To what extent do you think passive investing and social media affects the market

Just listened to a value investing podcast and the guy was mentioning that the common trend nowadays is to put your money where everyone else is putting it, because they did the research for you. I mean how common is the advice is the advise you’ve seen on Reddit to “just put it in an etf” and not worry. If the common man is piggybacking off everyone else in their investments, surely that leaves loads of gaps in the market and opportunities for value investing in 2025?

Cliff Asness is the guy I listened to. But he warns about being overly anti-passive too, passive investing still has its role and while it may be inefficient it’s not “wrong”. This stuff is hard to measure anyway.

I wasn’t born in the dot com bubble but I heard back that online community forums were popular back then and contributed to the stock market crash. It was probably lots of people discussing stocks just like we are now. Can someone confirm?

Last point - most of the stuff on Reddit and this sub (and my post) is just news so I wouldn’t take investment advise from it. Let’s just discuss