Is WSO dying

I'd have to agree with you. WSO seems to be clutching at straws when it comes to content creation. The "Each day we'll be posting the top WSO forum posts of 2014" is just another example of how the site is struggling to get the interesting posts it once had. Shame really!

I miss top news articles of the week each Friday.

Didn't Patrick recently announce that WSO surpassed 300k users? Not sure it's dying tbh

Na - you are just getting older. The content was never stellar, and it was always young kids giving advice to young grads. You are just realising that now that you have been here for a while and your industry knowledge has increased. You get lucky sometimes and get a bored person from the industry coming over and posting like myself. Cherish me.

What's good about WSO is that loads of hungry kids get together and get a bit of information from everywhere and share it. It's still a great source to learn about industry and jobs in finance. Props to Patrick.

Most new posts now ends with already been discussed thousand times, please use search.

I think the decline began when Braverman stopped posting.

I mean, I hope no one uses it as a substitute for, say, Bloomberg. But it's been great for a lot of reasons, like the back-and-forth between traders and newbies about the future of human traders, having guys like Bondarb or IP share their industry knowledge and insights, and on and on. And also with a good mix of Uncle Eddie and, for those of you who remember, Midas (I might be in minority here). Things change, and I miss a few of those features, but I think WSO still has great contributors and it should evolve.

The lifeblood of the site is the new users, and we need to go all Gandhi and shit and be the change we want to be. Make the site what we want, or what we would have wanted as 19-22 y/os. I'd do it but I have nothing to add, I'm an accountant.

I think it's a viewpoint difference and a time crunch issue. Was a godsend for me in college, but you get older/busier and stop posting as much and so do the people who made the site what it was when i first started posting. It's a cycle, and there'll be a new crop of guys every year

In terms of OPs, I think most of the regular posters write fairly good ones. They just don't write them that often. I think I wrote 2 OPs this year. I also have a regular job and while it's fun to help answer questions and participate in debates, writing OPs is actual work. Andy's job was a lot easier when we had Edmundo Braverman and Midas Mulligan Magoo.

Today, the floor is sort of open. If you don't like the content on the front page, if you're not a douchebag, if you don't have some creepy agenda (EG Kevin Roose), and you can do better than what we currently have, feel free to contribute. But it's a little bit of work to do it regularly. I'm not going to say put up or shut up because I complain about the dearth of good FP without contributing too many OPs myself, but I do think this is a great opportunity for everyone complaining about FP content to say "Hey, maybe I can contribute a front page article or two. Just about something that I am an expert in, and that most people on the site would enjoy reading."

There's ~10 people posting in this thread. If there are only ~100 high quality front page posts on WSO each year right now, but each of us commits to writing two more, the quality of the front page just jumped by 20%.

I think the last part of the problem is that being a for-profit website makes it harder for people to want to contribute. If we were a .org, people would probably want to contribute a bit more. But on a for-profit basis, the system kinda breaks down. The amount of work that goes into a good OP is probably worth about $200-300 when you factor in the value of peoples' time. The actual value to WSO is more like $20-$50.

So the last thing is that I'm trying to take a little bit more ownership of my account. I've registered IlliniProgrammer.com. I have no idea whether it's going to become a zany collection of posts about a rusty honda in NYC being driven by a goofy IT guy, or if it's going to become a financial advice website written from a quant perspective, or if I even have time to do anything with it, but the brand ownership makes it a bit easier to contribute stuff every once in a while. I'm helping WSO, I'm helping the website and the community, but I'm also helping myself a bit too.

I think the content question is going to be one of the most important issues going forward. There's a lot of really vivid writers on this site, but content is work, and how do we motivate people to contribute work while still making it a win-win? I think the solution is a model like Seeking Alpha. It's a lot of accounting, it's a lot of checks to write, but it also produces some high quality stuff.

Your inability to appreciate minute-by-minute prestige rankings, CBS bashing, over-privileged whining or benefit from my intellectual munificence isn't a sign (to this reader) of any measurable decline in content; but rather it showcases your lack of apprehension of the inherent gravitas in said topics.

