S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system really helped as many devs find jobs as it would have taken for the site to become a recruiting tool. It probably would have had to shift and evolve in several keys ways to survive
It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.
I thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).
You created an account one day and the only things you could do were commenting and asking questions; you created it some other day and the only things you could do were asking and answering questions; some other day the only thing you could do was asking questions.
Any day you signed up, asking any question first was a sure way to be downvoted bellow the threshold that would ban you from the site.
No, they didn't. I joined in late 2010 to post a question, and posted multiple answers within an hour of that. As far as I can research, it has always been like that.
50 reputation is required to comment, except under your own questions (which is meant to facilitate figuring out what's wrong with a problematic question, so that it can be fixed).
Nobody ever got "banned from the site" for asking questions. There are algorithms that implement rate limits on questions and answers, some of which are oppressive (the so-called "Q-ban" limits you to one question per 6 months; and the insiders on meta who are doing all the question closing and downvoting that everyone objects to all hate it and have complained many times). There is in fact no proper facility for banning users available to moderators: they can only "destroy" accounts that were used by spammers or suspend ordinary users for increasing lengths of time (in practice, bans are implemented by suspending for 99999 days, which is about 273 years). These algorithms kick in because of a pattern; I have never been shown evidence of the Q-ban kicking in because of a single question (the details are internal to the company; even actual moderators don't and can't know) and the initial rate limits are honestly pretty gentle (unless you imagine that you're entitled to prompt answers; but you're supposed to get those by searching). Note that self-deleting poorly-received questions is generally believed not to help with this. (The goal was to prevent people from making lazy attempts at asking questions and then disclaiming any interest in fixing them; I think this was a misstep, as people should be lauded for coming to an understanding about how the site works, and for deleting things that aren't actually fixable.)
> Approximately 56% to 60% of U.S. initial public offerings (IPOs) lose absolute value over a five-year period. Historically, the median IPO stock has lost roughly 41% of its value five years after its first day of trading.
I remember seeing a video about this subject, since large IPOs are automatically included in index funds it is kinda of a way to extract value from passive investors. Insiders cash out before it hits the indexes, index crashes by a fraction for a %, all pensions in the country (and many overseas) pay for it.
But with OpenAI and SpaceX IPOing roughly at the same time it will likely be more than fraction of a % in this/next year.
> since large IPOs are automatically included in index funds
No, this was not allowed. Until a certain someone with deep connections to the corrupt government (coughspacexcough) changed the rules for themselves for the upcoming IPO. It's going to be.... ballistic.
What do you mean? If a US company is big enough it ends up on the S&P500 _eventually_. I know index funds don't auto-include IPOs immediately, but eventually they are forced to buy into them.
but also, getting IPOs included captures the upside.
of course, public markets nowadays are definitely paying a pretty serious "agent-principal premium". (since public exits are usually very good for the C-suite and for all those vested stocks.)
so yeah, it seems it would make sense to buy the post-IPO dip, but then you would need to have some kind of formula for that, and ... that seems ripe for gaming by speculators ... so all in all, it's just more efficient to do what the rule of the index says. (and of course there's already speculation at the discontinuity.)
sure, but does that risk have good returns to go along? if IPOs are known to be very bad bets why do institutions (supposedly savvy professional investors) participate?
Because they (should) have sophisticated risk models that account for the long tail. If even a few ipos become Google or Facebook, the risk is worth it. But for average retail investors ipo participation will be bag holding exercise. That said betting your conviction is one of the only ways to beat the market, even if it comes with additional risk (emotional+intellectual attachments). If you really believe in ai or space exploration, the upcoming ipos represent an opportunity to bet on your beliefs and predictive capability
you mean that if average Retail Ronnie directly buys the new hot stock at IPO versus getting exposure to it through whatever ETF they have?
yes, directly buying a stock at IPO sounds really strange for me. (because either you know it's undervalued, but then it's insider trading. if not, then why compete with irrational fanatics?)
