale you could edit the account to turn it from a person to a fan-page, with the category correct for the company that bought it, so a company could buy a fan-page for them with 5000 real followers that actually are about the subject. I never asked how often people would realize what happened and unfollow... but I guessed most people wouldn't bother with unfollowing anyway.
The sheer amount of fabrication is nauseating. I suppose it's not much different than the business model of any common ad company at it's purest essence: customer manipulation
I know of a couple of folks that were in the business. Selling twitter profiles, Instagram profiles or asking users with >10k followers to make content ads that don’t look like ads.
Marketing is a massive business. It makes a shit ton of money. FB and GOOG are ad companies at the end of the day, and there’s ton of little companies that they nurture as side effects.
It makes sense. A lot or traditional ads are drowned in noise and even if they catch users attention, squashed by internal firewall and indexed under bs.
There are difinitely some posters, who are clearly promoting given brand, but.. 9/10 it is pretty apparent, so again drowned in HN sea.
Incidentally, have you tried Xyz vpn? Totally decentralized, easy setup and great customer service.
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 posts, etc..
And hence we end up with an internet requiring verification via SMS to prove you're a real person or the stupid Google CAPTCHA images or simply having to upload your government issued photo ID.
IIRC this has already been spotted in action on Facebook. I can't find the article, but about a month or 2 ago there were thousands of profiles being created on Facebook with profiles pictures created using GANs.
The way Facebook works, you never see 90% of the people or pages you are following in your feed, and maybe 10% of the content from those. If I “liked” a page that turned into a washing machine page, I wouldn’t even know for months and when I saw it, I’d be confused about how I “liked” it in the first place, rather than connecting the old page to the new version.
Well, unscrupulous advertising and marketing is. I get the sentiment, because we are flooded with it. But there is honest and respectful advertising too... unfortunately, most companies gravitate towards making a quick buck instead of investing in earning trust.
Exactly. Letting people know you have a product/service which will make their life easier isn't a bad thing, and you have to have some way of communicating that to prospective buyers. The problem is when you start lying about your product, or use psychological tricks to get people to buy something they don't need.
It's just easier to trick people and prey on psychological triggers than it is to make totally truthful ads and high quality, reliable products and services.
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.
I'm pretty sure I ran into an MLM that does this. They said they do "network marketing" with "social media" and represent big brands like Nike. I met with someone a couple times, but didn't continue to their seminar or whatever because they wanted me to do more than I was willing to do (in this case, get my wife to read a book and bring her). My guess is that you get paid based on some combination of your number of posts and your connections' posts.
It would be interesting to get an idea of what percentage of posts are from marketers.
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 produced content in some space and would allow their own stuff to get posted while blocking other people's submissions.
To me it seems like this is an enternal struggle of /having to be/ a "hipster", and move to the newest services/forums. In the sense that the only untainted grounds will be the ones where there's not that many people yet, or people joining/promoted to influencial positions are scrutinized.
It takes very few bad actors to poison the well. At least on Reddit, there's a myriad of small subreddits which makes it more difficult to infiltrate all of them effectively.
In game communities I've managed there's always a strong desire from the people within the community to become a moderator for IMO the wrong incentives. (wrong being standing out and sometimes power)
I've tried to combat this but it seems very difficult. The thing that works best is to really hide the status and let people make their own ways of standing out.
I also very rarely gave moderator status to anyone who asked. It would mostly be people I see could be a good fit and also make sure there are no obligations to actually use power.
I’m wondering how long it will take for large companies to realize that people are gradually adapting and starting to look for information on sites other than Google search bar.
Today, Google results are a big problem in the sense discussed in the article, there are no more sources of information that can be trusted like in the old days. Some days I reflect with myself trying to figure out how it can be solved…I hope someone ends up finding a solution.
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.
Those are two examples where I might not do it because the built-in search on reddit and HN are worse at finding things than searching the same site through Google. For wikipedia search though, no reason to put that through Google.
> I’m wondering how long it will take for large companies to realize that people are gradually adapting and starting to look for information on sites other than Google search bar.
Hopefully it will take them a very long time. I don't want companies to start poisoning online communities with their hidden advertising. When I visit an online community, I want to read about the real thoughts of real people that are hopefully much smarter than I am, and maybe even post a few of my own. No community wants paid members with ulterior motives and conflicts of interest.
Some issues i think reddit has is that they haven't been great about helping their helpers. I remember toolbox being the only way to moderate properly. It not actually being a tool by reddit itself and a massive resource hog and hampered by the size of the wiki for big subs.
Also reddit not curating the moderatorship of it's big subs unless there's controversy. Making it so the top mod can basically take over, disappear, etc.
Basically the tiered nature of mods is an issue imo.
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.
This is a growing concern. There's simply zero transparency, accountability, or ability to verify who is actually moderating these communities.
I'm particularly concerned about political subs, those dealing with hot button issues, and global news. There is zero way to tell if a mod is acting in a potentially alarming manner.
I often use google to search specific sites, because of this reason.
The simple issue is that people who make money from being first page on Google can afford the money it takes to game the index to their benefit.
This would be true of other search engines too if they were as popular as Google, so I don't blame them for it. Nor do I envy their task. I imagine making SEO gaming harder would be in Google's benefit, so they could sell more advertising.
Commerce has ruined Google's results consistently for years now. It is just what commerce does to everything, when there is money to be made from it. You can't even fly on a plane you paid to be on without being advertised at as thanks for your patronage.
I find blind app to be a lot more objective. Your company information is required to sign up. This primary property of the app makes it is easier to differentiate an ad vs real advice.
this is so true! but we have ourselves to blame for it. these days i don't get mad at google search results anymore. i knew someone gamed the result in order to try to sell me something...
here's one the has started to puzzle me: TED talks have become the ground for people trying to sell you something. but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right?
>but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right?
Are they really selling these things versus their revolutionary new book, trying to get attention for their research, or some good/service?
I agree. I think TED and similar pop-science programming is dangerous. People think they're actually learning something meaningful. I see it as the granola bar of media. They're filled with sugar and only minor nutritional value. You feel like you're getting something healthy, but you're not doing much better than a snickers bar.
You can say this about any advice. My brother worked in a bank. They gave bonus for everyone that sold a specific financial product for the clients. The internal name of the product was "good for suckers".
It was in Brazil, I don't know the equivalent. The name here was "capitalization title", it has terrible profitability, liquidity, but you can win "prizes". Almost a lottery.
I didn’t think much about it, but now that you mention it, I’ve been typing “reddit” after my google queries almost every time I search for something that isn’t a technical problem or me looking to buy something.
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 the results are littered with investing sites and long lists of information, that is more than likely helpful, but much more verbose.
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.
Look around at this thread for evidence. Targeted searching on other platforms that rank results based on votes from small communities yields much more relevant and trustworthy results.
Try searching for "financial advisor" on Google. I did it on my phone, and the only thing on my screen is ads.
Considering you’ll often find more informative links posted on reddit than you will see in your google results, I think it may be a problem with Google. At least for my anecdotal experience.
Which is what makes other people having similar experiences interesting. Because if enough of us feel like this, then there would be a need for a better search engine. Not sure who’s going to make it though, libraries?
I even look to Reddit when I am looking to buy something, because as pointed out above, Reddit often presents people with a more objective view on a product in contrast to the results you'd get simply from a generic Google query on the product.
Oh I look to reddit/HN and hobby forums when I want recommendations, but if I already know I’m going to buy something specific, like a yellow “specific brand” paint for my blood bowl team, I’ll google and look for the cheapest seller.
Virtually every blog post I've ever found on a well-known brand of orthodontic clear-aligner treatment includes a note, "by the way this post was sponsored but this is my honest opinion." Have to hand it to the marketing team.
The reviewers seem to believe they are unbiased but your satisfaction with the results may differ if you had spent $5,000 versus if you had spent nothing.
> I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results.
That works, but for many searches will include results from other sites, since the operator works on the entire URL, not just the domain. If you want to limit to just reddit.com, use `site:reddit.com`.
While you don't get as much "blogspam" on Reddit, it has a very different problem today: The amount of misinformation and echo chambering of said misinformation on Reddit is simply staggering.
Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over.
The other problem is that when someone does ask for advice, the quality of the advice is usually somewhere between mediocre to terrible. I think this is largely because there is no incentive for experts to stick around in subs to provide good answers. And because they are tired of giving the _same_ advice over and over. This gives space to the non-experts who don't _really_ understand the concepts behind the advice they are giving and end up giving bad (and sometimes dangerous) advice because that's what they were told by other non-experts in the same situation.
