Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scrapps who wrote (20053)	2/17/2000 3:48:00 PM
From: jhild	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22053

Having posted a couple of times myself on the penny threads, I think the fall off on SI has to do with the permissiveness and lowered (lack of) standards of Yahoo and Raging Bull. The community standards in those venues permit the profane, the vulgar, the personal attacks and even seem to encourage the tyranny of the many against the few. It stands to reason that virtual boiler room operations would find it easier to promote their stocks in these highly permissive atmospheres. The pay off for the sites is measured in eyeballs not in the quality of the messages, so I think those other sites have followed a course of maximizing page impressions, at the cost of fostering open discourse. I have seen the numbers dropping since mid-summer last year. And they will likely remain that way SI has even bowed somewhat to the pressure of these competing boards in what I think is a misguided attempt to seek to look more like them and adopt some of their features such as Ignore. The crucial thing that SI has failed to focus on is the very thing that made it popular. That is the promotion of community standards, the fostering of discourse in an orderly and accountable environment and the expansion of the searching capabilities to make the historical dialog and all of the info embedded in it more accessible. I note that the Motley Fool doesn't do penny stocks, sidestepping that issue all together. What is also overlooked by that article are the realtime chat streams that are run on Yahoo, in the Yahoo Clubs. Those things are like listening in on a massive party line. I think they are even more attractive to boiler room operations as the messages there are transitory, unrecorded and unsearchable. Hence unaccountable. Several posters can man such an operation and keep it humming and promoting stocks and playing on people's emotions like a virtual version of one of those betting parlor's straight from The Sting.