Reddit Has Become the Gospel of Personal Finance (qz.com) 94
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: If you look beyond the memes, cat videos, and quirky acronyms (TIL, OP, ELI5) you'll find a treasure trove of resources that will help you quickly get acquainted with the topics that have long eluded you. For me, even though I worked on Wall Street for nearly 15 years, Reddit is the first place I turn when I have a question about money. To me, here's what makes good financial advice: objectivity, accuracy, and relatability. With an alien mascot named Snoo, an impossibly sprawling site structure, and user anonymity, Reddit may seem like an unlikely place for the serious business of money. But in fact, it has each of these qualities in spades.
According to Amazon's Alexa, Reddit is the sixth most popular site in the US; the site reported 430 million active users at the end of 2019. Reddit is organized into niche communities (known as subreddits that begin with "r/") with their own guidelines, norms, and moderators covering both mainstream (r/kpop) and obscure (r/namenerds for new parents seeking inspiration) topics. Because users self-select to be active in these communities, Redditors are known to be passionate and have been described as "offbeat, quirky, and anti-establishment." All these qualities make it a great place for conversations about money. Consider the subreddit Frugal Living (r/Frugal), which shows what allows Reddit to offer better financial advice than many of those other sites: the Redditor community. Frugal Living's mission statement is to "understand the resources that we have, and [how to spend] them wisely and deliberately" and this subreddit contains actionable tips on eking out that last bit of toothpaste, warnings that Amazon Day is pure marketing, and why you shouldn't pay for scientific journals. These posts offer encouragement, collaboration, and a relatability that's hard to find in the traditional financial press, no matter your financial situation. [...] One final word of warning: no matter whether financial advice comes from the front page of the internet or the front page of the Wall Street Journal, it's incumbent upon the buyer to scrutinize the details, lead with skepticism, and, when appropriate, consult with professionals. Some of the communities that might help you get started, as mentioned in the article, include: Personal Finance, Frugal Living, Investing, Financial Independence / Retire Early, and Stocks.
According to Amazon's Alexa, Reddit is the sixth most popular site in the US; the site reported 430 million active users at the end of 2019. Reddit is organized into niche communities (known as subreddits that begin with "r/") with their own guidelines, norms, and moderators covering both mainstream (r/kpop) and obscure (r/namenerds for new parents seeking inspiration) topics. Because users self-select to be active in these communities, Redditors are known to be passionate and have been described as "offbeat, quirky, and anti-establishment." All these qualities make it a great place for conversations about money. Consider the subreddit Frugal Living (r/Frugal), which shows what allows Reddit to offer better financial advice than many of those other sites: the Redditor community. Frugal Living's mission statement is to "understand the resources that we have, and [how to spend] them wisely and deliberately" and this subreddit contains actionable tips on eking out that last bit of toothpaste, warnings that Amazon Day is pure marketing, and why you shouldn't pay for scientific journals. These posts offer encouragement, collaboration, and a relatability that's hard to find in the traditional financial press, no matter your financial situation. [...] One final word of warning: no matter whether financial advice comes from the front page of the internet or the front page of the Wall Street Journal, it's incumbent upon the buyer to scrutinize the details, lead with skepticism, and, when appropriate, consult with professionals. Some of the communities that might help you get started, as mentioned in the article, include: Personal Finance, Frugal Living, Investing, Financial Independence / Retire Early, and Stocks.
fuck off with the reddit ads (Score:5, Insightful)
Whats with all these trash reddit topics on here lately? reddit is just another forum but a trash one. It is not a reliable, credible or reputable source of anything. It harbored the most heinous shit on the internet like death and rape shit, the place where people got dox'ed, harassed, ddosed etc and the site did nothing about it. Even the founders of that trash site confessed that they shit posted and spammed the site with alt accounts to get the site going. And their stupid moderation system encourages horde mentality and shit posting with spammy 'feel good' posts.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:fuck off with the reddit ads (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair most members of r/wallstreetbets refer to themselves as Autists.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair most members of r/wallstreetbets refer to themselves as Autists.
But they do have their own TV show now, Hundreds.
Re: (Score:2)
Pornhub is "the locus of meaningful relationships".