> As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over.
I answer questions in r/personalfinance's "new" area, and the split is something like:
"I am upside down on my car loan/loan is too expensive/want to get out of my current car" - 40%
"How do I do I make [some crazy ROI]? I have [$small amount] to invest" - 20%
"I have no money and need to pay my bills" - 20%
"Can I afford to buy this house?" - 10%
Novel questions - 10%
So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.
I noticed a good amount of of young people humble-bragging too. Like "I just got out of college and I make 6 figures, should I eat lentils or splurge and get Sizzler?"
To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past.
> So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.
You should, but charge the full price, if you genuinely have useful information. The perceived value of an item changes according to the price you charge.
Given that cars are multi-thousand dollar expense, investing a tiny fraction to get better information is a good return of investment.
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 hobbies to coding to gaming. Ultimately they become discussion forums for the lowest common denominator of skillsets.
I’ve seen this on medical subs. Doctors get downvoted and their posts disputed. This is often because members have had poor experiences with doctors and the doctors underestimate the level of sophistication of the patient members, and their own level of knowledge is not always what one would expect.
Maybe some subreddits, but on other subreddits you get actual top people - I´m in a couple of card game ones and I sometimes get answers from a top 50 player. You also get advice from not so good players too of course.
That seems like an unusual case because you have an external way to verify the expertise of a top 50 player. You don't have the same for a finance subreddit.
> 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 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.
> rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong
Could that be, because so much of programming is a group activity (understanding, maintaining, and evolving other people’s code), and thus actually benefits (in an evolutionary sense) from simplistic group think more than from innovation and perfection?
>The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong
Frankly, that's my perception of HN, too. Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy, for example, and then prepare to fend off the throngs of people clamoring to be the first to tell you that email is hard (tm), and only fastmail can save us from Google's dragnet, oh also email is deprecated and we should just use signal or some other proprietary walled garden.
And the irony that your comment gets downvoted for pointing out that HN too suffers from a tribalist mentality about certain things (it does)... All these sharp minds don't like to be reminded of their own strange little obsessions and failings as human beings.
> Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy
Well, I guess there are different levels of expectations on what easy means. letsencrypt with dovecot and postfix is the definition of complex legacy, but in times where everything is spam that didn't come from domains with dmarc et all... there might be people that think of "what email server is" differently than you.
My wife gets this a lot with nutrition. She has a freaking PhD in Nutrition Science and also is a registered dietitian but god forbid she suggest that maybe bacon isn't the mostly healthy of foods in most subreddits.
Well nutrition isn't exactly a settled science. There are many problems with studies and as a result we have a wide variety of sometimes contradictory conclusions from them. New conclusions and findings come out but the nutrition community is unable to achieve a consensus understanding on these types of aspects of a diet. There are too many confounding factors involved in studies and it is nearly impossible to design a study that will show the exact effects of eating bacon on the diet without other dietary considerations tainting the results. Like for instance lots of new studies are coming out recently claiming that our disdain for saturated fats is highly misguided. However, nutritionists cannot come to a consensus because old school people stick to what they learn in school without keeping up with studies, people distrust the new studies or argue in favor of the many contradictory studies, etc...
I would not agree with those government diets, without some nuance sprinkled in. Calling all the government bodies published guidelines "scientific consensus" isnt the same thing as scientific consensus.
Vegetables - way too broad a category. Should be split into leaves, stalks, roots, starches, seeds, alliums, brassicaceae, legumes etc. Calling it all "vegetables" makes it hard for people to rank, prioritize, and proportion which are a better use of time, money, and energy to consume. There might be consensus on eating "vegetables" but not necessarily every group of them.
Nutritional density is more complicated than "vegetables."
Whole grains - Antithesis to previous point, grains are not categorized as vegetables. Why are whole grains their own recommended category everywhere as a staple part of diets? Is it cost? Industry lobbying? Diet recommendation should focus on leaves and seeds, with cereals as a filler. Cereal portion should be the one controlled to control weight gain, moreso than plant fat from seeds/nuts. We've gotten too comfortable with a huge serving of rice or potatoes with something thrown on top.
Fruit - mostly as not necessary to a healthy diet as this makes it look like. Can be avoided the same way meat is.
Fish (salmon & sardines) and Seafood (mussels) belongs in the consensus part over fruit.
Doesn't touch on fermented food.
The jury is more out on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol than these government bodies want to admit.
Its hard to reverse course quickly and say "everything we said for the last 30 years is wrong."
Almost none of the diet suggestions focus on digestion, absorption.
I just dont see consensus on what percent of a diet should be grain vs vegetable, starches, legumes, fats, meats. Maybe it doesnt matter. "WFPB is the healthiest diet" is very different from "WFPB is one of the healthiest diets."
The science is settled, but like everything else, untrained people can't tell the difference between a good study and a bad study, and the media reports on them all.
Check out the book _How Not to Diet_, which is the most recent masterwork on evidence-based nutrition.
It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.
I have experienced this first hand. I wrote a novel multiplayer algorithm for a game that shipped on the consoles at the ,time and weighed into a conversation about lag on Battlefield. Downvotes everywhere...
I’d describe the drift towards anti-expertise in terms of size rather than time - I’ve found that the best subreddits are fairly small or have heavy moderation if they are large.
/r/askhistorians has kept up their quality through removing top line answers that are not properly cited, sometimes entire posts have nothing other than [deleted].
I think most smaller communities are still pretty valuable, maybe because they are too small or infrequently used to have their users coalesce around a single set of ideas. I think/r/asknetsec is still a pretty good resource even though it’s in the bigger end of small, I’m not sure how it’s kept it’s quality though.
I don't really see how that fails to fit the pattern of "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."
While /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated, it is not particularly high quality.
>Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question
People don’t follow that, anyway. First, the rules for subs, on the sidebar on the desktop, are fairly hidden away now in the ‘about’ link. It’s doesn’t matter, though. Even when it’s at the top in a sticky post people don’t read it - take /r/scams, for instance, and the ‘I installed a RAT and filmed you watching poern so give me bitcoin’ scam. People post about that every day for months despite a highlighted bold post at the top of the sub for 6 months. Or /r/celiac. Plenty of links about diagnosis in the sidebar, but people ask ‘I have this and this symptom, do I have celiac?’ about 4 times a week.
Overall people come to reddit or a forum to have a discussion. Searching and reading is what they don’t want to do.
I’m on the fence as forbidding previously covered topics makes a forum dry and cobwebby. On the other hand, repeating the same basic advice 5 times a week for different people feels very repetitive, like you say. It takes a community of dedicated posters, basically obsessed volunteers, to make a sub consistently give good advice to everyone who comes by. I essentially do this as a hobby, myself.
Reddit also has a big problem with astroturfing. There are 2 really prominent use cases:
1. (mostly) US politics, with shills on all sides
2. corporate advertising. r/hailcorporate takes this to the extreme sometimes, but there are plenty of astroturfed posts supporting or advertising various brands reddit.
Think about how much companies would pay to have the discussion around their brand monitored and controlled on a forum with millions of eyeballs.
Also, reddit accounts being farmed for karma then sold on is an open secret.
I use Reddit a lot and I find some of the finance focused subreddits to be really repellent. I don't know if this is because, while I have a degree in economics, I'm not an investor or that I just have a low tolerance for some of the conduct that frequently shows up in those communities.
I really like /r/povertyfinance though clearly those folks are often going through way, way more trying circumstances I am. I guess I'd be more interested in finances for the alienated precariat.
I agree. If it were up to /r/personalfinance, everyone would have three credit cards and that's all they would ever use and it would solve every financial problem ever. They fail to realize that many people (myself included!!) are just not equipped for credit cards and it can cause huge problems.
Likely means that they have difficulty paying off the balance every month and incur interest charges.
Because most credit cards offer some sort of cash back/reward for every dollar spent, they are great if you can pay off the balance 100% of the time.
However, if you get hit with interest charges even once, it can wipe out any benefit you gained from the cash back/reward bonus. In such cases those people might be better off using a debit card or other means.
Poor self control. They'll spend money on a credit card without considering whether or not they'll be able to pay it off in a reasonable amount of time.
