An observation on the new ET

J

John Merchant

Please consider a mild complaint from an admittedly non-paying customer. You have posters here who relate poker to trading. Music to trading. Athletics to trading. Pure unvarnished ego to trading. My god, BSAM even just related checkers to trading. But when I relate healthy nastily perverse sex to trading, your moderators get upset. Now when I search here on a certain colorful word relating to sex (and to trading, at least in the pits) which seems to offend, I find 2284 references to it. Since when did uttering this word become equivalent on ET to screaming "Fire!" (also a four letter word beginning with f) in a crowded theatre? Now by my calculation I and mine account for 0.0452% of your membership, for 100% of the verifiable posted trades, and at least 10% of the clearly explicated systems. I am a recidivist old man. I am just not ready to start saying "Oh, fudge!" about daily events in the market that screw little (well, maybe not so little) guys like me. Thank you for your kind consideration. I will not fret if it is fair that I fade away and eschew free use of all four letter words beginning with f.

(Oh, I forgot. I even post CHARTS, too. What a sin!)
 
Quote from John Merchant:

Please consider a mild complaint from an admittedly non-paying customer. )
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Customer? Are you shopping for something?

Or is something shopping for you?
 
Quote from John Merchant:

But when I relate healthy nastily perverse sex to trading, your moderators get upset.
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Moderators respond to complaints, and your references to "nastily perverse sex" causes us to get complaints from the other members, so we deal with them.
 
John,

I share your sentiment and apparent confusion. Just yesterday, I alluded in a post that primemover (the artist previously banned as marketsurfer, hank rollins et al) was equivalent to the excretory component of the anatomy. I drew this parallel because he continues to pump his endless supply of "limited" PTJ tapes at "only" $500 a pop ($10,000 value!). He also bashes anything having to do with trends, spewing the gospel according to Victor Neiderhoffer as though it were his own statistical "research." (Not unlike Tom Cruise presenting his "research" on psychiatry, which was surely pabulum prepared and spoon fed by the ex-science fiction writers in the hallowed halls of Scientology.) I can go on, but suffice it to say that I find it boneheaded that a supposedly thinking person would bash people with a long history of making money whereas he backs a horse with a tendency to blow up at every available opportunity. As we all know, VN has the remarkable capacity to either make a lot of money or lose almost all of it, with there really being no middle ground. (Is there perhaps an overlooked statistically significant observation here?)

In any event, the anatomical portion of my post was deleted. I had been "edited!" Of course, this "editing" rendered the overall post as incomplete. It no longer made sense. I therefore asked that the entire post be deleted and was kindly obliged.

Why am I recounting this story? Because after reading your initial post to this thread, I did my own search. I searched for the word "asshole" on ET. Sure enough, there were 34 pages (pages!) of references to the term "asshole." Some of the references were general, whereas some of them were directed at specific ET members. I find it interesting that my post calling a previously banned member an asshole for continuing to engage in the very activity that probably got him banned in the first place was deleted, whereas other people's references to other ET members as assholes continue to stand.

I don't think that deletion or retention of posted material should be based merely on complaints, as appears to have been the case here given the pages and pages of "acceptable" usage of the term "asshole." Of course primemover/marketsurfer/hank rollins will be upset with the term "asshole," for much the same reason that Mickey Rooney may not have liked the term "short." A term should either be acceptable or not.

Don't you agree?


(P.S. Moderators, any comments?)
 
Quote from Thunderdog:


(P.S. Moderators, any comments?)
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Yeah, my comments are the same as above. We respond to complaints. We don't scour every word of every post or try to be some universal censor. If your posts don't get any complaints, then we don't screw with them unless it's something blatantly offensive. But if your post causes us to get multiple complaints from other members, then you can count on your post getting edited or deleted. It's a very simple system really.
 
T-Dogg. IMO it is a matter of personality. I am a well-known snot who lambastes stupidity on ET at every opportunity (although I am not in the same league with Nononsense). Out of respect I shall refrain from commenting on the charming attributes of YOUR personality. I'll bet I could use sweet words to say what I mean and still get edited, deleted, and lambasted. Perhaps so could you. I find it fascinating that my analogies between sex and trading (which I think are valid) arouse ire here. Is it a coincidence that the B-Team tends to get treated with less tolerance than the run-of-the-mill ET jerk? Could it be that cynicism is viewed as negative in ET-land? As a f'rinstance, if I started a new thread in psych (which ran me off last year and subsequently deleted a promising new thread) titled "Sex and Trading", it would instantly be deleted. Because it was me. And because it was about sex. And because it was cynical. So what? Who cares? Well, I had a profitable observation to make about the probable events after the open today based on market behaviors in past news shocks. But I kept it to myself. I also observed potentially profitable anomalous behaviors between oil and stocks all morning. But I kept it to myself. So there! Nyah! I'm voting with my feet. Mike.
 
My two cents on the issue is that foul language, references to anatomy etc, only diminishes the posters credibility. I simply don't see any reason to express any opinion that way.

When I get complaints I investigate and if the "offense" falls in the above categories, I generally simply delete the offending subject matter. I then sit back and wait for the angry PMs from the poster who doesn't appreciate being edited

... No one wins in this scenario, so why not simply be professional?
 
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