What should CAPS blogs be?
November 19, 2009
– Comments (79)
I ask in all sincerity. Just brainstorming/thinking aloud here, all ideas/criticisms welcome.
At least for me the CAPS blogosphere experience here over the last year or so seems to be drifting into "I hate/love gov't action/program/plan 987161616.3a" or "my political worldviews are totally awesome" or "the world is aflame with fire that is hot - the inferno conspiracy" and unfortunately sometimes a "this dude annoys me" rant place. Some of the rants are quite entertainingly well done. But that's not the point.
In general I personally find that kind of discourse to not be very helpful to me. There's nothing wrong with it but it's not what I come here for. My intent with coming to the Fool is researching /discussing markets and investments so I can be a better investor and If I help someone else well that's good too. I don't think I've ever made money off a rant, even the ones I happen to like.
Granted the unfortunate reality is the gov't actions of late are hugely determinant to market matters on things ranging allover from its' valuation to its' component members future business models. So it is to some degree unavoidable to say talk about Oil business without taking the FED, treasury, your mom's vote etc. into consideration. But at the end of the day when I'm at CAPS, I'm primarily interested in the investments not the gov't stuff.
What I'm increasingly not getting as an enduser is investment ideas from the blogs here. I get plenty from the pitches and the CAPS game itself still. Still I can certainly see why many of my favorite CAPS bloggers here seem to be disengaging from CAPS. The blogs are the best way to interact with people here since the pitch interface is fairly incomplete, so if you can't get what you consider to be good investing discussions there, then you might consider leaving altogether. Some have already done this.
It's utterly amazing to me how different the blogopshere has become from the discussion boards here. I don't think that was the Fool's initial intent. Evenso I think it's inarguable that the equity discussions are far better on many of the boards, despite the fact that GUI is much much better here (the boards are fairly hard to navigate and not very easy on the eyes).That might be because they have segregated discussions by topic/club etc. So if you want stock talk and only stock talk, it is easier to find.They have plenty of rant boards too, if that's your thing.
Frankly in my opinion there are far far better places on the web for rant content than the Fool Blogs no matter your persuasion (mainly due to the fact that other places make it their speciality and their users mostly come for that one purpose), whereas getting good stock discussions in my experience is fairly rare. And getting semi-civil discussions with the the humor the Fool participants are very well known for is virtually impossible.
I don't think any one person is responsible for this evolution. Even if someone/s was/were I don't care who that might or might not be. The who is unhelpful, the What may be
My best guess is that it's a systemic shift half unintentionally driven by the site's design (lumping all blogs together) and half driven by the enormous events in the world of the last years. Maybe the blogs should have more divisions like the boards so they can be more context sensitive, or maybe that wouldn't help. Maybe it's just a result of a blog format vs a msg board format. Maybe all discussions/news sites devolve in talk radio/opinion infotainment style discusssions. Couldn't tell ya, I'm not a website designer.
but it does concern me when I see guys put their own research (e.g. Wax and stocki711) which likely take several arduous hours to put together get significantly outdrowned REC and comment wise by the "latest outrage of the day" 10 minute rant. I hate to see guys like that quit, or not be as active because they don't get enough feedback/attention.
(let's face it, if you bust your butt on something , you choose to share it but few even acknowledge it, you are less likely to share future work I would think )
The fundamental analysis guys seem to get it worse than the TA guys which is funny the Fool has a rep for being fundamentally oriented. Maybe its cause TA guys tend to post charts. People do like pictures.
In any event I wonder if now isn't a bad time (with the next CAPS upgrades purportedly close to release) to reexamine what the blogs are and what they should/could be
So Fellow Fools let me ask you these questions-
Am I nuts or is there an unaddressed growing problem here?
And if you do think this place isn't living up to its potential what do you think would be the best way to address that?
In either case what do you want out of CAPS blogs?
Anyway I'm curious to see if I'm the only one who feels this way. If I am , maybe it's I who needs to change.
p.s. If you want to accuse me of being the pot calling the kettle black, not going to fight ya. I'd say guilty as charged. I'm well aware that my own blog quality is all over the map. Sometimes it's good , sometimes it's bad. Occasionally I do whine about things I don't like, some other times I'll merely highlight an investing article I find interesting. So I'm aware I have plenty of room to be a better blogger.
p.p.s. I'm also aware of the potential hypocrisy that this very blog could qualify in some minds as a "this dude annoys me" blog when I derided those above. Hopefully you won't view it that way, as my intent is to be constructive. Whether I've succeeded in that I'll defer to you.
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