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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   24843 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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It's All Astroturf

I came across this post today comparing two Reddit threads on LateStageCapitalism, posted 10 months apart, with essentially the exact same content, including top level comments and replies but with different user names.

Discussion on HackerNews.

The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.

The alternate explanation seems obvious. Hacktivists are manipulating Reddit to promote far-left ideas, creating fake accounts to post and vote. This does not take much imagination. In fact, Trump supporters were doing the very same thing in 2016 prior to being stomped by the site admins.

You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated. It doesn't take many votes to sway things in one direction or another. All it takes is a few downvotes to keep dissenting voices from even appearing in front of real users. On the other hand, with a few upvotes, your own content will be featured front and center. It's comically easy to achieve.

It's been said that most of what you read on line is written by crazy people. I think it's worse. I think it's written by people who are trying to manipulate you.

That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts

... How sure are you of that? I'd buy a few hundred reddit accounts with 10k karma each if they sold at 10c a pop right now (they're easier to have sister-site style fun with), but alas based on both my memory and checking of sites for buying and selling reddit accounts, aged accounts with good karma can sell for tens or hundreds of dollars (and several of the $10-100+ accounts are sold out). There's great breadth and depth in the online advertising market, and there are plenty of ways to use reddit accounts with enough karma and history to get past various automated filters. You don't even necessarily need to sell the accounts if you spam with them yourself.

And bots reposting the exact same content from a year ago is not something exclusive to political subreddits, I see the same thing on every other subreddit very frequently.

I can also say from personal experience that reddit does actively fight vote manipulation with account suspension and removing the involved upvotes.

You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated. It doesn't take many votes to sway things in one direction or another. All it takes is a few downvotes to keep dissenting voices from even appearing in front of real users. On the other hand, with a few upvotes, your own content will be featured front and center. It's comically easy to achieve.

So, I don't really think this is true. Certainly there's a lot of attempted manipulation, and some of it works, but mostly I think that good content gets popular and bad content doesn't. Up until reddit directly banned all the wrongthink, it was quite popular, you'd think the hypothesized manipulation would've stopped that.

A tad late to this but can give info as a former reddit powerjanny (I figure Zorba knows who I am, or will with this mention)

Mods of even the largest subs are given no tools to identify bad users. We were never told by admins when a brigade was happening, we had no method of specifically detecting brigades, we had bots that would ping if a thread was linked and we would sometimes get warnings from other mods, but that's it. My default when I see a locked thread with mods complaining about brigading is the thread was just especially provocative.

Spam is the majority of bad user activity on reddit. If it's a picture of the sort of shit you'd find in a gift shop--like shirts and mugs--in almost every instance it was a spammer. A second account would comment asking "Where can I get this?" and then either OP or a third account would reply with a link. Then there's the submission and comment reposting mentioned here, very common, and accounts we'd label auction accounts. Those accounts followed a pattern so clear you could look at the first page of their profile and know, not that this was hard. It'd be like 2-3 submissions, 2-3 comments made in the last few days from a >6 month old account. These were different than the word-for-word repost bots, as repost bots only very rarely messaged modmail while the latter would frequently message with invariably broken English of such content as "Why ban" or "And why is ban??" (That why.)

There is also the paid political activity on reddit. Some are mods, most don't need to be paid, they happily follow party line. It's easy to look at political subs, especially the new ones that have started popping up this year and will continue to pop up ahead of the election, and see the same usernames in the mod lists, and other usernames posting links to those subs and other political subs, all pushing narrative. I'd imagine if you opened politics right now it wouldn't take long to find a year-old account with more than a million post karma that constantly posts articles hating on the right, that person is paid for what they do. And, yknow, don't forget Ghislaine Maxwell. As to those random subs popping, the paid users either start new ones or take over dead ones, then upvote bot submissions in their critical windows so they're pushed to wider visibility and actual users start upvoting.

As for LSC, I'd imagine most specifically bad use there is spammers and powerusers farming karma, with a minority of the paid users who will post whatever boo Trump or boo Righties article to every possibly relevant sub.

I'd be happy to answer or try to answer other questions. I started before Trump arrived and the site lost its mind, I thought it'd be interesting, it was, it quickly turned terrible. I stayed day-to-day to ban spammers, I stayed long-term to enforce no politics and keep frothing ideologues off the mod list.

