It does feel like a watershed moment regarding hedge funds. This is the first time netizens capitalize on hedge fund short favorites and it has been surprisingly easy to cause an absolute catastrophy in the order of billion losses for them. I heard Melvin Capital may even have gone bankrupt?
And how to do it? You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up. Seriously. It's that easy. It's not illegal. It's so easy that even semiprofessionals can understand exactly which stock are hedge fund favorites. It's not hard information to come by. And, here's the kicker: There is a potential monetary reward if you enter and exit a stock at the right moment.
So it's simple to discover and execute, and there is a financial incentive, and it's not against the law. This is a trifecta of properties that makes this very interesting to follow indeed.
> And how to do it? You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up.
A lot of the people involved aren't just buying and holding. They're specifically buying/selling short dated out of the money options in order to move the price. Some understand the market microstructure and the various levers they have to make the price move using what is effectively leverage.
> Seriously. It's that easy. It's not illegal.
Finance is highly regulated and arbitrarily so. If you think the lawmakers and regulators will throw their hands up and say geez, it's technically legal, carry on, you're sorely mistaken.
Ideally finance is meant to be about allocation of capital. If a market is allocating capital to a dying company just because meme, then the market isn't serving its purpose. I don't see how this is different than what is constantly being criticized such as flash crashes, contagion and large moves based on rumors, other than the group benefiting (fiscally irresponsible internet strangers vs fiscally irresponsible professionals)
I know, hedge funds bad, and they do this crap all the time. That may be true, but this isn't going to end well for the average consumer. My prediction is reddit will shutdown wsb because that's what reddit does. And there will be more laws made targeting individuals engaging in this sort of activity (basically coordinating with groups of people). This may hurt newsletters and other financial venues. The large hedge funds will be fine, we might see a few bailouts, and life will go on.
> ... this isn't going to end well for the average consumer. My prediction is reddit will shutdown wsb because that's what reddit does. And there will be more laws made targeting individuals engaging in this sort of activity (basically coordinating with groups of people). This may hurt newsletters and other financial venues. The large hedge funds will be fine, we might see a few bailouts, and life will go on.
I totally agree, but it's not like there's a level playing field now. If the new regs enshrine the current reality in law then maybe there'll be more hope for fundamental reform.
Basically what we probably have now is a behavior that is legal so long as no one engages in it. Losing a fake option is not losing anything.
> I don't see how this is different than what is constantly being criticized such as flash crashes, contagion and large moves based on rumors, other than the group benefiting (fiscally irresponsible internet strangers vs fiscally irresponsible professionals)
Isn't that the whole point WSB is making? This is not different and the media treating it as something crazy or new is disingenuous.
> a market is allocating capital to a dying company just because meme, then the market isn't serving its purpose. I don't see how this is different than what is constantly being criticized such as flash crashes, contagion and large moves based
It’s not your job to decide what is an efficient place for capital. The market is serving its purpose exactly right now by allowing the free trade of shares in GME. If people want to spend their money on a GME share to be a part of something, that’s their prerogative.
You know what else the market allocates capital to? Gold funds, who do nothing but sit on giant vaults of gold. It’s about the stupidest allocation of capital possible but nobody is clutching their pearls about that.
Telling people what is inappropriate to do with their money is a great way to get them to do it more. The whole reason we have a free market is because historically the big people in charge can’t allocate capital more efficiently than free-for-alls.
But how can you regulate that people get together and buy stock? They need... 1) Internet bulletin board. That's it. The barrier of entry is just so damn low, and that's in part also why this has happened. In hindsight I'm surprised it hasn't happened before but I suppose Covid-19 brought this on.
I think it would be easier to regulate something that at least takes a certain amount of investment in terms of insight or knowledge, but here you can just take any random heavily shorted company and like... get people on a popular board to buy stocks over a day.
This time, sure, it was Reddit and the subreddit may be suspended. Next time it'll be a Discord or Telegram board or something. It's just... so easy
Why is the solution always to either shut something down or to regulate? Why is educating people to act more responsibly never ever considered an option?
> And there will be more laws made targeting individuals engaging in this sort of activity (basically coordinating with groups of people).
These laws will not be legal under US law, because US congress is not permitted to make a law abridging an act of speaking, or expressing an idea, or opinion.
> Finance is highly regulated and arbitrarily so.
The level of arbitrariness of legal process in legal systems of ex-UK colonies is in league of its own in the world, and USA is particularly prominent at that.
In US, financial regulations are some of the most vaguely defined of laws, in the rest of the world, they are usually are the most verbose, and formal in definition.
A law whose execution is wholly arbitrary is not a law at all, and a country allowing arbitrary interpretation of laws is lawless.
This is why what is "technically legal" is legal. What is defined in the law as legal, or not defined as illegal is what is legal. This is why no smarty pants bureaucrat should be allowed to wiggle out arbitrary powers by coming with "interpretations," "extended definitions," or "legal theories."
> If you think the lawmakers and regulators will throw their hands up and say geez, it's technically legal, carry on, you're sorely mistaken.
> Ideally finance is meant to be about allocation of capital. If a market is allocating capital to a dying company just because meme, then the market isn't serving its purpose.
Do you believe in it's right to give power to somebody, whether it will be a government, private party, or a class to rule over allocation of capital, and decide whose capital allocation is good, and whose capital allocation is bad?
There is a country that tried, they name to it was USSR.
> Ideally finance is meant to be about allocation of capital
What does it matter what it is "ideally", if it was never that in practice? Ideally communism is a stateless moneyless classless society, let's get working on dissolving the state then?
As a former fund manager, I think it mainly illuminates bad risk management practices at one specific fund. Why would you ever paint yourself in a corner where you lose 30% on a single name? It just makes me think all their other bets are also huge and simply lucky they haven't collapsed.
Funds are also diverse, though. There will be a load of funds who have taken the other side to Melvin, based either on various fundamental insights, or technical, whatever.
30% has not been lost on a single name. It's publicly available information that every known short by the fund (particularly those with high short interest) is now being targeted, and is up tens to hundreds of percent in the past couple of days.
It's not quite that easy. You have to find a stock that's overshorted (>100% of shares here) irresponsibly (if they used e.g puts they'd be fine), buy a lot and hold it long enough. Also quite likely WSB money wasnt enough and it's only because other hedge funds jumped in that we got here.
The stock doesn’t actually need to be shorted that much. We’re seeing the same thing happen with Koss, BB, and AMC right now. The infamous VW short squeeze was also caused by significantly less short interest: https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a35340727/heres-...
> Let's wait six months. This story is being badly reported all over. I suspect the hedge funds will mostly be fine.
