the motley fool reddit — and the version i never logged into

the motley fool reddit, with article, is a different room than the one without. reddit holds the version i never logged into. mike pours one. hank, ghost, of 1B, agrees. the post office, also avoided, lives a similar metaphorical block. logging in remains hypothetical.

i’m typing this from the desk at 10:51am on a wednesday. carla is in the all-hands on the third floor, which gives me roughly forty minutes before someone notices the lid of my laptop is too low for productive optics. that’s the window. that’s the post.

the thing i want to say first, before anyone asks, is that this is an investigation, not an account. the difference matters. an account is a thing you log into. an investigation is a thing you write while avoiding logging into things. those are not, despite what reddit will tell you, the same activity.

the motley fool reddit, the article, the the

the difference between “motley fool reddit” and “the motley fool reddit” is one word and roughly four months of behavior. without the article you sound like you’re searching. with the article you sound like you’ve decided. i have not decided. i have, however, read about the version sketched out at the fool cluster pillar, which is the page i go to when i want to remember why i started this folder in the first place.

so what is the motley fool reddit, in practice. it’s a subreddit. it’s not the company. the company has a website and a podcast and a newsletter and, somewhere in the building, presumably, a coffee machine. the subreddit has none of those things. the subreddit has people. the people have opinions about whether the people who run the company are right, wrong, or, more often, somewhere in between, which is the position humans hold about most things they have already paid for.

i learned this without making an account. i learned it from the way the threads load when you scroll past a paywall page. it’s the same way you learn what’s inside a restaurant by walking past it slowly. nobody has to invite you in.

why i never made an account, on principle

i don’t have a reddit account. i have, technically, a username from 2017 that i used twice, both times to ask a question about a microwave, both times answered by someone who turned out to be wrong but very confident. the username is dormant. the password is gone. the email it was tied to no longer receives mail because i cancelled the email, not the account, which is its own kind of monument.

so when i look at the motley fool reddit threads, i look at them the way i look at the mail pile by the door — through the plastic, sideways, with one airpod in. i have one airpod. binaural is a luxury i no longer afford. i mention this only because the act of reading reddit one-eared is, i think, the correct posture. you should be slightly off-balance when you read other people’s investment regrets.

the principle, if you want to call it that, is this: making an account would obligate me to participate. participating would mean responding. responding would mean being wrong on a permanent searchable record under a name that, even pseudonymous, would somehow be traced back to me by my own future self in a moment of 2 AM revelation. i have enough 2 AM revelations already. i don’t need to fund more.

mike at the corner has never made an account either

i told mike about this post on tuesday at the corner. mike pours, mike listens, mike does not log in to things. mike has a system for taxes that involves a shoebox and a faith in eventual review. mike has not filed since 2019. i mention this because it’s relevant to the posture of not logging in. the posture is not laziness. the posture is a refusal to make a record.

mike said what he always says, which is “yeah”. mike’s “yeah” can mean four different things depending on which syllable he leans on. this one was the second-syllable yeah, which means “i agree but only because the other option is talking more”. i marked it down. i drink water now during the third beer because i am, allegedly, an adult.

i told mike about the threads. i told him about the people who post their portfolio screenshots in the subreddit, who blur the dollar amounts but leave the percentages, who ask “is this normal” when the percentages are negative. mike said yeah. third-syllable this time. that means “of course it’s normal, what did they expect”. mike has a doctorate in things-people-already-knew.

hank from 1b has more presence on reddit than i do, allegedly

this is the part that broke me, briefly, on tuesday night. there is, on reddit, a thread about a dog named hank. it is not my hank — hank is not mine, hank is the dog of the lady in 1B who travels too much, and hank is, when he is anything, a problem that solves itself by sitting. but the hank on reddit has a username, a posting history, and seventy-three upvotes on a comment about kibble brands.

seventy-three. i have, by my own honest count, written roughly four hundred things on the internet across my life and have never received seventy-three of anything. a ghost dog from 1B has, allegedly, more reddit presence than i do. the implication of which is that the version of me that exists on reddit is the version i never logged into, and that version is, somehow, doing better than this one.

this is not paranoia. this is research. you can look up the relevant audio version of the same problem and you’ll find people who have been listening for years and still haven’t bought anything, which is, as i note here, my preferred way to consume any subscription.

the hot take collection from threads i did not read, ranked

i want to be clear about what i did and did not do, because reddit invites a certain kind of false intimacy and i don’t want to fake it. i did not read the threads. i scrolled the headlines of the threads. there is a difference. one is consumption. the other is a kind of disciplined glancing that i believe should have its own name, possibly in german.

here are the headlines i glanced at, ranked by how loud the comments looked from outside:

one. people who paid for the subscription and want to know if it was worth it. the comments are long. nobody knows. they are asking the subreddit because they cannot ask themselves.

two. people who almost paid for the subscription and want permission to not pay. the comments are shorter. the answer is “yes, you have permission”. this is what the subreddit does best.

three. people who never considered the subscription but found the subreddit anyway, possibly through search, possibly through the algorithm, possibly through a misclick on a thursday at 11:47am. these are my people. these are the lurkers. we do not post. we observe.

four. people complaining about the cancellation flow, the pricing, the email frequency, the article quality, and, in one memorable case, the font. i appreciated the font complaint. the taxman sends letters in serif font. font is not a small thing. font is a class war that nobody has the courage to declare.

and now the hot take. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. i didn’t make that up. i’ve believed it for years. the people on the motley fool reddit are, in their loud and confused and paywall-adjacent way, performing a kind of group therapy where the therapy is reading the receipts of strangers who wish they had also not logged in.

verdict, the reddit knows me without me knowing it

here is what i have, after all of this, decided. the motley fool reddit is a room. i have not entered the room. i have, however, listened at the door for several afternoons over the course of several months, the way i listen to the meeting carla is in upstairs by reading the agenda someone left on the printer.

i think the room is fine. i think the people in it are fine. i think the reason the search exists is because people, before they spend money on something, want to find a stranger who already spent that money and survived. this is a perfectly reasonable form of due diligence. it is also, for me personally, the entire reason i don’t make accounts.

tom called yesterday. i didn’t pick up. tom has a volvo. tom has a pension that he understands. tom would, i think, never look up the motley fool reddit, because tom would just buy or not buy the thing without asking strangers in advance. this is the difference between tom and me. tom has no investigations. tom has decisions. mine come pre-soaked in research and post-soaked in mike.

i thought briefly about going to the post office, which i avoid on principle, because there’s a notice in there about something that may or may not be a certified letter for me. i did not go. avoiding the post office is the physical-world equivalent of not making a reddit account. you preserve the ambiguity. you stay outside the room. the letter, like the thread, exists with or without your participation. and the air fryer i bought in november is still sitting on the counter, used once, judging me from inside its little glass window. some objects do reddit’s job from the kitchen.

if you want a version of this same posture in a different cluster, the bit about other people insisting on a version of events you don’t remember is well covered in the cluster on when an ex insists nothing happened, which is a different kind of room you also don’t have to enter to know is in the building. gaslighting is not a stock-pick category. it ought to be.

i also rewatched a chunk of The Big Short on monday at the desk, with one airpod, while pretending to update a deck. that movie is, technically, the version of the motley fool reddit that has a budget. the conclusion is the same. the people who looked won, and they didn’t enjoy it. nobody enjoys being right about money. you just get to be right.

further reading on the same shelf, if you want to go deeper into the operational side: the subscription itself, in plain english, and the abbreviation people use when they don’t want to type the full name. both rooms i’ve been in. neither contains an account.

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