dealtn wrote:MDW1954 wrote:Moderator Message:
As I said earlier, I have been watching this thread with interest. But nothing has really emerged that seems to grab a core consensus, so I haven't felt able to promote a particular change in board structure to those in a position to make it happen (ie, the other mods, and Clariman/ Stooz).
I personally feel a deaccumulation-centric board would provide a useful service, but I don't know what we'd call it, or quite how we'd distinguish it from HYS-S.
Reach some sort of consensus, and I'm all ears. As far as I'm concerned, you're pushing at an open door. But I'm only one mod.
--MDW1954
Well an easy way of distinguishing it from HYS-S would be a recognition that not every investment strategy for retirement, be that in accumulation, or decumulation, is about yield, and certainly not about high yield.
Your general point holds, but why does this site have a constant focus on yield, and a general feeling that high is good and low is bad?
There's a very easily-understood process in operation there: if a site has a lot of material available on a subject, it will be attractive to those interested in that subject, so those people will flock to the site and produce yet more material on that subject. Conversely, if the site has little material available on a subject, it won't be very attractive to those interested in that subject, who will be unlikely to be attracted to it - and those who already use it may even drift away from it in favour of other sites. So existing biases towards and against particular subjects will tend to be reinforced over time... In the particular case of TLF, the bias in favour of high-yield strategies (and HYP strategies in particular) was present right from the start, when it budded off from TMF in late 2016, and together with that self-reinforcing effect very easily answers your question. (Though of course only to the extent of asking a similar question about how it arose on TMF - but the answer to that is the same self-reinforcing effect operating over far more years, on a bias towards high yield that was originally quite a lot smaller.)
In short, TLF is the way it is because of those who use it, and those who use it are the way they are because of the way TLF is, two effects that feed on each other.
If you want to do something effective about it, the way to do so is
not to criticise the site or the provision it makes for high-yield investors, nor those high-yield investors, nor even to criticise the high-yield bias in the abstract without actually criticising the site or its users. Instead, it is to make the site attractive to other types of investor by getting it to provide a decent amount of good-quality material about other types of strategy - and as practically all of TLF's material is user-generated posts, that means by posting such material.
As an example of what I mean, take a look at the board list in
viewforum.php?f=5, and especially at the following statistics from it:
If you were an investor interested in Growth strategies coming across TLF for the first time, and you saw that, would you think it worth bothering to investigate any further at all, or would you instead put your efforts into finding a site that caters better for your needs? And if you did decide to investigate any further (perhaps imagining that the Growth Strategies board might be one that had only been set up very recently), would you find the fact that the board has had a total of 6 posts in the last 3 months at all encouraging?
I'm
not saying that an investor interested in Growth strategies can make a difference to the high-yield-dominated nature of TLF's discussions just by posting a bit more on Growth Strategies - it would take quite a lot of posting, of sufficiently high quality to get others responding in significant numbers, plus almost certainly a lot of time for the self-reinforcement effect to build up. It would also take a good amount of self-discipline to avoid even minor side-swipes at investors who favour high-yield strategies, as they will almost certainly provoke defensive responses from readers who favour high-yield approaches (there
will be such readers despite the board name) and the ensuing arguments are likely to prove offputting to readers interested in actually discussing Growth strategies. And when such arguments do develop (as they are highly likely to from time to time if doing this succeeds in increasing the board's popularity), more self-discipline will be needed to refrain from replying to them and instead get the moderators to deal with them for being off-topic for the board (and remember that the sooner such an off-topic argument is dealt with, the less likely it is that those interested in the actual subject of the thread will have given up on it, and more likely it is that it can be dealt with by moderator messages and/or selective deletions rather than locking the thread).
I'm certainly not guaranteeing that such an effort will succeed. But IMHO it has a
chance of altering things if pursued sufficiently determinedly, whereas just indicating that you think TLF should be less biased towards high yield than it is has no chance.
I do realise that the above has drifted away from this thread's subject of what (if anything) should happen to the Retirement Investing board, so if you want to discuss it further, I'd suggest starting a new thread, called e.g. "Encouraging more discussion of low-yield strategies on TLF". I'm not doing that myself because (as if hopefully apparent from the above) IMHO there really isn't much
anyone (whether admin, moderator or ordinary user) can do to encourage it other than to actually discuss low-yield strategies more, on the appropriate boards, and hope it catches on... But if anyone thinks that such a thread will get anywhere, please feel free to start one!
Finally, to return to this thread's subject and MDW1954's "Reach some sort of consensus" challenge, I'm not at all certain whether we have already reached some sort of consensus or not... Discussions like this one can result in people dropping out of them when they don't care about the matters that are still being discussed or only have mild preferences between them, or alternatively failing to make it clear that the preference they're still expressing is only a mild one, both of which can result in the discussion giving the impression of less consensus than there actually is. So I think some sort of poll is in order at this point to try to establish whether there is a consensus or not, and I've therefore just posted such a
poll.
Gengulphus