Right. All of a sudden the WSJ is publishing an article about the founder getting kicked out where he claims the subreddit is full of white supremacists. Really? Give me a break. FT is claiming many are “alt-right” all of a sudden. Bad reporting all around.
> Yes, it is, it's an abusive short squeeze, which is market manipulation.
I’m not sure I buy it, and I’m not sure there is a fundamental difference between dinner club (as Matt Levine wrote) where hedge fund managers talk about their favorite stock picks and people on an open forum openly talking about companies that they think should be purchased or sold. Is it not market manipulation when a short seller publishes a scathing report, or when a CEO goes on CNBC or Bloomberg and gives a good opinion of their company or a different one? Which has more reach?
I think the most sensible and straightforward thing is further regulation of hedge funds and large financial institutions. If they are going to act irresponsibly and then cry about it, well, maybe they need adult supervision? The positions of hedge funds versus, uh, retail traders on an Internet forum is an unequal one from the start, anyway.
Not to mention the ridiculous media blitz coming from institutions. Jeez what a way to really create a lack of trust and further erode our democracy. If I find a drug dealer working for the FT can I write an article about how some people who work there are drug dealers? It’s obvious what they’re doing.
I'd argue that the last year or so of Tesla was the first major incarnation of this gamma squeeze + memes to burn short sellers but yeah GME is a while other level.
There is kind of a continuum between cases that are pure squeeze 'n memes and ones that are more based on non-linear long term value propositions. Three years ago, I think you could make a case for Tesla that it was either going to go bankrupt or grow many times over, but not stay in between. It may even be that bankruptcy was the more likely outcome. But if you gather enough support in the belief that a successful outcome is possible, then it can become self-fulfilling, especially if capital is one of the main obstacles. The company can use capital raised from the boom in the share price to lower debt and invest.
In the extreme case this could be true of almost any company. Imagine if GME were just a shell and a brand. Then they raise money, get a great board, hire industry experts, and go... whatever.. compete with Steam, turn the physical stores into e-sports venues, pivot to game development, whatever. Use the money to get the expertise, and you already have the brand and attention, which is now worth a lot more. That is kind of what happened with Tesla to some extent, although they already had a great brand a genius owner.
It's not just Tesla, either. There are a number of stocks that are grossly overvalued right now when you look at fundamentals. Lots of people have been talking here & everywhere else for the better part of the past year about how the Fed is printing money and it's all going into a stock bubble. Oh yeah, and cryptocurrencies.
This GME thing is just one little piece of an overall new zeitgeist. I'm not about to even try to predict the next crash/bubble-pop, though. I just don't have the stomach for this kind of market. When a change comes, it may not happen in a predictable way. I think there's at least a chance we could somewhat be in uncharted territory here.
I'm sorry but this is a possibly irresponsible take for at least a few reasons.
The populism on this issue is completely out of touch with reality.
1) As the stock pops due to irrational upwards pressure - the hedges funds might lose a bit, but in reality a lot of 'regular people' will be left holding the bag.
When the stock inevitably crashes, those 'regular people' will lose a lot and it will probably be a more meaningful loss to them.
2) There is no easy way to make money doing this - you're literally promoting a collective ponzi scheme (!) whereby the only money made is by people putting more money in.
3) Bankers have a role to play in markets and that's by properly valuing them. Obviously there are tons of shenanigans, but otherwise, it's an essential role. 'Pumping and dumping stocks' is not value creating it's actually quite destructive. While Game Stop may appreciate being helped in some way, they are not going to appreciate their stock going insanely volatile. Why do you think they would actually want this?
The populism on this issue is really out of hand.
"So it's simple to discover and execute, and there is a financial incentive, " - please - no, this is completely irresponsible.
With regards to number one, what will happen is exactly the reverse of what you’re saying. Hedge funds have shorted more of the stock than exists. That means that when they decide to buy back the stock to close their shorts, they will need to buy every single stock of the company, return it to the people who lent them their stock, and those people will have to now sell it, so they can buy it again to return it to other people.
It won’t happen in minutes either, it will take days for this to happen. That’s why everybody is going crazy about this. WSB saw a perfect situation and exploited it. This isn’t a case where the stock will drop in mere minutes.
What about retail investors who looked at Gamestop before all this and thought it seemed like a reasonable investment, only to get wiped out by "irrational downward pressure" from hedge funds conspiring to short the stock 136%?
We'll have to wait and see a bit, but the huge pop in Gamestock was likely more the result of funds covering shorts, not retail investors continuing to buy at these prices. So it feels really disingenuous to blame retail for these wild swings when they would not have been possible without the irresponsible hedge fund trading that came before.
> "So it's simple to discover and execute, and there is a financial incentive, " - please - no, this is completely irresponsible.
Do you refute my claim that it's simple to discover and execute? They're essentially just banding together on public information here. GameStop, Blackberry, Nokia, AMC, they're all affected and I'm just counting days of developments here.
As for the financial incentive, it is _absolutely_ driving this behavior. The taste of cash. Most will of course lose money on this, but this is not my point. My point? There is a financial incentive! I'm not talking about morale or ethics, I'm talking about why I think this might be a watershed moment. The masses realizing this is at all possible.
Hell, throwing away cash on lotteries is also a terrible way to build fortunes, yet it's a massive industry and lives are ruined over this as well.
What about all the people who lost jobs at GameStop when the board got pissed the stock was in the toilet? You have a case of a hedge fund that was playing games to manipulate the price of a stock downward for a quick 400% profit the last few years with what appears to be no hedge on the other side of the bet. They could've bough calls to offset potential losses but they didn't because that wouldn't have meant such impressive gains.
People who should've known better got caught with their pants down and I have absolutely no sympathy for hedge funds.
Short squeeze are nothing new, so it doesn't feel like a "watershed moment" to me. Big investors also do it to each other, e.g. the Herbalife short squeeze.
Now Robinhood has stopped allowing purchases of those securities. While I suppose Robinhood would like to have good relations with hedge funds leading up to an IPO, they just pissed off a significant fraction of their actual customers -- and boy are they ever gonna get an earful about it.
Why do you separate users of /r/wsb from traders and hedge funds, as if those are different people? My guess is that majority of users there are traders and employees of such funds, simply using yet another talking space.
WSB is an open space[1], accessible to ordinary retail investors. The majority of the money may be from large funds, but the majority of discussion is from working schmos who day trade as a hobby. That's very different from the closed environment we associate with high finance.
[1]theoretically, in practise I'll predict it's about to be Septembered into oblivion
> Why do you separate users of /r/wsb from traders and hedge funds, as if those are different people? My guess is that majority of users there are traders and employees of such funds, simply using yet another talking space.
