i highly appreciate the effort of inandlong to improve the board's quality. nevertheless my personal feeling is that the whole problem cannot really be solved. sorry if i appear to be too skeptical . just a personal opinion. i think et has exceeded or is currently going to exceed critical mass. everyone who ever worked together with other people will know that every team, every meeting, every joint effort will break down once there are too many people involved. from a certain point onwards it takes more effort to coordinate than what is gained by pooling minds. i think et will survive and do well, grow and so forth. but it is like within a software company: in the beginning they are doing small-team innovative stuff. once they get bigger they care about other things, become better organized and loose momentum in terms of creativity. reason for this thread: i would like to know other boards that are currently in a phase et was in two years ago or so. i would appreciate pms on that subject. i am aware that this topic is somehow destructive for the board. nevertheless i post it since the board will probably not care at all and prosper in terms of the number of members anyways. peace
no one has really come up with a model yet that actually predicts the market, nor will they do so for human behavior. instead, they come close by sampling the past and, in the case of social organizations, they attempt to train the subjects to fit within the model (e.g. socialism, 'social engineering,' propaganda, and other evils). people, being individuals, never fail to fail to be totally predictable. same with markets. that's why there's opportunity there. it's a good thing.
chasinfla i am not sure i got you right. please tell me if i am not. i think you are trying to say that et could find a way back to more quality discussion by better self control, even if many other human societies would indicate that this is difficult. i do not at all doubt that it is possible. i think many things are possible that we all can hardly imagine - much bigger than the case of a big yet constructive internet board. my only concern is the likelihood of that happening. honestly speaking i did (and do!) profit a lot from this board. i find a lot of useful information here, probably more now than 9 months ago, when i first saw this site - due to the sheere size of the site. nevertheless this information is increasingly hard to find - or one has to struggle through all those difficulties mentioned elsewhere here in length. i want to prepare for the time when i might decide it is too difficult to find. peace
a quick review of irc chatrooms like# activetrader and #daytraders does not portend well for ET. Those rooms grew in size such that the noise to quality post ratio was slim to none. Unfortunately the newbies far out number the veteran traders in public forums.
i dont think there are near the people here reflected in the membership number. Many of these are multiples of one user, many are no longer here, etc. I actually think the number of active posters remains fairly constant.
por·tend ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pôr-tnd, pr-) tr.v. por·tend·ed, por·tend·ing, por·tends To serve as an omen or a warning of; presage: black clouds that portend a storm. To indicate by prediction; forecast: leading economic indicators that portend a recession.