When the quality of posts increases so will the content. If new users post the same questions ad nauseam, there is no incentive to chime in with the same insightful commentary. If the same user takes the same amount of time necessary to make toast and instead uses the no-shit-bar (search function) they will likely be able to answer their original question and ask a new question/clarification not previously discussed. Its like people posting their resume for review, read the thousands of threads and apply the advice to your resume, THEN after the wording, trimming and formatting has been done, post your "final draft" for review..

Bulletin board-driven community websites naturally wax and wane. Looking at WSO like a click business, the advantages WSO has are:

1. A constant feed of know-nothing, wannabee bankers looking for answers (cf repetition of same questions;

2. Market share as the place to come to answer those questions; and

3. Enough of an experience, recurrent user base who will answers those questions.

As long as there is a large pool of wannabee WS bankers and enough of a recurring user base who will answer their questions, WSO should retain the critical mass and gravity to remain the only place to go.

Perhaps I'm over-rating WSO's market share because I'm too lazy to find another website. That would undermine my analysis. On the other hand, if I found WSO, I'm a recurrent poster and I was too lazy to find other options, that's a fairly good anecdotal case supporting my view of market share.

The recurrent user base is a fairly strong barrier to entry, but users can be fickle and a new website may be able to crack into the market, win over some of the content posters and win market share.

Don't be one of those guys who misremembers things as better than they were at the time you used it because you have changed.

This thread got more interesting than I expected.

As someone said before this has been said for years. Users change and with users changing comes a change in the personality of the forum. NSW videos that Eddie and Midas would do will always have a place.

I think overall the site has gotten a lot better, and I've been reading since inception under various usernames. More entertaining, a lot more content, larger user base, better interface, etc. Definitely some dilution and repetition from college kids, but it's not hard to find quality posts or get questions answered or have a discussion.

You guys are too kind. I'll have to sit down and write a post about what I'm up to these days. I really do miss writing every day, but I just don't have time at the moment.

Hope you're all gearing up for a killer 2015.

I actually like the repetitive questions, only time I feel like my answers are brilliant.

As with the law of diminishing marginal utility, there could be a fluctuation in individuals lacking the emotional response that once drew them to the website. I'll admit, I've certainly been slowing down on checking the website and writing content past 3 months.

I've been an active WSO user for a while now and still think it is one of the best places to go to for finance - related career and lifestyle advice. WSO has helped me personally immensely over the years and I am sure is to this date of great value to the wider audience.

In my view, OP may be right to an extent in that the frequency of new high-quality content has come down, however that is probably because we now have a great set of answers to a large number of standard questions that a lot of professionals will face eventually. In other words, many parts of the encyclopedia have now been written. That may be a little less exciting to us long-term users but isn't an indicator this site is going down - as user registrations show, it's quite the opposite. And with the WSO user cohort moving up through the ranks, I am sure we will continue to see new interesting content.

I've been on WSO for more than eight years now and I think WSO is better now than it ever was before. Back in the day there were an extremely limited number of professionals using the site. Those that were mostly consisted of investment bankers. I couldn't get a single PE question answered because no one on the site had a PE job. Fast forward to now and the userbase has definitely grown with the site, both in size and in quality. The users on this board are infinitely more knowledgeable than the users of eight years ago. It is highly, highly evident.

Additionally, a lot of static content has been created that makes the site more appealing. We didn't have an FAQ section with answers to dozens of commonly asked questions. There was no SB/MS system. No rankings. I don't even recall if we had more than basic search functionality. This has been a tremendous leap forward for the site and definitely a reason a contributing factor to the growth.

Echoing comments above, WSO has also added its annual conference and a number of meet-ups. I now know a lot of users that I originally met online. This never used to happen even just four years back.

Also --- there is a tremendous amount of "behind the scenes" activity that occurs on WSO. I get a lot of direct PMs from users regarding all sorts of things. Often time we will connect on the phone or something of that nature. Through WSO I've even met a number of my MBA classmates prior to us matriculating together. There is a lot more to WSO than just the articles you read on the front page.

