Around the year 2000, I had my first experience posting on-line. I’m sure others had been involved in on-line posting much earlier than that, but being a not-so rapid adopter of technology that was my first foray. My reason for posting at the time was to research certain small cap stocks I was interested in investing in. Small cap stocks are smaller publicly trading companies, companies that aren’t well followed by analysts and the business press.
At the time, one of the tools I used to research stocks were Yahoo!’s stock message boards. The appeal of the message boards was that like-minded investors, people like myself who were interested in a few stocks, could share information and viewpoints. At the time one of the companies I really liked was a computer company called Neoware Systems. Neoware made thin clients. I didn’t know much about the thin client business, but the shares were trading at just above cash on hand, the company had no debt, and the company was growing reviews and earnings. Right after the stock market bubble burst in 1999, there were some real promising small caps stocks like Neoware that had solid fundamentals that just got buried with all the trash stocks out there. A small investor could find those companies if the investor was diligent and took the time.
What I learned while spending time on Neoware’s Yahoo! Message board was that there are a lot of different reasons people post. I initially assumed, naively, that all the posters where like myself, just trying to gather information and share insights. What I learned was that there are many different reasons that people posted.
Some people posted to try to create a positive buzz around the stock and push the share price higher. Many of those posters really weren’t basing their optimism on anything tangible or objective other than their desire to sell their shares higher than they had bought them. This was called “pump and dump.”
Others took the opposite approach. Those posters were interested in creating a negative buzz and pushing the share price lower. Usually those were people that had “shorted” the stock, or sold shares they had borrowed, and wanted to “cover their short” by buying back the borrowed shares they had sold at a lower price. Other spread doubt about the company not because they didn’t believe in the company’s prospects, but for precisely the opposite reasons. These posters wanted to keep the share price down so that they could buy more shares at a reduced price.
I assume that at the time, back around 2000, there were few paid posters, either pro or con the companies I followed. I’m quite certain in the intervening years the number of paid posters has mushroomed, as has the sophistication of these posters. I eventually abandoned these promising platforms for small time investors because the digital marketplace of ideas got too overrun with digital pickpockets and con men. Anonymity, then and now, does not lead to the trust worthy aharing of information.
Which brings us to today. Digital media today, whether facebook, twitter, Google, youtube, etc. etc., etc., is also full of people posting or otherwise publishing on the internet for all sorts of reasons. Some of those, perhaps even a majority, actually try to be objective and honest about what they post. Too many, whether anonymous posters in a comment section or well know writers paid to post on corporate media news websites, have too little regard for the truth and are posting for entirely different reasons. Too many are advancing a narrative instead of sharing an honestly held viewpoint.
Unlike the Yahoo! stock message boards of 2000, though, the internet of today is too important to abandon to digital pickpockets and con men. The more people who actually try to be objective and honest, no matter what their viewpoints or perspectives, that abandon these platforms the more corrupt and divisive the discourse will become.
That is why I post.