Great post and I think it provides valuable context.

powerusers farming karma

But... why? There is no use to karma. I have lots of karma on Reddit. Trust me it's useless. This isn't Twitter. Posts from users with 1 million karma are not given more visibility than posts from users with 100 karma.

The game is not farming karma for $$$. The game is trying to capture Reddit for the left. And it worked.

Mods of even the largest subs are given no tools to identify bad users. We were never told by admins when a brigade was happening, we had no method of specifically detecting brigades

As to those random subs popping, the paid users either start new ones or take over dead ones, then upvote bot submissions in their critical windows so they're pushed to wider visibility and actual users start upvoting.

It's just so easy. 0.01% of users can control the narrative quite easily. Just create a bunch of accounts to upvote/downvote during the critical window right after posts or comments are submitted. They aren't even "bots". They're real people using VPNs.

Trump supporters did it back in 2016. Then they got banned. Now only the left is allowed to do it.

Farming karma has gotta be a mix of things. I hate powerusers and would pretty aggressively ban them so I never bothered to talk with them to figure out their motivations, I'm sure it's a combination of things, any, all. Seeing the number go up, seeing all the notifications from comments on a post, seeing it on the front page of /r/All, especially #1. "Being the best" (at reddit, lol, lmao). Po-mo attention seeking, at any rate.

I never cared about the karma game enough to know the tricks. I know that >150 upvotes on a new post in around 15 minutes would usually be enough to get a post on the front page of a sub in old reddit. I don't know what it takes to get an obscure sub's posts to wide visibility. I don't see a reason it couldn't be several people swapping accounts, though the botting there seems easier since presumably it'd take 1-2 people.

TD figured out, or else perfected the technique, that stickying a post would significantly boost its visibility so they constantly rotated stickies. They were absolutely gaming the system, but I think the above is how. The admins worked against them of course, with the infamous example of them screwing up and making like 25/25 /r/All being TD, and later when people figured out via reddit advertising how TD had an audience comparable to /r/politics despite an ostensible order of magnitude fewer subscribers. I don't remember the sequence, but that general time period was when /r/politics had its big changeover in mods, paid actors among them.

Could it be they farm for getting above a threshold -- some subs have a minimum karma for posting or commenting -- and the farmers sell on to Guerilla marketing for the product placement con job that amazingly many don't see through.

It is a miracle that anyone volunteers to use Reddit at all given the degree of fake corporate slime, censorship and totalitarian level groupthink.

Of course I browse it a lot and only have the dopamine addiction to blame. I have given up commenting as it's lower resolution than ChatGPT4.

The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.

I've repeatedly encountered sophisticated repost bots making non-political posts, though never an entire thread like that. For example, I've seen bots that will post on /r/videos copying the top comment on the linked Youtube video, to get upvoted posts that are harder for Reddit to recognize as copies. In one case people noticed the comment was strange because it mentioned the year, which wasn't the same year the Reddit comment was made. That does not seem like something you would go to the bother of programming if there was no value in it. Reddit's spam filters treat accounts differently if they have an organic-seeming history of upvoted comments, so people who sell Reddit accounts want a way to create those at scale. Reddit might also treat real-seeming accounts differently when it comes up voting, so upvote-buying services might benefit from such accounts as well.

There are professional social media botting firms that also do political posts either for money or just in their spare time. The people who work there support the cause and they can use it to sell clients on their work.

I followed a few of these types of accounts, the ones that would repost old stuff to farm karma. Some of them were on /r/4chan, some were on bigger subs like /r/pics or /r/funny. What I saw was that a lot of them get banned pretty quickly, but some of them turned around and sold their account to a third party. The most common client seemed to be porn actresses trying to sell their videos. It seemed like the ones farming accounts were typically from 3rd world countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, although I bet there's pretty stiff competition from chatGPT now.

Reposting something popular is pretty common, and I don't think it's particularly harmful even if it's a little annoying to see the same thing (but how many of us even remember Reddit posts from years ago)? There's a big difference between that sort of thing, and political manipulation via buying upvotes, which is theoretically doable but I don't think anyone has shown real evidence that it's widespread. The layman's idea is politics is an arena drenched in money with moustache-twirling villains engineering everything behind the scenes, but in reality it has a lot less money than the power it wields would presumably incentivize, mostly due to coordination problems.

