Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while
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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.
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.
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.
This occurred to Lehman Brothers. Different industry, but they got shorted to the point that their clients withdrew their funds and they were left in a position that was ineligible/undesired for most loans.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/08/does-it-matter-t...
Financial opportunity to what? Be specific.
None of the examples there really makes a lot of sense in this case. You think this pump (and coming dump) happening with GameStop would convince lenders to lend to GameStop at better rates? Maybe if they had no clue what was happening and did no due diligence, but that is not the case. And I doubt share price is the only consideration made by lenders, if their share P/E ratio was very low (which shorting would cause) then this would also affect their lending opportunities positively.
You think they were planning to issue new shares? It would have been an amazingly stupid idea which likely would not have been approved by existing shareholders anyway and would have had much the same effect as shorting.
Considerations for an investment bank is quite different from the considerations for a game retailer.
EDIT: The claim that short selling contributed significantly to the demise of Lehman Brothers is also disputed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman_Brothers#Short-selling_...
I will add that short interest > 100% is a very common risk measure that firms with a short position actively track.
This is trickier than it might sound, because you are in some sense restricting the rights and capabilities of some subset of the shares. That has valuation implications.
I am not saying it can't be done or even that it's undesirable; just that the mechanics of this are nontrivial to enforce.
Beyond this, I'm sure there are many funds who try and successfully manipulate the markets, but they try to do it quietly. To do in blatantly in the open is basically rubbing it in the regulators face and giving them no choice but to crack down.
Nobody would notice a bunch of idiots doing this quietly. A 1 million strong mob hivemind will get noticed and will leave no choice for regulators but to come down hard on them.
This is not rocket science. It's the same sort of crowd who planned to storm the capitol, meticulously documented the evidence, posted it online (including confirmation of identity through driving licenses) and then went ahead and did the deed. They basically handed all the evidence to the feds on a silver platter.
I was pointing out the fact that if you go and do it and then brag about it in a public forum, don't be surprised that you get dinged.
It's literally like robbing a bank and then going to the police to hand in the video evidence, only to be surprised when the policemen are not impressed. Yes the big guys should be prosecuted. But perhaps if you didn't explicitly stand on the corner shouting "I'm going to rob a bank and all you guys should also rob banks", the authorities wouldn't be on to you.
I've been on the right side of two short squeezes last year purely by accident, and I'd certainly like to repeat the experience if I could. What exactly would be illegal if I was on the right side of a short squeeze on purpose? Predicting it? holding stocks until it happened? Explaining to people less experienced than myself how a short squeeze works?
You say 'intent' but what intent is discussed on these message boards that is so nefarious people with better Lawyers don't discuss it openly?
Stock can be bough for reasons that have nothing to do with it's market value.
I can buy a stock because i want to own it, maybe i want the voting rights, maybe i want to have standing so that i can file a lawsuit for securities fraud. Maybe i am planning hostile takeover. Maybe I want to proudly hang it at my door.
I am fully aware that you can buy or sell stocks for a myriad reasons, including meming. What is against the rules is trading stocks with the express intent of manipulating the market and deliberately squeezing other participants. This is exactly what was being pushed by WSB.
If you want to engage in adult debate, please refrain from personal accusations and strawmen.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-01-28/gamestop-fr...
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.
What Melvin did was risky and avoidable.
VW in particular was shorted much less but something like 90+% of the shares were accounted for between Porsche and Germany to reach the accounted for shares + shorts position of over 100%.
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.
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.
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.
The crash will be worse, and it will affect people personally - the plebes are going to lose a lot of money on this one in a few days when the market moves on.
That it will take days to unwind doesn't really matter - it will top out at some point, and it will go down. The timeframe is less relevant.
People who should've known better got caught with their pants down and I have absolutely no sympathy for hedge funds.
I'm saying populist shenanigans don't really defeat banker shenanigans.
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.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/01/investing/herbalife-bill-ac...
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.
Thanks for your input. I've worked during such crises myself and it's stressful.
I get that hedge funds are categorically unsympathetic characters in this play. But people are so angry that fact checking doesn't seem to matter. It doesn't help that a lot of things financial mechanics are esoteric and not commonly known, or that most people don't know the difference between hedge funds, banks, market makers and brokers.
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.
How would one go about educating people? There's been a lot of ink spilled on this story and it seems to have captured the public's imagination. Not all of the reporting is accurate, but all the major media outlets get out the point that this is essentially reckless market manipulation by a group of loosely banded individuals coordinating online.
I doubt anyone participating in this will cut it out if just told to by some authoritative body.
You're talking about the hedge funds, right?
I'm not saying reddit is manipulating the market either (maybe! I dunno). Just clarifying this point.
This is the market at work. This was taken too far and the market has a method for correcting this behavior and we're seeing it now. The difference is retail is going to win AND there's no backroom deal to be made to stop the bleeding.
We NEED financial reform but we need to look at what allowed this situation in the first place, not ways to silence what are effectively the whistle blowers.
The reason that short interest is calculated on public float is because that makes the most sense for normal situations. We just happen to have stumbled into one of those unusual situations.
The shares don't have your name on it. It has like Robinhood's name on it, holding on behalf of the customer.
Guess what the SEC has done about this blatant naked short selling. Nothing.
So while in theory naked short selling is illegal, in reality it is tolerate and allowed.
Why wouldn't someone be allowed to lend out a security they own to someone else?
If not allowed, why wouldn't I be allowed to make an agreement where I pay you the difference between a future stock price and some fixed value?
> The difference is retail is going to win AND there's no backroom deal to be made to stop the bleeding.
The backroom deal will be a phone call to the CEO of reddit, discord, disqus and similar and tell them to cut it out. Simple as that. No coordinating mechanism, this will die.
Can you explain what individual or company can own 140% of available shares?
Some people trying to make a point are going to make a lot of bucks as well.
And some people trying to make a buck are going to lose a lot of money. Not everyone can get out of an inflated stock with gains, pretty much by definition. And those least likely to understand the point are also probably the ones buying into the stock late (and at an inflated price).
The mix of who makes and loses money is going to affect how society sees this. It will look somewhere between an egalitarian social movement, or a few now-wealthy loudmouths who took everyone else for a ride.
Making money in a bubble is all about timing... and it gets ethically complicated when some traders have control of the timing (in this case by declaring whether the vendetta against Melvin is over or not).
Note that I have made no ethical considerations for Melvin; they knew what game they were playing and are not victims here IMO.
For the sake of argument, one can say that actions of forums like WSB should also be regulated to protect them, just like laws for compulsory wearing of helmet (while riding two-wheelers) or putting seatbelts (while riding cars) exist, even though one would think that education and common sense would make them do this automatically out of self-preservation instincts.
But since I am not an expert in finance or stock markets, I really am not in any sound position to comment on the specifics here.
My broader general argument (not at all related to WSB or the financial industry) is just that education alone is insufficient, and regulation is often required too for maximum efficacy.
This seems too authoritarian.
On this, we agree.
Now, if you do believe it's wrong and it should be educated against, how would this work? Do you think that this is wrong beacsue people are going to lose money? Maybe then it makes some sense to give better education, but this is obviously a special moment and it's hard to educate people so that they don't engage in a social phenomenon. Not to mention, a lot of educated people may be making some pretty educated bets and winning a lot of money; other educated people may just be 'paying' money for a cause that they believe in.
This exactly what stock market speculation is about, is it?
Thing is no one is going to prosecute a randomer on the internet for throwing $5k at an option especially when there's no proof that it was done in bad faith.
To be clear, market manipulation is very vague and very broad, and from what I've read the SEC is only going after you if there was fraud or lying involved. Most of WSB's activity is not illegal market manipulation.
P.S. not legal advice
I referenced the % just as a convenient label for that group of market participants.
What is a "fair impression," it's all up to owners of the paper to decide on selling price, nobody else can.
> Not when moving the price is the goal.
Market transactions don't move the price, its people doing them do.
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.
This is a sideshow. Feds or regulatory body will crack down, we'll just accept another banned community that is "a threat to our democracy" and we'll move on. I don't think what is essentially financial de-regulation is a movement that's going to pick up steam some time soon. There's vagueness in securities laws and this will continue. Meanwhile banks will periodically be sued for tens of billions that will fill the coffers of attorney generals, justice departments and various state regulators [0]
> Isn't that the whole point WSB is making?
Yes, partly. I think much of it is about having some fun and having a sense of community.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-banks-paid-110-billionin-mo...
Then why would any company ever get sued?
They don't make laws for this any more, it will be stopped by some obscure regulatory agency.
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.
It can probably be written in such a way that this style of speech can be argued through the new law to fall under some of the exceptions, perhaps incitement or fraud.
Can you post a link to some comparison of arbitrariness of ex-UK legal systems and other systems?
They may just decide instead of policing the speech, to police the practice, and make being an investor even more arbitrarily difficult.
I can easily imagine a law getting passed that in order to invest in a brokerage account where you have autonomy over the investments requires you to be an accredited investor, and it will be worded so that it is for the benefit of the people who were taken for a ride on massive "pump-and-dump" schemes that originated on misinformation platforms and social media, regardless of whether they were truly pump-and-dump or just tom-fuckery against "big hedge".
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.
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?
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
It's not so easy. There are concentrated tech players. There's decentralized systems but they aren't there yet in terms of usability for millions of people to just log on and use seamlessly like they do w/ Reddit. It may get there eventually, but its nowhere close to being available.
And then you have different layers of protocol that are all more or less centralized. AWS, gcp, Azure isn't going to host illegal or risky content. And even if you get around that, you'll have to contend w/ the ISPs that can just block arbitrarily if they so choose.
Yes, you can get around all those, but not on the scale to make a meaningful impact and the barriers will deter all but the most fervent supporters, and they likely wouldn't have enough money or influence to cause the havoc they're causing today.
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.
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)
[1]theoretically, in practise I'll predict it's about to be Septembered into oblivion
edit: formatting
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...
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 why Twitter held off on banning Trump for so long; not so much because of public interest, but because Trump alone kept the platform up, running, active and profitable. Social media loves controversy like that.
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.
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.
