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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

This post is a great tutorial in why we shouldn't derive meaning from expressed language. Imagine if you sat in a room of software engineers and tried to make conclusions about their life views based on their jargon: "I think what they're saying is you just need to form a single value store and react to it, dividing life into small composable micro components that are DRY. We can really comprehend how this minimalism impacts engineers..."

Language like WSB uses is meant to frustrate outsiders and limit posers. It makes it hard for the media to reprint things that are said, and even if it does, it would be nonsense. That's intentional.

And yes, there's double meanings and jokes to some of this language. Many WSB'ers comprehend the gambling-esque nature of what they do, and how many of their strategies aren't traditionally recommended.

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Language like WSB uses is meant to amuse edgelords and (hopefully) upset 'normies'. When normies are offended by cavalier use of slurs and labels (and if you're offended, you're by definition a normie), the edgelords point and laugh at the normie who doesn't share their same nihilistic worldview.

WSB is what happens when immature, nihilistic, overly online middle class boys grow up into immature, nihilistic, overly online men-children. The only thing that changed as they aged is now they have to hide their power level while in normie society.

i think that's reductive and while it feels true, it probably isn't. it's the same logic with which i can say HN is a bunch of mostly male programmers who take themselves too seriously, think they are much smarter than everyone and probably mostly all share the same personality traits

it's not quite true, and reducing a whole lot of people into one easy bucket dumbs all of the conversations down. IMO wsb is pretty riveting, and i would love to hear more nuanced takes on the sociology/mindset behind these types of communities, especially the legality when it comes to the market and what the future holds. at what point will WSB become illegal in the way that it moves stocks around? etc.

WSB is more about laughing at themselves rather than trying to amuse or offend someone. WSB doesn’t care much about so called “normies”, they have never attacked anyone outside of wsb and labels don’t spread outside of wsb either.

WSB never had nihilistic worldview, there’s plenty of people supporting each other, there’s regular donations to charities, and etc.

WSB is just a tongue-in-cheek ridicule of the finance world, that’s it. Attempts to see some specific class of people lurking there is just not true at all and mostly people project their views on the finance world onto WSB as well while it’s a completely different thing.

They’re engaging in blatant market manipulation. I’d say that harms people outside their group.

How is it any different from Kramer / CNBC / The Motley Fool recommending stocks to buy and giving price targets?

And I think that's fundamentally the point (for those who think through it that far and aren't just following the crowd).

2008 produced a lot of resentment of the heads-I-win, tails-you-lose financial arrangement (in terms of financial services companies) of the Western world, but there wasn't any attainable way of actually taking action based on that belief.

Now, there is. WSB gets to have its lulz, specifically at the expense of those they feel wronged them (banks, traders, etc).

As the saying went in Eve Online from Goonswarm, it doesn't matter if you lose 1,000 ships, if everyone wants to hang out with you instead of the other team. Cultural victory.

I imagine the first HFT firms felt very similarly.

Well, not that anyone is forced to participate in the market, especially knowing about intentionally irrational players.

Unless you consider the lack of other viable investment options. Still not violet forever tho

As someone who has spent the last few months following WSB, to me it feels very much like an old school Internet club/social scene/etc. Reminds me a lot being involved in a niche IRC community or something.

Along with all the silliness, there are a lot of smart people posting very interesting things on the forum. Open, free for anyone to read (in a hack-the-finance-planet) sorta way.

You have people writing in-dept thesis' on which way a stock is heading / what happened yesterday / how to "play" the trade. Its clear some of the people are serious as they put hundreds of thousands up against their theory.

Along with this you get a bit of a stick-it-to-the-man feeling as well. I will shed 0 tears if a bunch of people on reddit bring multiple hedge funds down. Perhaps the entire finance world should be more open, equitable and accessible!

This comment reads like a "they're really playing 4-dimensional chess" moment.

There are definitely some smart people on wsb, but I very much doubt the use of silly language (like, say, calling bears "gay bears") is anything other than users being intentionally ridiculous and funny.

$420.69

Funding Secured!

Stonks only go up. Why be a bear if stonks only go up? Makes no sense.

[edit] to be clear, I'm parroting WSB.

Buy, when the Fed is drunk and high.

The language there is definitely used as a shibboleth, a stenograph, and a ward. Enough of the people there are knowledgeable enough to know 1) the types of automation that go into mining social media, and 2) how to communicate in a manner that maintains plausible deniability in the event of interest from authorities. Everyone else plays along so they can be part of the group.

To me, chan language is linguistic evolution.

Massively increase the mutation rate, provide instant fitness feedback, and run the simulation for a substantial amount of time.

You're essentially selecting for the most mematic strains on the user population.

“Computers are haunted never go near them” - every SWE I know

https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks is a wonderfully funny essay on the topic.

The alternate title to Ghost in the Shell

>Language like WSB uses is meant to frustrate outsiders and limit posers.

This is true, but WSB is also fundamentally nihilistic.

4Chan started as teenage boys from middle class families saying bad things for and fun trolling for fun. "haha lol normies take it seriously" Typical teenage nihilism that is normally not very harmful. Then it gradually escalated into really hurting people and crazy people joining. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_All_Normies

4chan is still mostly teenagers and 20-somethings from middle class families shitposting for fun

Qanon disagrees.

4chan trolling nearly resulted in a coup, its reached a new level of seriousness.

>4chan trolling nearly resulted in a coup

A few things:

1. It wasn't a coup, it was a protest to protest the unfair election and overall left wing bias. Same way BLM was to protest the unfairness of how black people are treated.

2. It was mostly organized on Facebook and the general "normie" web

unfair election? what exactly do you mean?

