Seeing A Bigger Picture, What you have been deconstructing at Wikipedia Review... Options

[Patrick Byrne]

Congratulations on the great progress you have made defrocking some high clergy of Wikipedia since I last visited.

Full disclosure: My name is Patrick Byrne. I work at Overstock.com, which for about one year has employed a former journalist named Judd Bagley to oversee the creation of our car tab and a Wiki called "Omuse," handle relations with the press, and design a new tab (in the works). Long before Judd joined our company, and as a hobby since, he was analyzing techniques employed by a small group of people to hijack social media. Using the handle "Wordbomb" he posted the results of his analysis on this site and on a site he created called "antisocialmedia.net" (for the record, he did not tell me about antisocialmedia.net before he did it, nor for some time after its creation would he confirm that it was he who was behind it). In your admirable endeavors to unscramble what is going on behind the scenes at Wikipedia, Judd/Wordbomb has done his share of work. By a strange coincidence (?), one of the people whose pefidy this community has uncloaked, Slim Virgin, turned out to be a woman from my own past, and I posted elsewhere on this site such information as I thought might be helpful to you (which Mr. Brandt seemed to appreciate). I say this all in full disclosure because the financial press labors to find any incompleteness in my posts on the Internet, apparently finding something unholy in my exercise of first amendment rights without availing myself of (or recognizing the need for) their services.

Now to my point: Nothing is more irritating, I know, than to have someone suggest to you that your own cause is really part of a bigger struggle. One always suspects an attempt to divert one's energies into whichever other cause that speaker favors. So I insist that I seek no diversion from your own current, noble, efforts, when I suggest to you that the threads you are pulling here lead deeply into the heart of a financial scandal that has been percolating into the headlines for six months, and may swamp any financial scandal of our lifetime.

On another message board within Overstock.com I have begun synthesizing information about that scandal, starting by creating one concise, cohesive overview post. Rather than gum up this board with information about that other financial scandal, I will give a link to that overview post: HOW THE SYSTEM REALLY WORKS: INTRO

After you have read that you will wonder if there is independent confirmation of what I wrote there. There is a great deal, and organizing it will be the subject of my subsequent posts. In the meantime, however, consider taking 25 minutes to watch a Bloomberg Special Report, "Phantom Shares". Bloomberg has the most "elite" viewership of any news organization in the world (which may count against it in the eyes of some radicals, I know). Consider what it means when a news service at the pinnacle of the Establishment reports that our capitalist model is powered by a reactor that almost no one has heard of, and that this reactor that has a crack in it (and why it is that only such an elite news service could run that story).

Given my earlier involvement on the Slim Virgin issue, I hope that Daniel Brandt and you will forgive what may seem like a commercial interruption. I simply wish you to understand how what your are confronting here really is part of a larger puzzle, so that you may know the stakes riding on your efforts.

Warm regards,
Patrick M. Byrne
CEO, Overstock.com

[Pwok]

Sorry, CEO Byrne, but when I clicked on the Bloomberg link all I got was a screenful of symbols.

As for the other issue you raise, I'm not sure what it is. The post you link to doesn't say what it is. Why be so coy? A post earlier in this thread seems to suggest that you're railing against short-sellers. Please don't tell me that this is your beef. I know my way around the track, and if that's your beef then you're just another corporate dweeb who thinks his stock should be higher than it is.

This post has been edited by Pwok: Sat 1st September 2007, 9:39pm

[Unrepentant Vandal]

Sorry, CEO Byrne, but when I clicked on the Bloomberg link all I got was a screenful of symbols.

Try right-click + save target as / download link / save link as, or similar. Basically the server isn't getting the MIME type right.

Or open that URL with Windows Media Player.

They are part of a cover-up. The people behind it control the narrative in the mainstream financial press, but lacking that overt power within social media, they employ such figures as to hijack the discourse, as has been brilliantly deconstructed here and on antisocialmedia.net.

I'd be the first person to admit that there's a lot of, er, sharp business practice in the city... but the size that such a cover up would have to be strikes me as a bit implausible.

But there does have to be some sort of explanation for their behaviour. Perhaps they just don't like being challenged?

[Patrick Byrne]

Sorry, CEO Byrne, but when I clicked on the Bloomberg link all I got was a screenful of symbols.

I'd be the first person to admit that there's a lot of, er, sharp business practice in the city... but the size that such a cover up would have to be strikes me as a bit implausible.

But there does have to be some sort of explanation for their behaviour. Perhaps they just don't like being challenged?

Vandal,

I thoroughly agree it is wildly implausible upon first encounter. All I can do is draw the dots, then leave it to the general reader to decide what picture they form.

As for the financial media at large: yes, no doubt psychological facts have some bearing on the question. However, there is a small group the homogeneity of whose work strays far beyond the limits of coincidence: their stories are marketing literature for the points of view of a tiny coterie of hedge funds, over and over with great regularity and, in some cases, without a single exception. In the case of Gary it goes far beyond that: at the center of the scandal (as the Bloomberg show reports) there is a huge but essentially unknown corporation called the "DTCC," a black box sitting at the heart of our entire capital market. Publicly Gary spews uncontrollably at any effort to direct attention to this corporation, and in addition, Gary has been exposed posting on Wikipedia from within that corporation's computer system. Given that it is about as heavily guarded as Fort Knox, that is no small feat nor idle fact. When confronted, the DTCC went into cover-up mode.

