Yahoo Will Discontinue Displaying Seeking Alpha Headlines

Thanks! I had already divested mentally from SA, but a more powerful disempowerment from Yahoo is of course more influential than one single clickster.

SteveG3 said:

Cheer's to separating journalism from unedited blogging!

as a "contributor" I received a lengthy Seeking Alpha email about this. here is the first sentence,

"As of next Monday Yahoo Finance will no longer be displaying Seeking Alpha headlines on its website."

Just a bit of background...

Seeking Alpha does not fact check the "articles" of it's contributors. literally, no fact checking. I spoke to a senior IR person at Tesla a couple of weeks ago and Seeking Alpha came up. The Tesla person indicated that not fact checking seems to be a strategy of SA's to avoid legal responsibility for the content on their website. I said to him, perhaps then the party who could be appealed to to act more responsibly would be Yahoo, as putting these articles in their headline section implies the material is from a news source, which implies factual accuracy, fact checking... I don't remember precisely what the Tesla rep said, but I believe he said Tesla has discussed this internally, and I had the sense it may have even been brought up with Yahoo. (This, of course, is not to say that Yahoo and SA parting ways was prompted by Tesla or even had anything to do with Tesla.)

How does one become a Seeking Alpha contributor? I became a contributor by submitting an "article" last year. It was basically like signing up for an online account of any kind. IIRC they wrote that they accept 30-50% of people who ask to become contributors. Again, they do not fact check. They will review and request changes for grammar and tone (they would not allow me to use "FUD" to describe statements made about Tesla from other websites).

Bottom line, Seeking Alpha is a blog site, and it's misplacement in Yahoo's headlines section has exploited by some as a channel for factually false FUD. Apparently this ends Monday. Perhaps this will also improve Motley Fool. Fool apparently has some content of value. But the free stuff that shows up on Yahoo is often similar to the Seeking Alpha free for all. I strongly suspect this resulted at least in part to Fool trying to compete with SA.

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As a contributor, I like this. I don't need to stick to writing about Tesla. But in the no fact checking, SA is no different from Motley Fool or thestreet or many other sources. I've also learned that the better Motley fool content comes from the free for all. Motley fool insiders (author name starts with TMF) generally only publish short and relatively content free fluff pieces. This has basically caused me to quit writing for or visiting MF even though they paid better.

I have always wondered why blog articles are regarded as news headlines. I think that MF is no different from SA in this regard. This is not to say that they don't have value as discussion forums. They're just not in the same category as news headlines. Maybe Yahoo should have a heading for blogs.

Interesting development. Thanks for posting this thread.

I wonder if SA could develop a crowd sourcing model for fact checking that would leave them with practically no liability. For example, Wikipedia is able to engage users not only to write articles, but to edit them for factual accuracy. And of course, academic journals have a long history of peer review. So it seems that within a blogging platform, some one could come up with a sensible approach to community fact checking. When I was still reading SA articles, i often found that the readers comments were often much more informative than the given article, despite the tendency for obnoxious personalities to try to dominate the discussion with nonsense. In the most egrious cases, I would find that authors would willfully disregard the ritiques of factual inaccuracies broght forward by reader. In other word, readers were doing their job of fact checking, but there was no way to hold author accountable for their errors. This is where some sort of system for group editing such as developed in Wikipedia could be very helpful. Could you imagine being able to edit directly an article by JP or PS where you could insert requests for citations and claification and insert citations to the contrary or other counterpoints. An author would have to tighten up inaccuracies or have their article marked up with tons of red ink. Of course authors are entitled to express their own opinions, but they are not entitled to pass off misinformation as facts. Additionally, other sorts of reader feedback could be captured and reported statistically. For example a rating system on content, accuracy, clarity and fairness could accompany each article and each author. For example, Amazon and other online vendors capture user product reviews to help customers make better informed purchases. SA readers could use author and article reviews to filter out unreliable sources.

One of the basic problems with many SA contibutors is that they do not opperate from a basic position of fairness. John Petersen comes to mind as a classic example of an intellectual bully who uses "facts" only to argue his case and otherwise talks down other points of view with heavy handed rhetoric when facts are not enough. In others, he is more concerned about advancing his agenda than providing evenhanded information that will help investors think more accurately about their investment choices. Investors should be encouraged to think for themselves, not to be badgered into one position or another.

The basic problem with SA is that authors are not held accountible to readers. There can be many different ways to remedy this. For me, the remedy has been simply to stol reading SA altogether.

This is fantastic news. Other than a very few people with some actual journalistic chops (such as dalalsid and others who have visited us here) this site was pure drivel.

Good riddance to Seeking Mediocrity.

FluxCap said:

This is fantastic news. Other than a very few people with some actual journalistic chops (such as dalalsid and others who have visited us here) this site was pure drivel.

Good riddance to Seeking Mediocrity.

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Thanks . I'm going to quote you on this.