Investment forum flagging discussion and post-mortem

Development Ideas
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Would you like to lobby the community to tighten or loosen discussion flagging practices? Were you flagged completely unfairly and want to hear the community’s opinion on the matter? Do you need advice on how to mentally recover from flagging or perhaps information on how to avoid flagging altogether in the future? You’ve come to the right place!

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Ask and Answer thread Kysy & vastaa sijoittamisesta - Opi sijoittamaan - Inderes forum

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I just had to open up a discussion and say that today, the flagging, counter-comments, and drama have gotten a bit out of hand, like a vauva.fi forum. :grin: It’s been entertaining to follow with :popcorn:, but perhaps there should have been a bit more investment-related content instead.

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Yes, it’s healthy to remind yourself now and then that both the flagger and the flagged are real people on the other side of the screen. I also believe that most of those who are flagged have genuinely written on the discussion board without any malice, and also that flaggers wish everyone the best by trying to keep discussions clean, high-quality, and focused on the topic. :two_hearts:

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I agree, and we’ll certainly encounter this many more times. It’s good that we can now clean them up and centralize them in one place. I, too, found myself in a path of chaos today, even though I tried to stay in the background at first. The human mind is weak. My apologies.

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I haven’t written much on the forum myself, but I’ve certainly read a lot. So, a big thank you to everyone who has contributed by writing on the forum :pray:. I only discovered the Inderes forum at the beginning of the year, but I think it’s really great that there are relatively active threads here even for fairly unknown companies, which I probably wouldn’t have learned about without this forum!

I have to admit, it bothers me a bit how big of a problem these “off-topic” posts are sometimes considered, when there’s also great discussion and a lot of different knowledge available on one forum. I would argue that usually, when one is motivated about something (in this case, investing and related information seeking), one puts a lot of effort into finding even something that helps achieve the goal, and thus the “every little bit helps” mentality feels quite natural :slightly_smiling_face:

However, reading the discussions here has sometimes made me feel that some people take the entire forum for granted and write quite rudely in a tone that says, “Because I only have 10 minutes a day to read the forum, it’s strange that others don’t know how to write in the way the rules say, so that it would be enjoyable and easy for me to read through the posts in this thread during my lunch break/while putting a child to sleep, etc.”

To exaggerate, I’d be tempted to recommend to these people that they only invest in index funds if they find it so difficult to arrange enough time to read through a thread without a few irrelevant posts bothering and annoying them. I wonder if these people can even read investment-related literature if their time is so tight and reading can be quite easily disturbed? :no_mouth:

I am by no means advocating for “off-topic” messages or disregard for rules, but simply want to question whether this attitude is very reasonable and good. My intention is not to challenge anyone to a debate with this view, merely to express my own thoughts. :slightly_smiling_face:

In the NEL thread recently, someone asked why the stock price was rising. More or less all European hydrogen companies were rising at that time, at least those in my portfolio, and I quickly didn’t find any particularly surprising news about the company, so I was almost going to write a reply saying that the rise was probably not due to anything special today, etc. But before I even started writing, someone had already linked news from a German website concerning the company, which I had completely missed.

I was glad I stayed quiet. I intend to do the same in similar situations in the future, as “what’s making this go up?” can sometimes turn out to be a good question itself. That question has now been “naturally” flagged, even though the answer has, of course, been liked :smirk:

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I also think that some off-topic flags are unnecessary; usually in such situations, two forum members are just chatting with each other, and then it’s felt that it’s not a question of academic-level argumentation.

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Then a post gets flagged if a completely useless, two-word comment appears in the thread, which could easily be left unwritten. In company threads, all messages that deal with just the share price should be flagged. Discussions about whether to lighten up or what’s causing a 3% price increase don’t belong in the company thread for everyone to browse. Additionally, sometimes people start chatting in a chat-style way between two people, which could be handled with private messages.

It’s also interesting that if someone’s message is flagged, a complaint/wondering about the flagging might follow. In my own case, I ponder to myself why the message was flagged and try to write better next time.

