Quote from Xspurt:
ET has been allowed to shift from a forum where traders could discuss trading to more of an animal house where a great deal of the posts are about how useless trading or various techniques are. I have no idea why they are here or why they are allowed to continue.
If a trading thread is started up eventually it will be trashed until the poster sees no point in continuing.
I regret to say that as a trader I observed the developing trash trend and expected a drop off in posting. At the same time I have been watching another paid-for forum where this kind of activity is banned and seeing how the fee-based membership soared compared to the free anything goes Elite Non-Trader.
Today there is a jump in activity "over there" with 6 times as many members and 60% as many guests online compared to ET. I've noticed a steady decline in posting here as the competition leaves us standing and now the ET posts are hardly moving the front page. It takes some complacency for a free forum to be overtaken by a fee-based membership when the content is provided by the membership, but ET has achieved that loss of momentum.
Have we reached the Tipping Point for ET? Is it too late to get back to Elite Trading content?
Does anyone care?
(The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (ISBN 0-316-31696-2) is a book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little Brown in 2000.
Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."[1] The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.)
It's good that you have started this thread, and yes some of us do care.
I believe it is possible to have strong views on a subject and discuss it in a reasoned, reasonable manner without the discussion degenerating into insults and abuse. Sadly that happens all too often here.
There is beauty in free vigorous discussion, but for reasons I do not claim to understand, it does not seem to flourish in too genteel an environment.
If the end result of this thread is that some of the crassness is removed from ET, that would be a very good thing.