For me, what sets SI apart from the other financial bulletin board sites is the high quality of the posts. I come for information, analysis and understanding, and at SI, I get it. There are numerous financial data sites on the web where I can get analyst reports, consensus estimates, fundamental or technical analysis, etc. I don't need that from SI, so focusing on improving it seems to me a low value exercise. If they enhance this aspect of the site in a way that improves over what I'm currently doing, I'll use it, but it's not a big deal to me.
What SI gives me that I don't get elsewhere is access to the thoughts and ideas of a significant number of very bright, incisive people who bring their different experience and perspectives to the task of predicting the future so we can make money in the market. They post press releases & stories from different media around the world to insure that we all have the facts, all of them. Even more valuable, though, is the insight I gain when these stories are analyzed six ways from Sunday until every significant morsel of value has been made clear and evident. After using SI for a couple of years, I feel I understand the companies I follow better than I ever did before, and I not only invest more profitably, but with more confidence.
I'm interested in enhancements that improve this aspect of SI. The rest is fine, but much of the passionate dialog going on here is over relatively unimportant stuff, and we're missing opportunities to make real substantive improvements.
Several of my current favorite ideas follow:
1. Improved searching, as has been mentioned many times, will add significant value. Enhancements should include both People and Subjects, lengthening the depth into the past searches can go, and adding more control over searches (and, or, not, phrases, etc.).
2. Performance improvements will help me read more posts so I can find the good ones. "Next 10" is a start, but why not "All Remaining" too? This is a great feature and I have heard almost no feedback on it other than many people saying they LOVE "Next 10". Well, if you think "Next 10" is great, you ain't seen nothing yet.
3. Enhancements which raise the average quality (or average perceived quality which is nearly as good) of the posts I see. For example, how about a feature which cut down on the number of redundant posts. This might be done with a check, at the same time spell check is run, against the last 100 posts to see if the link in the current post has already been posted in that thread. Then number of essentially duplicate posts is high and wasteful. Members could still post it if they wanted, but if notified that it was already out there, most posters wouldn't, given that so many of them later waste another post apologizing for wasting the first one.
Another post-improver enhancement is the ability to selectively ignore certain posts. Many posts are worthless and if you didn't have to see them your experience would be significantly improved. Not everyone feels this way, of course, so implementing it would be optional. Not everyone has the same ideas on what to filter out or ignore, so there would be varying ways to do it, again all optional and controlled in one's profile.
One choice would be to be able to mark certain posters to be ignored always. Whenever their post came up, SI would act as if it wasn't there. When a member hit next, say on post 345, and post 346 was from a person marked to be ignored, the jump would go to 347 instead. When you hit "Next 10" it would show the next 10 not ignored posts. I know some people who only post trash and I'll never miss anything from them. Of course, they still get to post, and those who don't expressly ignore them still get to read all their stuff, but MY thread experience will be improved.
Another enhancement along this same line is the ability to choose to ignore replies to people that one has marked to be ignored. Some posters are not only not worth reading, but they are also good at pushing the buttons of otherwise intelligent and valuable SI members. Those folks often can't help themselves getting into a tit-for-tat with the so called thread morons, and they wind up wasting a huge portion of an otherwise valuable thread. If you didn't have to wade through this crap, your experience reading the thread would be greatly improved. Again, no one is being censored in any way. Some threads have been totally ruined in this way, and this is a way of preventing this from happening without resorting to trying to censor anyone. Best of both worlds. Imagine if every thread you read were as valuable as the best one you read. This wouldn't do it, but it would help.
Another way to improve the average value of the posts I read would be to eliminate the off-topic posts from view. Sometimes I want to read them and sometimes I don't, depending on my situation at the time and my mood. I'd like control because it would improve the value of SI to me. Suppose there were a button in the response window somewhere, where a poster could, optionally, flag their post as OT. Then another filter option could be added to the profile where a person could choose to ignore OT posts. I think this would work because so many posters currently try to indicate that their posts are OT.
SI is a community, but it is not the same community to everyone, nor should it be. The fact that this community is virtual enables us to manage it in ways we cannot apply to physical world. I for one would like to focus our efforts more in this direction because I think we'll get more for it. Now how about some feedback? |
