8 ms·
What I learned from a year of watching bad financial advice on TikTok
- austincheney 5y agoSounds like there is real money to be made by giving out horrible advice on TikTok at next to no risk.
- emikulic 5y agoOr CNBC.
- netizen-936824 5y agoOr fox news. Ever notice how many commercials for gold/silver they play? It feels predatory
- tamaharbor 5y agoI also feel sorry for those polar bears, bald kids, and puppies.
- netizen-936824 5y agoIN THE AAARMS OOOF AN ANGEL
- ParanoidShroom 5y agoI wonder if we will ever have fact checking regulation that every media outlet needs to conform to.
- didgeoridoo 5y agoDefinitely. We could call it the “Ministry of Truth”!
- Zigurd 5y ago
- fennecfoxen 5y agoWould it be fair to describe such a regulation as a law that abridges, in any way, the freedom of the press? If so you will need a massive and bipartisan political effort for it to be so, at least in any US jurisdiction.
- sdoering 5y agoA German comedian once stated that an esoteric could claim more BS in 5 minutes than a scientist could disprove in one lifetime. I know there is a YouTube series from renowned lecturers that discuss the same concept, but sadly can't find it right now. The problem is that any instrument being introduced could be abused for censorship as well. As much as I would like to have some things in place to counter the amount of BS in social media or on YouTube I fear it would backfire. I think much would be gained if the platforms dismantled their algorithms optimized for engagement that lead people down a rabbit hole of more extreme content. Because in the end statistically this leads to more ad revenue from more clicks.
- srean 5y agoYes, I call it a denial of service attack. Not sure what the solution is.
- sdoering 5y agoAddendum: I found the lecture on YouTube [1]. The lecturers made a book from the lecture [2]. [1]: https://youtu.be/A2OtU5vlR0k https://youtu.be/A2OtU5vlR0k [2]: https://www.callingbullshit.org/ https://www.callingbullshit.org/
- austincheney 5y agoNot exactly what you are looking for but MIT has a partially animated series on YouTube about econometrics that is excellent.
- pmarreck 5y agoChina already has this :/
- lysium 5y agoI don’t think this will help. Everything will be posted as an opinion or with lots of question marks. Also, what is a fact? Who determines it? And: we need unpopular opinions for innovations.
- matwood 5y agoIt wouldn't work. How and which facts are presented can shape whatever narrative the presenter wants. In topics like science, the 'when' also matters because what we consider facts can change over time as more studies are done.
- Mezzie 5y agoNope. It's not possible logistically or politically. Assuming we're talking about the USA, any such body would likely end up as a federal agency, which means it would turn into a political football whenever administrations change over. Each administration would have its own personal approach to the fact-checking, which means that even if you trust politicians (lololol), the fact-checks wouldn't be consistent. The only way to avoid this would be for Congress to be really specific in drafting the legislation, but Congress has incentive not to touch the topic.
- ParanoidShroom 5y agoCan't edit anymore, should have elaborated more: I'm not suggesting we need this for many reasons, I'm wondering how this will evolve. FB, Insta,TikTok, newspapers etc have these issues, many opportunists hiding behind the fact that scale fact checking is HARD. I'm just cynical and fear governments jump in with the a hammer called regulation. Will there ever be enough ponzi schemes were the governments will say "enough"?
- nomilk 5y agoI searched youtube today for a particular hardware product. The video I clicked on was 20 minutes long, and by every indicator I could see, the presenter looked like an expert at what they were talking about. Yet by the end of the video (which, thankfully, I watched at 3.25 speed), I hadn't gained a single new piece of information, and my brain hurt from dealing with so much repetition of facile hearsay. The key to the success of this video (and others) was that the presenter was nothing more than a salesperson, not for the product they were talking about, but for themselves. They're trying to sell themselves as experts, and if we're not careful, we end up trusting them and paying (with our time). I got duped, but it's a continual arms race between viewers looking for useful content, and facile content creators trying to game the system by imitating the hallmarks of great content without any substance to back it up.
- c0nsumer 5y agoThis is the reason for my strong dislike of online content moving to video. It's way, way harder to skim a video to see if it's decent quality. I feel like this is the inevitable result of video content having a lower entry bar than written. And even when writing's bad, it's more immediately obvious.