No, that's r/gonewild
And that's what the article is trying to say.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Exclude sites from your search engine:
Re: (Score:2)
Of course for full irony points you should have linked to instructions posted on a Reddit page...
Re: (Score:2)
As with anything, popularity ruins it. Personally I find some of the small niche subreddits that are devoted to a particular thing generally are useful, but any of the popular subreddits are trash and wastelands of misinformation.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, Reddit is the "gospel of personal finance" like Wikipedia is "the shrine of continuing self-education" or Pornhub is "the locus of meaningful relationships".
As long as you avoid the opinion type stuff, Wikipedia is quite helpful. I can't understand why nyone would go there for that stuff - we already have Slashdot.
Otherwise, I agree. If I found that my investment people were using Reddit for their "gospel" information, I'd be getting a new investment counselor immediately.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but if "offbeat, quirky, and anti-establishment" is the "Gospel of personal finance" then we don't even need the other examples, they wrote their own joke already.
Re: (Score:2)
Tag the topic as slashvertisement. :)
Re: (Score:1)
Mod parent up. Just my opinion based on my own experiences with Reddit. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed that it was possible to have worse moderation than on Slashdot. However Twitter still beats Reddit for the sheer low quality of the tripe.
Then again, if I knew someone who made financial decisions based on Reddit advice, I'd also know what to do with that bridge I bought. "Only used by a little old lady driving to church on Sundays!"
Re: (Score:2)
There is plenty of useful and reliable stuff on Reddit. Some of it is even mentioned in the summary. e.g. Amazon Prime Day is mostly marketing BS with very few actual bargains. As the frugal living subreddit often notes it's worth checking CamelCamelCamel before buying on Amazon to see if the item was previously cheaper.
For those in the UK I can also recommend HotUKDeals.com. The great thing about the internet is that we now have consumer intelligence to rival business intelligence, i.e. consumers can find
Re: (Score:2)
There is plenty of useful and reliable stuff on Reddit.
Much like Wikipedia, really. Sure, it's not completely reliable, stuff is deleted according to some bias, or just at random, and the occasional practical joke still slips by, but it's still mostly useful information. Just don't trust it blindly.
Amazon Prime Day is mostly marketing BS with very few actual bargains
Was it JC Penny that famously had it's fake sales? Everyone knew the deal, it was just an excuse to shop. When a CEO stopped the deceptive sales, consumers rebelled and demanded the fake sales back, and the CEO didn't last long. People like shopping, I guess.
Re: (Score:2)
No, that never happened. The sales were only "fake" because they always had sales. That's a fake fake sale. A real fake sale is where it says it is on sale but the "normal" price is inflated. JC Penny never did that. The normal prices were always the actual price at the other stores. You just never had to pay the normal price at JC Penny.
They didn't stop having fake sales; they made the past sales real by switching to what they had been previously been calling the "normal" price. The prices went up. The sto
Re: (Score:2)
I find the niche subreddits to be quite useful or entertaining, but 90% of what is on the front page and in the popular subs is pure cancer. And the bigger a subreddit becomes, the worse things are.
Re: (Score:3)
Reddit is a slice of the full internet: Usenet 2.0 (Score:5, Informative)
With a single login. Unlike facebook it doesn't require a real name (or even an e-mail address).
Yep, it's a place where people get doxxed, harrassed. There is/was a sub where you could watch Faces Of Death style videos. The 'defaults' (what people see with new accounts) are over run by shit low quality posts.
But it's also a place where my wife got good advice on cloth diapering (/r/clothdiapers [reddit.com]), where she talked about a lot of stuff during her pregnancy with other people in her situation (/r/BabyBumps/ [reddit.com]) anonymously without dumping it on her Facebook feed.
There are a lot of smaller subreddits dedicated ... what ever you're interested in: your university (/r/uofm [reddit.com]) or localities big and small (/r/de [reddit.com]) that are *a lot* better than their facebook counterparts.
That doesn't even get into the clusters of sebreddits and their off shoots like *gonewild subreddits where "redditors" post themselves (/r/gonewild, /r/gonewild30plus, /r/gonewild18, /r/gonewildcury) *porn subreddits which are dedicated to pretty pictures (/r/cableporn [reddit.com], a subreddit for well run ethernet cables). /r/trees, for people that smoke cannabis. /r/marijuanaenthusiasts for arborists (since the stoners took their sub).
