Online discussion areas have been part of the technology world before the Internet and the traditional online services (America Online, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc.). Usenet, for example, had a place of prominence from 1980 to 2010. Of Usenet, they said, “The entire realm of human knowledge is shared on Usenet every four days.” They also said, “The average person uses less than 10% of their brain, and Usenet proves it is probably lower than that.”

The successors to Usenet today are obvious, as a  Google/Bing/Baidu/Yahoo/DuckDuckGo search on a topic will likely return results from some of them – in particular, Quora and Reddit. I have a special place in my heart for Reddit, as Quora requires you to log in to see much of anything. Reddit brings together people with just about any interests to discuss topics. One estimate has 1.2 million different topical areas (called subreddits), of which around 140,000 are active. As such, it is a top 10 visited website globally.

For financial professionals, there are many existing different groups of interest. Each group has its own etiquette and moderators with various degrees of dedication to keep things civil and on track. Participation level and quality control is often left to the participants to self-regulate. A starting point for those thinking of a career in the world would be a subreddit such as r/Accounting (www.reddit.com/r/Accounting). Primarily designed as a point for people to discuss accounting careers, people will ask accounting and reporting questions, ethics questions, and much more. Likewise, r/Tax is for tax careers and r/TaxPros is for working tax professionals to share notes.

How is technology changing financial services? There’s r/fintech. Can I get help with my accounting software or help others? You will find specialized (but maybe not so active) groups like r/Quickbooks or r/Epicor.

Branching off to the world of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, there are groups such as r/Bitcoin, r/CryptoCurrency, r/ethFinance and more.

In my next entry, I hope to share some lessons learned (often the hard way) by posters to these latter groups.