In some cases, they have negative cash flow but don't realize it because they haven't sat down and truly inspected their budgeting and spending. They're constantly deciding which bill they can choose not to pay so that they can still make rent. They think getting a credit card will give them breathing room, so they get a one and slowly the balance creeps up, or it jumps up because they suddenly think they can afford that fancy $2,000 TV.
If credit cards don't work for you, check out Dave Ramsay, he has a very low tolerance for debt.
That being said, if you can handle credit cards, not using them is just leaving money on the table. I get 2% back everywhere (more in certain categories), which is better than most high interest savings accounts. If you don't get that 2% back, you're still paying the interchange fees (~3%) for other people because stores don't charge a different amount for cash/debit vs credit.
However, getting 2% (or more) back isn't worth it if you end up spending more money. The emphasis should be on changing spending behavior, not on payment optimization
My wife isn't very good at saving, so our solution is that I review our spending periodically and we discuss anything over $50 that isn't routine spending (e.g. grocery stores), and we each get $X/month for guilt-free spending. She tends to spend it as she "earns" it, while I save up month to month until there's a good deal so I get more value, add I occasionally treat her if she's run out of cash and has a craving.
This of course presupposes choosing that particular investment strategy, but the opportunity to ask anonymous, detailed financial questions and get thoughtful responses and ideas is great!
The Bogleheads wiki should really be the first stop for financial questions. It's a fanatic resource and I found the answers/content to be higher quality than Reddit.
Reddit is truly amazing, such that I've mostly replaced my usage of hackernews with it. I have serious issues with anxiety, and the inability for me to filter out content related to "current news" aka "clickbait fear mongering" means when I surf hackernews for too long I'll be upset for hours afterwards as I'm riled up with current events rewritten as FUD.
Reddit can be filtered by subreddit, so I've got a view with no FUD. Also as a personal finance hobbyest, I can sub to finance, personalfinance, financialindependence, and economics without having stories of police overreach or failures in the justice system written to scare people.
Also as a painter, there's another 10 subs I can subscribe to basically make my feed a walk through a museum.
Absolutely fantastic micro culture and I'm thrilled to have found it!
Thanks for those lists. I can’t believe I never thought to use reddit like this! Google reader used to be my go to for scolling through art, and I’ve never quite recovered from its closure in terms of having interesting stuff to just look at.
Well if you haven't been using Subreddits. I don't mean to be rude, but then you've missed the entire point of Reddit up until now. Reddit is not just a front page.
+1 for /r/earthporn. Lots of truly fantastic photos there. My only complaint is that many of them aren't terribly high-res. The cameras they shoot with are surely high-end DSLRs, but then for some odd reason they downscale them to 3000x2000 or even lower (1500x1000 sometimes). But many of them are very high-res.
I've just asked question in kindle subreddit about reader differences, no links/promoting/etc, next day my post was disappear. And it's common practice on reddit.
I'm sorry but what does your anecdote prove here? Reddit is a collection of thousands of subreddits, moderated by a wide range of people, your experience in the Kindle subreddit doesn't say anything about the micro culture of another subreddit. There are good and bad communities on Reddit, that is the beauty and the flaw of it at the same time: you have to find them.
Yeah, it is commmon practice for some subreddits, go find other communities. I've been part of very shitty ones 10 years ago when I didn't know how it worked, for years now I just tailor my usage for what I want, like and need.
You are aware that moderation varies wildly between subtedddits, right? With that in mind, what you are saying actually has no bearing on the GPs comment at all.
It was likely removed because the FAQ [0] already lists the differences and searching shows [1] that the question has come up before.
Good culture != the ability to substitute the subreddit for Google or your own research.
This is quite normal on Reddit. If questions like this are allowed, the subreddit often becomes inundated with them and there's no room for discussing anything else.
You think that... Tencent had your questions about Kindles censored? But why? That doesn’t even make any sense. Much more likely, the independent moderators of that subreddit decided that it wasn’t a helpful post.
Honestly I never use reddit search. Even if I remember the actual title or parts of the title I can't find the post again. Maybe it's improved but it was absolute garbage the last time I tried.
The best way to search on reddit is to use the "site:reddit.com/r/subreddit" method on Google, quickly gets you relevant results and is not that much of an effort either.
I kind of went the other way, I prefer the discussions on HN. Any subreddit that gets over 100K (and arguably fewer) subscribers just becomes a cesspit.
Take /r/ukpolitics for example, back in the day an anarcho-syndicalist could have a debate with a die-hard Thatcherite and while it'd be fairly heated, people tended to know their shit and I'd generally come away feeling like I learned something after reading the board for an hour or so. After 2015 (and even more so after the EU referendum) the subscriber count exploded and now it's a complete echo chamber. Try making an argument that the EU isn't some sort of Star Trekkian utopia or that Scottish independence might cause a lot of economic problems on that board and you'll get downvoted out of sight within maybe half an hour. It's very, very black and white now, the board is so fast that it's all about quick, karma-farming content rather than actual political debate.
I don't know why this seems to be a problem unique to Reddit. HN doesn't seem to have the same issue (at least not to the point it dominates the character of the platform), despite it being essentially a clone of old-school Reddit. It's a problem I'd be interested in knowing more about because I'm working on a platform with user-generated content. It's currently using a very naive "rank by votes, exclude old or heavily downvoted posts" approach but I fear this approach could lead to the same problem as Reddit.
The discussion by actually passionate people gets drowned out when subs get too large. It becomes difficult to discuss things beyond an elementary level, as newcomers may not have the experience with a topic that longer subscribers would have.
If you look at old HN threads, it feels more intellectually curious than today. But HN today is still very good. I wouldn't compare HN of today vs. 5 years ago, to say, what's happened to /r/financialindependence over a similar timeframe.
I also went the other way. I feel that Reddit is more like an all-you-can-eat buffet where the content is mediocre at best and toxic at worst. Even on seemingly innocent subs like r/oldschoolcool or r/earthporn people will launch unprovoked attacks to rebut a simple opinion. There's less tolerance for that kind of hostility here I think. The discussions on HN have more substance, are generally topics I'm keenly interested in, and I find less click-bait on here.
> HN doesn't seem to have the same issue (at least not to the point it dominates the character of the platform), despite it being essentially a clone of old-school Reddit.
That is because PG sets clear rules and actively experiments with techniques to keep HN’s integrity intact, and since HN discussions are usually of the more intellectual variety, it’s harder for shit-posters and bottom-feeders to find traction here with low effort comments.
>That is because PG sets clear rules and actively experiments with techniques to keep HN’s integrity intact, and since HN discussions are usually of the more intellectual variety
I hate to say it, but HackerNews is just another forum. It has its own political bent and biases (sometimes hard to see unless you step outside them). The level of discourse is better than some, and worse than others, but not particularly special in that regard; there are many good subreddits, too.
> I don't know why this seems to be a problem unique to Reddit. [...]
I think it's a matter of scale.
Reddit gets a couple magnitudes more traffic than HN. When your userbase is smaller, it's easier to keep it civil. Also, HN has a very strong stance against low-effort shitpost comments. They are quickly flagged and removed by moderators with a comment explaining the policy with a link to the guidelines. That's not to say HN is a "NO FUN" zone, but the funny comments are usually at least clever in some way, and not the same damn joke that has been told a million times.
It's remarkable how true that is of almost all forums that have been around a while. There are dead serious experts on every subject to be found on 4chan for example. Reddit is no different, but each subreddit is basically a tiny little kingdom and not all of them are run well (the LoL subreddit, for example, is a nightmare due to corporate moderation from Riot).
Never underestimate the power of the human ego or the almighty dollar. It's just unfortunate that in many cases these motivators get used for corrupt purposes.
EDIT - Since not everyone is familiar with the RIOT games example.
In the case of RIOT, they use it to control external discussion about their game and manage PR. Since the LoL subreddit is the largest hub for LoL related discussion in the western world, it's worth it to them to play kingmaker with the moderators (and they've given those mods the same power over Valorant now as well) and place them into jobs, or just outright pay them.
Of course, this turns into corruption because the mods have straight up banned credible journalists from the space, as well push discussion into uncomfortable directions. (Hating on certain people is not allowed, hating on others totally is.)
I can’t help but question what he’s actually learned when his links don’t actually explain a topic. He says he learned about mega backdoor IRAs, but then links to a thread about regular backdoor IRAs. I’m not sure he does know what differentiates a “mega” from a regular backdoor.