If you just want to shitposts, there are entire subs of just doing that. An endless number of meme subreddits. Even /r/funny & /r/pics are good proxies for Facebook when you just want to scroll through something on autopilot. My toddlers loved going through /r/aww [reddit.com]
That doesn't get into the 'technical' subs like /r/ece, /r/3dprinting, /r/flashlight [reddit.com] where people actually do sit down and discuss technical things.
As others have pointed out the +- moderation of a comment just leads to bandwagoning. After a sub hits a critical mass of ~10k users it just goes to shit since it's a huge noise to signal. Bad actors make top level moderation impossible. Stick to smaller subs dedicated to a single topic.
It's usenet, and it's infinite number of groups, with a web interface and a single login. If you only went looking for shit discussion it's no doubt that's all you found.
Re: (Score:1)
It's not anything like Usenet. It's heavily censored and the mods rule the roost. Post anything that they don't like and you will be banned, even if it's well within their rules. An unlimited upvote/downvote system means that users are subject to the 'tyrrany of the majority' and factually correct posts with sources are often downvoted to oblivion if they don't fit the narrative. Same with factually incorrect posts making the front page with thousands of upvotes.
That said, there are some decent niche subred
Re: (Score:2)
It's the middle lane of Usenet that takes up the bulk of use cases.
If you want true 'freedom' you can go to voat. 4Chan still exists. The dark web is probably full of what ever you wanted to find and discuss. Stormfront runs their own forums if you really want that sort of freedom on the HTTP [stormfront.org]. [The truth is "hate" to those who hate the truth!, sounds a lot like your post.]
But for ~430M people that want an alternative to Facebook it's pretty decent.
An unlimited upvote/downvote system means that users are subject to the 'tyrrany of the majority'
Then you go hang out in places where it's not worth other pe
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Wait a moment AC, weren't you complaining about all the stuff that Reddit banned recently?
You claimed Reddit was the enemy of free speech and censorship-happy because they removed subreddits like fat shaming, incels and neo-Nazis.
But now you are saying they don't do anything to moderate the place? It's almost like there is more than one person behind the Anonymous Coward pseudonym.
Re: (Score:2)
You could be talking about the internet itself, because as a whole, it's pretty much the same. This is why all your arguments are invalid. Reddit at least takes the premise of being a democratic forum, not just your run-off-the-mill chat. Even upvotes being anonymous and the voting system being somewhat weighted on user rep is a solid practice.
Reliability on Reddit is only an issue if you go there for a source of undisputed truth, which you shouldn't. Unless you trust the original "Gospels" like that of cou
Re: (Score:2)
Whats with all these trash reddit topics on here lately? reddit is just another forum but a trash one.
"Change My View..."
Re: (Score:2)
Reddit is also known to:
1. trace exactly who you are across multiple accounts. If you have duplicate accounts to post anonymously, they know the relationship between the accounts, possibly through either ip address, browser fingerprinting, or cookies, or all of them.
2. They can and will ban you even if you _upvote_ stuff that they don't like https://www.reddit.com/r/unpop... [reddit.com]
3. There has been apparently an increase in censorship of posts critical to the Chinese since the injection of 300 millions capital htt [time.com]
Re: fuck off with the reddit ads (Score:2)
As for me, I quit Reddit and don't read unmoderated forums/chat anymore. Too much crap, too much politics and too many memes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Reddit is not a forum, it hosts forums.
Some are shitty, some are funny, and some are informative and reliable.
For example I didn't see any "death and rape shit" on r/spacex, it even achieves the feat of being really informative and not just another outlet for the cult of Elon Musk. That's just an example.
Outside of a few trash subreddits, most of reddit is actually pretty decent. It is just that for some reason, the trash is what everyone is talking about.
I see what's going on here (Score:3, Insightful)
AT&T owned Reddit
AT&T bought Slashdot
AT&T is now pushing Slashdot users to Reddit
It all makes sense now!
Re:I see what's going on here (Score:4, Funny)
I don't think Reddit needs the extra 12 users.
Re: (Score:2)
hé, not fair :-/
I like /. and I'm here since last century, browsing daily.
