Funnily enough, viewing what you're doing there as "trading" comes a long way in hiding your gambling habit from both yourself and others. So much so, that certain extremely short running "binary options" trading platforms at least here in Germany do little to hide that they're offering a completely legal and unregulated form of gambling by showing plumbers and haircutters "earning money" by "trading" on these platforms in prime time TV ads.

Both.

I'm active in there under a trolling account and I've had some serious conversations with some of the people outside of Reddit.

It's comparable to Shekreli (one of their heros) raising the price of that drug and then treating it like a joke. They do things most sane people would never imagine, almost a competition to see who can be the most reckless. So in a sense it is serious in that many of them actually do trade. It's a joke in the sense that they treat it like one. Kind of like /r/theDonald

Both. I feel like there are ~some~ few really smart people in there.