In my opinion, it’s good to have proper rules. They are not always followed, especially in terms of value creation. The threads of certain companies are completely unreadable, and finding necessary information takes ages. However, I am satisfied with the current spirit and rules of the forum.

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My understanding is that there are individual, very active flaggers. Of course, everyone has their own criteria for flagging, but reading threads has become quite unpleasant due to this active flagging. The flag queue bothers me more than messages not strictly relevant to the topic.

I see two alternative ways to curb this flagging enthusiasm: 1) members have x number of flagging opportunities per day/week/month, or 2) a message goes behind a flag after, for example, three flags from different members. Moderators, of course, are separate.

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So if you’re day trading, technical issues sometimes override fundamentals.
For example, in Sampo’s thread, messages were flagged when someone commented on a stock where the RSI was close to 30 and it was a really good place to jump in. I don’t understand these flags.

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Technical questions are hardly ever flagged, right? If a message says, for example:

“the stock is rising because x y z technical indicators say so. I bought based on these and already earned 60%. Hopefully it will rise more”

I don’t believe anyone would flag that.
Instead, if someone writes:

“I bought based on my analysis and already earned 60%. Hopefully it will rise more”

I claim a flag would come immediately. The first message brings added value to the discussion and to the reader, the latter message not so much.

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So, doesn’t a message require flagging from at least 2 different users to be hidden? If not, should it perhaps? The mess in the Fuelcell thread was a clear case that one person can’t flag messages hidden at will.

Wasn’t there talk about the number of flags that lead to a message being hidden in the development thread sometime? How did it go, does a message need more than one flag to be hidden?

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Yes, it certainly requires something like that, because having your own flags does not have an immediate effect. Besides, flagging can be removed very easily by editing the message, so it is ultimately a rather gentle measure.

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In my opinion, that would seem to belong in the technical analysis thread, because it is technical analysis. There’s probably a good reason it has its own thread. Good buying and selling opportunities will certainly come up a lot based on technical analysis, especially in the short term.

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If there were a separate thread for fundamental analyses, should fundamental analyses be moved out of the stock threads? At least in my opinion, such a policy would be untenable, and if I were a TA person, I would challenge every such TA flagging (not by making 10 posts, but by removing the flag from the post and editing a greeting to the flagger)

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So both fundamental and technical analysis are present at the same time.
One must be on top of the company’s fundamentals to dare to trust technical analysis.
So I follow the fundamentals and then how the price keeps up with fundamental changes from an RSI perspective.
Example from yesterday: Kamux was strong SELL in the eyes of technical analysis yesterday and the day before, but the fundamentals indicated something completely different. Thus, a small domestically owned company is affected by recommendation changes, as happened with Kamux yesterday.

The point is that if you can only talk about one edge of the cube in one chain, then it’s a stiff business…

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This is only positive if you disagree and help fellow investors see the bigger picture of the stock (strong fundamentals, weak TA, recommendation changes?). If these were to be flagged, I would certainly join the opposing camp to complain about the absurdity of the flagging practices :smiley:

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The links below may be of interest regarding the topic. Some of the features are customizable, so they may not apply 1:1 here.

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One thing that annoys me is the constant “what’s making this go up/down” messages. I know that, for example, @Meri surely checks all sources before asking, but I’d argue that the majority of other questioners head straight here to ask when they see percentages without putting in any effort themselves.

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Isn’t that a perfectly good conversation starter on a discussion forum? If we want only professional-level content produced, then let’s just make the whole forum paid and compensate content creators for professional content production.

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@Seinakadun_Keisari. That’s exactly it.. I don’t shout for nothing. All means have been used before I ask anything. And usually I have enough channels to gather information. Like yesterday.. I would have needed a little help when my own machines ran out of power and one man can’t read as much as, for example, 8 guys.. simultaneously from their own machines. Usually, that then results in good for everyone interested in the matter. But now here we are only discussing proper flagging and how it is correct and according to the rules. Well, at what point in this discussion does investing and content creation for this forum come in… Well, I claim it doesn’t at all..

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