Seeing an entire Reddit thread with similar comments is very strange, and it's a shame that the new thread you mentioned got taken down as I would have very much liked to examine some of the accounts to see what they're up to.

Reposting something popular is pretty common, and I don't think it's particularly harmful even if it's a little annoying to see the same thing (but how many of us even remember Reddit posts from years ago)?

I think that there's a big difference between reposting good content and reposting someone else's post wholesale while pretending it is an original contribution for ulterior motives (political or pecuniary). Technically you're right when you say that it isn't particularly harmful, in the same sense that when you come home to find a thief picking the lock on your front door it isn't actually harmful because you were going to open the door anyway. Those accounts cause only minor problems when they're being created, but think about what happens when one of those accounts actually gets sold or otherwise activated - nobody is going to buy or create a fake account because they want to do something good for the original community. Whether they're trying to shape opinions/discourse or simply sell a product, they still cause damage to the social fabric and cohesion of whatever community they start sprouting up in.

nobody is going to buy or create a fake account because they want to do something good for the original community.

I don't think this is necessarily true. Reddit has a lot of silly or dumb rules... that's part of why this site decided to separate in the first place! I'm fine with Onlyfans sloots slinging their wares on the proper subreddits if that's what they want to do, and I really haven't seen much of an issue with pornspam on unrelated subs. All purchased accounts that I saw advertised on NSFW subs.

I'll believe political manipulation via bought accounts is a problem when I see actual evidence, but so far it's mostly been lacking. At least, I don't think it's much of an issue in comparison to the stuff the Reddit admins themselves are already doing via biased moderation policies.

I think there’s probably a good amount of political manipulation just like there are accounts that give high reviews to products or to review bomb rivals.

Pushing political views online on any site has a whole host of advantages.

1). It’s cheap. If I can get a package deal for 50-100 bots for less than $500, then this is going to be much cheaper than trying to use traditional advertising in the same platform, to say nothing of traditional TV, radio, or print advertising. This means that a single person can get thousands of views and upvotes on a topic with little investment. If I wanted to promote Jill Stein (who’s running for Pres. with the Green Party) spending $500 to get 10,000 views is pretty cheap.

2). It at least looks organic. People generally scroll past advertisements or ignore them. Ad blockers are common. Very very few people see an ad and pay attention to it. But if they see a post on their social media, they might read it and the comments below and thus the owner of the accounts has some opportunity to make their case.

3). You can quite easily tailor your message to specific people and interests. If I wanted to convince Biden voters to vote Stein, I go to progressive subs. I don’t have to get into conservative and pro Trump areas at all.

I'm pretty big into the political scene, and I haven't heard of any major campaigns using Reddit bots to any degree. There's two problems. The first is the tradeoff between price and effectiveness, where cheap stuff isn't particularly effective and effective stuff isn't cheap (at least relative to traditional advertisements). The second problem is that it's against ToS so most strategists and consultants shy away from it. It would be pretty obvious if they used typical campaign advertisements and just had bots upvoting them, so to get around that they'd need a second ecosystem of secret internet-only advertisements which would make costs balloon further. What you're saying isn't wrong, but I just haven't seen it happen to any real degree.

Microtargeting has been tried a lot but is just not effective.

Eglin Air Force base was the most reddit-addicted city back in 2013. Narrative control is useful for any state, you want to promote certain causes and shout down opponents.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160410083943/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html?m=1

Couldn’t this stat just be explained by members of the Chair Force brave pilots having far too much time on their hands at the airbase? I’m not incredulous of the idea that political or governmental actors are attempting to manipulate consensus via botting and astroturfing (it’s been confirmed that the feds have done this in quite a few cases IIRC), but I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing in this particular statistic from 2013.

I don't think this is necessarily true.

I do not believe for a single second that anyone in the history of the entire world has ever said "I have a great, on-topic and timely post to share with this reddit community, but my account is too new. I'm going to purchase an account with a pre-existing history so I can share this incredible post with a community that I have no pre-existing engagement with."