Moderation serves many purposes, but only one of them is to save your delicate eyes from seeing things you don't want to see. Perhaps the more important one are things like: ensuring that your social media service doesn't have a bad reputation so that people other than disaffected white guys will actually want to use it.
If your site is overrun with porn, then sure, each user could just block those millions of posters with your open standard... but every new user still sees it, and decides "this service isn't built for me" and never comes back.
At the core of community moderation is community. If the community looks like it's full of people doing gray-illegal things, then normal people (and advertisers) will generally shy away... and lawsuits will not be far behind.
Social media without meaningful moderation (ie. FB and Twitter before the latest crackdown) was an error.
Many times I've read a discussion about someone being fired for a social media post. Some people will defend them, some people will say the reaction was justified. And I can't make up my own mind, because that post was swiftly deleted by moderators and now everyone's just acting on their own memory of the post.
All journalists, nearly all politicians, and lots of other people as well communicate largely on social networks owned by these giant amoral artificial creations. What does "public space" even mean anymore? Should we stand on the stroad median with the panhandlers? Would anyone even read our signs?
It is possible for citizens to impose conditions on the existence of the corporations their elected government creates.
Discord and Reddit in this case, even if they're not banned from Reddit yet, is their only means of communicating with eachother. Sure people can create some kind of group / channel on another platform, but if they are banned from one there is no way for them to know where to go.
Obviously the group is going to be mostly dispanded when they are banned or removed. I would say this is a kind of censorship. If they would've been given some time, like a week or a month before the banning then I would agree it would not be censorship because then they can assemble somewhere else.
Private companies and individuals can do what ever they like with their property, no?
Arguments like these are all to often made out of convenience, but should be made in good faith and on principle. Do you truly believe in their right to private property?
Are you trying to argue some kind of Marxist position in order to show censorship can exist without government involvement.
I’m happy to have a discussion on why capital owners probably stole their wealth at some point. But you need to take me on the journey to how that’s related to censorship
If the rules of property mean I have certain rights.
But I don’t like the rules of property, and I want them to change.
And also, counterproductive. If you'd like to change the rules, perhaps defending them every time they're used to hurt your ideological opponents is not the way to do that. Maybe it would be more effective to agree with them and help them.
They aren’t banning you from speaking, just stopping you from doing it in their house, you can continue your message everywhere else.
This meta discussion about the actual point feels awkward. Is the alternative you are suggesting that you have to accept whatever anyone says always? Is it more nuanced than that?
That's not the definition of censorship. To quote Wikipedia:
"Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions, and other controlling bodies."
Do you cry censorship when someone shushes you in the cinema?
Wrong comparison.
I’m pointing out a ridiculous application of what you’ve pointed out, private business, or an individual stoping you from speaking while technically censorship, happens all the time and no one raises an eyebrow.
Would shushing a whole crowd of people talking in the cinema be untoward?
What about a whole subreddit worth of people?
But in this case, it’s a perfect analogue, that illustrates why decrying censorship here is odd.
Reddit can kick people out if they don’t like the behaviour. This happens every day in businesses all over the world (virtual and non virtual) and it is not decried and for the most part is approved of.
No it's not a perfect analogue. To make the cinema comparison work: There is a cinema. You can rent rooms in that cinema. You and your friends go in to talk about stuff. Someone else comes in and "shushes" you instead of going to another room where nobody is in.
Reddit can also kick out people for having the wrong opinion, as they do, as was observed. Banning for the wrong opinion is of course censorship. Banning for specific lingo used by those people is also censorship.
There is difference between banning for wrong opinions and banning for eg. spamming. The line is slim.
Discord has made no attempt to stop anyone saying anything, they're just chosen not to lend these people their megaphone.
Discord reacted to how the platform they had already given was being used. That's different, practically and morally, from NBC not giving them a TV show.
They did not give it without terms of usage so your point is mute.
Let's start with the basics. Forget the selective enforcement aspect and the lawyering over the definition of "censorship" - can anything a private company does with its private property ever be criticized?
Terms of service are not above criticism, did not say it and did not imply it. I don't understand how you came to think that considering that in your previous post there is no criticism of discords TOS.
I was simply replaying to your statement that: "Discord reacted to how the platform they had already given was being used.". I don't understand why anyone would think that the owner of the platform should not be able to dictate the terms of use of their platform or react if those terms are not followed.
Do you want to live like that?
Most pro-censorship voices motte-and-bailey the latter by conflating it with the former.
That they can is not being argued, that they did it now is the issue.
In the same vein, no one would argue that a male manager shouldn't be able to schedule a female employee on their shifts. But when that male manager asks for a date and is refused, the action takes on an entirely different tone.
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.
In two clicks I found their community guidelines on their website:
https://discord.com/guidelines
Second rule:
"Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities."
Calling someone a "retard" or "autist" is considered by Discord to be mocking people with disabilities.
Also IRC exists and is still in use by many people. Anyone can set up a server.
> ive been folowing this saga since GME was 60 or so but sadly i was too afraid to become autistic, and have now gone full retard
And this isn't an isolated comment, there are hundreds of comments like it in the 90k+ commetns on that thread, and in that subreddit. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6er79/the_...
I'm criticizing the incentives Discord's polices create for moderation.
I'm sorry my wording was bad. I certainly did not intend any FUD spreading.
This is just about power and money, the chances that many of these HNers aren't losing money due to the actions of /wsb is low. I have no doubt many of the posters trying to defend the move are being a bit disingenuous. Not all for sure, but certainly some of them.
Honest question: why?
If anything, public discourse enables people to observe and see potential clusters, covid could be traced to tweets talking about pneumonia in November and December of 2019.
If, instead of squashing them, we figured out the underlying problem, which almost always is lack of prospects, we can act accordingly.
So that the "invisible hand of the market" may decide who is wisest (as demonstrated when we look at all the instances where this happened)?
I think all of these wishes of a true public space are usually colored by the (mis?)perception of certain opinions being opressed, when in fact they are often just socially unacceptable because of their destructive nature.
Not to be that guy, but I grew up in Austria inbetween old Nazis and young Neo-Nazis. When they said: "you are trying to silence us" what they meant is "we want to establish the old power again, so we can silence you. until that happens, we want free speech". This is literally (translated from a very thick accent in Austrian German) what one of the neo nazis said to me after the 8th beer and a heated discussion. To assume these people want free speech for anybody other than themselves is naive. For them tolerating others is a vehicle to convince them of their cause: Once they have what they want they will get rid of it.
The question how much tolerance we have to show those who themselves are intolerant is a old one and still not easy to answer. However to me it is quite clear that we should sacrifice the free society we have without a fight.
I'm of the belief that to protect your free society you protect it's virtue, even when people take advantage of it. If you hold steadfast to "free speech", no group ever gets past that first stage, so they can never take power. It means sometimes tolerating hearing reprehensible views of the world, but it is either that or giving someone all the guns and the power to control what you say, and if history teaches us anything, that always ends badly for the regular people no matter the initial intention of the person doing the censoring, a power like that is irresistible to those who want to use it to benefit themselves.
Never thought its gonna get to a point where i have to explain individual liberty in the west
There is historical evidence of this, the monarchs of the centuries past, the Catholic church, they all stifled the ability for people to freely discuss ideas, and even killed people for sharing the wrong ones. As soon as the printing press was invented that allowed people to share ideas freely you had revolts against them all over the next few centuries leading to representative democracies and republics, the enlightenment and development of ideas such as human dignity and individual rights, diversity of religion in the west took hold, the end of theocratic rule over Europe, and it all culminated in the creation of the US and an end to global colonialism mid 20th century. We owe our great way of life and our emergence from theocratic and monarchical shackles in large part to the ability to express and share ideas freely, this is a big reason why western societies hold that right in high esteem, it was a resounding success, it worked for us up until now and it will continue to do so if we let it.
This delicate balance was at times destoyed by a single person that started attacking people aggresively for who they were rather than attacking the argument they made in a way that makes them understand. Allowing that person to freely speak was reducing the classes freedom over all, because that person wanted to dominate the discussion so much, they fostered a climate were all other discussion was not possible anymore and free speech was prevented from happening.
In that case throwing someone out is a totally acceptable option. In fact this is the reason why discussion on this very site work out: because we are after insight and we punish behavior that is pure sophistry, aggressive, snarky, etc.
I am convinced that to speak freely as a collective, sometimes we must stop certain individuals from abusing their freedom of speech within our forums.
The outcome of such experiments always end up the same. People want to generalize about groups of people when its against the right group of people. We want to specifying gender when it is unnecessary, as long it not in the wrong situation. And we want to attacking people for who they were rather than attacking the argument, if its against people which is socially accepted to attack and dismiss.
People just love violence when its done for the right reasons and abhor it when it done for the wrong reasons. At the same time we try to apply principles like freedom of speech and find it completely incompatible with our split view on violence.
The discourse about whether and how much we should tolerate the intolerant is old and has be well discussed by post WWII philosophy. If we want to defend the freedom of all, we need to restrict those freedoms for the people who try to get rid of them.
Or as a neo nazi once said to me: "we want to establish the old power again, so we can silence you. until that happens, we want free speech".
The trouble comes back to the issue when a community and places such as universities tries to mimic laws without actually consider the problem of consistency, and at the same time wanting to believe in principles that they then don't apply to everyone. The result is inconsistency, hypocrisy, and often in order to escape the fact, removal of transparency.
I'm sorry I don't understand, are you arguing on behalf or against Discord who called the wsb crowd a bunch of white supremacist Nazis? I'm not being snarky, I genuinely can't tell if you're defending the open discussion about stock trading or the people that came in and called them names and got them shut down.
I am all for a discussion focused group having rules and expecting participants to adhere to them and booting them out if they don't. What I am opposed to is businesses that market themselves as places to freely discuss, wait til they have market control, then change their terms and kick people out based on tenuous accusations, in this case for the apparent reason of protecting hedge funds from the market. It is egregious what Discord did.
This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between having a conversation in a corner at a rock concert, and having a conversation in an online service hosted by someone else outside of that conversation, in a territory owned by a state where the host has to comply with laws which place the accountability of user-generated content on the host. A more apt comparison would be... I don't know, I actually don't have any idea. How about simply not being deliberately offensive or hateful or using whatever rhetoric that could ultimately translate into real-world violence?
