Originally published on Yours.org on September 11, 2018.
I’m going to try and keep up the doodles, despite being in a perpetual state of information overload over the last nine months.
Some of you may follow Clif High and his Web Bot project, perhaps more for entertainment value than investing advice. The basic idea is:
“Internet bots monitor news articles, blogs, forums, and other forms of internet chatter. Words in the lexicon are assigned numeric values for emotional quantifiers such as duration, impact, immediacy, intensity, and others. The lexicon is dynamic, and changes according to shifts in emotional tension, and how humans communicate those changes using the internet.” (from Wikipedia)
I certainly don’t subscribe to his ALTA (” asymmetric language trend analysis”) reports but I’ve watched a few YouTube videos featuring Clif and his pseudoscientific predictions. Clif claims that the world of cryptocurrencies is a natural fit for this type of analysis as the lexicon contains many new and unique words and meanings specific to the space.
When I first fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole for real (late 2017, lol), I spent A LOT OF TIME doing a highly personal and intuitive version of what Clif’s bots may be doing, an unofficial linguistic sentiment analysis of crypto “communities” and markets. My self-confessed insanity included browsing most of the following on a daily basis:
- r/btc
- r/bitcoin (losing a few brain cells with every visit)
- r/bitcoincash
- “Crypto Twitter” (Core and Cash camps)
- GCBU
- mainstream financial news outlets for “crypto” news (CNBC, Bloomberg, etc.)
- Medium articles
- blogs
- Yours articles
- YouTube! (ranging from popular but vapid Crypto-YouTubers to various old Bitcoin conference videos)
Aside from the imbalance of noise to signal, the constant stream of information and toxicity of interactions (e.g. Reddit, Twitter) is probably too much for most people (especially sensitive or intuitive types) to handle without compartmentalizing. As humans are not bots, the daily absorption of this type of content is not emotionally sustainable without self-care and the ability to keep one foot, or preferably both feet, grounded in reality.
I’ve somewhat decreased my daily exposure to all things Bitcoin since realizing that the intensity of the initial fall down the rabbit hole is not sustainable over years and decades (unless maybe you are Roger, but then I’d still recommend having some close friends who can honestly tell you to take a break as needed, if even for an afternoon).
Although I can’t draw my doodles without doing an adequate amount of “keeping my finger on the pulse”, I can be grateful that my children keep me busy doing normal people things as well.