You can do this with the “Tracking” button at the bottom of every topic. Just Mute the topics you don’t want to see.
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Guys,
I saw the popularity contests as people posting without feeling secure. Posting for a like to top someone else’s likes just seemed like being very insecure. The quality of information is not natural when people post that way.
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Al,
With digital tools and marketing TMF can turn on a dime and up its traffic to the site. You are making past arguments into future assumptions that the status quo will remain. The new boards are evidence you are wrong. What the fool does next I do not know. More posters is probably a reasonable use of bandwidth for the fool.
Assuming TMF wants a stagnant business would be a business oversight on your part.
Well, there’s nothing wrong with your being wrong about things. It just means you have something to learn.
Generally, recs were a popularity contest on political posts, to be seen as hooray for our side.
For most everything else, they were people trying to help each other out by pointing out which posts were worth reading.
And for some they were essentially “thanks for your hard work, this is one of a series of posts that makes the board better, so please know it’s appreciated” regardless of whether that particular post was any good in and of itself.
That it is no longer possible to see at a glance which are the excellent posts, massively degrades the quality of the experience here.
-IGU-
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Bandwidth? Sure. Bandwidth is cheap. But it’s not a reasonable use of any other Fool resources, much less “digital tools and marketing.” These boards are a tiny, irrelevant portion of the TMF site and business.
What you’re describing fits with the business model the Fool used to have. Back in the day, TMF was primarily a financial media company. Their business was oriented around building a huge audience for free media content. The boards were an instrumental part of that. Fool-created content drove their audience to the boards; the boards kept people engaged and consuming more free content; TMF used the boards to generate content; nearly every public-facing TMF staffer was active on the boards; etc. They made their money indirectly monetizing that audience.
But TMF moved away from that a long time ago. They moved from being a financial media company to being a financial products company. Now, they sell their content to subscribers, rather than broadcasting it to a large audience. The boards that are important to them are the “pay” boards that are an amenity to their subscribers, not the free boards over here. All their “digital tools and marketing” are aimed at getting people to purchase their subscription products, not to join the “free” audience over here. That’s certainly the right call for their current business model. Which is why the transition to the new boards happened with great solicitude for the paid subscribers, and mostly indifference to the existing free audience.
TMF doesn’t want a stagnant business - but their business has nothing to do with these free boards any more. It’s mostly concentrated on their subscription services (along with forays into selling more traditional financial products directly), not cultivating an audience around free broadcast content. Because they were upgrading the amenity associated with their actual customers (the paid boards), we free boards got swept along in the upgrade as well. But we’re not their customers, not their audience, and not their business focus.
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We are talking the equity markets here. Not really talking that much politics. People in the equity markets in groups do not point out what the better information is. Those are lemmings. It really does not work that way.
ItsGoingUp? ItsGoingDown is more like it!
Al,
You are assuming a lot of things about the fool.
Taking a wild stab at it. The fool is watching MarketWatch and can do it better. People really want MarketWatch but most of it is behind a paywall. As is the fool, but we are the freemium. This new format is more efficient to run and the younger folks would not have bothered with the prior format for the free boards.
My only assumption is the fool wants more growth.
Al I need to ask, have you ever marketed anything online?
I agree with this sentiment. I am reminded of Benjamin Graham’s famous quote about the stock market:
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”
I thought the old rec system was similar. At any given moment recs were nearly worthless, but over time they separated the wheat from the chaff.
AW
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How on earth would you know who had what returns?
Or you mean that older guys who are true believers in supply side econ got a lot of moral support no matter how messed up it was?
What were they weighting? Bull… 
In my experience with the old rec system, I found that posters with a history of high recs had posts that I thought were valuable to read, even when I disagreed with them. There is nothing wrong with having one’s beliefs challenged in a respectful manner.
Your experience may have been different. Nothing wrong with that.
“If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will.”
Abraham Lincoln
AW
ps - old as I am, my economic beliefs go beyond simple labels
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That is also why he led the fight against slavery and had passed a few amendments, the bad in people.