Do you want a change in this society? I'd guess you do, most people want to change something. Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive. The right to speak is the right to offend.
Real world violence, sure. Let's ban that. And asking people to be nice, that's not a bad thing. And banning name calling in your private forum to promote substantiative discussion, that's probably a good idea. But deciding what unappetizing ideas are allowed and are not allowed to be discussed is a bad idea, I thought we learned that lesson in the last century. Free speech isn't what leads to fascist dictatorship, control of ideas does.
All this and I just want to remind you that we are discussing a web site using "white supremacist Nazis" as a pretext to prevent people from organizing against wall street hedge funds.
This is not true. Whatever you’re disagreeing with another person, you don’t have to call that person any politically incorrect slur, which is really the kind of “offensive” that we are talking about here.
"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...
//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. "
At most, it is a mall telling a coffee shop owner that they need to take care of a small subset of regulars - the teenagers - because they are regularly using offensive speech. If they don't, the coffee shop is in violation of the malls' leasing agreement. Coffee shop does nothing, so they are evicted.
It isn't like a place got shut down because they let the general public in.
Discord did a thing and people don't like the thing Discord did. Now what?
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.
What is that statement meant to convey?
If you want to use their service you have to follow their rules.
Turns out that Discord doesn't like people using the terms "Retard" and "Autist" in a disparaging way.
They don't want that kind of discourse to be part of their community.
In the same way, I'm guessing that you're not going get far on this forum calling people "retards"
If you want to have your own community where you want to have that kind of discourse, you can self host a forum. Instead of Discord consider IRC, it's an open standard, and anyone can host a server.
You don't need AWS, you just need an internet connection. You just need to find a hosting provider that's willing to host it. Of which there are plenty.
I dont think you have any proof of that - it's not actually written clearly in their term of service what level of calling each other names is allowed.
Considering that people were calling each-other retards on Discord for years, any judge would conclude that they are happy with this behaviour.
On the other hand, timing of these bans are very suspicious, maybe they recieved a phonecall and banned the community under false pretences.
I really hope we can subponea some documents and find out if this is coming from corruption or cosmic coincedence
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.
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.
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.
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 internet is a fad”
It is just nerdy men in their basements.
> Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats.
This is exactly the same issue that we are still debating today. He is exactly right.
> Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
He's right again. About the only thing that you can do with the government today is renew your car's registration (if you're lucky). The fundamentals of government haven't changed a bit.
The whole context of his argument is that the internet is not going to replace business as usual. You won't replace a school teacher with a CD rom. Online courses are widely regarded as being much worse than a college education. There is really no surprises in anything he said.
I sincerely thought he would just be someone who wasn't "with it"... but no, he actually has a clear understanding of how the promises that the internet didn't materialize in the 90s, and still haven't today.
...And regardless, if you need to quote literally who to find an example of someone saying the internet is bad? I mean, this is just arguing on the internet for you. Read the headline, not the substance, and dig up random factoids to "gotcha" people instead of really thinking critically about the core problems of the world. And nothing gets solved; no minds are changed.
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" ;)
Ehm no, its the Address-book of my phone. From Dog-sitters to Family and Business.
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.
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.
Then they are lacking empathy and being short-sighted. And apparently won't see the problem until it affects them directly.
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.
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.
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?
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)
Further, I think everyone is drastically over estimating the impact of r/wsb and retail investors in general on the GME action. This is hedge fund vs. hedge fund in an opportunity for unusually outsized gains on both the long and short positions over relatively short time frames. Good for them to keep the narrative focused on retail investors rather than capitalist titans in a financial blood bath.
If you don't see this, then you don't know if these people are still your allies.
Still, as long as things like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and Signal and perhaps even Firefox exist, I'll believe we can do better.
I initially didn't want to use it, and I know many others that didn't. Slowly the communities they loved moved to it until they were completely excluded and felt forced to adopt it as well. At this point I only have two friends left that still refuse to use it, everyone else gave in citing network effects. It reminds me precisely of how Facebook felt when I was in school, in that you were excluded from friend groups and events if you chose not to use it.
I know there are many alternatives, but getting your favorite communities to switch to them is completely intractable. Communication shouldn't be like this and I think that we can do much better, even if it takes us awhile to get there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_power#Elasticity_of_dem...
For a free product, the analogy to "raising prices" would be "adding annoyances or other negatives to the product".
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.
As a Long time lurker of the sub, I’m not happy with reddit closing it down.
[0]: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/unprecedented-move-td-amer...
After all, its all about the lulz...
It just so happens the creative output from those aligned with that culture has dominated more recent generations(Sesame street, Free Willy, Fern Gully, all that). In a sense "they won". But those not on-board are still around, and there is a lot of resentment.
I'm only 36 and while I was raised on this stuff but even so a LOT has changed and "progressed" from when I was a kid. Can you imagine how much has changed for those who lived through the civil rights movement?
Off-topic, I know, but I'm trying to understand how you picked these three things as the epitome of culture produced by the counter-culture.
JTA: I don't mean to use a potentially prejudicial term here, and not clear on the distinction between "hippies" and "60s counterculture" myself.
Don't blame them. They've just adapted to cut throat capitalism. The society they live in has molded them into what they are.
Sweeping generalities like this are anathema to discourse.
Really?! I've seen plenty of trolling in my day, and that didn't ring any of my alarm bells.
Is it really that bizarre to you to call anti-establishment /r/wsb gamblers "nihilistic"? The ethos of the subreddit is basically "eh, screw it, let's see what happens" so is it that hard to imagine a subset of members going a little further, to "eh, screw it, none of this matters"?
She was just reacting to what she perceived as unfair.
Hoping/imagining that society can do better isn't nihilistic.
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?
Nevertheless, it doesn't really matter if they are idealists or not if it eventually pushes for a change. Woodstock was a for-profit music festival that turned into a cultural icon. As someone else in the comments said, probably Rosa Parks never meant to start a revolution.
When I say they are nihilistic, I don't mean it as an offence. I do agree that "it doesn't matter", the market is not working as a place to invest into promising companies, it's simply a gambling with extra steps and I enjoy watching many classical gamblers being destroyed. I also don't trade any stocks, I don't own any publicly traded stocks.
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.
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.
Fun to talk about though. This is a very entertaining story.
I wonder if this is a clever-ish social media algorithm trading, shrewd fund managers or really just desperately mistaken retail traders.
this "make the regular people mad to fake a short squeeze to pump the stock" is some weird 4D explanation. not saying it's guaranteed, but the simplest answer is sometimes the best, that they are in a position to be squeezed and it's looking more likely.
Matt Levine seemed to have agreed with this take on Monday: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/the-ga...
And full disclosure, I made a lot of money via GME these past 2 weeks. I'm just not a believer in what's currently being pushed as the truth on social media. To me, GME seems to be a classic case of Tulipmania hiding behind a "short squeeze" mask. It's the latest Bitcoin and no one wants to miss out.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gamestop-mania-reveals-power-sh...
Citron has been coping for over a week now, and is still in it.
If your shorts are not covered then you are basically completely screwed and are willing to do absolutely anything to tank the price as soon as possible even if it means you do not get maximum possible returns. You would push propaganda that your shorts are covered and convince people that you have complete control over the situation.
If you told the truth you would be exposing yourself to unnecessary risk in both cases.
Isn’t that what it means when someone is naked short?
The short could have been naked when it was made, but there is nothing stopping the hedge fund from buying the underlying security ahead of the short position closing.
Which is why GME was targeted in the first place.
For reference, during the unlimited squeeze of Volkswagen’s stocks in 2008 it was estimated that less than 1% of Volkswagen shares were liquid — due to Porsche silently buying the majority of liquid stocks — to cover the short positions which led to the “unlimited squeeze”. I have a hard time believing that The number of liquid GME shares out there are nearly as low as 1%. The only way I could see the liquidity going that low is if institutional investors with tens or hundreds of billions dollars in market cap decide to buy up all liquid shares, effectively lowering the liquidity of GME to similar levels as Volkswagen during the 2008 unlimited short squeeze.
I believe the float is between 30-40%, hovering around 37%.
Naked shorting is when you sell the underlying stock without borrowing it first. You have 2-3 days from transaction to settlement (depending on the market), so you can enter a transaction at T and then only locate borrow at T+2. Obviously, you're running the risk that you can't find borrow in time.
In most cases, however, you short by checking for available borrow first, and _then_ shorting.
Naked short is selling without even borrowing it.
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.
Also, private business can do whatever they want. 1st amendment only applies to government not private business.
And quite frankly, I don't buy that accusation. That seems like a convenient, unfalsifiable canard, doubly so when all the tech companies acted in concern.
And please stop with the "1st amendment" thing, which nobody in this conversation even mentioned. This observation is off-topic and the very definition of a dead horse in a conversation about what the law ought to do.
A pizza place gets bashed for saying that they wouldn't serve pizza to a same sex wedding - they get bashed by one group and praised by another. Payment systems cancel Parler - one group praises private actions, the other bashes it.
I hate Parler, but it showed that both sides are rotten authoritarians.
I guess most ineffectual terrorist on the world.
Are we going to play this game though? People stormed the Capitol hunting for members of Congress. They were chanting "Hang Mike Pence". If they weren't white, would you have any trouble calling it terrorism? Would insurrection or sedition be more agreeable?
Ok. Let's. Are BLM and the riots they caused terrorist acts? By your definition - yes.
I would argue no. I think there needs to be more extreme threshold for something to be labeled as a terrorist group.
as long as no one dies, it is not terrorism for you ?
One who literally set himself on fire, only to get kicked in the testicles by an irate baggage handler?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Airport_attack
We still call that a terrorist attack, because it was.
Not that Al-Quaida was deserving of the liberties that were sacrifced for it...
Violence (murder!) for political motives. Terrorism.
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.
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?
WTF? Get over yourself.
Isn’t that what people are also basically saying of Twitter. And Facebook. And ...?
Facebook is the dangerous one.
