peterot wrote:
Stockhouse is full of people doing illegal things. It is a dirty dirty forum but really useful if you are into trading stocks, particularly day trading. Even biggest scum bags provide valuable information. That is my point. All info provided is useful in some way to someone. If it is illegal it can be dealt with by the proper authorities.
I disagree with your analogy, and I hope my explanation might provide some insight about why we choose to moderate the way we do.
Generally, if you want to make use of the information on a forum like Stockhouse, it's your own money that you're risking. A forum like Stockhouse is sort of the ultimate expression of "publicly available information being taken into consideration in the price of a security." Personally, I think it's also part of the reason why volatility indices have gotten so f'ed up in recent years, and why valuation of a lot of things - especially commodities, which really ought to have a more "rational" value - is so insane. But that's more Lavender Room territory.
But, generally, there's a pretty objective to evaluate past predictive performance. And, further, the risk is shouldered by you as the investor that chooses to make use - or not - of the information you find on stockhouse. YOUR money is on the line.
In the case of trial by internet here, it's rarely - if ever - your money (or even your reputation) that's on the line. It's that of a race, or a race director, or an athlete, or bike company, etc. There's no real skin in the game. Your race experience is not substantially affected by whether another participant cheated. So even if the information is accurate, it's still not necessarily "useful" to most people other than in a strictly voyeuristic way. Yes, you want to know if someone cheated. But you don't really derive any actual value from knowing it.
Moderating a forum like Stockhouse is necessarily impossible, because in order for it to function in a reasonably fair way, you basically have to allow everything. It's not fair to delete a post that says, "I'm short on XYZ you ignorant motherfucker," while leaving a post that says, "I'm long on XYZ. Have a nice day." But that same logic doesn't apply here. Decorum does matter here. Truth does matter here. We're not going to allow trial by internet because there's not necessarily a corresponding "free market" to actually sort things out in "the real world."
Stockhouse doesn't censor stuff because you are most likely to screw yourself based on bad information there. We do censor stuff because you are most likely to screw someone else based on bad information here. That's why, for example, this post is not being censored (yet; if it is, it will ONLY be because it becomes a re-hash of the Chicago threads, as often happens). Though I think you might have been better off posting it here -
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...post=1566945#1566945
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