While I do occasionally hear rumors that SI is for sale, none of which have panned out, I haven't heard any rumors that it'll be shut down.
My belief that it'll eventually shut down is based solely on my personal observations of the following:
1. How it's doing (posting activity trends).
2. How it's managed.
3. How I expect Naveen Jain to feel about SI.
1. Though I haven't specifically run any measurements lately, casual observation tells me posting activity is still waning. Especially stock-specific commentary. My WAG would be that the site gets fewer than 4k posts per day now and fewer than 1000 per day related to any specific stock or the market as a whole.
It's not the site it used to be. It's just where some of us die-hards still hang out as a community. Not to dismiss the handful of very excellent threads that're still market-specific. There's just a LOT less of that anymore.
2. I hesitate to be too harsh about a former employer, but in retrospect, my views as an employee were likely just as obvious by what I wouldn't say. So.... SI has been very aggressively mismanaged since the reins were snatched from the Dryers and Jill. I think Shannon Callies represented a real good chance of turning things around, but we'll never know.
It's been "managed" and "improved" for years by people who don't understand message boards from a fundamental "software application" standpoint, don't understand the people who populate such sites, and definitely don't understand the kinds of people that populate THIS site.
A perfect example (that I tried to correct, then failing that, tried to distance myself from) is the still prevalent tendency to "bullshit a bullshitter", or say "Thanks for bringing such and such to our attention. We'll get right on it. Your input is valuable to us. Really, it is. Seriously." right in the faces of precisely the demographic that's the best (bar none) at assessing the written word, comparing it to past and present reality, and recognizing rhetoric and hyperbole when it's encountered and interpreting it correctly.
Or, to put a finer point on it, BS'ing exactly the worst people on the planet to BS. It highlights ignorance of a prime tenet of public speaking (after all, all SI is indeed a stage and we're all the players), "Know your audience". And is a glaring example of what I've long felt a "problem" was for SI: not knowing or understanding its market.
Brad and Jeff understood us because they were us.
There. I said it. As you can tell, that one's been stuck in my craw for a very long time. <g>
3. I can't imagine any way that SI can be making a profit. I could very easily be wrong, but I don't think I am. NJ, I'm certain, will only tolerate losses for a finite amount of time. Especially from a property that's in the segment he's stated he wants out of. Even if they're keeping it alive "for the technology", they'll find that the technology is worthless. Too many competing technologies out there that are a LOT better. Their inability to derive any income from deploying the technology (they're too late to that game and too poorly-equipped) will be, IMO, what shuts it down. Until then, I think it's being kept alive only as a futile attempt to "showcase" the technology and perhaps rely on the sheer size of the beast to give the tech some cred.
I think that money (less of it nowadays) can still be made running a decent stock message board, but I'm convinced that not only does INSP have no interest in doing so, they lack the ability to do so. |