You feel that cold breeze? The future is coming and it's chilly.
I've been using matrix for the past year or so and I can tell you it's been great. I'm surprised at how stable and easy it is. I text friends who are on different servers, and no one notices. The clients are all starting to get E2EE by default. Hopefully the future is as warm.
The Discord spaces on the other hand have split up into a bunch of other broken spaces.
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.
Much of the censorship and top-down control we're witnessing today will only get worse while there's no bittorrent-like or blockchain-like decentralization.
Have been following one of the decentralized web approaches, don't remember, netsomething dot net, runs in the browser, very nice interface. Started promising until it got swamped with right wing lunatics doing nothing but trolling and spewing antisemitic stuff all over the place. I am not even offended, it is just a waste of my time to wade thru this trash to find some meaningful conversation.
Any unmoderated community is going to attract these lunatics.
The only places where I find meaningful conversation are topic centered Forums. Anything sans topic turns into a burning dumpster when unmoderated. This is humanity. The lunies get their voices amplified and the sane fall silent.
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.
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.
To my eyes, that controversy is part of a very public power struggle. I firmly believe that the WSB community is in the right, and that any legal gray areas are subtle enough that it would require a judge to decide. So there is no reason for internet companies to pre-emptively wash their hands of the situation. But yet here we are.
I don't see how that is market manipulation any more than short sellers shorting over 100% of a stock.
Maybe there is an argument for regulation to prevent this but the financial sector has been staunchly against any such regulation for decades.
Thus, it is "controversial". That is the question I was answering.
By definition, WSB is controversial because a lot of powerful people criticise them and would prefer them not to exist. Legally, I can see that they're moving in an uncharted gray area that might eventually require lawyers and a judge to determine whether they did something illegal, or that eventually attracts lawmakers to adapt existing regulation.
I'm firmly on the side of WSB here though, and none of the above should be considered a moral rationale for its pre-emptive censorship. Controversial certainly doesn't mean wrong, of which one might have the impression after the last months of social media purges.
I'm not at all surprised that WSB becomes the focus of such a power struggle, and very much hope it becomes another catalyst towards de-centralized, censorship-proof online communities.
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.
The power in those sites is that they are not siloed and at scale, meaning you can reach a much broader audience. Parler would never be able to influence the mass market because it was so specialized - making it ineffective at evangelization. WSB would never be what it is without the platform of reddit. Going to a small specific site will not have the same power, even though I think it is better to host your own hardware and do that.
I'm very excited about it personally, I like disruption.
8chan, which was far better, went under for it though.
Cloudflare did drop 8chan for political pressure.
Both also have a very undeserved reputation. I saw news reports on 8chan as if it were something similar to Stormfront. The front page was mostly video game and pornography and one had to search very deep into it's hidden circles to find racial supremacy content.
ISPs could just drop their customers' traffic to that server. This happens all the time and has happened to 4chan before.
Or they could go further and refuse to peer with any ISP that doesn't block 4chan, or lobby to have the government compel ISPs to block it, likely on think-of-the-children or think-of-the-terrorism grounds.
Self hosting definitely isn't some magic way of preventing all censorship.
There is no perfect pill. People who self host have higher protections than those that don't.
With TOR you have to hire someone to fill captchas just to read things.
If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested. The site doesn't give protection.
I steer clear of it, but wonder if with more EU like moderation a better site could be formed.
There are other anonymity networks that it doesn't filters out as well. But in principle, it does not allow posting from anonymity networks.
4chan is also quite mainstream and one of the largest websites on the internet, certainly larger than Hacker News. Similar Web ranks it around 800 world wide, but it's probably even higher, given that it's split into two domains that remain separate for advertisement reasons.
Passes can be used to get exemptions from i.p. address range blocks, they do not permit posting from Tor.
That page is probably very deliberately not super clear about that, but it you will find that buying a pass will not allow one to post from Tor.
> If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested.
The idea of posting something and being arrested disgusts me. The bar around the world for such an action should be just as high as it is in America. If I post that I'm going to come and kill you, thinkingemote, at 10:17 a.m. at your place of work located at <insert address here>, then by all means I deserve to be arrested. I've made a credible threat with credible information, verified by the fact I know your name and your workplace address.
However, saying something "mean" to you, or "misgendering" you, or even calling you a racial slur, should never be enough to arrest someone.
It reminds me of one of the few (maybe only...) great lines from Ghostbusters 2: "Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God-given right!"
So it should be online as well. If you don't like it, you can absent yourself from the platform(s), and in almost every case, if you don't want to do that, you can block the other person.
US citizens can be arrested for posting material such as child pornography too.
In that case the porn is like the specific death threat. A crime on its own. Actual speech is different
> A crime on its own
With that logic in the UK it is a crime to do what the posters end up being arrested for so it's ok.
That's why doxxing is also an issue.
> Nobody is dying from mis-gendering
And nobody is dying from CP, what is your point?
The sad part is, you forgot your own rule. You got your feefees hurt (which was clearly bullshit also) and said you were "done communicating" or some such nonsense.
That's the great thing about a troll. They're also liars.
People who can be easily radicalized or manipulated is just indication that they wasn't educated well enough to think on their own with their brain. And in any case chan culture is far better than some actual criminals or cultists who are much better at brainwashing people.
I'm not trying to justify some of chan content, but I consider that it's greater good that some people get a lesson about how easily they could be manipulated.
Subjected to enough propaganda, literally anyone will succumb to the propagated viewpoint with very few exceptions.
Being exposed to this kind of "humor" is deliberate choice. And even 4chan is not some single entity: there are plenty of boards on other topics that nowhere as extreme and sometimes they better moderated than e.g reddit , facebook or linkedin.
That link is now banned on Wikipedia even though...
Why are you on HN then in the first place?
>required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London, carrying an embossed revenue stamp.[1][2] Printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies, and it had to be paid in British currency, not in colonial paper money.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamp_Act_1765
The printing press was the social media of the 18th century. And just like then the powers that be have no idea what to do with it and are trying to put the Ginnie back in the bottle.
Something to be proud of, certainly. But not a grassroots thing, even if it did have some degree of popular support.
In contrast, the South was fully represented in the Northern government, and Lincoln was quite conciliatory and kind to them when he was able. However, they were fighting for an extremely immoral cause, which the 1776 Revolutionaries were not really doing as the issue of slavery was much less an issue than in the 1850's.
Didn't the British make a deal with the natives to not expand west?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763
That deal happened 2 years before the revolution. If you read the declaration of independence you'll find that it is very critical of that proclamation:
> The History of the Present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted [...] He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
It wasn't the only thing that caused the insurrection of the colonies, but it certainly was a component.
https://www.history.com/news/remembering-the-proclamation-of...
"Eschew flamebait."
Please stick to the site guidelines, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If we all work together we can avoid flamewar hell, which will keep HN interesting, which is in all of our interests.
https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6n4ay/the_...
Assuming it (like others) gets taken down, here's a copy+paste with some cleanup:
<snip>
Note that Discord has had significant investment from private equity funds including FirstMark Capital, Greenoaks Capital Partners, Index Ventures, IVP, Greylock Partners, Benchmark, Accel, General Catalyst, Ridge Ventures, Spark Capital, and Tencent Holdings. At least one of these firms has invested with Point72 Ventures, which recently helped Melvin Capital. So it's not too surprising that strings were pulled to get the Discord channel banned for "hate speech" (which is a very useful brush to tar anyone with, as anyone who challenges it can easily be dismissed as a nazi).
<snip>
Reddit is owned by Advance Publications, which is owned by Donald Newhouse and the Newhouse family (some details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Newhouse). Fortunately, Newhouse's family office (think a private hedge fund dedicated to investing just the family's money) is pretty far removed from the hedge fund world afaik. The family office's CIO (details here: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1g6j2tztzpb3t...) got her career started in the investment bank world and did not work for hedge funds, at least according to her Linkedin profile. So the Donaldson family has limited motive to stick their necks out and force a ban of this subreddit.
<snip>
Some folks just have an irrational faith in establishment followijg the rules, even when its obviois that there is noone to police them
If he was so powerful his returns wouldn't be that shit. Last year was good for P72 but other than that they're extremely mediocre ever since they stopped insider trading lol
We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back.
Or is this simply a case of getting too popular for Reddit? The fact that discord was banned around the same time as r/wsb going private is suspect.
edit: After hours market shows GME is has TANKED!!!! Closed at 345 and dipped to 248. Holy, there will be class action lawsuits for sure now.
edit: I've been on the phone for 2 hours waiting for my broker to answer. All of this seems weird. They SUDDENLY have volatility and decide today is the day to stop answering my calls???
edit: /u/DeepFuckingValue's posts have all been wiped!!!!! WTF!
Edit: that seems to be private now too?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868680#25935933
I think the SEC thread created this morning had something to do with going private.
It isn't the first time they've gone private but this time with the discord being banned and all, im getting ban vibes.
Look if Discord can ban WSB over some cuss words, imagine what Reddit can do.
I'm on the phone with my broker as we speak and now I fear that this is a coordinated attack.
edit: so after I made that comment about github's half assed apology towards the guy that they terminated for saying "watch out for nazis", those same group of people are downvoting and flagging every single one of my comments. AGAIN. You didn't care when people were bringing attention to the anti-semitic memes being posted on Github 4 years ago, now you want to bury every fucking comment, just like the angry hedge fund managers getting their revenge on serfs making a little money.
They even say this on the placeholder page.
A few hours ago zjz (a mod) posted about trying to get an unlimited API endpoint for Reddit from the admins so the mod bots can cope with the load.
"We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back."
It's been bringing bad press on Reddit and that's usually the trigger for the admins to enforce their content policy.
(see the Donald, racist subs, fat people hate, violentacrez, jailbait - while these clearly did violate their policies, it took bad PR for enforcement to happen)
So, new people can’t join in and immediately start trying to pump up random stocks.
WSB is getting flooded right now, so the mods are building in some auto-moderator things to get a handle on the subreddit.
"It looks like your account is too new to use /r/wallstreetbets. Sorry about that, but people use new accounts to spam us all the time. Please don't ask when you can be approved because we're going to say no and then laugh at you. Your account must be one month old at least."