Because the subreddit is famous for just losing money and lots of people just not knowing what they're doing. I'm sure there are a few traders on that reddit but I suspect it's like a professional programmer joining a dev bootcamp community. A whole bunch of people who are just learning and are doing crazy things. (I did crazy things when I was learning, hell, I sometimes do crazy things now)
> It does feel like a watershed moment regarding hedge funds. This is the first time netizens capitalize on hedge fund short favorites and it has been surprisingly easy to cause an absolute catastrophy in the order of billion losses for them. I heard Melvin Capital may even have gone bankrupt?
I spent all night going through many of those threads, and I have to say they are ready to join Bitcoin once the SEC cracks down on them and freezes their Robinhood accounts and possibly even their bank accounts linked to Robinhood.
If Melvin does go down it will be its own success, but now they're going full vigilante investor mode, and putting money in BB, AMC etc... this won't stop unless the State intervenes and could set a precedent and as you say create a 'watershed moment.'
It won't be long until they realize what the long con really is: central bank based fiat currency that created these boom-bust cycles in the first place.
I initially mocked them when I heard about them taking GME to its recent rise, and still kind of do as WSB is a joke even by their own admission; but that doesn't mean it cannot create positive change. After all comedians just use humour in their jokes to highlight and poke fun of some of Society's most absurd aspects with varying levels of success in reforming it.
Dave Chappelle's latest monolouge at SNL after the election highlighted this very well.
For those wondering why the sub went private for a time:
> We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad nights sleep. We've got so many comments and submissions that we can't possibly even read them all, let alone act on them as moderators. We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn't allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven't given us special access despite asking for it.
"We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore"
The issue is really that the entire feed went buggy from all the comments, even the inbuilt too, which they are probably using called AutoModerator has delays of over 10 minutes and more instead of being instant.
Reddit limits API usage mainly for IP, so you need multiple IPs to avoid this issue.
It's not impossible to have multiple instance of the same bot running in parallel, but there are too many race condition and it became too much to handle.
Here come the deplatforming (again). This time /r/wsb is the 'enemy'. Media reports it and causes the paper hands to panic; This is what the large short sellers want.
Are they sure that 'deplatforming works' this time? (The have already assembled on /r/wallstreetbetsnew)
For the tech platforms, the mainstream media, social media, etc they might as well ban every single person off of the internet at this point.
As for GME, just put on your diamond-grade hands for once and hold until Friday's squeeze.
> (The have already assembled on /r/wallstreetbetsnew)
Creating a new sub on the same topic as a previously banned sub is against the rules on Reddit. So if their sub is banned for hate speech it doesn't matter how you rephrase it they just ban any similar new subs.
This is really exciting, feels like open standards, independent internet is going to continue getting extreme motivation to expand and establish, with private "freedom of speech" censorship by for-profit platforms.
We're going to see more fragmentation, and growth of closed platforms perceived by users as "slightly less evil" such as telegram vs watsapp. This may also motivate the return to truly open internet ideals of the past.
I don't know where you even come up with these outdated ideas.
Very few people care about what you are talking about. The subset of people who care are: tech savvy, young, mostly male, and vaguely misanthropic. This demographic is already served in numerous places, and everyone else is rather glad to see these people chased off of platforms they use for sharing videos of dancing and food.
Go on Tik Tok for a while and count how many people complain that “their last video got them banned” (usually this is ethots promoting their only fans).
The alt right, internet strippers, people who like drugs, people who want to talk about stocks, people who want to talk about something their HR dept wouldn’t approve: these people all want free platforms. It’s not just weirdos and trump supporters.
> Very few people care about what you are talking about.
No, very few people care about the ethical implications of what OP 's talking about. But it's pretty hard to not start caring when you become a casualty. OP is saying that if there's enough casualties, maybe it will be the catalyst for a movement.
You don't even need a majority to care. You just need enough people who can't use or refuse to use a particular platform to trigger a mass exodus.
I think it's optimistic that we'll see that with many of the huge, well-established platforms like Facebook or Twitter. But this at least presents an opportunity to get some competing platforms off the ground.
People need to stop being so lazy and throwing around the word censorship. If a bunch or teenagers come into my coffee shop and start loudly calling each autists and retards I'm going to kick them out. I'm not censoring them by kicking them out.
This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between some kids screaming in your coffee shop and a community on a website supposedly dedicated to free discussion. A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.
And while some are screaming for these sites to get shut down over it, most of us aren't. What you see from most of us is recommendation to stop using services that silence you. This is a reasonable response, if someone doesn't like you, go somewhere where they do like you. That's what the comment you're responding to is advocating, embracing and even getting excited about. The internet needs a true public square, not a private entity masquerading as one that for some reason totally unbeknownst to them has to constantly remind everyone that they are not a public square.
It seems once a platform gets to a certain size, an entitlement to service regardless of whether it's against the terms of service grows.
"Retard" is considered a slur by some. It doesn't matter if others don't consider it to be. The one making the judgement is the service provider.
Same with Parlour complaining about being kicked off AWS when they violated their terms of service.
There's a copy of the letter AWS sent to them that's public [0]
"
Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. {...} You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.”"
"
It's just a desire to have freedom from consequences.
If they self hosted in Alabama, I'm sure they would have been fine.
Your coffee shop is not relevant on the global scale. But with big platforms like Facebook, it's not easy to opt out from them. Facebook and other platforms aren't just social media for teenagers. Many companies nowadays only have a Facebook/Whatsapp profile as their only contact point. If you get banned from these services you miss out on accessing a wide share of services, not related to social media.
Also, if you have people coming to your coffee shop and acting badly, people can judge it for themselves and form their own opinion. On the internet, bans are quiet and you can easily silence a large chunk of the userbase without making a noise.
You may cheer these big platforms now because it's only "racists, white supremacists and crooks" being banned, but as soon as the first group of people you agree with gets blocked from these platforms you'll be the first one to fight for freedom of speech.
It's more like a group of people open a coffee shop in your mall and you decide to close their shop once you learn they serve people who don't speak your language.
I don't think the metaphore holds. Everyone can hear the coffee shop kids regardless of whether they want to or not, but only those who seek it out can read the discord.
Okay cool, let's invent a new term. How about: "Politically motivated minority persecution?"
Maybe a bit too much. How about: "Social Engineering via Targeted Group Deplatforming?"
Because that is how these look-like to me and to a lot of these "persecuted" groups. These groups aren't necessarily "hateful" or "organizing" violence. A lot of the time it's just distasteful, kinda sexist etc and the "platform" owners simply don't like them and want to keep them from growing because (I think) they think that there is a real fear that societal opinion might swing their way. However the missing key here is that a lot of times, these are genuine "political movements" before they've cooled & solidified, and exist solely as mis-directed or nebulous emotion, hence the "hateful" and distasteful content.