People get terminology wrong in niches like this all the time, especially when the terminology is so similar.
The fact that the OP even knows that a backdoor Roth IRA exists (much less a "mega" backdoor IRA) puts this person leagues above the average person, who probably doesn't even know the difference between a Roth IRA and a traditional IRA, much less what an IRA even is.
Honestly, I trust sources like OP mentioned more than most financial advisors because advisors tend to pitch a product instead of conveying information. Schools aren't doing it, so that basically leaves communities like this.
Must admit, reddit got me caring more about my finances.
It seems not many people are taught about money properly. I certainly wasn’t and non of my friends where.
I’ve always been good in that I never spent what I didn’t have and lived within my means. What savings I did have where in a zero interest current account though!
Following the finance Reddit’s at least put me in the right path. 6-12 months cash savings now in a high interest account, now have a pension plan, putting money in to ETF’s until I have enough in the ETF’s I’m willing to by some individual stocks which may not be as stable as the ETFs I have.
As someone who’s been a senior dev for 10+ years doing well but stuck in a rut I’m also finding the various cscareers Reddit’s useful about the job market. Seeing people’s salaries, negotiations, what jobs to look for, what companies to look for etc etc.
and sibling /r/UKPersonalFinance for UK specific advice (since finance products, terms and laws tend to be different in different countries) There are probably ones for most other countries too. At least Aus from what I saw yesterday
Don’t know who downvoted you, but as someone who joined WSB two months ago, it is mind blowing. Yes, these are bets. You are likely to blow it all. But imho it gives perspective to the topic of personal finance. Even if it’s just to understand one’s own limits. Valuable sub.
r/fatfire - same thing as above but for people looking to
have more than "just enough" to retire (multimillion, mostly full of high earners like SWE's, agents or successful entrepreneurs where this goal is somewhat realistic).
r/personalfinance & r/ukpersonalfinance - well rounded finance forum.
r/frugal - okayish for if you are in a really tough spot. If you are doing ok I generally don't recommend them because ultimately you are trading your time/health using most of the hacks from here.
not a subreddit but I cross-reference bogleheads wiki and /r/personalfinance wiki anytime I want to look for consensus or diverging opinion. Bogleheads still has a slight edge on /r/personalfinance for its specific topics.
Between Reddit and bogleheads, that is all the financial wisdom you need. Bogleheads has deeply shaped my investment approach and it should be the same for 95%+ of other people as well.
> 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, Vanderkam notes, “you have all this real estate you have to fill on your blog, your podcast, and your books. That’s where all this little stuff winds up coming in, but in the larger scheme, it’s kind of irrelevant.”
>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 lots of places with rates of 1.5-2%.
I get 5% interest on up-to a $20,000 balance in a high interest checking account. You'll see higher returns using a high interest checking as opposed to savings account if you can find one you qualify for.
I clicked through a few of those offers. Each one has a balance limit (after which interest drops to near zero), monthly fees, sign-up fees, or requires you to generate banking fees through another service.
And how could they not? Finance isn't magic, and we are in a world of all-time low rates. There is no possible way these companies can be paying you 5% on cash without making it up elsewhere.
The accounts typically have sign up bonuses, not fees. I got $125 bonus for signing up. The catch is typically that they require usage of the bank debit card N times per month. The github link is a program I wrote to hit that requirement by buying 50 cent Amazon gift cards and paying cable bills in small increments.
You'll never net more than $1000/year in one of these accounts given they have balance limits. Some folks sign up for multiple high interest checking accounts in order to park more money.
As I said in my prior message, Ally Bank has 1.6% on savings. I think CapitalOne 360 has either 1.6 or 1.7, Discover has something similar, etc. I think Tab Bank has a little higher rate. These aren't hard to find. You probably won't find a full 2.0% anywhere currently.
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.
>It's unusual to have $62k or more in a savings account.
You're not paying attention. The OP said it would take decades to make $1k or $2k; I pointed out it doesn't take that much money to make that in only 1 year. It's not that unusual to have $30k in savings, so that's roughly $1k in interest in 2 years, which is an order of magnitude lower than what the OP was claiming.
In hindsight it’s something extremely basic, simple and obvious to do which is why I had the exclamation mark for my lack of knowledge.
In the past couple of years I’ve made $2-3k in interest. Not much but it’s $2-3k I wouldn’t of had if sat in a checking account so to me it’s free money for holding the exact same savings just under a different account with my bank.
>putting money in to ETF’s until I have enough in the ETF’s I’m willing to by some individual stocks which may not be as stable as the ETFs I have.
Are those retirement accounts or taxable brokerage. Because for many people, maxing out their IRA, 401K, and HSA is like 35K a year alone, and putting money into taxable brokerage should take a backseat unless 1) you like the gambling for its entertainment factor 2) you choose to keep your short term savings / emergency cash in the market (*I much prefer a combination of 6 months savings invested a little riskier than it should be + a large line of credit. Then you have the choice of selling stock or borrowing at 10% APR, for something you can hopefully pay off very very soon. A 15K LOC at a credit union is a godsend.) But other than my asterisk, taxable investments are usually an inefficient use of funds. 401K match and HSA are top priorities.
The downside is that putting money into those makes it harder to withdraw for when you do need those funds. Savings accounts makes it much easier to pull available funds. Other than that, you're right.
Thats what the line of credit is for. When you need immediate money, dont want to cash out stock, can pay it back in a month, or to give you a month to park it somewhere with a lower interest rate.
You can spend out of a brokerage account as if its a savings account. Sell your stocks, and youll have cash.
Maybe I'm missing something, but HSAs seem to me to usually only be available if you have a high-deductible health insurance policy. That can be OK if you're 25 and very healthy, but for many other people is a high risk.
HSAs are a no brainer if you can afford to spend the out of pocket maximum. Either you pay the insurance company more in monthly premiums for a lower deductible, or you pay a lower monthly premium and invest the difference in an index fund and you keep the returns. Which grow tax free in an HSA.
Your probability of having a healthcare expense does not change based on the type of insurance you choose (high or low deductible). Only the timing of the cash flow. But the government gives tax advantages for using an HSA. It's an IRA with the ability to withdraw penalty free any amount you used for healthcare anytime you were covered under an HDHP.
If you switch to say an HMO or PPO plan can you still use your HSA for out-of-pocket healthcare costs as you can an FSA? If not, what happens to your HSA/what can you do with it?
HSA is yours to keep forever. I recommend using Fidelity, no fee and access to all the best investment options. You should transfer all funds from an employer sponsored HSA if it's not Fidelity to Fidelity.
Any medical expenses you incur while you have a qualifying high deductible health plan (HDHP) can be expensed anytime in the future from your HSA. What I do is invest all of the HSA funds, and pay for all of the medical expenses with after tax money. I pdf all of the receipts for the medical expenses, and now, if ever in the future I need cash, I can withdraw it from the HSA penalty free since I have proof of the medical expenses. If you don't end up having medical expenses (good luck), and you turn 65, then you can withdraw and pay regular income tax like an IRA/401k (if you need the cash, you should of course use up your IRA/401k first).
I don't even understand how the government plans to prevent fraud if people decide to claim the same health expense multiple times, as you only have to keep tax records for a few years, and the law as it currently is lets you deduct health expenses from anytime in the past at any point in the future.
Its a Traditional IRA that doesnt tax growth. Its tax free going in, on its gains, and going out. Theres really nothing like it.
Best case scenario, spend all your health care with cash. Let the HSA grow as long as you can. Reimburse yourself for a decades worth of health care spending when you need the cash.
If you want to see the future of Social Networks, look no further than Reddit. Reddit is the Future of Social Networks.
The Next Social network, the one what will eat Facebook's lunch, just like Facebook ate MySpace's lunch, will not be people-to-people based, but it will be People-to-topic and topic-to-topic based; media-rich and mobile-friendly.
And no, it won't be Reddit, too much Legacy crap with Reddit and not enough novelty.
Agree. I either want to talk to a community for each of my interests (on a subreddit or a dedicated forum) OR to a small group of close friends or family (messengers). Only rarely would I want to broadcast generic information / entertainment to everyone I know (facebook).
One platform I'm missing is one where I could (anonymously) talk to strangers in my area. To discuss or ask about locally relevant things, or just see what people that aren't my friends think. The apps that already exist seem to be always targeted at students.