Spotting accounts like this harvesting karma is like spotting people who are in the middle of getting their robbery tools ready - the only purpose for what they're doing is so that someone else later on can break the rules while making them so money.

Reddit has a lot of silly or dumb rules... that's part of why this site decided to separate in the first place!

No? The Motte tried to actually avoid breaking the rules of Reddit, and we split because we knew that not actually breaking the rules wasn't going to be a defence against the eye of Sauron making sure that there weren't any visible communities of people talking about how lightning strikes seem to appear before the thunder - or at least that's how I recall it.

It also had silly and dumb rules. I'm pretty sure speech codes were explicitly racist, for example.

"I have a great, on-topic and timely post to share with this reddit community, but my account is too new. I'm going to purchase an account with a pre-existing history so I can share this incredible post with a community that I have no pre-existing engagement with."

I didn't say anything like that so I don't know where you got that.

Spotting accounts like this harvesting karma is like spotting people who are in the middle of getting their robbery tools ready

Comparing Reddit upvotes to burglars ransacking peoples' homes is laughably hyperbolic. Again, I've only ever seen these bots end up either 1) getting banned, or 2) advertising for porn on NSFW subs, which is fine. The assumption that they have to be doing something bad doesn't really hold up to the benign results I've seen.

The Motte tried to actually avoid breaking the rules of Reddit, and we split because we knew that not actually breaking the rules wasn't going to be a defence against the eye of Sauron

I was referring to rules as they're enforced. Reddit's rules might be fine if applied evenly, but they're still problematic with how they're enforced.

I didn't say anything like that so I don't know where you got that.

This is the thought process of someone deciding to purchase a pre-existing account with karma in order to get around reddit rules as you suggested in your previous post.

Comparing Reddit upvotes to burglars ransacking peoples' homes is laughably hyperbolic.

Of course - but that doesn't do anything to change the point I'm making, which is that people pumping up fake accounts, whether to sell to others or use for marketing, is actually the act of preparing to break the rules in letter and spirit. Selling the accounts for these purposes is in fact bad by itself if you care about the community at all (I don't for the record, but c'est la vie).

Btw: it was the right decision to flee reddit. Before their IPO recently they banned a few inconvenient subreddits. The specific case I know was that a country had two subs, a bigger progressive one and a smaller right wing one, and the latter was heavily brigaded and any small infraction was reported. It was then closed by the admins as causing too much work and being badly moderated (which it wasn’t).

What I saw was that a lot of them get banned pretty quickly, but some of them turned around and sold their account to a third party.

But... why? Reddit users don't have followers like Instagram or Tiktok.

There's almost no value to a Reddit account, even if they have 1 million karma.

New Reddit has followers, it's had them for years. Following someone is approximately equivalent to Old Reddit's friend feature, though I think you can only see your own follower count or it may have a privacy toggle somewhere. If you pull up /r/friends on old reddit you'll get a feed of posts from people you've added as a friend, and since that doesn't require the other person to accept a friend request, it's functionally a follow.

/images/17145786036956487.webp

Karma is people liking you.

I just bought an account with 1 million karma. Now I want to reach all the people who like me so I can spam my product.

Oh wait... I can't.

Karma is absolutely useless beyond a minimal amount needed to get around spam filters on some subs.

Well, I know some subreddits ban accounts under a certain age, and Reddit likely has additional filters for accounts that come on and immediately start advertising for porn. Buying someone else's account that has at least some legitimate-looking activity probably goes a long way to evading that.

These are the type of posts which reach the front page of Reddit. The first one had 15.8k upvotes which means it reached hundreds of thousands of people.

The value of spreading a political message at that scale is far in excess of the value of a porn bot.

Right, these politically motivated reposts are interesting to me simply due to novelty so I wanted to investigate more, but alas it seems that the duplicated post with comments has been scrubbed.

You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated.

You ever notice how political arguments usually have the same arguments, even the same sources? Plenty spreads through the networks of social media, I'm sure, but the idea that they're working from the same songbook because it's been provided to them by an organization is pretty credible. There's a LOT of money floating around, ready to chase after social influence.

Some of that is organic follow-the-leader, though. Important and influential activist posts thing, everyone else does too.