Not all, but a good chunk of them of course. Sometimes you just get bad groups, but in a lot of those cases, I think it's more clear that they're doing something blatantly evil. For lack of a better example: coordinating and sharing info on how to sabotage deforestation using dangerous methods like putting nails inside trees, which would cause chainsaws to snap and hurt the operators.
You would also be censoring people if you ran an upscale restaurant with a dress code and standards of behavior, or if you didn't let them post ads on the walls.
As long as you make your rules clear and enforce them fairly, censorship and standards of behavior are completely fine.
The very large social media platforms all market themselves as being neutral. They got to be the largest by providing a space for everyone.
So the ask here is "please enforce the rules fairly the way you have always promised you would." Asking a business to deliver on the promises they've made and continue to make is not an entitled attitude.
After all, all these businesses are in complete control of what they promise. If they don't like the old promise, they have a first amendment right to make a new promise that suits them better.
It would only be a fair parable if your coffee shop was the only coffeshop in the entire city or that it exists like 1-3 others but you all talk with eachother on the phone and collectively agree to deny those people service.
And you need to review the code of conduct for this platform, as you are in violation and, according to your own logic, should be kicked. (Which I oppose)
No, it's like a bunch of teenagers came into your coffee shop, and before you could throw them out your coffee shop [in a mall] was permanently closed down by the mall owners.
//Been told I'm posting too fast again by the benevolent left wing moderators on HN so this is what I would have replied:
"From the comment on WSB that was a story on here before it got flagged off the front page:
"We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore."
In other words, they told the kids not to swear and enforced it but someone came up with a new swearword that the cafe owner didn't recognise (it's hard to think of an analogy for using weird characters to say a bad word) and so the cafe got shut down. "
This is about as exciting as a mob of 10000 people rushing a restaurant at the same time to 'save it' and then forgetting it the next day.
Unfortunately, there is no more new math here.
Even worse, it looks like stocks may become unduly hyper volatile due to such things and none of the people in the underlying economy actually want that, it's a huge headache and risk for them.
Whenever people say this, I wonder whether they are considering the possibility that once the internet goes in the direction of fragmentation, more states would swoop in with regulation to barricade their own internet in the same way that China has a great firewall. There are plenty of incentives into banning US-based tech companies--states would then have access to data about their citizens instead of being at the mercy of Facebook or the US, and local software companies would begin to thrive.
Independent internet, exactly what is that? Governments will simply crack down on any site which does not do what the politicians demand and better yet they have a ready made army of SJWs who will name and shame anyone they can identify; or if your reddit totally botch it and name the wrong people.
sadly far too many people are in the camp of protecting freedoms and rights they personally deem acceptable and anything falling outside of their honest narrow view they will follow the crowd and jump on it with glee.
the same levels of censorship and oppression people bemoan existing in some other countries is nearly here in the West and sadly all I hear is cheering.
"Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.
For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere."
I'm slightly sceptical, because with open standards you still need to do moderation somehow. The WSB are complaining that Reddit didn't give them the mod tools they need.
I believe we're going to see fragmentation in platforms rather than open standards. And I say that because we've just launched our own reddit alternative, Retalk.com. It's also moderated, but by different standards.
There is nothing preventing an open standard moderation tag that each user selects how to treat.
With such moderation tagging in place, for example, if I wanted to use Reddit but mistrust moderators, with an open treatment of data, I would be able to select to ignore their rating/per entry and use ratings by a group of users I select. (impossible to imagine Reddit doing something like this)
However, it requires I have access to core data. Today, the superusers or platform admins can prevent "controversial" entries from even being visible on the platform/subplatform/subreddit.
And they chose today as the best possible time to enact this ban? Really?
I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).
Regardless of how right or wrong this moderation choice may be, I hope that this accelerates the push for decentralization and encryption; the few companies that virtually all online humans use to communicate have far too much power over us, and we should be more willing to recognize that extreme centralization of power is dangerous.
(One final note: (EDIT: subreddit is now public again) now that this caused the subreddit to be set to private which seems to have instantly caused $GME to start tanking in AH, they are going to be in for users that are much more upset than they are used to if the narrative decides that this ban caused the crash, if it does in fact last until tomorrow)
Some posts below said that banning for hate speech was really a charade. But if that's true, what's wrong with retail investors pooling their resources to squeeze short? How is it different from a hedge fund pooling resources to flex their muscle of financial engineering?
There wouldn't be anything wrong with that. There'd be a lot right with it, honestly - I would be trumpeting it as a clear victory of the little guy over snobby funds who don't think anyone else can understand finance.
But what's happening right now is almost certainly a pump and dump with a short squeeze as a facade. I've seen a lot of commenters who seem to be grievously misled about the actual mechanics of a short squeeze, and think that short sellers will be forced to buy all their stock at market price on Friday.
I wonder if covid has made people view online communities as the public space. In prior years treating an online community as your sole social outlet wouldn't be viewed as healthy. Now it's almost the defacto.
I remember the days when you could say some truly deplorable shit online and almost no one would care. People who didn’t want to hear it would ignore or block and move on.
Now it seems like so many topics and words are completely off limits. It’s very restrictive and I think it’s making the web a less free, a less open, and a less fun space.
It’s extremely hard to exist online when you have not only a raging group of pro censorship PC police hell bent on removing you, but coordinated networks of platforms that will remove you in unison.
So I think it’s less that people see online communities as their public squares, and more that it’s very difficult to exist online if don’t hold the same ideas and opinions of those controlling the platforms.
The parent comment is not talking about WSB going private (which you're right, it does happen from time to time by the mods for housekeeping). But they're actually talking about Discord shutting down WSB servers - for those unfamiliar, WSB subreddit also had an official discord server which was quite active.
The timing is due to the insane influx of new users causing the server mods to completely lose control and trolls wreck havoc.
The subreddit did not go private due to the ban. You're reading too much into the headline. It depicts two separate events that are both caused by too many new users (too many new posts in the subreddit's case).
The Discord ban was clearly because the community itself is controversial from a legal point of view. That's why the ban happened today. But I think this is an unwise move. Each community that is censored over something legal but controversial, pushes the creative citizens of the Internet towards building more open platforms.
Hope we end up there soon, this constant censorship of communities I might want to have a look at to satisfy my curiosity gets mighty tiring.