So yes, WSO has changed a lot, even more so in recent years. But I think that is for the better. And I definitely don't think WSO is easily replicate-able, even if the content is user generated. I always point prospective students to this site and will continue to do so.

wow, just saw this thread. Thanks guys for all the comments and for all the feedback / ideas.

If I'm being honest with myself, I think there has been somewhat of a dilution in the forum posts if you are ignoring all the webinars / AMAs we are putting out each month (which is fair since only some people like these). From a pure community perspective, we've gotten better at tracking activity...While the last ~4 weeks have showed us getting back on track and growing again (finally), the past 2 years traffic and activity has plateaued.

I think what everyone has highlighted here has at least some merit...the hard part is knowing which of these factors is natural and which we should be concerned about:

1. There is now an incredibly MASSIVE database of discussions so while not all new users search, the % that do and never end up posting has increased dramatically. That pattern of participating and interacting has dropped...and yes, many of the new users register to gain 100% access to the content and don't ever post (the 300,000+ members is a vanity metric and means VERY little)

2. A lot of the content and searching has shifted to the WSO Company Database which continues to accelerate in growth. Company reviews, interview insights, compensation data, etc were all hot forum topics in previous years...that information is now more structured and going into the company database and people are searching that database to find answers...whereas before the forum was used to ask all of those questions...

3. Content quality...while we have made a BIG push into our weekly webinars (doing ~2 one hour webinars per week), but it feels like that has created more pushing and less interactive material. The webinars also focus on a niche topic related to helping people in their career and are a far cry from Uncle Eddies and Midas NSFW. Not sure if that is a bad thing, it is just less entertaining and more educational.

Before when @"Edmundo Braverman" and @"bankerella" were regulars, they would frequently create fun and lively discussions...I think going into 2015, it would make sense to invest more into this type of content to make sure that we keep the actual professionals entertained with the backdrop of so many college student users flooding the forums. Consider this noted :-)

We are making a pretty dramatic design and backend (upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7) transition at the end of February 2015 (assuming all of our testing goes well) to try and once and for all improve the mobile experience and clean up the site (fully adaptive theme, etc)....you can read more about our 2015 goals here: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/wso-plan-for-2015-and-site-sugges… Going back to that, it sounds like I missed a big goal: Improve the editorial content to the home page...to be honest, it won't be easy. What @"IlliniProgrammer" said is dead on:

The amount of work that goes into a good OP is probably worth about $200-300 when you factor in the value of peoples' time. The actual value to WSO is more like $20-$50.

so how to we bridge that gap? The reality is that gap makes it very hard to find good paid content and stay afloat. We are investing a lot of $ into this upgrade (because we have to, D6 not supported once D8 is out) and the redesign (because people have been complaining about the mobile experience / non-adaptive theme for a while)...but I think there is a good argument to be made that we need to refocus on high quality content (not just webinars, but text as well). I'm not sure if that is a Seeking Alpha model, but I'd definitely be open to something like that for sure. I think they pay a flat rate to their authors and then pay them a bonus after 30 days based on how many impressions the article generated? Does anyone know this rate or the exact payment methodology used?

Thank you for getting my brain working again...sometimes I get stuck in the weeds, these threads are a HUGE eye opener.

Back at it! Patrick

ps - keep the suggestions coming, it's the only way we've improved in the past!

I first started reading during the IBOasis days in 2005 (posting around 2009). I can tell you Investment Banking Oasis really was the wild west. @"CompBanker" made some very good points above. There were not too many legit industry professionals and prob 90% of them were IBD. Their word was taken as gospel. The amount people who never worked a day in finance parroting what they'd read was extreme, the majority of posts. Basically college kids answering other college kids, haha. Back during IBOasis the very few legit professionals pretty much all went to target ivys, so there was a prevailing view that you could only get an IBD job if you attended a target... I don't even think the term "semi-target" was ever used back then.

The addition of the search feature was a game changer. Also, getting members certified is another crucial feature imo.

and @"DickFuld" not sure I can add much since I just joined a little over a year ago but I appreciate the mention. I'll tell everyone why I joined WSO, why I became active, and why I think it's a great site, maybe that will help.