I'm guessing the first post is all real people and the second one is bots copying it. All the comments in the second post were posted within a very short period of time on a new post by accounts with usernames typically used by bots.

The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.

Your rebuttal makes no sense. The argument is that these accounts are pretending to be people to sway people's decisions on the products they buy. The commercial value of an account doesn't factor into it.

Did you read the threads? The comments were all political, not selling products.

Also, as a Reddit user, I can tell you that I almost never encounter any "bots" shilling products. It simply doesn't work. You can go into a user's history quite easily. And if someone posts 10 comments for "Product X rules!", someone else will notice, post that, and they'll be downvoted to oblivion.

There is value to be had in chilling the room and creating a false consensus in an overall community.

The argument is that this is how they gain provenance. Since people are suspicious of new accounts, gaining karma and age by commenting is the solution. The bots don't care who they are copying, only that there is someone to copy.

Secondly, the fact that a person can go into another's history doesn't mean they will, and it doesn't mean that you'll be able to pick out a pattern. What if an account just belongs to someone who is both deadset on the products they like and genuinely provides them as support. No one is out here saying "Product X rules!", the examples on HackerNews literally involved "talking" about the issue and what is supposedly "good" to use.

I have a question, tangentially related but actionable nevertheless.

Every single information and/or discussion channel/forum is getting shittier and shittier. I posit that in addition to algorithms maximizing engagement or minimizing whatever, it's also the userbase. The average user is getting younger, less attentive and mostly importantly dumber. And this will only get worse as more of the third world with their sub 100 IQ's (Indians shitting up comments is a plentiful example) gain access to the internet.

Most of the internet is already unreadable to me. Not only is the discourse vaccous, it's actively harmful to my psychological and intellectual health.

Where do I even go in 10 years? Maybe Sam Kriss was right about the internet dying. It might serve me emails and host my software creations but it will not serve people like me anymore in the near future.

The only way this will be solved is timestamped id verification, then sites can make it so you need to be a non-Indian adult to be allowed to talk on social media. Unfortunately trusting some third party id verification API is a huge privacy risk, but it'd be worth it for some sites.

This can already be done "manually" by requiring timestamped ids sent to mods but if there was a way to do it with a third party system I'd be more willing

Much of what constituted the valuable discussions on the open internet of the past now takes place in Discord.

I've been pretty terminally online since the late 90s. Through most of the aughts and even early teens, I'd estimate it was 90% forums, 10% IRC for discussions. Discord has really changed everything now. I'd estimate that the previous ratios have flipped, and at present 90% of my internet discussions are via Discord, and 10% are forums like this one, Reddit, or SA.

I blame cell phones. I'd be a better motteposter if I was on my PC.

And as you say: add a distracted teen to the phone problem and quality is horrible compared to an adult looking at a computer screen.

In 2009 I suggested Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists Linking to archived page: project name Outer Circle. It was discussed on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110 My health deteriorated. Nobody else tried implementing the ideas.

Where do I even go in 10 years?

That allows for planning ahead and maybe writing your own version of Outer Circle. The core idea is

Current approaches fail because they try to create a single forum, which requires agreement on what is good.

Shared hierarchical white-lists are a mechanism for allowing "multiple forums" to peacefully coexist with the same "comment base". You don't see shitty comments because you don't white-list them. The shitty commentators don't try to ban you because they never white-list long boring intellectuals and don't know that you exist. But there is overlap. The forums have the potential to reach critical mass, with enough commentators to sustain interest. And "freedom of speech" benefits from all content being opt-in. Every-one can ban any-one for any-reason, and that ban doesn't extend beyond their personal version of the forum.

It's like The City and the City except libertarian.

How do you resolve issues where someone you whitelisted replies to the comment of someone you haven't, and vice versa?

It’s addressed in the link. If I understand correctly: if you reply to a comment, then you “endorse” it by default, allowing people who whitelist you to see the comment. But you can also choose not to endorse a comment you reply to (in which case neither comment is seen, I think).

Where do I even go in 10 years?

We're on a site five steps removed from a LiveJournal called squid314, and I certainly wouldn't have predicted this back in April 2014. Scott had been doing SSC for about 14 months, the events that would result in GamerGate were still playing out, and I don't think /r/slatestarcodex was even around then (June 2015?).