And shorting more stock than a total company even has is not controversial? Or using massive shorting to just keep on pushing a stock down? It feels a lot more controversial to me and yet, the hedge fund managers dont't really feel anything. Well apart from the fact that they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar and now they have to pay. But I wonder if their platforms are now being censored. Classic money is power, I'm firmly on the side of WSB here.
“ a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life”
I agree with you, but I lament that outside of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit, it’s been very hard for any social media company to gain traction.
They serve very different audiences. Facebook and Discord seem to be the most intrusive, as they displaced many mediums. I cannot communicate with my homeowner group, because I am banned by facebook for using profanities.
Then Facebook decides to leave political posts proliferate unchecked, while I can't use the word baboon. I personally hate Facebook so much that I told the recruiters to GTFO and never contact me.
> a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life
Hmm, it's almost as if this just happened recently, but people looked the other away because it was tightly coupled to politics. I think 2021 is going to blow 2020 out of the water.
I don't think as many people looked the other way as you suspect. I was happy about the first instance for the same reason I'm happy about this instance. I want to see them all burn to the ground so we can go back to the principles of the web pre web2.0 but building it back better and more resilient to being hijacked by corporate money.
Yes, though that's kind of irrelevant. What use is Facebook to me if all my friends are only on Discord? These companies aren't the only source of socialization for everyone, but for a lot of people they effectively are.
> I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).
What? I have never used Discord.
If you think that a company has a monopoly on your social life, that's on you. There are lots of chat services There's even gasp email, and double gasp group texts.
The problem here isn't that we need a new decentralized system, the problem is that people are too lazy to use the decentralization we have today.
Email is not comparable to Discord... Teamspeak and Mumble are dying because everyone moved to Discord -- and all the professional meeting solutions are awful.
Aren't they opening themselves up to a world of hurt by this ban? I admit I don't understand securities law, but surely interfering with an ongoing stock bonanza like this should raise some authorities' eyebrows, particularly if it turns out someone from Discord side had a stake in the whole thing? I mean, surely they realized that this decision will directly impact the stock price.
In the last 20-30 minutes too, which suggests it was purely because of WSB getting wacked. That's weird, it seems like the sentiment of the people investing in GameStop wouldn't be changed just because of this.
See, the problem is that people are doing all this because they believe that it doesn’t matter. These are not idealists or indoctrinated revolutionaries.
No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core.
These are not Eastern European kids who dream to finish school and go to Western Europe and do something with their lives, these are also not Chinese who dream to go to America for a new life. They are not the American youth from the 60s or the bolsheviks from the pre-soviet era.
On the other hand, some of them must be rich now. Who knows what easily won money could bring.
The worst, or maybe the best, part of your post is that you don't realize the American youth from the 60s literally created this generation with their greed and entitlement.
"All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core"
Okay boys, french revolution, american revolutuon, british revolution were all a nihilistic mistake. Time to give up our hard-earned right and go back to being serfs governed by god-emperror.
The establishment shall never be challanged even if it's chopping off heads, tortuning the unbelievers, raping and burning women for witchcraft.
You are certainly right for many participating in this short squeeze. But collectively this short squeeze is undeniable proof that what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. The hedge funds play by a separate set of rules from the rest of us.
"See, the problem is that people are doing all this because they believe that it doesn’t matter. These are not idealists or indoctrinated revolutionaries.
No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core."
I'm so happy we have mrtksn to explain the motives of about 5 million different people.
Thank you so much for enlightening us with your psycho-analysis of all those people.
When you're able to play a video game and have a large amount of users agree to use anything besides Discord, then I'll grant this objection. Until then, I'll refer to it as a monopoly (not over all communication of course, just within its own niche).
Yeah, I'm getting really tired of people saying "not a monopoly" when we're discussing de facto monopolies. Especially in the short term, and for knee-jerk reactions. Do you think any Discord competitor is going to welcome /r/wsb with open arms after that move? Ergo: monopoly.
Looking at this from another point of view, no other option but today.
There is probably more users violating the terms today (hate speech) then ever before. If they were already watching, then there is a threshold. Today would be the day the threshold is hit. Today is probably the tipping point of no return, moderation becomes virtually impossible.
For all the uneasy feelings I get about the triggerhappy banning by these platforms, there's probably a light at end of the tunnel. Boot enough people and the better alternatives might actually flourish with network effects.
Yep, this is for me very exciting. I like banwaves. They're digging their own graves, they'll go the way of Blockbuster soon, and the internet, public discourse, information availability and dare I say humanity will be better for it. I wish they'd do it faster.
The fact that 4Chan itself has not been the target of deplatforming efforts is confusing to me. If I were to put my tinfoil hat on for a bit, I might speculate that it’s a honeypot that shares data with the feds.
The way bans on reddit have tended to work is that by dispersing the group, there's an additional barrier created to stop the spread of the idea. This has happened with fatpeoplehate, the trump reddit, and with the red pill reddit among others. Its not just a group of people of a similar knowledge level and similar ideas coming together, it is also new users happening across the subreddit and deciding to take part. Take away the new users and it becomes an echo chamber.
This is what makes Youtube, Reddit and Facebook so powerful. They can choose who can stay on their platform, and how much discoverability their ideas have if they are allowed to stay on the platform.
I agree with you but I don't have any uneasy feelings -- these are private companies doing whatever they want with their resources. The sooner everybody wakes up to this fact, the sooner all this pointless hand-wringing will be over.
Readit News
As for this thread, it's got 500+ comments. If you want to see them all you'll need to click through the More links at the bottom, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935511&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935511&p=3
And how to do it? You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up. Seriously. It's that easy. It's not illegal. It's so easy that even semiprofessionals can understand exactly which stock are hedge fund favorites. It's not hard information to come by. And, here's the kicker: There is a potential monetary reward if you enter and exit a stock at the right moment.
So it's simple to discover and execute, and there is a financial incentive, and it's not against the law. This is a trifecta of properties that makes this very interesting to follow indeed.
I just saw this article too: As hedge funds try to cover losses, the rings are now spreading over the market: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-26/hedge-fun...
The author speculates that this might even ultimately trigger a market correction.
A lot of the people involved aren't just buying and holding. They're specifically buying/selling short dated out of the money options in order to move the price. Some understand the market microstructure and the various levers they have to make the price move using what is effectively leverage.
> Seriously. It's that easy. It's not illegal.
Finance is highly regulated and arbitrarily so. If you think the lawmakers and regulators will throw their hands up and say geez, it's technically legal, carry on, you're sorely mistaken.