As long as you define “discussion” as “I just saw this suspicious looking Black guy breaking into someone’s house. He opened someone’s garage using a garage door opener and unlocked the door using their key. He must have murdered the owner, stole the car, and taken their keys.”
Reddit does pretty well for the "random collection of locals". I follow a subreddit for:
- my state
- the nearest metro area of my state
- politics in my state
It seems like most of the posters are actually in my local area, so it's fairly easy to kick off a discussion about some local issue. The downside is that there's a significant leftist bias (true for most of Reddit), but it's fine if you take that into account.
Reddit has a lot of city-specific forums. Some are ghost-towns though, while the bigger cities tend to be a bit more hostile to post that aren't photos or links to news articles. But some have sister-forums like r/AskTO for posts like that.
If it is not people-to-people based, it’s not a social network. That’s what defines the category and makes it distinct from other forms of interaction.
Reddit is a web forum, a form of interaction that predates social networks; they never went away. Reddit is just the best platform yet for creating and hosting them.
This form of interaction—short conversations organized by topic—predates even the Web, via newsgroups. It is one of the oldest patterns of interaction on the Internet. For a few people it arguably even predates the Internet, via direct-dial BBS.
reddit appears to me to have a lot of crap with the few nuggets in the rough. subs like personalfinance seems to be on net helpful for people, but "cousin" subs like investing are cesspits of grifters and ill informed maniacs
Reddit also suffers from the dreaded circlejerk effect which simply reinforces an idea regardless of if its correct or not.
Using your example of /r/investing, if you propose anything which isn't a broad market index your post just doesn't get seen, it just buried under 10 other comments which blindly followed the subs meta.
I believe a sub is best when its small and focused, 5-10k subs max. Beyond that the ideas and culture get diluted by the mass mob. God help you if your little sub ever ends up on the front page, may as well just shut it down at that point.
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.
Funny you mention that. Its sister subreddit /r/science is my example of something that has frustrated me greatly in the past. Most of the stories are something I'm trying to learn about, not an expert in, and I've found it very frustrating to try to engage. So if i see anything interesting there, i'll find somewhere else to talk about it.
Sadly Reddit is locking down the personal finance subreddit behind their app so they can monetize it better. I find this article to have interesting timing as the readership on that subreddit must be going way down nowadays.
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?
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...
I'm guessing you're on your phone? I get prompts urging me to use their app, but I have been able to opt for the browser instead, and I use Tor fairly frequently (phone and desktop). Have you tried old.reddit.com instead?
Maybe it's specifically targeting certain browsers/platforms. I'm on Firefox on Android, maybe they're specifically targeting iOS?
I have found a very enjoyable way to browse reddit: through RSS. I make RSS feeds of the top weekly posts in the three subreddits that I follow and subscribe to those. I use hnrss for reading HN, of course.
I absolutely love reddit - a massive collection of discussion forums on very specific topics and most seem to be moderated by individual(s).
I can find topic related to all my interests - finance, economy, devops, machine learning, politics, sports, specific country and even things like walmart and costco.
Although effectiveness of advice can vary depending on topic (people are pretty opinionated on certain subreddits) but overall, it is a great community effort.
I had non-technical people coming to me asking if I knew how to mine "bitcoins" right before the the crypto bubble popped. If I had any left it would have definitely been time to exit the market.
I seen exactly same thing happen in one of my groups of friends where no one ever had any interest in IT before that point. For a month or two before crash they was talking about their crypto investments daily even though before this all they was interesting about are some extreme sports, woman and cars.
Personally, I would rather ask questions on the Personal Finance & Money community at Stack Exchange, and watch videos on YouTube but to each their own.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadIt sounds like you're completely ignorant of the subs in question, and just spouting off whatever comes to mind.
Not to mention what they're describing isn't a group consensus on financial advice, it's just the stereotype of lowest common denominator behavior. It's like suggesting that there's a group consensus that playing the lotto is sound financial wisdom just because a large number of people do participate in it.
Every generation needs their own form. Before blogging/RSS it was cable financial news on TV, before that magazines, and before that I don't know.
Basic financial literacy (creating a budget, tracking it, adjusting) is sorely lacking.
Today, you may be adept at trading $10k of stocks on Robinhood using money that you're parents gave you hoping over the year for a big 20% win, but you'll equally forget that you have $10k of credit card debt with interest accruing at 30%.
You can still see the result. The most common response to any bad economic news is short 1-4 sentence outburst about how Fed is printing money, no matter how irrelevant it is to discussion.
For anyone based in the UK, please go and read the content at https://ukpersonal.finance/, it is invaluable for your future. Financial literacy for the millennial generation is my #1 recommendation for general life improvement. It doesn't matter what situation you are in: in debt; with lots of savings; lack of credit options; etc... You will learn tremendously and can genuinely improve so many aspects of your life.
Also the discussion is two way, so you get to ask questions without paying hundreds to an IFA. In some instances you probably should speak to an IFA (or an accountant) for a holistic overview of your particular situation, but redditers are quite quick to point that out too.
I would not be so vigorous in endorsing any subreddit, especially not one that is related to financial matters. I will attempt to frame my salvo, with the express intent to inform. No money was lost.
After trying to subscribe to Freetrade and Trading212 (Robinhood equivalents). I was unable to register with the former ─ a bug they mention regarding deep links in their FAQ, referencing an older version of iOS. I followed their instructions on troubleshooting, without any success ─ found an arcane way to get to the chat session (really hard, without being subscribed to the service), which resulted in no action. However, it was really surprising to find out that asking for help in this subreddit, where this app is held in high regard, elicited no response and only downvotes. Always assume some inherent bias, where money is concerned; don't follow blindly and stumble across problems, after the event.
And in this anonymous stranger setting, many people are actually more inclined to give a good/harsh/honest advice than in face-to-face conversations.
To be clear, I'm not criticising reddit. I'm just saying, reddit isn't doing this, reddit is a tool for people to do this.
You can basically say the same thing about literally anything that is not a person.
I've always been interested in personal finance, but this community has helped me learn new things and everyone is very supportive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/finanzen/
Seems like a more familiar community to me.
The financial advisers are dealing with people who are so bad with money that they don't see problems with spending more than they earn or taking on debt for things they don't need. The incentives for anyone profit motivated is to take their money and move on. No point offering any useful advice; it just cuts into the margins. Ideally, sell the client complicated financial products.
The typical person paying for financial advice is basically putting a sticker on themselves that says "I'll buy anything; try and sell me a bridge!".
People are incentivized by karma to create popular advice. Sometimes this overlaps with good or better advice but not always.
Anyone who's got in depth knowledge of any particular field has probably seen this in action when that field comes up.
In my observation detail/nuance and ability to accurately handle non-typical situations tend to promptly go out the window when you try to start making advice on anything complex popular.
Make it actually kinda frustrating to start helping over there. You basically can't answer a beginner question, because they probably have a new account and can't vote yet, so your (possibly good) answer gets 0 likes... Do that a few times and you get banned from answering.
IIPs aren't perfect by any means of course.
Consumer reports, popular mechanics, wirecutter, nerdwallet, valuepenguin, bankrate (the points guy, credotcards.com) bicycling.com The financial and mattress websites have gotten out of hand, but there still IS good information between the ads. Its probably almost time for an aggregation of the roundup sites, one that sorts and links back to all the best of articles on a given topic. Content ads can still be useful starting points for research - such as https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/food-drink/a28493008/b...
You do have to read, and the answer isnt always spelled out at the top of articles. For example, the Wells Fargo Propel card is way better than most card comparison sites give it credit for. They admit how good it is, and then suggest what may be a lesser card for some people (like Wirecutter recommeding the Costco card over it.)
> 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.
Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another.
What would you do here, specifically?
Agreed, I often default to Reddit or HN for a lot of stuff although there are an increasing number of obvious adverts disguised as genuine posts (see r/hailcorporate for some examples).
More difficult to spot are marketing firms who curate a bunch of fake accounts, make them seem like "real people" by posting random content but interspersing this with subtle ads. There was an AMA recently from someone working at a firm that does this, they even gave their accounts personalities by posting in specific related subs (e.g. hiking, outdoors) in order to advertise boots. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, but still my point is that even though Reddit generally leads to better advice take it with a grain of salt.
Edit: Found it, wasn't an AMA but just a comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/f9rjh0/he_dressed_up_...