I'd posit something like "the openness of the system can only be in proportion to the quality of the general population". As the population gets worse, more gatekeeping is required. Unified logins, generic codebases, and modern web design are on average bad signs; single-site authentication, custom codebases, and archaic design are on average good signs. A lot of commercial web design is to make it easy and attractive for anyone to participate, and in a way, I think we want the opposite. We want people who value the content enough to step outside the path of least resistance.

But there's also the problem of keeping population growth above replacement.

Gatekeeping and openness aren't exactly the same, you can be "open" and also high-quality if you're swift, brutal, and arbitrary with moderation, which is the best place to be imo.

But there's also the problem of keeping population growth above replacement.

If hypnosis works on some people, why not force people making virtual boyfriend apps into conditioning women using those apps into having a 'breeding kink' ?

I could see CPC okaying this.

My suspicion has always been that the CCP elite is less committed to increasing the birthrate than is often suggested.

They don't really need to if the rest of the world sinks even more.

I'm not sure though. They've been trying to curb excessive working hours. I doubt they're doing that so their subjects can have more leisure time.

I... was making a joke about the problem of getting new members to this forum, if we're deliberately not making it easy to join.

But OK, if we can get the makers of virtual boyfriend (or girlfriend) app to insert hypnotic suggestions to follow the "Courtesy" rules in the sidebar, that'd be a major win for humanity. Heck, even "don't be egregiously obnoxious" would go a long way toward making the Internet usable again.

The subreddit was created in early 2014.

I've been wondering if the dark web might ever become useful for that, just as something that raises the barrier to entry and keeps idiots away.

Alternatively we could paywall sites, even just like $1 to keep away spammers and low effort bullshit.

Anything that introduces friction for both high and low IQ is right out as friction will increase user base entropy. You ideally want a one time cost. Blind, a kind of 4chan for software engineers, works for tech, as you need a corporate email to get in. Lobste.rs deals with this problem by being invite only.

Blind, a kind of 4chan for software engineers

Oooooooh, I'm sold. Looks like /g/ and /pol/ had a baby. God has seen fit to let me live another day, and I'm about to make it everyone else's problem.

but where do us high-IQ aimless NEETs go to post? can I sue Blind for discrimination?

People argue in favour of Urbit a lot with this exact reasoning.

Hmm, I've never tried Urbit. Have you? Is it worthwhile, in your opinion?

I have not. It's just that a lot of people in my circles talk about it. For example, I follow Justin Murphy (who imo hosted one of the best Moldbug irl appearances) was very into it. Interestingly, most of his followers would fall into the Continental Philosophy constellation, so there's some viewpoint diversity already.

The open internet is clearly dying. Most discussion now happens now on walled gardens such as Discord and Facebook.

LLMs will make this much worse. For example, ChatGPT-5 has been presumably been trained on internet data such as as StackOverflow. But no one will post any more questions to StackOverflow since GPT-5 will just give them the answer directly. StackOverflow will die. Rinse and repeat for any site where people once posted questions.

StackOverflow has been going downhill for a long time. Goodhart's Law, "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

It's now full of thirsty newbie coders who are desperate to get answers in the hope that their StackOverflow profile will and them a job. Unfortunately being eager to help isn't useful it you're looking for specific domain knowledge.

Yeh. ChatGPT is more useful these days.

I spend nearly all of my message board time on either the Motte, Data Secrets Lox, a few other small-volume boards, and a finance board more oriented toward long-term investing. Pretty much everything else is direct blogs/substacks and an occasional quickly-regretted venture onto Twitter.

The key is smaller groups that are either gatekept or uninteresting to the general public. Everything else is garbage.

What is Data Secrets Lox? Can you describe a bit more about that?

It's the "official" builtin board style forum of (like the 3rd cousin?) of themotte. I think the relationship is roughly like:

lesswrong 
   └─> slatestarcodex ──> astralcodexten <─> datasecretslox
              └──> r/slatestarcodex ──> r/themotte ──> themotte

Obviously the full history is a bit more complicated and there is a bunch of cross mixing between the branches.