1. I joined because I was bored during some insurance CE and thought killing myself would be a bit extreme. ok, sorta. I joined & became active in WSO because I remember people helping me along the way and because my school doesn't have a great finance network, I wanted to give back to strangers with the hopes of helping some kid out there like me and maybe scoring some points with the big man upstairs.

2. I became active because I hate misinformation. both in my profession, in lifestyle, fashion (business dress). to combat the juniors helping freshman posts that have been talked about, I chimed in on a lot of bullshit threads talking about what tie to wear to this particular internship interview because I wanted kids to get perspective from someone who's employed. additionally, the anonymous nature of WSO means you can post without fear of reprisal from other users if someone disagrees. for example: I wear pleats and own a black suit that I wear on occasion (you'd be amazed at how confident you can feel in a black suit, white shirt, regal tie, and bald head), these would be causes for crucifixion in most cases, but I think the debate is healthy.

3. getting active in WSO is also intellectually stimulating. I have friends at hedge funds, MM PE firms, in IB, etc., but only a handful, not a lot. most are accounting, healthcare (the business side), medicine, or law. seeing posts from experienced users here was really interesting, though I've never said it vocally, it's been a great place to come so that I can lose my blinders to the world outside of PWM. it may have helped my PM skills, who knows, but it's been fun either way. also somewhat selfishly, it makes me not sound like a dolt when talking to those guys.

4. WSO is a great place to hedge your career. in investing, you don't put all of your eggs in one basket, you have a margin of safety, you hedge your bets because we are humans and we are prone to make mistakes. someone along the way told me to hedge my career in whatever ways I could, similar to a stock position. for example, a welder getting certified on a national level is a way of hedging. keeping in touch with your pledge class is a way of hedging, and for me, joining WSO is a way of hedging. in the extremely unlikely situation where PWM doesn't work out for me (like 6 sigma unlikely, but not impossible), I am confident I can use the knowledge base of WSO to give me some direction.

5. everything dingdong said about resources I'll echo. I feel privileged because my dad was in commercial banking and knew a lot of people plus my uncle was a banker turned private investor via traditional path (target>IB>M7>....you get the idea), so I had a lot of good advice early on. I realize not everyone is so lucky. when kids from my fraternity/alma mater ask me questions, many times I'm floored because of the misconceptions of the various facets of the industry (no idea why, perhaps the media and liberal professors?), so while I try to help them all out individually, I just point them to WSO, the collective knowledge here is orders of magnitude more valuable than individual advice from someone who has only minor experience in one area.

so no, WSO is not dying, there is just no stream of recurring posts like bankerella, Eddie, et al. find a poster who's in b school and already secured employment for post graduation or a college kid who's already secured full time, I'm sure we can get the content more regular up in here.

I think WSO has remained pretty stable. I've lurked since... maybe 2009? 2010? But only started posting actively as I've gotten more comfortable in my career (i.e. I didn't want to be one of those college shitheads parroting everything).

As mentioned, it's an invaluable and unique resource, both through the forums and PMs. To help with new content, I just made an "Ask me Anything" thread over in the PE section with a (hopefully) unique perspective on things.

The only change that I think would help is a feature where you get punched in the face for starting a "prestige" thread. Like, a cartoon-style spring-loaded boxing glove comes out of your monitor and just fucking decks you. If only...

WSO has changed, that is for sure. Now if you feel that it is better or worse after the changes that is your opinion. But I think the culture has changed with the culture of the industry. While we still live in out sized fish bowls those bowls contain a few less exotic fish and coral. The public scrutiny is too high to get away with some of the shit from the boom eras. This transitions into acceptable behavior inside and outside of the office. Thus the though police have seeped into WSO not by force of punishment, although I have had many posts taken down because someone found my content "questionable". However for the most part I feel the change is a symptom of the greater stress in the industry to tone down the antics.

There are more preftigious posters on the board now (i.e. GS/MS/BX to megafund PE/HF elite brothers and sisters) - old days were dominated by unpreftigious middle market bankers and PE bros.

is it time for techoasis.com?