Diamond hands all the way.
deep state + wall street => deep streetDoesn't look like they were wiped?
They're not fuckin leaving that easily and the show goes on.
> edit: After hours market shows GME is has TANKED!!!! Closed at 345 and dipped to 248. Holy, there will be class action lawsuits for sure now.
Good. Great time to buy more til the big short squeeze.
Can't stop, won't stop, next stop? GameStop.
It’s disingenuous at a minimum, and crony capitalism when taken to the maximum.
Are they doing anything about Nancy Pelosi (her husband Paul to be specific) buying Tesla calls before bills were brought forth with generous EV charging network subsidies? “Nothing to see here.” (Nothing against Pelosi and not intended as whataboutism, picked because it was top of mind from some research today and the disparity of enforcement)
Edit: Pump and dump schemes absolutely should not be supported. Piling into a short squeeze is not a pump and dump scheme.
Edit 2: https://i.imgur.com/SZJ9XEa_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&...
Nothing against Pelosi? If that's as it appears to me (trading on insider information, by a person in a position of public trust no less) she needs to be heavily fined, in prison, or both.
Looking at the starting and retiring net worth of a Congress person is a bit painful.
The rule however assumes that congress conducts themselves ethically, and evidently that is clearly not the case.
It should be pretty simple for most elected officials to dump their publicly traded stock and get into a diversified mutual fund before they start campaigning and while they hold office. For those who have concentrated holdings that are hard to dump, they could put it into a blind trust or whatever. Office holders really shouldn't be making a lot of trades; equity based compensation aside (either of their spouse or if they're a part time officer where those still exist, and have a part time job with equity based compensation)
In 2013, Senator Harry Reid introduced S.716, which after 14 seconds of discussion was passed by unanimous consent. Its net effect was to make the rest of STOCKS untrackable, and therefore unreportable and unenforceable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act#Amendment
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/04/16/17749...
LOL. Give me a break.
This is ___100%___ a P&D scam. They can squeeze shorts because they target trash stocks of failing businesses (you know -- the stocks that get shorted), then create a positively ridiculous story about a value proposition. A bunch of moron retail investors on Reddit aren't going to do shit to squeeze shorts, but they're the front for a couple of very well financed players.
But...something something Nancy Pelosi. Christ. Yeah, she's really scamming the system playing a stock at all time highs. Real elite moves.
Honestly I think we need some new rules about securities and elected officials, but the obvious ones would not cover a sitting president patronizing his own failing businesses in order to increase revenues using taxpayer money.
We want rules against people buying stock or taking bribes from oil companies, but nothing about using your own company to 'provide services' to federal officials. But even if you transfer control of your holdings to a third party, you still know what was in there when you started. And if 'what was in there' was your nephew's business...
http://investors.overstock.com/news-releases/news-release-de...
The purpose of the system is what it does, and the capital market operators, institutional participants, and regulators prioritize their interests. This exercise is simply exposing those efforts to daylight for all to see.
Dr Byrne from Overstock puts it better then I can (from your citation): “The SEC once again opts for nerf penalties for financial rapists.”
If one thinks WSB or retail in this are the problem, you haven’t been paying attention.
> The point is that the SEC’s measures are half hearted at best.
I have no love for the SEC, but it sure did sound like you said they didn't do anything about it when they clearly did.
> If one thinks WSB or retail in this are the problem, you haven’t been paying attention.
More shifting use of "you" in context. It'll be interesting if we can teach an AI to understand these types of confusing and conflicted statements.
It's only because so many people are rallying around the ideological worth of the stock that keeps the price from crashing. As the fad dissipates naturally over time, its ideological worth will decline and bring the price down with it. Time is on the side of the hedge funds.
People seem to think they were paid off by some big players. Ha! In their dreams.
Do hedge funds not know how to do social media marketing?
Why go on CNBC to announce your position when you can pay some kids and influencers to shitpost on wsb to rile up an online mob and leave no fingerprints?
It is crazy to me how ppl continually fall for this stuff? How does any mass online movement not trigger skepticism? I mean look at the history of this stuff from Kony 2012 to the Arab spring to Russian troll farms.
I do however think that this is a significant new front in the battles between Wall Street behemoths. Market manipulation by stirring up online mobs of mooks. If this one is organic, the next won’t be.
I always thought that Kony 2012 was just a dry-run for these sorts of things. I've never been able to figure out who did it though.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13542078551094108...
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13546095155645603...
If only Discord - a centralized, online platform - had the power to ban individual users. Too bad. The only reasonable action was to shut down the entire server. That's all they could have possibly done. I'm sure the timing was just coincidental.
Funny how that works. If they're not careful, people might start to think 'Hate Speech' could be misused to pursue an agenda. 'It's not that I disagree with what they are doing, they should have just called each other assholes instead of the X word so now the whole thing has to go'
The flood of those comments would both drown out any manual attempts at hatespeech, while also being so unilateral that it wouldn't really make sense to ban any individual community for having them any more.
Given that it has 250,000 users i imagine individual posts would be easy to miss manually.
If people don't already think this then they haven't been living in America.
> We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. 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. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.
Then they came for the British socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a British socialist.
Then they came for some Redditors, and I did not speak out— Because I was not like those Redditors.
(Obviously will be continued - this has progressed faster than expected, but it's not surprising at all. See earlier comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25880239)
This situation seems bullshit but in general I think its quite logical to ban "servers" if the mods do not uphold the rules.
The mods were moderating. Discord didn't even try to claim otherwise. The group was just huge and things inevitably slipped past the mods now and then. That happens in every platform. It's not the server's fault.
Bottom line is Discord has the power to deal with the individual users but they chose to nuke the server instead. What a convenient decision.
2. if "hate speech" bans must go through the legal system, what about other bans? eg. trolling or other disruptive behavior?
3. going through the legal system takes months/years, how do you prevent actually bad actors from misusing this?
banned for posting memes like https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/135439073542503628...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/discord-where-teens-rule-and-pa...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/01/29/disco...
This sounds like an excuse. They mention fraud several times -but say it’s NOT because of fraud— but I almost perceive a wink when they mention it like that.
I didn't appreciate that so I reported it and left.
-
Lots of people confusing this with not liking WSB.
The other WSB discord which was linked to the subreddit was fine even though it was barely moderated. Rough around the edges like WSB tends to be... but fine as a place to hang out and see funny things.
-
This second server was extreme even by WSB standards.
The joke is "4chan found a bloomberg terminal" but really it's like Reddit found one... no one is as down right randomly gross or racist as people are on deep end 4chan or Reddit would have banned it a long time.
This server was really like if the worst part of 4chan pretended to know what a stock is. It wasn't even coherent by WSB standards, and the signal to noise made WSB proper look like an actual Bloomberg Terminal
Here is my position, as this seems to be increasingly foreign for many people I talk with. A private entity (person or enterprise) should be able to manage their servers without outside interference. If I open up a server privately, I should have the right to moderate it, or not, however I see fit. 4chan still exists (as of now), and IMO, should not be interfered with. If somebody wants to create an LDS chatroom where swearing and drinking coffee lands you a ban, more power to you. We should be allowed to freely associate as we see fit, and those who own the space can decide the rules for discourse.
Now, am I saying corporate interests would never actively coordinate with government or other powerful interests to maintain a certain narrative or obtain power, absolutely not. That is a totally different discussion, and probably relies on a bottom up approach. The plebs aren't going to change Twitter's TOS or the programming on FOX, and we shouldn't expect to either. The corporate media sphere is carefully curated for whatever drives their interests. That maybe engagement, supporting commercial or policy positions beneficial to immediate or patron interests, or just old fashioned Operation Mockingbird interference. It's best if we ditch it altogether.
Their full statement as quoted in the linked article denies that the ban is for "financial fraud" but includes "spreading misinformation" as one of the reasons for the ban. I don't see any contradiction or winking involved. People who repeatedly spread hate speech and discriminatory content and glorify violence after repeated warnings not to do so are pretty likely to be spreading a wide variety of misinformation other than financial fraud.
As for whether such things can be the reason to ban the server, I'm sure Discord's terms of service allow them to ban for this reason. Historically a lot of tech companies were hands-off in practice, but ever since the January 6 violence in the US and the related online activities, many of these companies would right now prefer to err in the opposite direction.
None of these things (in quotes) can even be defined, and anyone who believes that the government or some tech oligarch is going to be a fair judge must have been born yesterday. It's ridiculous how we can both simultaneously criticize countries like China, but at the same time encourage the exact same types of suppression in our own Westernized way.
If someone dislikes Discord's judgment on that matter, they can switch providers or run their own service. If every viable provider stops dealing with them, that kind of implicit collective judgment and its consequences have always been part of humanity.
Also, most Western countries other than the US do have laws or judicial precedents which define terms like hate speech and provide penalties for engaging in it that are routinely adjudicated and enforced by courts. Even US judges consider hate speech as evidence an aggravating factor in how they handle crimes with hate as a motivation, accept the illegality of incitement to imminent violence, etc.
I don't care - there bloody well should be.
Would it be any different if I preferred the traditionalist and the one who wanted to force my business were the equality advocate? What if my preferred barber just stayed quiet and it were the one who vocally advocated either view who insisted on my business? What if the business terms of the barber with distasteful speech were worse, and how much worse would they need to be for that difference to outweigh their free speech rights?
None of this seems very plausible to enforce well.
More importantly, who would decide among all these possibilities? That's quite the power of imposing one's views (and financial policies) on others. I'm not sure I trust any government or private regulatory authority with that much control over private lives and livelihoods.
Further, not everyone who wants to keep politics and business separate even agrees on what mixing politics and business means.
Is it politics for a company to go out of its way to make bathrooms explicitly gender-neutral, put pronouns in staff directories, encourage even people who are not trans to indicate their pronouns so that trans people don't feel singled out by doing so, discipline people for persistent or intentional use of the wrong pronouns in the workplace, and cover common trans needs like hormone replacement therapy in the company health insurance plan?