Ideally finance is meant to be about allocation of capital. If a market is allocating capital to a dying company just because meme, then the market isn't serving its purpose. I don't see how this is different than what is constantly being criticized such as flash crashes, contagion and large moves based on rumors, other than the group benefiting (fiscally irresponsible internet strangers vs fiscally irresponsible professionals)
I know, hedge funds bad, and they do this crap all the time. That may be true, but this isn't going to end well for the average consumer. My prediction is reddit will shutdown wsb because that's what reddit does. And there will be more laws made targeting individuals engaging in this sort of activity (basically coordinating with groups of people). This may hurt newsletters and other financial venues. The large hedge funds will be fine, we might see a few bailouts, and life will go on.
I totally agree, but it's not like there's a level playing field now. If the new regs enshrine the current reality in law then maybe there'll be more hope for fundamental reform.
Basically what we probably have now is a behavior that is legal so long as no one engages in it. Losing a fake option is not losing anything.
> I don't see how this is different than what is constantly being criticized such as flash crashes, contagion and large moves based on rumors, other than the group benefiting (fiscally irresponsible internet strangers vs fiscally irresponsible professionals)
Isn't that the whole point WSB is making? This is not different and the media treating it as something crazy or new is disingenuous.
It’s not your job to decide what is an efficient place for capital. The market is serving its purpose exactly right now by allowing the free trade of shares in GME. If people want to spend their money on a GME share to be a part of something, that’s their prerogative.
You know what else the market allocates capital to? Gold funds, who do nothing but sit on giant vaults of gold. It’s about the stupidest allocation of capital possible but nobody is clutching their pearls about that.
Telling people what is inappropriate to do with their money is a great way to get them to do it more. The whole reason we have a free market is because historically the big people in charge can’t allocate capital more efficiently than free-for-alls.
But how can you regulate that people get together and buy stock? They need... 1) Internet bulletin board. That's it. The barrier of entry is just so damn low, and that's in part also why this has happened. In hindsight I'm surprised it hasn't happened before but I suppose Covid-19 brought this on.
I think it would be easier to regulate something that at least takes a certain amount of investment in terms of insight or knowledge, but here you can just take any random heavily shorted company and like... get people on a popular board to buy stocks over a day.
This time, sure, it was Reddit and the subreddit may be suspended. Next time it'll be a Discord or Telegram board or something. It's just... so easy
These laws will not be legal under US law, because US congress is not permitted to make a law abridging an act of speaking, or expressing an idea, or opinion.
> Finance is highly regulated and arbitrarily so.
The level of arbitrariness of legal process in legal systems of ex-UK colonies is in league of its own in the world, and USA is particularly prominent at that.
In US, financial regulations are some of the most vaguely defined of laws, in the rest of the world, they are usually are the most verbose, and formal in definition.
A law whose execution is wholly arbitrary is not a law at all, and a country allowing arbitrary interpretation of laws is lawless.
This is why what is "technically legal" is legal. What is defined in the law as legal, or not defined as illegal is what is legal. This is why no smarty pants bureaucrat should be allowed to wiggle out arbitrary powers by coming with "interpretations," "extended definitions," or "legal theories."
> If you think the lawmakers and regulators will throw their hands up and say geez, it's technically legal, carry on, you're sorely mistaken.
Do you believe in it's right to give power to somebody, whether it will be a government, private party, or a class to rule over allocation of capital, and decide whose capital allocation is good, and whose capital allocation is bad?
There is a country that tried, they name to it was USSR.
They don't make laws for this any more, it will be stopped by some obscure regulatory agency.
This exactly what stock market speculation is about, is it?
What does it matter what it is "ideally", if it was never that in practice? Ideally communism is a stateless moneyless classless society, let's get working on dissolving the state then?
Funds are also diverse, though. There will be a load of funds who have taken the other side to Melvin, based either on various fundamental insights, or technical, whatever.
This fund has/had bad risk managers.
What Melvin did was risky and avoidable.
Let's wait six months. This story is being badly reported all over. I suspect the hedge funds will mostly be fine.
>You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up. Seriously. It's that easy. It's not illegal.
Yes, it is, it's an abusive short squeeze, which is market manipulation.
Right. All of a sudden the WSJ is publishing an article about the founder getting kicked out where he claims the subreddit is full of white supremacists. Really? Give me a break. FT is claiming many are “alt-right” all of a sudden. Bad reporting all around.
> Yes, it is, it's an abusive short squeeze, which is market manipulation.
I’m not sure I buy it, and I’m not sure there is a fundamental difference between dinner club (as Matt Levine wrote) where hedge fund managers talk about their favorite stock picks and people on an open forum openly talking about companies that they think should be purchased or sold. Is it not market manipulation when a short seller publishes a scathing report, or when a CEO goes on CNBC or Bloomberg and gives a good opinion of their company or a different one? Which has more reach?
I think the most sensible and straightforward thing is further regulation of hedge funds and large financial institutions. If they are going to act irresponsibly and then cry about it, well, maybe they need adult supervision? The positions of hedge funds versus, uh, retail traders on an Internet forum is an unequal one from the start, anyway.
Not to mention the ridiculous media blitz coming from institutions. Jeez what a way to really create a lack of trust and further erode our democracy. If I find a drug dealer working for the FT can I write an article about how some people who work there are drug dealers? It’s obvious what they’re doing.
In the extreme case this could be true of almost any company. Imagine if GME were just a shell and a brand. Then they raise money, get a great board, hire industry experts, and go... whatever.. compete with Steam, turn the physical stores into e-sports venues, pivot to game development, whatever. Use the money to get the expertise, and you already have the brand and attention, which is now worth a lot more. That is kind of what happened with Tesla to some extent, although they already had a great brand a genius owner.
This GME thing is just one little piece of an overall new zeitgeist. I'm not about to even try to predict the next crash/bubble-pop, though. I just don't have the stomach for this kind of market. When a change comes, it may not happen in a predictable way. I think there's at least a chance we could somewhat be in uncharted territory here.
The populism on this issue is completely out of touch with reality.
1) As the stock pops due to irrational upwards pressure - the hedges funds might lose a bit, but in reality a lot of 'regular people' will be left holding the bag.
When the stock inevitably crashes, those 'regular people' will lose a lot and it will probably be a more meaningful loss to them.
2) There is no easy way to make money doing this - you're literally promoting a collective ponzi scheme (!) whereby the only money made is by people putting more money in.
3) Bankers have a role to play in markets and that's by properly valuing them. Obviously there are tons of shenanigans, but otherwise, it's an essential role. 'Pumping and dumping stocks' is not value creating it's actually quite destructive. While Game Stop may appreciate being helped in some way, they are not going to appreciate their stock going insanely volatile. Why do you think they would actually want this?
The populism on this issue is really out of hand.
"So it's simple to discover and execute, and there is a financial incentive, " - please - no, this is completely irresponsible.
