What happened to WSO
Why is it that when I go to WSO looking for thoughts that are more substantive than minimum effort, sub-single sentence replies, the only quality content I can find is in threads that are at least 10 years old?
For example look at this post from 2007: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/private-equity/deal-discussion-in-pe-interview
These monkeys are discussing like GENTLEMEN and now WSO is infested with memes, troll posts, tier lists, and college student LARPers. I don't know if this is due to a general social degradation online and the move away from forums to social media but it's so disappointing. We have this community that's so full of incredible professionals in finance careers that could be sharing so much knowledge and it's completely going to waste.
It feels like every time a thread is posted it's a race to who can post the most outrageous joke response and harvest SBs, and then everyone gets distracted and no helpful replies really come in
It's not WSO. It's the new generation that's on WSO.
Those would've been Gen X sir
You can't change how others behave, but you can change how you behave. Contribute well-thought out and insightful posts and maybe others will return the favor someday
Unfortunately there has been a real decline in quality and it has driven lots of long term users either to post less or off the platform entirely. It’s not that trolling and other shenanigans didn’t happen it’s that it happened less frequently and the trolls were generally more amusing.
This. Gotta be the change you wanna see, and part of it is that online culture has changed a lot. I don’t have the energy to write out my full thoughts here but in short I think we need a resurgence in cyberbullying and public shaming to fix the core issue.
Short answer: barriers to entry were removed and the audience expanded dramatically, which naturally dilutes the quality over time. This is not unique to WSO.
Longer answer: the way we consume and interact with content online has radically changed in the last ~15yrs or so. To access WSO in 2007 was intentional - you were seated at a computer at home, school, or work. Maybe on your laptop at a hip coffee shop called Starbucks if you paid for WiFi. You were deliberately researching finance careers, and probably came across WSO buried a few pages into your search results from Google, or Yahoo if you were a little old fashioned. Somebody doing this would also likely be skewed demographically toward higher levels of income and education. The motivations were also different: this set of people was genuinely trying to learn and exchange ideas; there was less of a race to see who could post the snarkiest comment, or repost some early meme for the honor of silver bananas. There was far less attention seeking behavior compared to today.
Fast forward a decade or so, and now everyone has a smartphone and high-speed internet access. Remember how WSO was originally accessed a decade prior, sitting on a computer in your room? It was a deliberate activity that you participated in and then finished, not something tethered to your brain 24/7. In fact, people who spent *too much time* online were considered to be fucking losers. You’d be told to get a life, called a basement dweller, etc. Precursors to the present-day “touch grass,” if you will. Internet addicts were out-of-touch, socially maladjusted weirdos. Think Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons (at best).
Presently, the problem is that now there are tens of millions of internet weirdos in the U.S. alone. It’s mainstream, or at least not shameful, to be a total fucking dork anymore. In fact, in many cases it’s incentivized and rewarded: whether it’s the dopamine hit from getting an upvote on a dumb post, or the kids literally taking in millions as “influencers” or “content creators.” You now get to see and read thoughts from every village idiot, every weirdo, from all over the world, AND NOW, all of the LLM-generated content that has trained on them. They probably found WSO randomly from a reddit post or something.
Happy Monday, y’all.
Think you’re spot on. It’s obviously not just WSO suffering from this phenomenon, but online forum culture in general has nearly disappeared
nobody is reading this. I went to a top undergrad and a top mba and I never even read the case studies
Speaking of total fucking dorks . . .
*fewer smart people
The barriers to entry thing is it. That's why reddit is full of idiots regardless of which sub you're on, it's hard to get to substantive discussion.
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