Many people on the right of the US political spectrum would call that politics. Many other people conclude that some good workers happen to be trans and would feel more comfortable working at such employers than at ones with traditional attitudes toward them, meaning that these changes have the apolitical good business consequence of maximizing the ability of the company to attract and retain workers.
Does one have to inquire into the motivation of the employer for adopting these policies to decide if they're mixing politics or business, or just engaging in business?
Lots of subjectivity even on moral rights questions like this.
Though, I will say that my use of the word "enforce" is really only applicable to legal rights, not moral rights, outside of some kind of dystopian enforcement of what people are allowed to think.
The problem with modern leftism is consistency in beliefs. It's why I had to just walk away despite still agreeing with most leftist policy ideas.
Both sides of that case agreed that the company was choosing to deny its custom wedding cake services to a gay wedding because of the owner's religious beliefs against gay weddings, not because of anyone's speech. In other words, they objected to making a wedding cake because of attributes inherent to who the engaged couple were, not anything that was being said or expressed.
I view it as plenty consistent to forbid businesses which serve the public from choosing not to serve customers based on innate aspects of who they are, like being the same sex or gender as each other, while still allowing them to make such choices in reaction to the customer's speech. Sometimes the line is clear (no speech was at issue in this case), and sometimes it's blurry, but that's absolutely a consistent rule whether or not it's the one you support.
The reason the Supreme Court ruled for the bakeshop was very narrow. The ruling acknowledged that states can constitutionally have non-discrimination laws that apply neutrally to businesses without making available exemptions due to religious beliefs. The ruling was just about the behavior of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in applying their state law to this case, which the Supreme Court majority viewers as hostile to the owner's religious beliefs and not religiously neutral as the government must be. So it was about religious bias in the government action, only. One member of the 5-4 majority wrote that he might well have ruled the other way had the commission acted neutrally.
FWIW I also disagree with the ruling, for the same reasons I oppose online censorship by private companies.
Anyway, the cakeshop scenario is a bit different in another way: it can be argued to involve expressive activity on the part of the employees who create the custom cake, since it's far more artistic than mechanical, and since they do literally write any requested message with decoration. By contrast, Discord's actions against the customer are simply a choice of which speech by others they choose to allow to flow through the platform they control, plus a statement of their own speech which they choose to put out about their action.
(For what it's worth, they've chosen to partially reverse their ban since we started out discussion, if I understand right.)
If you want to ensure there is a content neutral platform, maybe the best way (at least under US free speech concepts) is to advocate for a government-owned/run Internet group communication platform, just like we have in offline life when you go to the nearby park or plaza to protest, or when you send mail to everyone in your local community through USPS.
Everyone agrees that, in the US, the government can't constitutionally censor that on the basis of content or viewpoint, with a few exceptions such as forbidding child pornography. I'm guessing that platform wouldn't keep getting funding from the politicians if it got too much offensive content, but if it wasn't shut down entirely, they couldn't be selective about which speech to permit.
Well, sure, in that it's a word with lots of nonproblematic uses.
> It’s a legitimate dictionary word.
This implies probably a more normative role for dictionaries than is appropriate, but, sure, it is. However, as a noun applied to people (as distinct from the verb meaning “to slow down” or the noun meaning “a slowing down”) it’s one which every dictionary I can find flags explicitly as “offensive”, so insofar as one uses dictionaries as arbiters of usage, I think there clearly is a problem with the use of “retards” in question.
But that goes for all excess vulgarity not just the r word. It’s not that I’m offended, but it’s a personal taste for less crassness.
I wouldn’t be so sure.
I wouldn't want to contribute to a world where someone with mental disabilities feels like they're the indirect butt of someone else's joke. I feel like there's a way to be humble (and witty, likely!) without having to punch sideways.
And now, on GameFAQs, I could not include the term “tardive dyskinesia” in a post. It was refused because apparently the four character sequence “tard” cannot occur in any word.
They could, at the very least, simply implement a system that a human moderator receives an immediate notification when a any of their banned words is used, who will then use good human judgement, rather than such wide blanket bans of four character strings.
Are kids going to be prohibited from saying “tardy” When they’re late?
I would also assume that in class, context would be more easy. Of course, some people were fired over the use of the word “niggard”, but it's a fairly obscure word, but I did once see it in an English translation of the Qurʾān.
That’s to say it’s no surprise that ignorant people will take offense before they understand words that might be uncommon in their lexicon.
Verily, what is with the U.S.A.-man's unparalleled ability to be offended by a word, or any word phonetically similar, regardless of the context? — I am really quite glad I do not live there. It seems stressful to be able to loose one's profession so quickly over it's infamous “cancel culture”.
Or the online palæontological conference where the word “bone” was filtered...
How can one ever think such blanket filters will not go awry.
Also worth noting that the Discord group is so much worse than WSB the subreddit. Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
I've never heard of this subreddit before, nor it's Discord Server, but I do know that one doesn't just stumble upon either on accident. The only people being hurt here are the ones that went looking to be hurt.
What we have here is a group of immature people, emboldened by internet anonymity, saying stupid things for the "lolz".
Does anyone think they'll be more mature because their server was banned? Of course not... they'll just make a new one, further emboldened by the obvious censorship. Let idiots be idiots, folks... we all know one when we see one.
We are at a point where certain languages are being banned and made illegal, you can't blame people for being worried that we are on the cusp of totalitarianism.
The banning of discord and r/wsb going private is quite scary, especially given the timing.
I guess hedge fund managers are just like mob bosses, they do not like being played.
edit: why is it that ANY mention of the github nazi incident gets INSTANTLY mass downvoted and flagged? Every single comment about this on HN gets censored.
For what is worth, they pretty much never use it actually insultingly, and do not seem to harbor any ill-will against LGBT people (and some of them are lgbt). They also mostly use those words to describe themselves, and do it more as a nod to boiler room talk/4chan.
>Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
As far as I know, a lot of that is done by bots, though possibly set by other users to prank the discord.
This isn't necessarily inflammatory. It is - like it or not - WSB's culture. It is not meant to be taken literally.
It is a frothy place, full of herd mentality. That is part of the clique. Going against that does incur the same tone of language against you. But it's not for who you are personally. It's the same language they use to describe the "in group", but it _seems_ worse to the out group.
Is the intent to mock people? No. Does it mean anything negative? No, 99% of it is literally re. the financials. Are there bad people in every group? Yes.
Please don't go looking for people to be bad guys - maybe instead assume good intent. You don't have to nit everything people say to find something to prove them wrong. You didn't focus on anything I was communicating - you tried to pick an argument with the smallest aspect of the thread.
And now you contradict yourself saying it’s not meant to be degrading because it’s all just a joke.
You’re proving the toxic culture that those kinds of communities ferment.
It's self deprecating to go against the market and be a bear in the biggest bull run of the decade. It's foolish to do so. I and many others being bearish have lost money. This is the entire point behind GME.
Like I said, it's all about the financials - not about you as a person.
I can remember this usage on NewGrounds in the early 2000s already. — I feel it's kind of sad that it's a part of internet culture that is becoming more and more obscure as the internet is experiencing an endless november of “normalfags”.
They're not 'pro-LGBT' because that language is stultified, boring, soul-rending mainstream corporate-speak. Speaking that way is beneath human dignity. "Are you pro-LGBT?" "Do I have a problem with gays, you mean?"
Better to be a human wallowing in the filth than a socially correct bugman standing clean, sterile, toothless to attention when the commisars come by.
https://desuarchive.org/a/thread/213247621/#213261293
It seems to hate “gays”; what it doesn't hate is homoerotica. It seems to take it's cues more from the Græco-Roman or Japanese interpretations that reject “intransient sexual orientations” as a concept altogether.
They simply want to look at pretty males without being bothered by now having to define themselves with some label that behaves more like a tribe than it does a truly descriptive term.
Most of the Japanese fiction that deals with same-sex love isn't phrased in terms of “It's okay to be gay.” but rather “Love has nothing to do with gender.”.
I will say that the obsession with traps does for some reason feel to me as unrelated to views on homosexuality, which is weird, and possibly a misunderstanding of mine.
They don't slice up the world the same way you do; whoever made up that word put gays, lesbians, and transsexuals together for political reasons, and left-wing political activists your median chan-users are not- why use the language of someone else, someone who despises you and wants to crush you?
From their point of view, the mental theatre that contains actors named 'LGBT' and 'Diversity, Inclusion and Equity' as front-and-centre characters is a cold, dead place-
whereas their native memescape, filled with Colourful Words, traps, arguments, the cacophany of 'hateful memes', is alive and vibrant by comparison, if tinged by a deep despair at the leaching of vitality from the world.
It's why the NPC meme caught on.
Traps are anime, and so are idealised abstractions as much as anime girls are. They're also tinged by imported japanese culture, I'd assume.
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/08/ableist-language-and-th...
A platform of gaming community chat rooms, actually.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/wher...
Fair point.
Stupidest fucking catch-all excuse I’ve heard yet. It would save everyone some time if these services just said, “we’ll kick you off if the mood strikes us.”
All the subtopics are bleeding through all the threads though.
How much do you think it would cost to pay the top mod of /r/wsb (which is now private) to make the sub private? How much to some discord admins to ban the discord?
Is that amount more or less than the billions these hedgies were losing?
Edit: for the curious, according to my open tabs minutes before going private the sub had '3,218,594 readers. 778,127 users here now'
Edit2: The sub is back online and up to '3,577,830 readers' and counting.
But there's no connection here, nope. Pure coincidence.
No one has any chance to coordinate now. Discord’s action is effectively market manipulation in a literal sense, because this is certainly going to affect the market.
I’m curious why the sub went private though.
EDIT: I regret my phrasing. I didn’t mean this was illegal market manipulation, just that discord is literally manipulating the market by cutting off one of two primary coordination channels.
But they’re within their legal rights to do so, of course.
EDIT2: WSB Subreddit is back; mods issued a statement: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/wher...
They considered making it private [and did briefly] during previous fiascos. At the time there were threads by the mods in which you can post so you are included but the alternative was by post history. It's very possible they've left e.g. the 10% most active posters in the sub and can still coordinate to an extent.
