The discussion has dried up. May be divi should post BRK vs SPY performance
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You wonder how many of the regulars from the old boards made the transition. Stats on the most active recent post show 40+ users.
Active users are here but maybe watching and lurking while they learn the new system.
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I could see people waiting and watching since the change to the new boards are quite the transition.
While I knew I obtained a lot of value from the old boards, I severely underestimated how much I enjoyed and profited from the posts. That said, I think I’m in the very small minority of individuals not wanting to revert to the old message boards. I rarely posted on the old boards and love all the new options for posting.
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Hi Paul, you’re a familiar poster of longstanding and so good to see you here. Speaking for myself, it’s establishing a new normal……new system, figuring it out and looking for content. The content is low at the moment but then again, things are different that the other board where I had everything already set.
Lucky Dog
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I am sure the new boards have more features. Perhaps this format may allow me to post more deepdive analysis. I will try one of these days. Right now, we are in a market cycle, everything is going down, so have to wait for some clarity on the bottom.
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The fact that I can copy and past an image has made an immense change on my desire to post. Copy and pasting images inline has been around for a long time. That’s just one change. There’s other I really appreciate too.
To me, that’s like the modern period of homemade sandwich making being ushered in when the first person combined meat and ingredients with pre-sliced sandwich bread for the first time. It doesn’t seem revolutionary but doing it any other way is straight up archaic.
I was a lurker (mostly) on the Berkshire board for 23 years. Only posting when I thought I could add to the conversation. But the board was my primary source for news and discussion of a company that is by far my biggest holding.
This new format does not seem to facilitate the same type of discussion.
Are there any other sources? Seeking Alpha is not horrible…
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I seem to be in the minority in that I didn’t have much set up in the old system. Looking at posts that I missed while away on vacation involved clicking “last 7 days” links many times, sometimes ending up looking at 5 year old posts by accident. When looking at posts on my iPhone on vacation the text was ridiculously small. And a few times I was hit with the realization that as useful as a graph could be on an investing site, it just wasn’t possible.
So I like the new interface, partially because I didn’t take the time to figure out how it make the be old interface work, but I don’t have much to share about Berkshire.
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I appreciate your noting this. I was wondering if the lack of posting I was seeing was because of my difficulty in navigating the boards, rather than posters not being back.
I am slowly wading in, but it’s been very frustrating. Very little of my stuff was transferred over and I’ve had to replace over 20 years of faves one at a time. Somehow the people I follow are now down to 5…probably not a bad thing because I had faved posters on boards that I no longer even follow, but yet another glaring example of how things were not transferred as we were repeatedly told.
I miss the ease of the old system where one clicked on the heart to fave a board, or ignored thread with a click, rather than scroll down to the end of the conversation to get rid of all the replies you don’t want to see, just to have it reappear when another reply comes in. Trying to add favorite boards now means dealing with a huge list, where when you click on one to add and go back to add more, it takes you back to the top of the list and makes you scroll through it all over again. So many short cuts lost. So much content lost. The boards are the people. No matter how “good” the technology, (and personally I find it way too complicated and confusing,) if the posts aren’t there the boards are worthless.
IP
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I find you can link to threads on the old board and they do come up. I’ve done that with summaries on lithium. A variety of topics come up again and again. And we monitor progress in the news. Creating topics for those should collect new comments in one place. But then sorting through very long threads can be inconvenient.
We have much to learn. And perhaps TMF will be watching and make adjustments. The old system was highly developed, had a few qwirks but most of us had work arounds. Posting jpgs is nice. Search is a plus. Quotes is a nice feature.
We are learning.
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If they could have allowed easily links, allow embed pictures, charts, etc, that would have been awesome. Anyways, here we are, lot of folks asked for a modern interface and they delivered it. Now, you need to learn it.
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No, I think actually people asked for ability to edit their posts. And have a decent search capability. Nobody asked for a “modern interface”. Nobody asked for the TMF boards to behave like endlessly scrolling Twitter & Facebook interface.
And now you are seeing people cursing this new interface and wishing they’d revert back to the old one.
That’s what Coca-Cola said about the New Coke.
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That was maybe the greatest consumer “bait and switch” of all time. You need to switch to a cheaper, less tasty ingredient in your primary product? Here’s a plan: create a fake “New Coke” that everybody hates; force them into it. Yowls of protest ensue, and en masse defections. Let the controversy grow to a fever pitch, the entire nation (world?) focusing on your company’s desecration of a beloved icon. Then, the big about face: New Coke is gone, bring back “Classic Coke”. Nobody even notices that the formulation, the flavor has changed. Because you brought back the bitter taste, but NOT the expensive cane sugar. And the publicity? Even CocaCola’s mammoth marketing budget could not have bought that kind of attention.
We can only hope The Fool is that clever…
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Cane sugar was taken out of Coke several years before New Coke appeared. Yes, the issue was price, but the company made the transition over 5 years, changing the balance of sweetener from 0-100% to 10%-90% to 20%-80% in a series of steps so consumers would acclimate to any taste difference slowly. It happened to be during that time that Pepsi launched “The Pepsi Challenge” where consumers in blind taste tests said they preferred the slightly sweeter Pepsi, and that is what caused Coke to launch the New Coke product.
It was a colossal blunder, of course, but Coke Classic used corn syrup as a sweetener too, just as original Coke had been for several years.
For those who can tell the difference, most supermarkets carry Mexican Coca Cola in tall bottles, usually in the “Ethnic Foods” section, and that still uses cane sugar since Mexico does not have the kind of price supports and tariffs on sugar (much from Cuba) as the US does.
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I think it’s due to a combination of tariffs on sugar (raising price) and US subsidies on corn (lowering price). I got excited the first time I came across one of these cane sugar Coca Colas in the store and had to buy it. I expected it to taste noticeably sweeter than the corn syrup variety but was surprised that it did not. I couldn’t taste a noticeable difference. Maybe it’s just me.
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Right you are Goofy!
And Coke simply forgot that consumers don’t taste “blind”; that brands mean something, and that Coke was one of the few things that had not changed in a world containing more and more change.
Cheers!
Murph
BL Home Fool
(and on the firing line in the foodservice industry when all this happened)
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For those who can tell the difference, most supermarkets carry Mexican Coca Cola in tall bottles, usually in the “Ethnic Foods” section, and that still uses cane sugar
Around fifteen Augusts ago (I think…two of the high school kids at that time are now MDs), on a whim I brought home a few bottles of Mexican Coke and a few more of the US supermarket Classic Coke. I poured out a blinded taste test for six young men (sons and friends, ages around 12-17) and my wife.
The tally was seven to zero for the Mexican cane sugar variety. I was surprised…mostly because getting my sons to unanimously agree on anything was statistically unlikely
–sutton
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I buy Mexican Coca-Cola in glass bottles from Costco.
High fructose corn syrup has nothing good to commend it. Except it shows the power of the corn growers lobby.
But that last paragraph sounds cynical. Surely, the FDA took great pains to carefully study this at the time…
If only…
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High fructose corn syrup is profitable mostly because the price of sugar in the US is held above world prices by price supports. Blame Congress, not the corn industry lobby.
Sugar from cane or other sources is a double sugar of fructose and glucose. Body chemistry sees sugar and HFS as the same. Tox concerns are doubtful at best.
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Blame congress for needing corn lobby money to fund congressional re-election campaigns?
Blaming both of them and the FDA. High Fructose corn syrup is banned in all other countries for health concerns.
Not meaning to argue, but I respectfully disagree that synthesized high fructose corn syrup is equal to cane sugar.
jan
:^)
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