For @WendyBG, @Goofyhoofy, @HaltCatchFire and anyone else missing “Best Of” or being able to sort/find posts by recs/likes. Try this:
Might be possible to improve upon but feels like I’ve spent a week trying to figure out a solution, so it’s the best I’ve got for now.
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Of course they do. They’re just not trying to get it on the free message boards. No one disputes that online marketing could drive more traffic to the boards. It’s just that TMF’s current business model doesn’t make that a likely outcome.
You’re new here. The business model you’re describing - something like MarketWatch- is what TMF used to have as their business model. But they’ve been moving away from that for quite a long time. Their corporate strategy is no longer based on being a financial media company, but selling financial products for a fee. They used to promote the message board. Constantly. Their content was linked to the message boards, the message boards were featured prominently throughout the site, content from the message boards was used on the main site, TMF staffers maintained an active and vigorous presence on the message boards, etc. None of that is the case any more - TMF’s corporate focus is on subscription products and other financial services that are sold directly to paying customers.
There’s no sign of that changing, and no reason to suspect it would. It’s just not part of their business model any more. They’re going to use online marketing and other efforts to drive traffic and growth to the parts of the site that make money - subscription and premium services - and not the message boards.
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In informal research circles the number of recs received is referred to as STNI*, and is used much as @AlphaWolf describes.
The higher the number, the more value the post is deemed, by the readers, to have. And the author gets a well deserved dopamine serotonin rush**.
Obversely, the lower the number, society judges the value much lower.
ralph
- Signal To Noise Indicator
** FB is the poster child for misuse of the “like” filter bubble.
TMF may be trying to limit the negative effects of “like”?
Although, this is what came to mind when i recently got a missive from TMF that I’ve been “leveled up”:
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Agreed, and it also serves as a gauge for the author. Let’s say you spend an hour on writing a tutorial. Without replies or recs/likes it’s difficult know if anyone found it useful, and one-liner replies can be unnecessary noise among valuable feedback.
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You know Jaak in particular brings in a heck of a lot of factual data towards the arguments that are pro or con nuclear energy. I bring in the econ perspective. We get next to no likes. We are telling the truth with sound analysis. A bunch of guys with misinformation like each others posts all day long. Some of them may be getting a pension from some of the utility companies. Others believe in all sorts of things that are not happening and will not happen. The likes are piling up on a lot of misinformation.
Now someone will say I am jealous! 
All I can say is that is not how life works when you are honest. You are not green with envy.
Most of this result seems to be about whether your favorite poster is visible first. Vacuous.
People are entitled…when it is their property.
I like this format a lot better. The controls matter. The edit feature is a big deal. The speed of the server is a big deal. The organization is better when you get used to it.
Reminds me of the old joke, a man joins a monastery and takes a vow of silence. After ten years he is called into monseniore’s office and given two words, “bed hard”. He goes back to his silent work and prayers. Ten years passes and he is summed to the office for two more words, “food bad”. This time with sheer determination he goes back to his silent prayers. Ten years passes and he is summed into the office again for two more words, “I quit”, to which the monsenoire states, “you always were a complainer”.
In other words better you all complain or I wont know if you are alive.
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The Discourse people have some fairly strong feelings about “discussion forums”. They have specifically stated that they don’t want what you are asking for. Call them idiots, you wouldn’t be the first.
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The recs are right there for you to see. You even get notifications every time one of your posts is liked. The users that liked your post are visible to you. There is plenty of valuable feedback for you.
The part that is missing is the competition to get your name/post on the Best Of list.
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Yep the idea is to be in with the ‘popular’ crowd. Slam those who do not have likes. Ignore or even put down those who are honest. Avoid different points of view.
I called it all ‘insecurity’ earlier.
The curse of mass media people needing someone else on a monitor to make it alright for them. Very insecure indeed.
I thought of laying it off on how secure can anyone be in the stock market but this goes to any endeavor online where people have a like button. Facebook breeds insecurity in many people.
Stand up for yourselves. Think for yourselves. Be honest for yourselves.
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