It won’t happen in minutes either, it will take days for this to happen. That’s why everybody is going crazy about this. WSB saw a perfect situation and exploited it. This isn’t a case where the stock will drop in mere minutes.
We'll have to wait and see a bit, but the huge pop in Gamestock was likely more the result of funds covering shorts, not retail investors continuing to buy at these prices. So it feels really disingenuous to blame retail for these wild swings when they would not have been possible without the irresponsible hedge fund trading that came before.
Do you refute my claim that it's simple to discover and execute? They're essentially just banding together on public information here. GameStop, Blackberry, Nokia, AMC, they're all affected and I'm just counting days of developments here.
As for the financial incentive, it is _absolutely_ driving this behavior. The taste of cash. Most will of course lose money on this, but this is not my point. My point? There is a financial incentive! I'm not talking about morale or ethics, I'm talking about why I think this might be a watershed moment. The masses realizing this is at all possible.
Hell, throwing away cash on lotteries is also a terrible way to build fortunes, yet it's a massive industry and lives are ruined over this as well.
People who should've known better got caught with their pants down and I have absolutely no sympathy for hedge funds.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/01/investing/herbalife-bill-ac...
[1]theoretically, in practise I'll predict it's about to be Septembered into oblivion
edit: formatting
Because the subreddit is famous for just losing money and lots of people just not knowing what they're doing. I'm sure there are a few traders on that reddit but I suspect it's like a professional programmer joining a dev bootcamp community. A whole bunch of people who are just learning and are doing crazy things. (I did crazy things when I was learning, hell, I sometimes do crazy things now)
I spent all night going through many of those threads, and I have to say they are ready to join Bitcoin once the SEC cracks down on them and freezes their Robinhood accounts and possibly even their bank accounts linked to Robinhood.
If Melvin does go down it will be its own success, but now they're going full vigilante investor mode, and putting money in BB, AMC etc... this won't stop unless the State intervenes and could set a precedent and as you say create a 'watershed moment.'
It won't be long until they realize what the long con really is: central bank based fiat currency that created these boom-bust cycles in the first place.
I initially mocked them when I heard about them taking GME to its recent rise, and still kind of do as WSB is a joke even by their own admission; but that doesn't mean it cannot create positive change. After all comedians just use humour in their jokes to highlight and poke fun of some of Society's most absurd aspects with varying levels of success in reforming it.
Dave Chappelle's latest monolouge at SNL after the election highlighted this very well.
Agree. I think we're all seeing that hedge success for many is more about market influence than actual market prediction.
> We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad nights sleep. We've got so many comments and submissions that we can't possibly even read them all, let alone act on them as moderators. We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn't allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven't given us special access despite asking for it.
-- https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/wher...
Deleted Comment
It's not impossible to have multiple instance of the same bot running in parallel, but there are too many race condition and it became too much to handle.
It’s quite restricted so you need to do all sorts of hacky stuff to get live info out of it.
Are they sure that 'deplatforming works' this time? (The have already assembled on /r/wallstreetbetsnew)
For the tech platforms, the mainstream media, social media, etc they might as well ban every single person off of the internet at this point.
As for GME, just put on your diamond-grade hands for once and hold until Friday's squeeze.
EDIT:
The sub-reddit is back. http://reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets
Creating a new sub on the same topic as a previously banned sub is against the rules on Reddit. So if their sub is banned for hate speech it doesn't matter how you rephrase it they just ban any similar new subs.
We're going to see more fragmentation, and growth of closed platforms perceived by users as "slightly less evil" such as telegram vs watsapp. This may also motivate the return to truly open internet ideals of the past.
Very few people care about what you are talking about. The subset of people who care are: tech savvy, young, mostly male, and vaguely misanthropic. This demographic is already served in numerous places, and everyone else is rather glad to see these people chased off of platforms they use for sharing videos of dancing and food.
The alt right, internet strippers, people who like drugs, people who want to talk about stocks, people who want to talk about something their HR dept wouldn’t approve: these people all want free platforms. It’s not just weirdos and trump supporters.
“The internet is a fad”
It is just nerdy men in their basements.
No, very few people care about the ethical implications of what OP 's talking about. But it's pretty hard to not start caring when you become a casualty. OP is saying that if there's enough casualties, maybe it will be the catalyst for a movement.
You don't even need a majority to care. You just need enough people who can't use or refuse to use a particular platform to trigger a mass exodus.
I think it's optimistic that we'll see that with many of the huge, well-established platforms like Facebook or Twitter. But this at least presents an opportunity to get some competing platforms off the ground.
Then they are lacking empathy and being short-sighted. And apparently won't see the problem until it affects them directly.
The flood of messages i got (XX is on Signal now) from techies and non-techies speak another language.
>tech savvy, young, mostly male, and vaguely misanthropic.
You forgot the word "white" ;)
And while some are screaming for these sites to get shut down over it, most of us aren't. What you see from most of us is recommendation to stop using services that silence you. This is a reasonable response, if someone doesn't like you, go somewhere where they do like you. That's what the comment you're responding to is advocating, embracing and even getting excited about. The internet needs a true public square, not a private entity masquerading as one that for some reason totally unbeknownst to them has to constantly remind everyone that they are not a public square.
"Retard" is considered a slur by some. It doesn't matter if others don't consider it to be. The one making the judgement is the service provider.
Same with Parlour complaining about being kicked off AWS when they violated their terms of service. There's a copy of the letter AWS sent to them that's public [0]
" Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. {...} You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.”" "
It's just a desire to have freedom from consequences. If they self hosted in Alabama, I'm sure they would have been fine.
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
Also, if you have people coming to your coffee shop and acting badly, people can judge it for themselves and form their own opinion. On the internet, bans are quiet and you can easily silence a large chunk of the userbase without making a noise.
You may cheer these big platforms now because it's only "racists, white supremacists and crooks" being banned, but as soon as the first group of people you agree with gets blocked from these platforms you'll be the first one to fight for freedom of speech.
Maybe a bit too much. How about: "Social Engineering via Targeted Group Deplatforming?"
Because that is how these look-like to me and to a lot of these "persecuted" groups. These groups aren't necessarily "hateful" or "organizing" violence. A lot of the time it's just distasteful, kinda sexist etc and the "platform" owners simply don't like them and want to keep them from growing because (I think) they think that there is a real fear that societal opinion might swing their way. However the missing key here is that a lot of times, these are genuine "political movements" before they've cooled & solidified, and exist solely as mis-directed or nebulous emotion, hence the "hateful" and distasteful content.
