Maybe that is perhaps a natural evolution. If you are FIREd, maybe you shouldn’t be spending a lot of time on an online forum…
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… unless you turn investing into your new job, as @cubanpete_the_swiss did 
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It’s in the interest of FIRE wannabes not to alienate the FIRE "been there done that"s.
Coincidentally, people who “made it”, do not give AF. So you can either suck it up and tolerate their antics, or you can piss them off and they’ll just go.
You know this anecdote where 4 guys met to drink beer and they split the bill proportionally to their income? Then the bartender gave them a rebate for being loyal customers and they got into an argument about how to fairly split that rebate. And the next day the richest guy didn’t come to the pub. It’s a bit like this.
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I actually typed more or less that - down to the use of the word “wannabes” - but thought it’s further inflammatory to some of us wannabes here. But 110% agree with you!
Edit: even wrote something along the lines of understanding the frustration of people who’ve FIREd for 10+ years and living off dividends being lectured on dividends. Bit like me trying to lecture Rossi or Marquez or Messi on motorcycles or football. Edit: or options.
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Nah.
Guys (& gals), it’s still an online forum.
No one here should be offended if they get questioned about posts or views from other members. If person X doesnt wanna bother lecturing person Y in their free time, that’s their decision.
But if you have no actual clue if people are what they are pretending to be, only the actual posts count.
Whether you are Messi, or wannabe Messi.
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Imagine someone lying anonymously to strangers!
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Imagine he says he’s Messi, but in fact he’s Ronaldo…
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Depends a bit on how you do it, and how you back it up.
Certainly lecturing Messi on football is crazy.
But one example: The big guys in the gym don‘t necessarily have good knowledge about training (quite often actually in my experience).
A lot of them will have achieved their size with a combination of genetics and steroids. And regardless of what they would have followed for a diet and training plan, would have gotten big.
You can absolutely still point out sub-optimal strategies, even with people who followed them for decades and it worked for them.
In the investing world for example: Maybe they have so much money, no matter the portfolio and strategy, they never withdraw more than 2%, and anything they do works essentially, as long as you are taking suffiecient compensated risk (and there is a million ways to do this).
Not wanting to critize divdiend strategies with that or whatever. In the right circumstances, it can absolutely make sense.
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Hah, you got me as I am a gym guy and sometimes see the steroid freaks doing comically bad stuff, or what I call micro exercises (like loading 200kg bench press and doing essentially 10cm movements, supported by bars etc).
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Even though i don’t like people leaving the forum due to some disagreements, I think there are two points to think about
- what is more preferable -: some posts which break the rules with a lot which add value or lot of posts which follow the rules but don’t add much value.
- if something like this happens again, what do we expect from Mods? Are we only talking about this because two value adding members left or we would have done the same for any new member too? Its important to be consistent either ways
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I wanted to look up the discussion around Employer’s Exploitation that took place in January (wife looking for husband’s 2nd pillar money). I can find it anymore. Unfortunately, it seems this whole thread was also deleted without any notification. A real shame …
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I think we can have both though I think what some are referring to in the quality of participation of some posters comes down to different investing styles (active vs passive, custom designed mechanical vs all world all caps, derivatives vs stocks/bonds, etc.). I think both styles can live together too.
In this specific case, I think the reason we have to choose, which didn’t absolutely have to be is because:
We have big egos. Some posters have achieved financial success with huge salaries and/or wealth. Others have less financial success to display but have a good understanding and smarts to display. To make things more confusing, financial success isn’t solely a function of one’s qualities (though having those certainly helps and we have people who I’d say have both, which I admire).
We wouldn’t be talking about this without egos interfering.
That and :
I understand moderating takes time and energy but many of these reactions happen when threads disappear without notice. I would prefer threads getting locked rather than hidden, though I can understand a desire for cleanliness for the forum.
It may not help in the case of the thread mentioned by gaijin, as I don’t recall if and why it was hidden, but sending a notice to the OP when a thread is hidden and/or locking it for some time with a message to let the participants know what happened before hidding it after some time might help calm down spirits. It won’t solve everything (only policing ourselves, which means having these kinds of discussions once in a while will) but it may reduce the pressure some.
I know sending PMs to people takes time and we then have to deal with their answer which may not bring much in terms of de-escalating and take moderators’ time but I don’t think most moderating actions require immediacy (some do) so if sending a PM or letting a message on the thread and locking it is at all an option but it requires time and/or mental availability a mod may not currently have, waiting a bit and closing the thread when time is available for more communication might be worth it.
Regarding the Employer’s Exploitation thread, most “deleted” topics usually are simply hidden and can be found by a Google search. For this one, it seems it’s been either actually deleted or moved to a place only available to moderators/the forum owner. My guess is legality was at play but I can’t say for sure.
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I am not sure that was the dilemma.
We can have lot of posts with quality and without breaking the rules.
Actually breaking these simple basic rules is a strong indication that the quality is bad.
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Your post made me think of Master Debater https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmuxmgWV2I0
Why not both quality post and follow the rules
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That’s always preferable
why would a “swiss forum” be in the .co.uk domain and not ch? weird 
does anybody use that forum? is it useful? is moderation relaxed and people can exercise their freedom of speech?
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on a serious note, X isn’t comparable to a forum, because discussions die out pretty quickly, while branching out to several sub-discussions. in a forum, with a single thread, you can rely on that everybody read all the same posts and has the same context. so it’s more similar to a group discussion. X is more like “hey this is what i think”, and then you have 100 sub-discussions tearing this opinion apart.
I take part in many forums, and I would say for most of them, nobody is happy with moderation. Why? Because if you moderate something, then somebody is unhappy, if you don’t moderate something, then somebody else is unhappy.
It’s a no-win situation.
Let’s accept that we are all human and we make mistakes. This includes both users in what we post and moderators in how they moderate. Let’s allow a bit of grace for both users and moderators to make mistakes and things will be much better.
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You really don’t get it or you don’t want to get it?
Creating an account and reading threads, and posting and figuring out if it’s a nice forum, that all takes time. Imagine you need to do that 10 times before finding out.
And asking the forum members of one forum you’re active on, what other forums they recommend… is that so radical? Especially that we’re on the topic of things that we’re not supposed to write here. It’s an obvious thing to ask ok, do you guys know a place where these things can be discussed? I suppose it’s a better option than fighting moderation in a forum, where this stuff isn’t welcome?
You seem unhappy that people would exchange links to some other forums they might be interested in. Why? What do you care? If these people are gone from here, you should be happy.