I'm also on reddit for ~10 years, mostly to lurk
Re: (Score:2)
Only since last century? Pshhaw, I'm here since last millennium. Get off my lawn.
Re: (Score:2)
I see it as a "quality push", with them trying to get a more sophisticated kind of spammer to litter reddit. From the guy that peddles his host-based filter to the paranoid loon who thinks everyone on the internet is out to get him, Reddit would still gain in quality if both of them moved there.
And so would Slashdot.
Oh, no it’s true! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Have this *gold* award.
Reddit is a haven... (Score:5, Insightful)
... of idiocy, corporate propaganda and guerilla marketing, with flashes of insight here and there like any mountain of shit.
The reality is that the modern internet is being used by the public, and the vast majority of the public are cretinous and gullible. Even slashdot hasn't been immune to the dumbass invasion since the internet became mainstream 20 years ago in the late 90's and early 2000's.
Watching us go from owning our PC's to not was fucking disgusting enough on it's own, either way our species is a disaster, we now have OS's spying on us and every fucking modern game or program has been client-servered to death and stolen. The corporate world has been very successful stealing software from the gullible masses and using this lack of privacy to harvest data and spy on the kids and idiot adults via steam, mmo's, f2p games, and now windows 10. Our species seems to not mind being exploited and robbed as long as they don't have to think.
Slashdot even with the invasion of the stupid by the internet now being reachable by any idiot with an internet connection instead of being primarily just nerds. The quality of discussion goes down with the proportion of the public that is drawn to the site. So in order to get those ad $ you must "grow" and that means catering ot the lowest common denominator eventually since smart people are a tiny slice of the population.
Re: (Score:2)
It is sad that the poor majority will never understand this. They will always be taken advantage of because as you just said it..
"Our species seems to not mind being exploited and robbed as long as they don't have to think."
Every election is now a race to see which politician can convince them that they will do all the thinking for them... if you just vote to give them all that power. And even though they feel the dagger in their backs... they never seem to see the dagger as it comes for them... by the ve
Re: (Score:2)
Yup. I am constantly amazed by the garbage some pimply faced kid in their parents basement can come up with! (Heh... give ‘em 20 years I guess...)
While I might give investment advice there... boy would you be a fool to trust me!
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure Slashdot started to attract a certain element in the late 90's, before that I never saw a non-technical or uninteresting article on Slashdot. Probably went downhill when they let CmdrTaco log into the site.
Lose money with friends! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This covers all investing advice, actually.
Accepting investment advice underperforms an index fund. Guaranteed. It doesn't matter who your advisor is.
Target audience (Score:2)
Clearly this was not written for a millennial audience. We know how reddit works, thanks.
The Gospel, eh? (Score:2)
Does it promise to resurrect my Lucent stock?
Re: (Score:2)
Does it promise to resurrect my Lucent stock?
Wow! I forgot about Lucent. Used to have some stock too...
Re: (Score:2)
You sold that to Alcatel, you just don't remember.
If you want to own shares in it's afterlife, that is called Nokia.
Reddit? (Score:1)
Isn't the mod culture a problem? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and learning new guidelines for each topic becomes a job of its own on that site
Still better than having 100's of accounts across the web, linux, rpi, centos, programming, amd, intel, and any other hobbie or even sex advice.
Re: (Score:2)
but personal finance is highly subjective
What? NO! Didn't read the summary??
For me, even though I worked on Wall Street for nearly 15 years, Reddit is the first place I turn when I have a question about money. To me, here's what makes good financial advice: objectivity, accuracy, and relatability.
Reddit is the bastion of objective financial advice, someone on Wall Street said so.
Re: (Score:1)
The difference between Slashdot and them now is they've got "eking out that last bit of toothpaste".
I'm sold.
Re: (Score:1)
Are -any- of you not Cowards?
Speaks louder than anything I'd say here. And besides, as I've tediously made the fact clear enough already, evolution will eliminate every single person in "r/godisnotreal", down to the last self-identifying animal, without the slightest question about it.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
I've found out the hard way that the moderators there have way too much power. I commented in one thread, adding to a joke about shaking hands with politicians while ill. Was it a good joke? Definitely not. Just a stupid one off comment that I figured one person might be mildly amused by and would then disappear into the ether. A few people responded, adding to the joke.