Although I don't see a reason not to trust this comment, the line about "we have seen great success with this method" had me wondering how they measure the impact of this strategy? It seems this would be quite time and effort intensive, therefore expensive. How do they know they can attribute sales to this since presumably they aren't providing affiliate links as that'd be too obvious?
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 washing machine one. She bragged about two things: 1. It worked, the "counter-viral" campaign successfully made people ignore the washing machine issue. 2. They got paid ludicrous amounts of money (she hinted that each account with 5000 followers, that was Facebook limit, was worth some thousands USD, and that they had many, many accounts, precisely to go around that 5000 follower limit, for example if a company ordered 50.000 followers from them, they would setup 10 fake accounts and try to attract 5000 real people in each, each account with different hobbies to try to attract different people).
EDIT: some other interesting info:
* They had a huge cache of personal photos, to make it look like the person was real, there are even stock photo agencies that create these photos, for example take a female and a male actor to tourist destinations and take pictures to make them look like a couple doing romantic things, then they would release the photos slowly, so people wouldn't notice it was fake, and to stretch their money for photo purchases.
* They would get sometimes employees with real hobbies, and have them take care of fake accounts with same hobbies, so a surfer for example would have some 8 accounts under her care, each for a different company, and write some surfing content that is real, but tweak and then repost on all 8, with differences, and adjusting to fit each profile.
* Another technique at the time was the sale of "instantaneous company profile", you made a fake profile, and made it get genuinely popular with a target demographic, then you sold it to someone, after the sale you could edit the account to turn it from a person to a fan-page, with the category correct for the company that bought it, so a company could buy a fan-page for them with 5000 real followers that actually are about the subject. I never asked how often people would realize what happened and unfollow... but I guessed most people wouldn't bother with unfollowing anyway.
Marketing is a massive business. It makes a shit ton of money. FB and GOOG are ad companies at the end of the day, and there’s ton of little companies that they nurture as side effects.
There are difinitely some posters, who are clearly promoting given brand, but.. 9/10 it is pretty apparent, so again drowned in HN sea.
Incidentally, have you tried Xyz vpn? Totally decentralized, easy setup and great customer service.
You can similarly generate the history and backstory of each fake person, complete with realistically banal social media posts, etc..
(Unless Facebook had access to the national ID database, a terrifying prospect)
Yeah those excuses run thin. Actively participating in this stuff is not acceptable.
Only if the prospective buyer is actually interested. This too often gets translated to "I have a right to spam everyone!"
Maybe that's a space worth disrupting? Google is getting fat and lazy (but still has a scary warchest and resources).
All of the advertising on the internet that I don’t find abhorrent is controlled by the content creator.
It would be interesting to get an idea of what percentage of posts are from marketers.
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 produced content in some space and would allow their own stuff to get posted while blocking other people's submissions.
It takes very few bad actors to poison the well. At least on Reddit, there's a myriad of small subreddits which makes it more difficult to infiltrate all of them effectively.
I've tried to combat this but it seems very difficult. The thing that works best is to really hide the status and let people make their own ways of standing out.
I also very rarely gave moderator status to anyone who asked. It would mostly be people I see could be a good fit and also make sure there are no obligations to actually use power.
Today, Google results are a big problem in the sense discussed in the article, there are no more sources of information that can be trusted like in the old days. Some days I reflect with myself trying to figure out how it can be solved…I hope someone ends up finding a solution.
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.
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.
Hopefully it will take them a very long time. I don't want companies to start poisoning online communities with their hidden advertising. When I visit an online community, I want to read about the real thoughts of real people that are hopefully much smarter than I am, and maybe even post a few of my own. No community wants paid members with ulterior motives and conflicts of interest.
Also reddit not curating the moderatorship of it's big subs unless there's controversy. Making it so the top mod can basically take over, disappear, etc. Basically the tiered nature of mods is an issue imo.
I'm particularly concerned about political subs, those dealing with hot button issues, and global news. There is zero way to tell if a mod is acting in a potentially alarming manner.
The simple issue is that people who make money from being first page on Google can afford the money it takes to game the index to their benefit.
This would be true of other search engines too if they were as popular as Google, so I don't blame them for it. Nor do I envy their task. I imagine making SEO gaming harder would be in Google's benefit, so they could sell more advertising.
Commerce has ruined Google's results consistently for years now. It is just what commerce does to everything, when there is money to be made from it. You can't even fly on a plane you paid to be on without being advertised at as thanks for your patronage.
here's one the has started to puzzle me: TED talks have become the ground for people trying to sell you something. but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right?
wrong!
at least to me. this feels wrong.
Are they really selling these things versus their revolutionary new book, trying to get attention for their research, or some good/service?
I agree. I think TED and similar pop-science programming is dangerous. People think they're actually learning something meaningful. I see it as the granola bar of media. They're filled with sugar and only minor nutritional value. You feel like you're getting something healthy, but you're not doing much better than a snickers bar.
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 the results are littered with investing sites and long lists of information, that is more than likely helpful, but much more verbose.
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.
Citation needed. Searching "index funds vs etf" on Bing gives ads for the first five results, while Google shows a card thing and organic results.
If you're going to accuse them of deflecting, at least show evidence that it's not just the whole internet.
Try searching for "financial advisor" on Google. I did it on my phone, and the only thing on my screen is ads.
Which is what makes other people having similar experiences interesting. Because if enough of us feel like this, then there would be a need for a better search engine. Not sure who’s going to make it though, libraries?
The reviewers seem to believe they are unbiased but your satisfaction with the results may differ if you had spent $5,000 versus if you had spent nothing.
Well, search on reddit has always been pretty terrible.
I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results.
That works, but for many searches will include results from other sites, since the operator works on the entire URL, not just the domain. If you want to limit to just reddit.com, use `site:reddit.com`.
Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over.
The other problem is that when someone does ask for advice, the quality of the advice is usually somewhere between mediocre to terrible. I think this is largely because there is no incentive for experts to stick around in subs to provide good answers. And because they are tired of giving the _same_ advice over and over. This gives space to the non-experts who don't _really_ understand the concepts behind the advice they are giving and end up giving bad (and sometimes dangerous) advice because that's what they were told by other non-experts in the same situation.
I answer questions in r/personalfinance's "new" area, and the split is something like:
"I am upside down on my car loan/loan is too expensive/want to get out of my current car" - 40%
"How do I do I make [some crazy ROI]? I have [$small amount] to invest" - 20%
"I have no money and need to pay my bills" - 20%
"Can I afford to buy this house?" - 10%
Novel questions - 10%
So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.
To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past.
I wonder if that's usable as an indicator?
You should, but charge the full price, if you genuinely have useful information. The perceived value of an item changes according to the price you charge.
Given that cars are multi-thousand dollar expense, investing a tiny fraction to get better information is a good return of investment.
I've witnessed this pattern in an array of subreddits spanning from hobbies to coding to gaming. Ultimately they become discussion forums for the lowest common denominator of skillsets.
/r/programming in a nutshell.
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.
Could that be, because so much of programming is a group activity (understanding, maintaining, and evolving other people’s code), and thus actually benefits (in an evolutionary sense) from simplistic group think more than from innovation and perfection?
Professionals have time for the internet as a hobby. Hobbyists have time for the internet as a job.
Frankly, that's my perception of HN, too. Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy, for example, and then prepare to fend off the throngs of people clamoring to be the first to tell you that email is hard (tm), and only fastmail can save us from Google's dragnet, oh also email is deprecated and we should just use signal or some other proprietary walled garden.
Well, I guess there are different levels of expectations on what easy means. letsencrypt with dovecot and postfix is the definition of complex legacy, but in times where everything is spam that didn't come from domains with dmarc et all... there might be people that think of "what email server is" differently than you.
That seems like an odd turn of phrase.
https://wfpb-wolf.netlify.com/consensus.html
https://wfpb-wolf.netlify.com/scientific_studies.html
Vegetables - way too broad a category. Should be split into leaves, stalks, roots, starches, seeds, alliums, brassicaceae, legumes etc. Calling it all "vegetables" makes it hard for people to rank, prioritize, and proportion which are a better use of time, money, and energy to consume. There might be consensus on eating "vegetables" but not necessarily every group of them. Nutritional density is more complicated than "vegetables."