A coup can't succeed without support from the military, the police or a majority of the population. A few hundred badly organized crazy people can't perform a coup, they can however perform acts of terrorism which is what they did. Crazy people sometimes kills high level politicians, there are many cases like that in history, doesn't mean it was a coup or it was even near succeeding.

Unsuccessful or incompetent coup attempt is still a coup.

I guess I'll be pedantic for a moment. A coup, by definition, is a seizure of power from government. If they are not successful at seizing power, then it was not a coup.

It was an attempted coup.

If I show up at the capitol building alone and demand to be put in charge, is that also a coup attempt? Obviously where you draw the line is subjective, but this event never had anything close to the requisite backing to become an actual coup, so calling it that feels a bit disingenuous to me. What it was is a riot and and an insurrection, but not a coup.

It's an insurrection (non-government/military attacking government property/people). A coup would be if it was another wing of the government or the military doing the attacking.

Does the POTUS count as a wing of the government? The POTUS and some members of congress? It was not a coup, but I'd call it an attempted coup.

The police let the terrorists in and DC authorities were denied National Guard resources by Military authorities.

There are several documented terrorists who are active duty police officers and the terrorist who was killed was an Air Force officer.

Seems like this coup attempt had plenty of support from the Military and Police.

It was more of an erection of the village idiots, than an actual military coup.

The belief that a bunch of 20 year olds can joke a president into office, stage a coup using memes or currently take down Wall Street with emojiis is the funniest thing and is itself a joke created by and believed by these forums.

I don't think you can make specific philosophical assertions about a very large group based off a hobby. Just like we can't say that all react developers are minimalists, we can't say all WSBer's are nihilists or anything else.

I think you have some very fundamental misunderstandings about 4chan, including who it was composed of and what both their stated and achieved goals were. As a hint, remember that 4chan is a chan made up of several sub-boards with different user niches across boards. Even if we narrow it down to /b/ or /pol/, you still have competing internal factions and different movements across time.

Nor is your quote an example of nihilism, even in context. Nihilism is a rejection of perceived realities and the certainties tied to those realities - someone who believes truth doesn't really exist is engaging in a form of nihilism. You seem to want to say something like "they're attacking social norms" as best as I can understand.

> we can't say all WSBer's are nihilists or anything else

This type of counterargument seems to be very common in the internet.

Can you explain how valid you consider "we can't say all X" argument being in general? How can you make reasonable arguments about group or people so that this argument is not valid.

So usually a setup of "All Xs are Y" is used to setup a straw man. By taking a large and diverse group and simplifying it down to a single viewpoint (that's not a tautology) then you're setting up an out group to be attacked under a single characteristic. An example of this usually goes: "Well, Christians believe the world was created in 7 days, and since we have good evidence the world wasn't created in 7 days, Christians must be insane." You just took 2 billion different people, who are spread across factions with internal debates and arguments, and simplified them into a straw man that at most represents a small percentage of that slice.

Sometimes we do want to make broad statements. "Kids like minecraft!" is kind of wrong, but it's kind of right and isn't necessarily a straw man. It'd be more accurate to say something like "About 70% of kids report playing minecraft"[1], or we can keep to anecdotal evidence: "all my nieces and nephews play minecraft". Those statements are generally correct. We still have some data problems - a kid is generally going to give you the answer they think makes you happier, and they're probably pretty relaxed about half-truths to annoying uncles/aunts asking them about gaming habits.

If our goal is to make truthful (as in, accurately representing reality) statements, then we need to be precise and avoid broad strokes when we describe a group. [2]

[1]: I'm making that stat up as an example

[2]: On the other hand, if our goal is to define an out-group and attack them, then broad strokes and vague insults are really useful and hard to counter

> we can't say all WSBer's are nihilists or anything else

The parent poster didn’t say that, though. They said that the group was nihilist. A community can have a shared attitude and outlook; that doesn’t mean that outlook is shared 100% by the members of that community.

There are a lot of statements in these subcultures that can't be definitively pinned down as ironic or not ironic. For example, calling software "broken" started as a gross oversimplification that drew attention to itself as a gross oversimplification. It could be used when you wanted to gloss over complex questions of what the software is good for and what you need it to do, while at the same time, to avoid lying by omission, drawing attention to what you were omitting.

But then people started calling software "broken" to express, "My gut feeling is that this software sucks, and I think it would be a waste of time for me to question or attempt to substantiate this feeling," and they felt validated in that attitude because there was a perfect means for expressing it in the programming lexicon.

Now when I hear someone say "broken," it doesn't have the reassuring subtext of "I know this is a gross oversimplification, and I'm open to providing more detail about my reasoning." It might mean the opposite. (Or it might mean, "I'm making outrageous statements because I know I'm right, and I would relish the opportunity to bully anyone who questions me.")

Similarly, one person might say "everybody hates me, and I can't blame them because I'm worthless" in a deliberately ironic way, to express an emotion and at the same time signal their awareness that what they believe under the influence of that emotion is not true (since their mom is bringing them tendies in the basement.) The next person might say the same thing with no intended irony.

The Bogleheads forum uses its own form of language to gatekeep too. I’ve found it so much more smug and closed-minded than WSB.

I don't get how this hurts the elites or whoever else apathetic to the WSB crowds. Margin loans are collateralized. Wall street firms are making record trade profits (or at least much better than main street banks). Like lottery this can only hurt those who actually play the game.

if anything, I think WSB shows off the hacker humour pattern: "haha, only serious".

that's also an element of internet troll evil clown: "oh, you didn't really think that I meant that!"

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