Not all, but a good chunk of them of course. Sometimes you just get bad groups, but in a lot of those cases, I think it's more clear that they're doing something blatantly evil. For lack of a better example: coordinating and sharing info on how to sabotage deforestation using dangerous methods like putting nails inside trees, which would cause chainsaws to snap and hurt the operators.
Moderated content because you are responsible for stuff that's being posted? Then go "censor" stuff all you want. Same rules for all.
Open platform and not be responsible for content? (Similar to ISPs) Then everything should be allowed until a judge tells otherwise.
You would also be censoring people if you ran an upscale restaurant with a dress code and standards of behavior, or if you didn't let them post ads on the walls.
As long as you make your rules clear and enforce them fairly, censorship and standards of behavior are completely fine.
The very large social media platforms all market themselves as being neutral. They got to be the largest by providing a space for everyone.
So the ask here is "please enforce the rules fairly the way you have always promised you would." Asking a business to deliver on the promises they've made and continue to make is not an entitled attitude.
After all, all these businesses are in complete control of what they promise. If they don't like the old promise, they have a first amendment right to make a new promise that suits them better.
Dead Comment
//Been told I'm posting too fast again by the benevolent left wing moderators on HN so this is what I would have replied:
"From the comment on WSB that was a story on here before it got flagged off the front page:
"We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore."
In other words, they told the kids not to swear and enforced it but someone came up with a new swearword that the cafe owner didn't recognise (it's hard to think of an analogy for using weird characters to say a bad word) and so the cafe got shut down. "
Unfortunately, there is no more new math here.
Even worse, it looks like stocks may become unduly hyper volatile due to such things and none of the people in the underlying economy actually want that, it's a huge headache and risk for them.
Whenever people say this, I wonder whether they are considering the possibility that once the internet goes in the direction of fragmentation, more states would swoop in with regulation to barricade their own internet in the same way that China has a great firewall. There are plenty of incentives into banning US-based tech companies--states would then have access to data about their citizens instead of being at the mercy of Facebook or the US, and local software companies would begin to thrive.
sadly far too many people are in the camp of protecting freedoms and rights they personally deem acceptable and anything falling outside of their honest narrow view they will follow the crowd and jump on it with glee.
the same levels of censorship and oppression people bemoan existing in some other countries is nearly here in the West and sadly all I hear is cheering.
For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere."
Time for them to spin up a Lemmy server?
https://lemmy.ml/docs/en/index.html
wallstreetlemmi.ng maybe?
Dead Comment
I believe we're going to see fragmentation in platforms rather than open standards. And I say that because we've just launched our own reddit alternative, Retalk.com. It's also moderated, but by different standards.
With such moderation tagging in place, for example, if I wanted to use Reddit but mistrust moderators, with an open treatment of data, I would be able to select to ignore their rating/per entry and use ratings by a group of users I select. (impossible to imagine Reddit doing something like this)
However, it requires I have access to core data. Today, the superusers or platform admins can prevent "controversial" entries from even being visible on the platform/subplatform/subreddit.
I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).
Regardless of how right or wrong this moderation choice may be, I hope that this accelerates the push for decentralization and encryption; the few companies that virtually all online humans use to communicate have far too much power over us, and we should be more willing to recognize that extreme centralization of power is dangerous.
(One final note: (EDIT: subreddit is now public again) now that this caused the subreddit to be set to private which seems to have instantly caused $GME to start tanking in AH, they are going to be in for users that are much more upset than they are used to if the narrative decides that this ban caused the crash, if it does in fact last until tomorrow)
But what's happening right now is almost certainly a pump and dump with a short squeeze as a facade. I've seen a lot of commenters who seem to be grievously misled about the actual mechanics of a short squeeze, and think that short sellers will be forced to buy all their stock at market price on Friday.
Deleted Comment
Now it seems like so many topics and words are completely off limits. It’s very restrictive and I think it’s making the web a less free, a less open, and a less fun space.
It’s extremely hard to exist online when you have not only a raging group of pro censorship PC police hell bent on removing you, but coordinated networks of platforms that will remove you in unison.
So I think it’s less that people see online communities as their public squares, and more that it’s very difficult to exist online if don’t hold the same ideas and opinions of those controlling the platforms.
The subreddit did not go private due to the ban. You're reading too much into the headline. It depicts two separate events that are both caused by too many new users (too many new posts in the subreddit's case).
Hope we end up there soon, this constant censorship of communities I might want to have a look at to satisfy my curiosity gets mighty tiring.
I agree with you, but I lament that outside of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit, it’s been very hard for any social media company to gain traction.
They serve very different audiences. Facebook and Discord seem to be the most intrusive, as they displaced many mediums. I cannot communicate with my homeowner group, because I am banned by facebook for using profanities.
Then Facebook decides to leave political posts proliferate unchecked, while I can't use the word baboon. I personally hate Facebook so much that I told the recruiters to GTFO and never contact me.
Hmm, it's almost as if this just happened recently, but people looked the other away because it was tightly coupled to politics. I think 2021 is going to blow 2020 out of the water.
Isn’t that what people are also basically saying of Twitter. And Facebook. And ...?
Facebook is the dangerous one.
What? I have never used Discord.
If you think that a company has a monopoly on your social life, that's on you. There are lots of chat services There's even gasp email, and double gasp group texts.
The problem here isn't that we need a new decentralized system, the problem is that people are too lazy to use the decentralization we have today.
What should I use if it's so easy?
The Discord spaces on the other hand have split up into a bunch of other broken spaces.
You feel that cold breeze? The future is coming and it's chilly.
No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core.
These are not Eastern European kids who dream to finish school and go to Western Europe and do something with their lives, these are also not Chinese who dream to go to America for a new life. They are not the American youth from the 60s or the bolsheviks from the pre-soviet era.
On the other hand, some of them must be rich now. Who knows what easily won money could bring.
Okay boys, french revolution, american revolutuon, british revolution were all a nihilistic mistake. Time to give up our hard-earned right and go back to being serfs governed by god-emperror.
The establishment shall never be challanged even if it's chopping off heads, tortuning the unbelievers, raping and burning women for witchcraft.
"Who knows what easily won money could bring"
Did you ask this question in 2008?
Sweeping generalities like this are anathema to discourse.
Hoping/imagining that society can do better isn't nihilistic.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core."
I'm so happy we have mrtksn to explain the motives of about 5 million different people.
Thank you so much for enlightening us with your psycho-analysis of all those people.
We will try to be less nihilistic next time boss.
https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-google.html
8chan, which was far better, went under for it though.
That link is now banned on Wikipedia even though...
This is what makes Youtube, Reddit and Facebook so powerful. They can choose who can stay on their platform, and how much discoverability their ideas have if they are allowed to stay on the platform.
Why are you on HN then in the first place?