Whole grains - Antithesis to previous point, grains are not categorized as vegetables. Why are whole grains their own recommended category everywhere as a staple part of diets? Is it cost? Industry lobbying? Diet recommendation should focus on leaves and seeds, with cereals as a filler. Cereal portion should be the one controlled to control weight gain, moreso than plant fat from seeds/nuts. We've gotten too comfortable with a huge serving of rice or potatoes with something thrown on top.
Red meat - carcinogens appear to come from preparation methods (browning, curing) and can be mitigated by vegetable intake. https://examine.com/nutrition/does-red-meat-cause-cancer/
Fruit - mostly as not necessary to a healthy diet as this makes it look like. Can be avoided the same way meat is.
Fish (salmon & sardines) and Seafood (mussels) belongs in the consensus part over fruit.
Doesn't touch on fermented food.
The jury is more out on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol than these government bodies want to admit.
Its hard to reverse course quickly and say "everything we said for the last 30 years is wrong."
Almost none of the diet suggestions focus on digestion, absorption.
I just dont see consensus on what percent of a diet should be grain vs vegetable, starches, legumes, fats, meats. Maybe it doesnt matter. "WFPB is the healthiest diet" is very different from "WFPB is one of the healthiest diets."
Mostly plants is one of multiple ways to an optimal diet.
The science is settled, but like everything else, untrained people can't tell the difference between a good study and a bad study, and the media reports on them all.
Check out the book _How Not to Diet_, which is the most recent masterwork on evidence-based nutrition.
It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.
So I could format my data for Reddit, or post a simple summary (which looks as authentic as any random poster), or I don't post at all.
I have the highest quality, low cost food Data, but can't post it. But hey Aldi astroturfs and gets away with it.
/r/askhistorians has kept up their quality through removing top line answers that are not properly cited, sometimes entire posts have nothing other than [deleted].
I think most smaller communities are still pretty valuable, maybe because they are too small or infrequently used to have their users coalesce around a single set of ideas. I think/r/asknetsec is still a pretty good resource even though it’s in the bigger end of small, I’m not sure how it’s kept it’s quality though.
Maybe that’s just reflecting how our species seems to work. The larger the group, the more it turns into a mob unless increasingly tightly structured.
/r/legaladvice is heavily moderated to keep it clean and high quality.
Ken White was banned for deliberate persistent rule breaking and hijacking the sub to make it popehatLegalAdvice.
https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_i...
While /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated, it is not particularly high quality.
People don’t follow that, anyway. First, the rules for subs, on the sidebar on the desktop, are fairly hidden away now in the ‘about’ link. It’s doesn’t matter, though. Even when it’s at the top in a sticky post people don’t read it - take /r/scams, for instance, and the ‘I installed a RAT and filmed you watching poern so give me bitcoin’ scam. People post about that every day for months despite a highlighted bold post at the top of the sub for 6 months. Or /r/celiac. Plenty of links about diagnosis in the sidebar, but people ask ‘I have this and this symptom, do I have celiac?’ about 4 times a week.
Overall people come to reddit or a forum to have a discussion. Searching and reading is what they don’t want to do.
I’m on the fence as forbidding previously covered topics makes a forum dry and cobwebby. On the other hand, repeating the same basic advice 5 times a week for different people feels very repetitive, like you say. It takes a community of dedicated posters, basically obsessed volunteers, to make a sub consistently give good advice to everyone who comes by. I essentially do this as a hobby, myself.
1. (mostly) US politics, with shills on all sides 2. corporate advertising. r/hailcorporate takes this to the extreme sometimes, but there are plenty of astroturfed posts supporting or advertising various brands reddit.
Think about how much companies would pay to have the discussion around their brand monitored and controlled on a forum with millions of eyeballs.
Also, reddit accounts being farmed for karma then sold on is an open secret.
I really like /r/povertyfinance though clearly those folks are often going through way, way more trying circumstances I am. I guess I'd be more interested in finances for the alienated precariat.
Because most credit cards offer some sort of cash back/reward for every dollar spent, they are great if you can pay off the balance 100% of the time.
However, if you get hit with interest charges even once, it can wipe out any benefit you gained from the cash back/reward bonus. In such cases those people might be better off using a debit card or other means.
In some cases, they have negative cash flow but don't realize it because they haven't sat down and truly inspected their budgeting and spending. They're constantly deciding which bill they can choose not to pay so that they can still make rent. They think getting a credit card will give them breathing room, so they get a one and slowly the balance creeps up, or it jumps up because they suddenly think they can afford that fancy $2,000 TV.
That being said, if you can handle credit cards, not using them is just leaving money on the table. I get 2% back everywhere (more in certain categories), which is better than most high interest savings accounts. If you don't get that 2% back, you're still paying the interchange fees (~3%) for other people because stores don't charge a different amount for cash/debit vs credit.
However, getting 2% (or more) back isn't worth it if you end up spending more money. The emphasis should be on changing spending behavior, not on payment optimization
My wife isn't very good at saving, so our solution is that I review our spending periodically and we discuss anything over $50 that isn't routine spending (e.g. grocery stores), and we each get $X/month for guilt-free spending. She tends to spend it as she "earns" it, while I save up month to month until there's a good deal so I get more value, add I occasionally treat her if she's run out of cash and has a craving.
This of course presupposes choosing that particular investment strategy, but the opportunity to ask anonymous, detailed financial questions and get thoughtful responses and ideas is great!
Reddit can be filtered by subreddit, so I've got a view with no FUD. Also as a personal finance hobbyest, I can sub to finance, personalfinance, financialindependence, and economics without having stories of police overreach or failures in the justice system written to scare people.
Also as a painter, there's another 10 subs I can subscribe to basically make my feed a walk through a museum.
Absolutely fantastic micro culture and I'm thrilled to have found it!
/r/specart has a lot of good stuff.
/r/imaginarylandscapes (and their sibling subreddits) is really high quality.
/r/earthporn if you like nature photography.
So yeah, fantastic micro culture!
Yeah, it is commmon practice for some subreddits, go find other communities. I've been part of very shitty ones 10 years ago when I didn't know how it worked, for years now I just tailor my usage for what I want, like and need.
Good culture != the ability to substitute the subreddit for Google or your own research.
This is quite normal on Reddit. If questions like this are allowed, the subreddit often becomes inundated with them and there's no room for discussing anything else.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/wiki/faq
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/search?q=differences&restric...
Censorship is pretty normal in Reddit in general (also in Discord, also sponsored by chinese Tencent):
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/ctyj10/reddit_is_...
http://time.com/5526128/china-reddit-tencent-censorship/
https://ncac.org/news/blog/is-reddit-moving-away-from-free-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2019/feb/10/...
https://www.change.org/p/reddit-admin-stop-censorship-at-red...
"Pretty normal", don't you?
I have multireddits set up for whatever mood I'm in (e.g. gifs of cool things, text stories, finance, news, etc.)
r/multihub has some good collections.
Take /r/ukpolitics for example, back in the day an anarcho-syndicalist could have a debate with a die-hard Thatcherite and while it'd be fairly heated, people tended to know their shit and I'd generally come away feeling like I learned something after reading the board for an hour or so. After 2015 (and even more so after the EU referendum) the subscriber count exploded and now it's a complete echo chamber. Try making an argument that the EU isn't some sort of Star Trekkian utopia or that Scottish independence might cause a lot of economic problems on that board and you'll get downvoted out of sight within maybe half an hour. It's very, very black and white now, the board is so fast that it's all about quick, karma-farming content rather than actual political debate.
I don't know why this seems to be a problem unique to Reddit. HN doesn't seem to have the same issue (at least not to the point it dominates the character of the platform), despite it being essentially a clone of old-school Reddit. It's a problem I'd be interested in knowing more about because I'm working on a platform with user-generated content. It's currently using a very naive "rank by votes, exclude old or heavily downvoted posts" approach but I fear this approach could lead to the same problem as Reddit.
If you look at old HN threads, it feels more intellectually curious than today. But HN today is still very good. I wouldn't compare HN of today vs. 5 years ago, to say, what's happened to /r/financialindependence over a similar timeframe.
That is because PG sets clear rules and actively experiments with techniques to keep HN’s integrity intact, and since HN discussions are usually of the more intellectual variety, it’s harder for shit-posters and bottom-feeders to find traction here with low effort comments.
If you want to read his thoughts, check out his essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
I hate to say it, but HackerNews is just another forum. It has its own political bent and biases (sometimes hard to see unless you step outside them). The level of discourse is better than some, and worse than others, but not particularly special in that regard; there are many good subreddits, too.
