Hello and A Message I Sent to IV Admin

aenima

July 16, 2016

Hi guys,

I've a been a long time lurker on the Yahoo! ELN board. I did not post there partly because I rarely had anything to contribute and partly because my firm (I'm an M&A lawyer) does not allow me to express my opinions about stocks even if they are not on our restricted list. I felt that I could begin repaying the debt I owe to the numerous valuable ELN posters by doing my best to facilitate our transition from the Yahoo! disaster. With that in mind, I just sent a message to IV Admin, which I've pasted below. I look forward to this new board. Keep up the posting. There are many of us who avidly read the board but cannot for various reasons post.

______________________________

Dear,

InvestorVillage Administrator,

I have been a long time user of the Yahoo! Finance message boards. Like many others, I felt outraged at Yahoo!'s Kafkaesque treatment of its users embodied by their almost surreal desire to act in a manner directly opposite to (most of) the users' desires. The result of this perverse capitalism has been a board system that is at best useless.

I would like to congratulate you on the services your message boards offer. Without listing the features, I think many others like myself have found in your boards a representation of our "lost world". Just by monitoring your traffic over the past few days, you probably see what a unique opportunity this must be for your site.

Over the past few years, investor message boards have provided me, much to my own dismay, with invaluable insights. I think this almost socialistic, if you will, method of collecting information is quite revolutionary and more people are bound to eventually participate in it. We have found that sharing may ironically be the best way to beat this ultimately very egoistical game we call investing. And Yahoo! has given you the chance to be on the ground floor. I hope for yours, and indeed theirs :), sake that you take full advantage of it.

I would like to offer a suggestion for improvement. Maybe you can use credit cards to validate users, (while of course keeping the information so obtained confidential)and then limit each user to only one username. This will reduce the traffic to the boards significantly by limiting access only to people actually interested in engaging in constructive discussion. It will make your boards significantly better then even the old Yahoo! boards, which were infested with numerous people engaged in nothing but deranged rambling meant to only clog the boards. As soon as one "ignored" them, they would reemerge under a different username. By addressing this, the credit card authentication will both improve the usefulness of the board AND save you some server space. It will also give you a direct competitive advantage should Yahoo! ever come to their senses and decide to revert to the old board format.

Sincerely,

XXX

< EOM >

9:04:05 PM

Re: Hello and A Message I Sent to IV Admin - Reply from Blue

aenima

July 17, 2016

Well, here's something that won't happen on Yahoo! I got a response to the message I sent last night. I hope most people bear out the bandwidth issues and other (to me, seemingly minor) concerns such as too much scrolling and come to appreciate the fact that Yahoo! may have done us all a huge favor. Rather than a temporary asylum, this may be the beginning of a whole new era of finance message boards.

_________________________________________

XXX:

Thank you for taking the time to write to us. We are in fundamental agreement with you on a number of points, the main ones being the inherent power of civilized investor communication and collaboration to level the playing field on Wall Street, as well as a desperate need for restraint on abusive message boards practices far too long tolerated and frankly encouraged by many of our competitors who take a hands-off approach to providing financial discussion forums. We are doing everything we can to turn this challenge into an opportunity and we sincerely hope that more people like you will spread the word to other serious investors.

If you would ever care to speak with me on these or related subjects, feel free to call me on my cell: 504-250-0021. Just ask for "Blue."

Best of luck to you (and don't worry about your name--we take our privacy policy very seriously).

Ralph "Blue" Kidd
Co-Founder, CEO, Chief Site Administrator
InvestorVillage
504-250-0021

< EOM >

2:33:37 PM