2024 Forum Update

I’ve been doing a bunch of member interviews over the past month, and we’ll soon be rolling out a bunch of improvements in response to the qualitative data we’ve collected.

The first update is simple, though: a forum reorg. :slight_smile:

The high level reasoning for the reorg is as follows:

  1. The quality of Commoncog’s membership is pretty amazing. Y’all are business operators, advisors, and investors of extremely high caliber and thoughtfulness.
  2. Social media is only getting worse — Twitter has fallen off a cliff ever since Elon bought it, and LinkedIn is … LinkedIn.
  3. Let’s create a third space.

To be more precise: let’s create a third space for business nerds. The thing that I’ve learnt over the past year or so is that Commoncog’s membership is united in one thing: interest in the art of business. You could call all of us ‘business nerds’ — regardless of whether we’re investors, or operators, or advisors to businesses.

Business is such an infinite game that we can talk about it from so many angles: psychology, and human judgement and misjudgment, expertise, and self help, and emotional regulation, and operations, and market, and capital, and so on.

Here’s what the reorg means:

New Topics

The overall organisation of the forum has changed as a result of this goal. I’ve modelled this community around some of the longer-running value investing forums (with special thanks to @Gilbert_Lee — who urged me to consider this model).

The topics are:

  • Blog comments (warning: all topics and comments here are publicly viewable!)
  • Business — this topic is about the study of the art of business — post about things like business experimentation, or just sensemaking around specific business events or situations.
  • Markets — strategies or topics related to financial markets.
  • Books — book recommendations for the business nerd.
  • Deals + Recs — deals or recommendation for things from the community’
  • Self Improvement — this is an older topic; anything related to self improvement experiments or topics goes here.
  • General Careers — this is an older topic; if you’d like to talk about career decisions or get general career advice, post here.

Enjoy!

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Extremely happy with how these are shaping up now. Thanks for the effort here, Cedric.

Looking forward to being somewhat more active on here, too. Given I agree with this:

Social media is only getting worse — Twitter has fallen off a cliff ever since Elon bought it, and LinkedIn is … LinkedIn.

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biz-nerd people

i like the thought behind this feature

I also echo ryan’s thoughts abt social media in general

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Nice. I’m looking forward to participate more in discussions. One thing that’s probably been holding me back is the caliber of this community’s discussions seems so high, that I feel like a relatively new operator like me should take a moment and absorb it first!

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I’ve updated the Forum Guidelines as a result of this forum reorg. The big thing is that I’ve changed the overarching principle:

Outcome Orientation

This community is targeted towards ‘business nerds’ — folks who are interested in the art and practice of business. The overarching principle in this community is:

In general, you should be approaching discussion in this forum with an outcome in mind. In many cases it might just be “collectively making sense of some business news” or “getting inputs for some business idea”. In other cases it might be “hanging out with fellow business nerds.”

Of course, there are other rules, and the rest of this document lays them out. But this principle should inform most of our discussions.

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