One can dismiss behavior with psychological descriptions for only so long. After you read what I lay out, I wonder if you will continue to do so.

Respect,

Patrick

[LamontStormstar]

Mr Byrne, now you have an odd site. It at first looks like ebay but I can find no "about us" page and on your Wikipedia article it basically says you get your own inventory and sell it trying for low and that's that, making you like one of many discount online shopping sites, although the others are usually specialized. Then on closer digging into your site I find you have auctions with unique people selling. So people can sign up and sell and then they're competing with the main bulk of items of what you're selling and it's possible that there may be a price war and someone on the auction side may win and your site becomes more of an auction site as if the auction side can't keep up then the auctions will be basically hardly any items like it is now, just like on most online auction sites other than ebay.

Your site also has in no way tried to fix ebay's feedback system from what I've seen and I know a lot of ways on how to fix that.

As for naked short-selling, Wikipedia has the most poorly written article on with combining unclarity with generally promoting naked short selling as much as it can. The rest of the internet appears to be against it. It's also takes a lot of reading to understand how exactly it can happen, generally this long thing http://cmkxdiamond.proboards66.com/index.c...92996593&page=2 So, Unrepentent Vandal, I'm not sure how you yourself could be naked short selling. Maybe you meant regular short selling? It appears more like if I bought a bunch of shares of stock using sharebuilder.com and sharebuilder.com just claimed I have the stock and didn't buy any for me then unless the company tanks, sharebuilder.com loses money. Unrepentent Vandal, did you sell someone fake stock or just regular short sell?

Back to Mr. Byrne, now I read that your company has been naked short sold for a very long time, like someone is trying to kill it. But based on the excessive length it looks like someone tried to kill it early by naked short selling, but they failed, and then the fake shares never dematerialized.

Gary Weiss supposedly is against bad stock practices and should know better, but he take the naive idea that naked short selling is good because it can get rid of scam companies instead of causing more problems than it selfs, but then you and WordBomb say he is on a campaign against your company. So who tried to take out Overstock and why and who is still trying to take them out?

This post has been edited by LamontStormstar: Sun 2nd September 2007, 12:28am

[Patrick Byrne]

Mr Byrne, now you have an odd site. It at first looks like ebay but I can find no "about us" page and on your Wikipedia article it basically says you get your own inventory and sell it trying for low and that's that, making you like one of many discount online shopping sites, although the others are usually specialized. Then on closer digging into your site I find you have auctions with unique people selling. So people can sign up and sell and then they're competing with the main bulk of items of what you're selling and it's possible that there may be a price war and someone on the auction side may win and your site becomes more of an auction site as if the auction side can't keep up then the auctions will be basically hardly any items like it is now, just like on most online auction sites other than ebay.

Your site also has in no way tried to fix ebay's feedback system from what I've seen and I know a lot of ways on how to fix that.

As for naked short-selling, Wikipedia has the most poorly written article on with combining unclarity with generally promoting naked short selling as much as it can. The rest of the internet appears to be against it. It's also takes a lot of reading to understand how exactly it can happen, generally this long thing http://cmkxdiamond.proboards66.com/index.c...92996593&page=2 So, Unrepentent Vandal, I'm not sure how you yourself could be naked short selling. Maybe you meant regular short selling? It appears more like if I bought a bunch of shares of stock using sharebuilder.com and sharebuilder.com just claimed I have the stock and didn't buy any for me then unless the company tanks, sharebuilder.com loses money. Unrepentent Vandal, did you sell someone fake stock or just regular short sell?

Back to Mr. Byrne, now I read that your company has been naked short sold for a very long time, like someone is trying to kill it. But based on the excessive length it looks like someone tried to kill it early by naked short selling, but they failed, and then the fake shares never dematerialized.

Gary Weiss supposedly is against bad stock practices and should know better, but he take the naive idea that naked short selling is good because it can get rid of scam companies instead of causing more problems than it selfs, but then you and WordBomb say he is on a campaign against your company. So who tried to take out Overstock and why and who is still trying to take them out?

Dear Lamont,

As far as Wikipedia goes, yes, those pages are poorly written nonsense because a fellow named Gary Weiss controls them. Gary is protected by Slim Virgin. The rest can be learned about within this site.

I am not going to address the issues about our company here, but the general topic of naked short selling and its effect on American companies can be researched here:

http://www.overstock.com/naked-short-selling.html

Patrick

[LamontStormstar]

As far as Wikipedia goes, yes, those pages are poorly written nonsense because a fellow named Gary Weiss controls them. Gary is protected by Slim Virgin. The rest can be learned about within this site.

I am not going to address the issues about our company here, but the general topic of naked short selling and its effect on American companies can be researched here:

Well you should address it here. Who tried to kill your company with naked short selling and how is Gary Weiss involved?


Why is your company unsure if it wants to be an online retailer or an online auction site? Why haven't you tried to fix the problem with the ebay-style feedback system? One fix is to take off the rating values and have it be pure comments and let the person who receives the comment be able to reply a second time if the feedback-leaver does a follow-up. If you ever want to compete with the online auction sites you should combine the retailer and auction aspect into a single search to gradually get more and more auction stuff to replace the online retailer aspect as at this point your selection as small. Maybe put the online retailer aspect into a single auction account that just used buy-it-now prices and let it get feedback.

I realize I'm not a rich CEO, though.

This post has been edited by LamontStormstar: Sun 2nd September 2007, 8:46pm