When Does Reddit Give Good Advice?

More often than I thought

Near the end of my parental leave, I decided to get my financial affairs in order and put together a proper investing plan. I’ve been chucking extra money into the S&P 500 since I started working, but this was never really part of a coherent financial plan - I was just sort of doing what seemed to make sense and not worrying about it all that much. Now that I had a kid counting on me, I figured I should have this stuff sorted out in a more rigorous way.

I learned a lot from various resources on the Internet - including, to my dismay, the hodgepodge of made-for-SEO factory content that mashes together information on commonly searched-for keywords. Fortunately, this enabled me to make some pretty substantial improvements to my setup. I fixed up my asset allocation (for future money, at least), better prioritized my contributions, and put together a roadmap to financial independence*. I don’t make that much and I’ll be working for a long time yet, but at least I know where it ends, and if circumstances arise that it, uh, unintentionally ends before then, at least my family will be taken care of.

I was amazed during this process to find myself getting a large amount of information from Reddit. I’ve spent the last several years forming a pretty anti-Reddit viewpoint when it comes to taking advice, so it seemed to me like that would be the last place I would go to learn how to manage my personal finances.

And yet - there I was!

Wrong Answers Can Be Useful

I think one of the most fundamental problems with Reddit is that there’s a lot of bad information on there. And I think with respect to learning how to play competitive real-time strategy games, that can set a lot of people on the path to developing poor fundamentals, which then goes on to hamper their long-term development as a player. Playing well, more than anything, is about building good habits - it’s just a lot more expedient to follow the right advice and do the hard work upfront, than it is to undo the damage of playing incorrectly as a novice player.

I think that’s all fine and good, and I still agree with it. I think what I may have discounted, though, is the value of knowing both - the right and the wrong answers. It’s useful to know it all, even if you really only need a part of it.

For me, when it came to investing, that meant dividends. For years, I interpreted dividends as “free money”. I didn’t realize that dividends are accounted for in share prices - “a stock price adjusts downward when a dividend is paid” - and I hadn’t carefully considered the tax implications for myself as a US investor. It just didn’t make sense to prioritize dividends in my individual situation. But while the answer made sense intellectually, in my gut I still found the concept attractive, and I stuck around in the dividends subreddit for awhile, reading responses, absorbing portfolios, and getting a real, up-close-and-personal look at what dividend investing is actually like.

One of the first things I noticed was people verbalizing what I had always thought to myself, but had never openly stated - dividends are nice because you can periodically cash them out instead of re-investing. To put this in less generous terms, dividends make it psychologically easier to spend your investment returns. And I don’t mean that as a personal judgment of anyone espousing this idea - actually, I empathize with it, because it’s exactly how I was thinking about dividends, too.

From a total returns point of view, it’s arguably the “wrong” way of thinking about it. But I needed to understand that perspective before I could internalize the “right” way. And it pushed me to create a financial plan that considered both spending and saving as part of a larger goal, rather than viewing the former as intrinsically bad and the latter as intrinsically good - a bias that I too easily found myself stepping into.

I think this general idea - knowing what’s true, but actually thinking some other way in your gut - applies to a lot of things, and it can be detrimental to your growth. When it comes to real-time strategy games, I think competitive balance is a really good example. Objectively, I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to ignore balance concerns and focus on self-improvement, given that the competitive side is best served by balancing for the best. That’s just “the right way” to do it - the healthiest long-term attitude, the one that’s best optimized for long-term skill growth.

But it’s really hard to ignore balance concerns, isn’t it? Everyone has games where it seems like they did everything right but still lost because the game feels unbalanced. There were days, back when I was grinding StarCraft II, when TvZ felt unwinnable to me. And while I was playing at a moderately high level, I wasn’t anywhere close to a pro-gamer or anything like that. I certainly wasn’t at a point where balance was affecting my games.

But regardless of whether or not I understand, intellectually, that balance doesn’t affect my games, I also need to understand it in my gut, because it’s my gut that decides whether I finish out a practice session with focus, or with tilt. And I feel like leaning into some of the “wrong answers” about balance has a lot of potential to do that. The oft-cited advice to off-race is a good example: instead of telling yourself balance isn’t the problem, put yourself in the other guy’s shoes and see for yourself whether or not they’re overpowered. It’s not winnable if they do X is a hard case to make when you’ve done X for yourself and, well, lost. Knowing the theory sometimes takes seeing the other side to make it feel more tangible.

I see this as a sub-branch of the general idea of understanding every side of a debate, even if you don’t think anything will convince you to change your mind. At the very least, it broadens your horizons and adds nuance to your views; and sometimes, it can change your way of thinking, in a way you didn’t expect.