DSL was created by users of the open threads on SSC when the blog went down IIRC. So very closely related to TheMotte's origin

Yes, exactly. I would describe it as more esoteric in that there are many more threads with diverse topics. Also the general vibe is a bit more relaxed and personal beefs are tolerated somewhat more.

The finance board is just bogleheads.org which is pretty public at this point. I mostly stick to a few niche topics (like TIPS investing) that have dedicated posters, but there is a lot of good information there for people who are new to investing.

Why TIPS? Do you ladder treasuries for deep cash? SGOV/BIL holder here.

BOXX > SGOV for tax reasons, in my opinion.

More comments

The TIPS are for my version of a liability matching portfolio. The main idea is to ensure that we have an inflation-adjusted income floor in retirement that matches current spending, so that in theory our lifestyle will not need to change for financial reasons.

In our particular case I am penciling in my retirement at 63 and wife's when I am 68 (she is younger). We'll both start drawing SS when I am 70. So I need amount A for years 63-67, amount B for years 68-69, and amount C for years 70+ (currently planned through 82). These amounts are obviously estimates but reasonably good ones, and they exclude items like college which are accounted for separately. Once these floors are established, then the majority of the rest of the portfolio will be in global stock index funds with some in Treasurys.

I have about 2/3 of this locked in already. Currently there is a gap in TIPS availability from 2035-2039 which coincides with part of my plan. The 2035s will be available next year as 10y and I will just buy them as they become available. Then for some of the other years I will fill in as money becomes available.

This strategy is not for everyone but my wife is particularly risk averse and we do not need to take any additional risks to ensure a solid retirement. My goal is to preserve our current lifestyle - I'm not trying to hit the jackpot. The overall allocation is about 33% stock, 39% TIPS, 28% T-bills at this point.

a finance board more oriented toward long-term investing

Where can this board be found? :)

I am also curious and PM'd the user. I am 90% sure he's talking about Bogleheads because we live in a boring world, but hopeful for something better.

Try Gyroscopic Investing. https://www.gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/index.php

Yes that's correct, and also that we live in a boring world. Fortunately investing should be boring so that works out well. There are some occasional trainwreck posts that are entertaining, but the mods there are extremely quick on the trigger so they tend to peter out quickly.

I first started there over 20 years ago when it was much more niche and the strategies espoused were not as well known. The philosophy has probably saved/made me a few hundred thousand dollars over time versus picking my own stocks, so I have some residual good feelings.

Wouldn't mind a paywalled or otherwise well curated forum where people share their insights and research.

I was going to evaluate your intelligence and see if this post made sense, but you made your account private because you're either a coward or a dullard. Stand by what you post. I'll fight anyone anywhere.

  • -18

Wat

Though he could have put that better, I definitely agree that being able to see posting history is nicer. Occasionally I'll really like someone's post and look to see what else they've said, or what their top comments are, or what other things they might care about, so it's not just used in order to attack someone.

you're either a coward or a dullard

This is not allowed. Banned for three days.

Every single information and/or discussion channel/forum is getting shittier and shittier. I posit that in addition to algorithms maximizing engagement or minimizing whatever, it's also the userbase.

The true old timers will tell you that they wish September '93 would end.

Not that I disagree, but the observation is hardly new, and yet we're nominally still here. I sometimes wonder if it's bias in the observation, but maybe there are objective measurements somewhere.

World avg IQ is 92.

Average Internet user IQ in 92 was likely 115-125.

Some years back I was marginally active on Reddit, not at the power-janny level, a post or a comment here and there, and having a handful of accounts to upvote myself, without any bots or efforts to circumvent detection, made a notable difference in the visibility of my quips and animal videos. Still you're dead wrong. Hacktivists aren't manipulating Reddit, because manipulation implies an outcome the target isn't desiring to happen.

Do gamblers want to lose their money?

because manipulation implies an outcome the target isn't desiring to happen.

This is a good point. In the past, both left-wing groups and right-wing groups sought to manipulate Reddit. Both were successful. Back in 2016, many posts from /r/thedonald reached the front page. Then their subreddit was banned.

Now only left wing groups are allowed to manipulate Reddit. It's anarchotyranny.

Nit pick: /r/the_donald was the banned subreddit.

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