Then, all of a sudden, I got a message that I was permanently banned from the group for "making death threats" and the entire thread was de
I don't think it's a matter of power (Score:2)
Tendies and Gay Bears (Score:2)
Others (Score:2)
Bogleheads.org forum and wiki (Score:5, Insightful)
is by far the best resource for long term investing.
The most important things are:
1. you savings rate
2. minimize fees - they should be 0-0.15% ER, for a total US market or S&P (yes, 0% is possible)
3. minimize taxes (see bogleheads wiki page on efficient placement of funds)
4. use index funds - not everyone can outsmart everyone else at the same time, and markets are efficient.
5. choose a reasonable asset allocation, but don't sweat it too much
6. rebalance by buying more, perhaps once a year if in retirement. Don't panic. Ignore financial news, it's 99% useless and no longer news by the time you're hearing it.
Re: (Score:2)
Joined Vanguard Diehards on Morningstar in 1998, Moved across when they established the Bogleheads site. More practical financial advice on that site than any other site on the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
There are much better finance communities (Score:4)
I trust the Boglehead forums: https://www.bogleheads.org/for... [bogleheads.org]
They have sane moderators that keep salespeople and spammers out and the topics are usually on-point. Some funny ones, too (like the one about the guy who bought a house with a safe without a copy of the combination).
Plus, their buy-and-hold focus makes sense and has saved me oodles.
Re: (Score:2)
+1. It's an extremely valuable and educational resource.
15 year exp in wallstreet! (Score:2)
after 15 years working in wall street, goes to look for financial advice on reddit.
says a lot about wall street.
Gospel? (Score:2)
Fictitious info about non-existing things?
The trajectory is clear (Score:5, Interesting)
First round back in the days was Usenet. Bjarne Stroustrup himself would post in comp.lang.c++ [stroustrup.com] and even get into flame wars. The PIGS (poor indian graduate students) developed a Travel Agents Survey. [ A sample [infolanka.com]]. Those days plane tickets to India would be bought en-bloc by consolidators and resold through travel agents. Prices, quality of service and trust worthiness varied a lot. So, an early user driven review service was created in soc.culture.indian. It grew well, and it almost became the defacto consulting tool among us. Yeah, crowd sourced info can be amazingly and incredibly accurate defying normal expectations.
More people would remember the early days of Wikipedia. Passionate people creating and curating info in their domain of knowledge. Arcane histories like the movement of SMS Emden in the WWII or the drinking songs sung in the garrisons of the East India Company in South India its influence on classical Karnatic music [wikipedia.org]. Well researched, well documented and accurate.
What happened to Usenet, what happened to early Wikipedia will happen to Reddit. Selfish people with ulterior motives will infiltrate the community, subvert it for their own purposes, and destroy it.
Game theory predicts, a population of all "doves" is very vulnerable. It would take very few "hawks" to wreak damage. With hindsight I see now that America was kind of all "doves" when it comes to law obedience, when I came to the graduate school in the 1990s. Stores trusted you when you returned merchandise, the banks would trust your word when you call them by phone. Coming from India where people are very suspicious, I was very very surprised by it. Decades of strong law enforcement has driven out all the hawks and the society had become all doves.
Then, Internet came, Suddenly all the scamsters in the world had direct access to the trusting rich population of America. Old generation seniors are still falling for the "This is the IRS calling, you are going to be arrested, unless you give me 500$ right now" calls.
Anyone who takes financial advice (Score:2)
from the sort of people who frequent reddit deserves whatever happens to them. The same goes for all the "social media" sites/apps like facebook, etc.
Reddit is a great example of the "wisdom of crowds".
Reddit is a sewer.
Not with MY money!
Delete your account, don't look at it, don't click any links to it, don't forward anything that anyone else sends to you. Shut them down.
Am I the only 6 ... (Score:2)
On the few occasions I tried, it seemed like a random jumble of posts with no discernable information structure.
Between it and Pinterest, I can't figure out which to give the most useless UI award to
Re: Am I the only 6 ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Pump and Dump? (Score:1)
Since when does slashdot.org become another pump and dump scheme?