Sometimes, There’s Many Right Answers

I’m guilty of tunnel vision when it comes to build order traversals. I like having one right answer in any given situation; the so-called “optimal” reaction. As a result, I sometimes get stuck in analysis-paralysis. This makes me play worse, which then furthers my feeling of being lost as I lose game after game.

I think the part of this that’s especially commonplace is the sense of frustration that comes from losing a game that I feel I “should” have won, if only I had played it the correct way. It’s ironic - feeling entitled to a win after making an inferior series of decisions relative to my opponent - but I think we all get that vibe from time to time, an almost tactile sensation of mechanical and tactical superiority regardless of how a game actually plays out. To lose from that position is kind of a bummer.

I think it’s worth getting comfortable with the idea that there are many valid ways of playing out a given game state, and sometimes you’ve just gotta lose a lot of games and gain a bunch more experience before you start to grasp what’s going on; and a lot more losing and a lot more experience before you understand all the different setups and reactions.

Reddit is helpful here because it’s a really good crowdsourcing platform. I think some of the most useful Reddit threads I’ve come across are when someone asks a question, and lots of people offer lots of different answers, rather than everyone coalescing and upvoting one or two individual comments. Ironically, these threads often have a pretty poor upvote-to-comment ratio, and in practice function more like a traditional Internet forum. But they’re regardless very helpful.

I recall, for example, struggling with English Feudal all-ins over the summer, and I was unsatisfied with the answers I read on Reddit. “Try building horsemen against longbows? Oh wow man, thank you, I did not realize this game has a counter system.” But in retrospect, I came across a lot of new ideas, and I think I would have benefited from YOLO’ing a few of them onto the ladder, just to understand the match-up from different angles - even if I was confident that they were the wrong angles. At the very least, it would have reset my head space, and allowed me to stop being tilted.

Crowdsourcing is helpful because it’s humbling, too. On the investing front, I’ve come to appreciate just how much I don’t know about finance. I’ve read some Reddit posts that distilled a lot of useful knowledge in just a few short paragraphs, on bonds and taxes and international investing and everything in between. And the cool thing about “finance Internet” is that, relative to video games, it’s proportionally more slanted toward older professionals with genuine subject matter expertise, who freely share their knowledge and ideas.

I feel bad, in retrospect, remembering the times I would lose a game and still think I was the better player. It just lacks a certain humility, you know? I think one of the reasons my improvement grinds frequently plateau - other than material factors like the learning curve - is a progressively decreasing beginner’s mentality. And I think that mindset is crucial to quickly identifying and resolving gaps in my gameplay, because otherwise I get stuck in ruts that are hard to get out of.

Sometimes, You Can Meet Genuine Experts

Over the summer, I had an enlightening conversation with Gemini regarding the merits of coaching in esports (yes, the article is still coming! I promise!). He mentioned something pretty insightful - that in esports, players have the option to be coached by the very best players in the world, whereas in a regular sport, that’s typically not possible. “You’re not going to get coached by LeBron”. But, you can get coached by a top professional StarCraft II player. And that’s actually not always a good thing, because being good at a game and being good at teaching others how to play it are different skill sets.

The cool thing - and what I’ve failed to give Reddit due credit for - is that lots of good teachers actually dole out free advice in places like /r/AllThingsProtoss. And many of them are pretty high-level players, too. The smaller, more niche sub-Reddits are often higher signal than the more mainstream ones, and that’s something I’ve learned to take more advantage of. I think this is partly due to a difference in incentives; smaller sub-reddits reward people for posting thoughtful, quality responses that collect upvotes throughout the day. But I also think it’s a reflection on the userbase, too - I think the snarky, lowest common denominator nature of bigger sub-reddits drives away a lot of good users, and that becomes a vicious cycle for the quality of posted and upvoted content.

This is an area I’d like to explore more during my next grind, and not just on Reddit. I guess I’ll date myself a bit by admitting that I don’t use Discord all that much, even though it’s the “big thing” nowadays. I think I go it alone sometimes when grinding, and I want to try doing it as part of a community next time. The Conqueror III grind in Age of Empires IV was a lot of fun, but it took a lot out of me, too - I was surprised how quickly I ran out of motivation on my way to top 50, and I haven’t even touched the new expansion pack yet.

Anyway, that’s for next time. I’m as surprised as anyone at how I’ve come to better appreciate Reddit, of all places, over the past few months. It can be a surprisingly good resource when used in the right way. Like a lot of things, it has its own set of problems, too, and I think I’ve covered those in the past. But maybe I didn’t give it a fair enough shake, and I’m excited to try it out in a different way the next time I do a big grind.

Until next time,
brownbear

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* An Iced Cafe Latte and an Americano in Manhattan runs more than $13 nowadays - up 50-60% in the past 3 years! I was always a “make coffee at home” kind of guy but got lazy about it after moving to New York. I’m back on the wagon, folks.