Edit: That seems to be the case, as their new message is "WallStreetBets is under in tents load and is only for approved submitters. In the meantime, please enjoy some spaghetti. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW1GR7BECq4"
Edit2: Now changed to "We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back.
They were debating whether it would be worthwhile and feasible to limit posting to people who had commented in the reddit 6 months prior as a filter.
If I run an email service and find that a user is running a pump-and-dump scam through it, do you really think I shouldn't be able to shut down their account?
(If you're interested in the actual law on market manipulation, it's here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/78i)
This is backwards. The label "manipulation" is applied (or not) retroactively based on whether something was determined to be illegal or not. It's not something you can know in advance; two copies of the exact same action might be judged differently.
Is that hate speech now?
Yeah, I kinda think the SEC should be in charge of whether you're doing a pump-and-dump or not.
It certainly will have an effect, but I'm not sure it meets the definition of "manipulation". I think (though am not certain) that the manipulating party would need to have a stake in the market asset for manipulation to apply. Many definitions (though not investor.gov) imply that personal gain is a requirement. No doubt there will be a legal case made here.
As with other subgroups both economic and political, the real coordination happens in Telegram and Signal. The public channels amplify.
Even though r/wsb is now private, there are already 3.8m people who are subbed to it and can still see & use it.
What is a hedge fund except more explicit coordination of many people's money on a much greater scale? The classic example of Porsche's squeeze on VW stock was Porsche's management coordinating many people's pooled assets.
This is probably not a popular (ha) opinion on HN right now, but just wait and see!
Trump is business establishment through and through and has managed to wake a populist movement for his own enrichment.
He (and his sycophantic cronies) were (and continue to be) very much part of the “I got mine” greed establishment.
Instead of answering to the Population, it seems that Trump and his crew care only for self-enrichment. How he managed to capture the imagination of a Populist movement is indication of the total lack of alternatives.
“If big business is on your side, everyone on TV is on your side, Hollywood is on your side, every university faculty is on your side, and almost every union is on your side, then you are not The Resistance.” -Apocryphal
Missing the mark here, mate. No one in this chain said that. Maybe re-read the actual criticism?
Edit: Here's the article I was reading: "How Trumpism explains the GameStop Surge" https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/politics/gamestop-stock-surge...
If I was saying anything about the relationship between Trump and WSB at all, I was ascribing the opposite blame: populist movements like WSB explain Trump.
The server was vile. Moderation used racial slurs casually.
Suddenly thousands of new people are flooding into the server from WSB on Reddit where the standard is obviously higher than that.
What do you think happens to report numbers? They skyrocket with user count!
Suddenly all eyes are on a truly vile corner of Discord of course they're going to ban them!
Including literally the WSB discord that used to be linked in the subreddit!
> To be clear, we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks. Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.
-
https://discord.me/server/join/protected/c3fe5f4361
That server was vile. And not because of WSB tongue-in-cheek "retard" "gay-bear" stuff, just actual hateful usage of racial slurs actual, homophobia not just based on using certain words, and more
Your narrative that this is a response to "stock pumping" is completely off base.
-
Edit reply:
There's proof for my side... Discord said they were banned from getting tons of reports.
There's no proof for a narrative where Discord self-censors over an intentionally vague tweet about social media and stocks.
"We deleted the server to not implicate ourselves in a tool of securities fraud" would have been a pretty damn good reason by itself... no need to lie about that.
-
Edit reply:
If enough upset people crying over their banned cesspool downvote you, you can't reply to comments anymore :)
I guess in the face of your lack of even "proof", I'm brazenly suggesting that having an admin saying ni*er hundreds of times will get your server banned.
I'm not sure how you would know whether they were being genuine in their stated reason (unless you work for discord?) but obviously the timing strains credulity for many. There's no proof on either side here, so I'd prefer to stop arguing.
Clearly discord doesn't want to actively suggest illegal activity happened on their platform, so they're not going to state that as their reason.
I guess in the face of your "proof", I'm brazenly suggesting that this marks the first time in history a corporate PR department has lied about the company's motivations.
The other server is (or was) 100% more tame, and at the time experienced more traffic than the one that was just banned (obviously this changed once the link was removed).
There was no way you were going to find a mod spamming the n-word, in fact people were regularly banned for using slurs.
I mean being founded by the guy who was running the sub, it was in line with the subreddit, edgy, but with nuggets of clarity and an understanding that it's possible to take things too far.
u/DeepFuckingValue on r/wallstreetbets discovered this a month or so ago, took out a $50k position, and let the rest of the sub in on it. That position is now worth $50M, a 1,000x increase.
Now there is literally no limit to the upside of a short squeeze. The price goes up high enough and the short sellers declare bankruptcy and liquidate their positions to cover the cost of purchasing shares. If they still come up short, then the same happens to the banks that lend to them . If that comes short, the brokerage must step up. At that point there’d probably be government intervention and a bailout. The WSB motto has become “we can stay retarded longer than they can stay solvent.”
According to a naïve view of the law, at least, that is correct. Far more likely there will be market outages and regulator shenanigans at undo the situation. Nobody is more of a sore loser than the establishment.
Diamond hands all the way. They had the chance to take it on the chin like a man, but they wanted to play rough, so we'll play rough.
What's the endgame? Sell at some point? At a profit or a loss?
Seems like in that scenario anger would play to the hands of the people who bought earlier and can sell to newcomers...
The whole thing driving this is a massive buy-up of all available stock. No one wants to sell; everyone wants to buy.
If Melvin Capital were a patient in a hospital, it'd be brain dead and on life support. We're just waiting for everyone involved to say their goodbyes so the plug can be pulled.
At $90 a share, Melvin had to get a $2.75bn capital injection to stay afloat. That was the time to get out. They instead tried to force a sell-off so they could buy up cheap shares and reduce the bleeding. That failed. For roughly every $12 over $90, Melvin Capital lost $1 billion. Well at $348 a share, they're now negative $21.5bn in value. Its over. Their greed has resulted in their utter destruction.
Once Melvin's corpse is wheeled out of the hospital, BlackRock and Burry might head for the exit, especially Burry, since he bought in at $4 a share, and a 5% stake there is such an enormous return even at $200, much less $348, that at some point, you're just being a greedy asshole.
Some people on WSB a little more ruthless, and frankly with the BS that Wall Street has gotten away with for the past few decades, I can't say I blame them; they plan to hold till $1000, which hilarious and crazy as it sounds, may not be impossible, but I'd judge it unlikely.
I'd say anyone that got in $GME before the huge price spike ($20 and lower), now's a good time to cash out. You won. Your lottery ticket hit all 6 numbers. Go live your life.
To all the short-sellers, I can only bow and say, "We who are about to die, salute you."
Sure. Then what? For all the other people, that is. Just plain crashed stock prices? An unfortunate lesson in counterparty risk as they try to extract their winnings from a bankrupt hedge fund?
This is the narrative going around, but is there any evidence that they had a completely un-hedged position? That they had absolutely no cover at all? I know you said "potentially no limit", but you say that, and continue on to posture that they're obviously down $21.5B. As far as I understand it, their TAUM is ~13B. So you're claiming that they lost the entire fund, and are just... pretending it didn't happen?
Lets pretend that GME goes to 1500/share, and Melvin Capital materially misrepresented (ie, criminally lied, which feels like a big accusation) about exiting their position, and they find themselves down $100B. Again, they only have ~13B TAUM.
Where do you expect the other $87B to come from? Or did you switch half-way through and are not just talking about Melvin Capital anymore?
Yes. That's right. You've exactly understood it.
> is there any evidence that they had a completely un-hedged position?
The question isn't, "Did they have a completely un-hedged position?" the question is, "Can the rest of their positions in the market cover this specific position?"
There's every reason to believe they're flat out lying about having liquidated their short position in $GME.
Don't worry though. At 4 p.m. on Friday, we'll know for sure. Just hang tight and wait. I predict its going to be a painful time for Melvin.
From what I've seen, this is very unclear. It all hinges on very specific phrasings down to "did they forget the plural s/did they edit it back in".
As they say, we've seen who you cheer for, your disapproval means nothing.
At the same time, it's still just people getting lucky/unlucky in the stock market. One Wall Street group got burned, but others made bank. At no point did the system change or become threatened in any way. Given all that, I don't understand why it is portrayed as some sort of heroic fight between good and evil.
Our social media firms have no obligation to the public, no matter how many people rely on them.
Consider that 35 Bn are on the line, whichever way the domino falls.
Closing a discord in exchange for financial favours later down the line is not even a crime.
You could hire people or bots to flood the channels with garbage or porn, and get them banned on purpose.
They're well within their rights to ban it and it was hella toxic in there... but... they should give those people the remaining time or $ on their boosts back.
Otherwise that's basically stealing.
(With apologies to Bob Dylan...)
Serious point, though: They can decide to ban (almost?) anyone at any point. They will state a justification, but it looks a lot like banning anyone whenever they decide to.
...which reminds me: I need to start a letter writing campaign complaining to Apple about peddling sexual imagery (:aubergine:) to minors.
That’s not the case with :ok: though. I sure don’t get out much, but I see no widespread use in the real world.
What’s actually happening is that, with respect, one or more of the following vocal minorities is pushing for a change-in-meaning:
- white supremacists
- hoaxers / trolls
- virtue signallers
The guy has turned $50k into $50M in the one year since those first comments were made, with half of that made yesterday.
Anyone that claims that Discord is private company and can do whatever they want, read the room.
Discord did this because they were likely afraid of negative government attention, SEC, IRS, FTC, FCC etc.
If a private company censors because it thinks that's what the government regulators want them to censor, is it really private company just doing "moderation"?
Corporate America is getting scary... I think that their actions could be initiated by the U.S. Government...
edit: 1 hour later, ~250k more subscribers... (3,754,326 readers as of 21:05 EST)
Is it just me or am I seeing more subtle revolt against this persistent, opaque censorship on the Internet?
I'm trying to stay down-to-Earth, but it honestly seems to be getting out of control with Google, Twitter, et al.
If you feel strongly about it you should go ahead, switch to a decentralized platform and get your friends to follow suit.