I think it's a matter of scale.
Reddit gets a couple magnitudes more traffic than HN. When your userbase is smaller, it's easier to keep it civil. Also, HN has a very strong stance against low-effort shitpost comments. They are quickly flagged and removed by moderators with a comment explaining the policy with a link to the guidelines. That's not to say HN is a "NO FUN" zone, but the funny comments are usually at least clever in some way, and not the same damn joke that has been told a million times.
EDIT - Since not everyone is familiar with the RIOT games example.
In the case of RIOT, they use it to control external discussion about their game and manage PR. Since the LoL subreddit is the largest hub for LoL related discussion in the western world, it's worth it to them to play kingmaker with the moderators (and they've given those mods the same power over Valorant now as well) and place them into jobs, or just outright pay them.
Of course, this turns into corruption because the mods have straight up banned credible journalists from the space, as well push discussion into uncomfortable directions. (Hating on certain people is not allowed, hating on others totally is.)
The fact that the OP even knows that a backdoor Roth IRA exists (much less a "mega" backdoor IRA) puts this person leagues above the average person, who probably doesn't even know the difference between a Roth IRA and a traditional IRA, much less what an IRA even is.
Honestly, I trust sources like OP mentioned more than most financial advisors because advisors tend to pitch a product instead of conveying information. Schools aren't doing it, so that basically leaves communities like this.
It seems not many people are taught about money properly. I certainly wasn’t and non of my friends where.
I’ve always been good in that I never spent what I didn’t have and lived within my means. What savings I did have where in a zero interest current account though!
Following the finance Reddit’s at least put me in the right path. 6-12 months cash savings now in a high interest account, now have a pension plan, putting money in to ETF’s until I have enough in the ETF’s I’m willing to by some individual stocks which may not be as stable as the ETFs I have.
As someone who’s been a senior dev for 10+ years doing well but stuck in a rut I’m also finding the various cscareers Reddit’s useful about the job market. Seeing people’s salaries, negotiations, what jobs to look for, what companies to look for etc etc.
Go out into the late evenings, drink excessively, do designer drugs, party it up, all while mixing locker-room talk and investing strategies.
r/fatfire - same thing as above but for people looking to have more than "just enough" to retire (multimillion, mostly full of high earners like SWE's, agents or successful entrepreneurs where this goal is somewhat realistic).
r/personalfinance & r/ukpersonalfinance - well rounded finance forum.
r/frugal - okayish for if you are in a really tough spot. If you are doing ok I generally don't recommend them because ultimately you are trading your time/health using most of the hacks from here.
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page
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.
"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, Vanderkam notes, “you have all this real estate you have to fill on your blog, your podcast, and your books. That’s where all this little stuff winds up coming in, but in the larger scheme, it’s kind of irrelevant.”
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.
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 lots of places with rates of 1.5-2%.
High interest checking accounts: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/high-interest-savings-to-get/... Automation for meeting minimum spend requirements: https://github.com/jakehilborn/debbit
I clicked through a few of those offers. Each one has a balance limit (after which interest drops to near zero), monthly fees, sign-up fees, or requires you to generate banking fees through another service.
And how could they not? Finance isn't magic, and we are in a world of all-time low rates. There is no possible way these companies can be paying you 5% on cash without making it up elsewhere.
You'll never net more than $1000/year in one of these accounts given they have balance limits. Some folks sign up for multiple high interest checking accounts in order to park more money.
Anyway, 1.6% is going away given the Federal Reserve just cut rates by 50 bps yesterday. Expect an email from Ally soon.
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.
You're not paying attention. The OP said it would take decades to make $1k or $2k; I pointed out it doesn't take that much money to make that in only 1 year. It's not that unusual to have $30k in savings, so that's roughly $1k in interest in 2 years, which is an order of magnitude lower than what the OP was claiming.
In the past couple of years I’ve made $2-3k in interest. Not much but it’s $2-3k I wouldn’t of had if sat in a checking account so to me it’s free money for holding the exact same savings just under a different account with my bank.
All that says is that you barely have any balance in the account. Maybe a couple grand.
Are those retirement accounts or taxable brokerage. Because for many people, maxing out their IRA, 401K, and HSA is like 35K a year alone, and putting money into taxable brokerage should take a backseat unless 1) you like the gambling for its entertainment factor 2) you choose to keep your short term savings / emergency cash in the market (*I much prefer a combination of 6 months savings invested a little riskier than it should be + a large line of credit. Then you have the choice of selling stock or borrowing at 10% APR, for something you can hopefully pay off very very soon. A 15K LOC at a credit union is a godsend.) But other than my asterisk, taxable investments are usually an inefficient use of funds. 401K match and HSA are top priorities.
You can spend out of a brokerage account as if its a savings account. Sell your stocks, and youll have cash.
Your probability of having a healthcare expense does not change based on the type of insurance you choose (high or low deductible). Only the timing of the cash flow. But the government gives tax advantages for using an HSA. It's an IRA with the ability to withdraw penalty free any amount you used for healthcare anytime you were covered under an HDHP.
Any medical expenses you incur while you have a qualifying high deductible health plan (HDHP) can be expensed anytime in the future from your HSA. What I do is invest all of the HSA funds, and pay for all of the medical expenses with after tax money. I pdf all of the receipts for the medical expenses, and now, if ever in the future I need cash, I can withdraw it from the HSA penalty free since I have proof of the medical expenses. If you don't end up having medical expenses (good luck), and you turn 65, then you can withdraw and pay regular income tax like an IRA/401k (if you need the cash, you should of course use up your IRA/401k first).
I don't even understand how the government plans to prevent fraud if people decide to claim the same health expense multiple times, as you only have to keep tax records for a few years, and the law as it currently is lets you deduct health expenses from anytime in the past at any point in the future.
Best case scenario, spend all your health care with cash. Let the HSA grow as long as you can. Reimburse yourself for a decades worth of health care spending when you need the cash.
The Next Social network, the one what will eat Facebook's lunch, just like Facebook ate MySpace's lunch, will not be people-to-people based, but it will be People-to-topic and topic-to-topic based; media-rich and mobile-friendly.
And no, it won't be Reddit, too much Legacy crap with Reddit and not enough novelty.
Clayton Christensen would agree.
One platform I'm missing is one where I could (anonymously) talk to strangers in my area. To discuss or ask about locally relevant things, or just see what people that aren't my friends think. The apps that already exist seem to be always targeted at students.
Unfortunately, my town is going through some crap times politically and it makes it really hard to not spend time on Nextdoor just becoming enraged.
- my state - the nearest metro area of my state - politics in my state
It seems like most of the posters are actually in my local area, so it's fairly easy to kick off a discussion about some local issue. The downside is that there's a significant leftist bias (true for most of Reddit), but it's fine if you take that into account.
Reddit is a web forum, a form of interaction that predates social networks; they never went away. Reddit is just the best platform yet for creating and hosting them.
This form of interaction—short conversations organized by topic—predates even the Web, via newsgroups. It is one of the oldest patterns of interaction on the Internet. For a few people it arguably even predates the Internet, via direct-dial BBS.
Using your example of /r/investing, if you propose anything which isn't a broad market index your post just doesn't get seen, it just buried under 10 other comments which blindly followed the subs meta.
I believe a sub is best when its small and focused, 5-10k subs max. Beyond that the ideas and culture get diluted by the mass mob. God help you if your little sub ever ends up on the front page, may as well just shut it down at that point.
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.
Google gives me this article about the new trend: https://reclaimthenet.org/this-community-is-available-in-the...
Maybe it's specifically targeting certain browsers/platforms. I'm on Firefox on Android, maybe they're specifically targeting iOS?
https://www.reddit.com/r/frugal_jerk/
I can find topic related to all my interests - finance, economy, devops, machine learning, politics, sports, specific country and even things like walmart and costco.
Although effectiveness of advice can vary depending on topic (people are pretty opinionated on certain subreddits) but overall, it is a great community effort.
How can you tell the difference between an individual and a corporate shill account to a degree that you can make this statement?
- > 1M subscribers - most definitely filled with shills - > 100k subscribers - probably lots of shills - < 50k subscribers - probably not many shills
I try to avoid big subs and stick mostly to smaller subs.
> When the shoeshine boys talk stocks it was a great sell signal in 1929
https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
https://i.imgur.com/V8zRG5C.jpg