- pmarreck 5y agoIt’s also monetized better
- c0balt 5y agoNot the gp but the "Enhancer for YouTube" extension for firefox supports up to 5x (given enough bandwidth) and MediaPipe for Android up to 3x.
- spaniard89277 5y agoYeah but then you don't understand what they say, so it's not useful. I guess this is what the Internet has come to.
- mmaunder 5y ago2022 is going to be a rough year for many folks speculating on assets going up forever. It’s come-to-jesus time. Inflation is driving real wages down and stimulus is being withdrawn while we’re looking at 5 rate hikes this year. We’ll be very lucky if it’s just a flat year and even then some of these strategies will get killed by finance costs while trying to ride it out.
- uzakov 5y agoWould be interesting to hear your opinion on why you think certain assets will not keep going up. Treasury bonds rates are low (especially once you consider shadow inflation), inflation is fairly high atm. Where can investors park their money for some return above inflation?
- treeman79 5y agoBubbles pop. Pyramid schemes reach their conclusion. This is a natural cycle. Also starting to seem some bans on wasting electricity for useless number crunching.
- uzakov 5y agoBut I guess the answer still stands, from investor(especially regular investor) point of view, where can you park your money that is likely to generate return on part/slightly higher than inflation, while not investing into too high risk assets? There are not many options available, ie t-bonds etc are not an option for many
- croes 5y agoSo it's always, buy low, sell high. They totally forgot, pick the right numbers at the lottery and always bet on the winner.
- paulgb 5y agoIt's so unfortunate that kids are getting terrible financial advice from TikTok, instead of from TV like their parents' generation.
- honkdaddy 5y agoTo be fair though, the financial advice my parents generation got was stuff like mutual funds, real estate, and 401ks. Not necessarily "good" advice, but unlikely to leave them worse off than before. From what I gathered from the article, some of the advice on TikTok is stuff like meme stocks, shitcoins, and NFTs - investments which are very likely to bankrupt them.
- paulgb 5y agoThat's true, I was more getting at the Mad Money sort of analysis that is entertainment masquerading as financial advice, but it's fair to say that it never reaches the level of crap that's on TikTok.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- giorgioz 5y agoHERE IS WHAT I LEARNED SO FAR. I'M NOT A FINANCIAL ADVISOR. RESEARCH THE THINGS I SAY. One important bit is how the guy working in investments keep his money in ETF. I was lucky enough to work in the Silicon Valley 10 years ago and have colleagues that knew about ETF and explained them to me. It took me still 8 more years to understand fully what they are and open an investment account and buy one. ETF are quite well-known in the US but scarcely known in Europe, at least in my social circles. Most of the people I know in Europe doesn't know about ETF and only invest in it's mortgage of the house where s/he lives. They only know about Real Estate and as soon as you speak about ETF they think you are preaching some get-reach-money-scheme and they ask you stuff like:"Ah so I should buy a lot of gold OR bitcoin?"...mmm...NO...do not buy a lot of gold and crypto...buy ETF which are diversified group of stocks to have a diversified investment. FEW TIPS FOR WHO DOESN'T KNOW WHAT ETF ARE: 1) research passive investing with ETF 2) DO NOT TRY TO BEAT THE MARKET: The chances you are the smartest person on the planet and have incredible financial ideas that no-one else had are practically 0 and even financial geniuses get it worse than just buying a little bit of everything after a couple of years. 3) BUT Warren Buffet did it! Warren Buffet is not just an investor. He's a business man, he got down in trenches many times to save up companies. He created value as war-time temporary CEO. 4) do not invest with Robinhood/Etoro, get a investment bank that has been around 10-30 years but not a dinousaur. https://www.interactivebrokers.co.uk/ https://www.interactivebrokers.co.uk/ is available in many countries. 5) Start by buying only one ETF of a very generic market index with the lowest fees. For example MSCI World. 6) Do not buy ETF of niche sectors because they are just not diversified and you might as well just buy stocks and gamble. 7) Do not try to time the market. Just keep the ETF and instead of wasting time buying/selling stocks spend time working as an employee or startup founder. 8) People that tell you that they make money daily-investing should be taken as serious as professional poker player (to be clear both daily-investing and poker playing are NOT profession but just pure gambling and luck. The Casino always wins in the long run. Find something you love that creates value and do that.).
- AniseAbyss 5y agoAs a European I have a pension fund that invests for me. I don't pretend to have the intelligence or guile to get rich on the stock market.