In this case, it makes sense to try and appeal to them, even though from a purely moral point of view you could argue that the r/WSB people did nothing wrong and it's Melvin Capital (and whatever parent hedge fund is now bailing them out) who did wrong by betting more than they could afford to lose.
Guess now in a few hundred years cycle again and we'll discover the legal system and curtail the power of the new church. History repeats.
Extreme hype / popularity around a community, followed by degeneration (or increased visibility of prior degeneracy) of that community, followed by bans and/or deplatforming. Off the top of my head FatPeopleHate, TheDonald, and recently Parler are prior examples, I bet there are others though.
WallStreetBets seems like it's heading down a similar path. In fact, I bet a lot of the people in these communities overlap, though I have no proof.
The Donald was quarantined and moved out of site (not outright banned) under accusations of wanting to harm police (which was out of character considering all the our boys in blue memes). Then they were slowly destroyed, mods replaced and finally banned. In the meantime, dozens of subs called for death of cops before, during and after BLM and nothing happened.
Parler was a twitter competitor and number 1 at that. The coordinated assault on it using moderation as an excuse was simply atrocious and hypocritical knowing what we know of Facebook and Twitter as tools for coordination and crime enablement.
You're perpetuating the good vs bad narrative. Convenient, but false.
From the point of view of someone with no stake in the outcome, the possibility some WSB regulars' strategy for cashing out their profits was based around these newbies being encouraged to buy as much GSE as possible probably isn't an argument in favour of delaying action
> the possibility some WSB regulars' strategy for cashing out their profits was based around these newbies being encouraged to buy as much GSE as possible probably isn't an argument in favour of delaying action
That argument would make sense if the justification of the ban had been about legality, not use of language. If it's about use of language then it's not relevant.
Sure, punitive sanctions are more likely to be taken when the volume of complaints goes up, the trolling goes up and the forum ceases to be an insider's club and starts being representative of how your platform is perceived by the general public. That's been the case for every platform ever and particularly recently, with no conspiracies involving Wall St bribery required.
> That argument would make sense if the justification of the ban had been about legality, not use of language. If it's about use of language then it's not relevant.
It's an obvious retort to the suggestion Discord could have delayed enforcement action until after it blew over [if they weren't in cahoots with Wall St]. The only reason to delay when they're getting complaints now is to help one set of their users unload financial positions onto another, so keeping it open until that happens shouldn't be a consideration precisely because it's irrelevant to their stated reason for the ban.
(I mean, I'm sure Discord had internal discussions about the legal liability of [not] taking action whilst people pumped stocks too, but the answer was likely 'none whatsoever, do whatever you think is best for your reputation')
> Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
Not saying it isn't true, but what I am saying is that it puts in stark relief all the servers they are NOT banning due to similar/worse behavior.
How long are we going to keep falling for this same shtick?
Seriously, are you naïve or is this bad faith? I can't tell anymore.
If your entire justification for something boils down to "I'm technically allowed to do this" it should be pretty obvious that you're doing something shitty.
How so? "Institutions will publicly blame hate speech as an excuse to do things they wanted to do otherwise" in no way requires an assumption that "hate speech doesn't exist on the internet."
Of course we can't say for sure. But at the same time we can't say for sure that specific policemen were actually racist when they attacked black people, or if they would do the same thing against white people in similar situation. You can find statistical patterns there, but similarly you can also find statistical patterns that certain groups on message boards gets banned for less than certain other groups.
If they wanted to have an anonymous server, they could host it on I2P and provide instructions on how to connect.
I have put together this new forum/communiy website where we could talk without being censored by reddit or other political interests. I know it is a small efort to create a new account, and start a conversation, but in a very short period of time, we will be free forever. Please share and bring all your friends. Enough is enough, we need to be in control of our lives and ideas.
https://reddit-wallstreetbets.com/
Please share and bring all your friends tomorrow. We can move out of this and be in control of our lives
Sometimes I really miss IRC, but people keep abandoning it for Discord.
"has to"? really? I mean, that is quite the extreme claim.
I hope you have some evidence for me that there was no way that these could get any economic advantage in their lives without basically pissing their money away pumping a stock up way above any value that makes sense in a game of hot potato where someone is going to lose out because the price just makes no sense. I will be waiting.
I mean some might say having the money to pull this in the first place is some manner of economic advantage. But I guess not the kind of people who think they are entitled to be wealthy in a reality where being destitute and improvised is the normal state in nature if you have more than 7 billion people, and anything else took thousands of years of human development.
A good time to shill Aether :https://getaether.net/
Like reddit, but decentralized and distributed.
They even have a wsb sub.
I disliked Trump, parler and the kind of alt-right shit you could find on Twitter, but by using their right to ban anyone, I think Facebook and Twitter showed that there was no repercussion to censoring/deplatforming users that did not align with their internal values and now we will see those events become much more common as companies become risk averse with regard to the kind of content they host.
It’s an account on discord’s SaaS platform.
If you want a server you actually control, go matrix.
Nobody can ban you then.
is this because of the SEC??? or are we witnessing a Godfather 2 ending where Michael whacks everybody just before the credits roll?
Something is incredibly fishy about this, the ban and subreddit going private happened not too far from each other.
Really worried about what will happen on Friday, there is no way to read the wsb subreddit anymore!
It's about loss of trust, which is, perhaps, one of the most delicate things in the universe.
Now everyone in the world knows, in no uncertain terms, that your person, business, website, cause, discussion board, advertising capabilities, email, online documents and tools can evaporate and be taken away and shut down, with you and your business destroyed overnight.
That's the world we live in today.
This, BTW, has nothing whatsoever to do with politics. WSB was not about politics.
I thought this GME "event" might result in much-needed introspection and changes in the financial community. If you didn't catch Chamath Palihapitiya's interview on CNBC's "Halftime Report" today you should take the time to watch it. I couldn't find the full interview (easily 20 to 30 minutes long) or I would have posted a link (this is the closest I found [1]). He clearly goes over some of what he thinks might have motivated the GME event. I agree with quite a bit, if not all, of what he said.
Part of me hopes that folks now cutoff from WSB will revolt against this and continue on their mission.
Full disclosure: I hold non-directional positions on GME. In English, I make money whether it goes up or down...so I don't care which way it goes.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25878457 [1] https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/01/27/billionaire-investor-c...
BTW #2: This isn't to say that such things as porn and other online conducts and content might not be in a range between objectionable to net-negative to criminal in different parts of the world. The issue is with platforms placing themselves in the position of being arbitrers of what's purity, values, truth and righteousness. If that's what they want to be they need to be financially and legally responsible for what they do not moderate. We have laws to deal with the criminal elements among us.
BTW #3: (sorry for the edits). This is also a case of famous Martin Niemöller poem [2]:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
Everyone was thrilled when they came for Trump and Parler. Now they are coming for someone else. The question is: Who's next and where does it end?
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-nie...
The stock related discussions has been actually more overlooked. They are typically tolerated and rarely monitored closely.
Reddit is controlled via various cults and they control not just their own subs but also others belonging to other groups.
The parlor lesson has been learned. I won't stick my neck out for principle when it ends up bankrupting my company and having the masses hate me.
Not worth it.
https://twitter.com/avalonpenrose/status/1354496683938201600
But in all seriousness, if they are breaking the law they should be charged. If not then let these institutional investors clean up their own mess.
Librarians have been fighting the same battle as well.
http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks...
There's a reason Signal got 40 million people in a week.
Seems like free speech platforms all the way down to the infrastructure level would be great investments to build right now.
If you cheered for Twitter shutting down Trump, or Amazon kicking out Parler, you shouldn't be surprised for this.
Disclaimer: I do not have a position on Gamestop or any other US stocks.
I wonder if the fact anyone can join the open source party at any time, means they generally don't.
To explain, I posit that people like to have the reassurance of Open Source existing as the minimal floor of quality of experience.
And then they go chase "the best experience" knowing that if it all falls over they can go back to the welcoming embrace of Open Source.
Who knows, maybe WSB people are busy with a Murmur server right now!
Any group or person who attracts negative attention must go.
Not worth the business risk.
Politicians are eager to make even apolitical issues partisan. The outrage driven media is happy to launder and legitimize retoric into fake news. Internet mobs are quick to follow.
Standing for principle will hurt your business and ruin your name.
Not worth it. I would do the same thing.
TLDR: Company does business. Why is this news?
Anyone who’s ever been an activist for long enough knows that the censorship that silenced your enemies will eventually silence you.
Corporate policing of speech needs to stop.
1. Technology enables new social phenomena that subvert the status quo.
2. Corporations move to combat these phenomena <--- we are here now
3. New technology to subvert these controls
4. Industry faces reckoning and embraces the new technology, losing some profit but avoiding a complete loss of control.
> but avoiding a complete loss of control
We need the complete loss of control. Corporations control entirely too much of American, and really, worldwide, life as it is. We can't give this one to them. Its too important. The ability to freely communicate ideas, even in vulgar, poorly considered ways, is too important and too fundamental to humanity to be allowed to be controlled.
To quote Picard, "The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!"
Obviously its going to be a bumpy ride as the whole of society suddenly has to learn to cope with so many views, learn the critical thinking it takes to grapple with false information, learn who is trustworthy and who is not etc. but in the long run we will be much much better off for it. This is merely what society wide growth looks like - its not going to be a straight line up. Pulling the plug on that is deeply, deeply wrong no matter how scary it seems.
Some of the other issues like disconnection are amplified by existing institutions. In the 60s or 70s, a single working person could provide for an entire family. Now, most households have both parents working to provide barely the same standard of living or lower. When the vast majority of your time is directed into work by economic necessity, of course there is little time left for socializing or anything else. Don't believe the bullshit that it is somehow social media's fault. The trend of disconnection goes longer, and it has just as much to do (or much more IMO) with no free time, no money, stress and insular urban planning.
The institutions are dying because they are ineffective or do not serve the public and have been for far too long. How is it that we had almost a year to prepare for a plan to distribute vaccines but we found out there is none now? How is is that corporations lobby for and routinely pass laws that hurt people? How is it that the health insurance industry still exists and causes millions of deaths when most other countries have lower costs AND better outcomes with socialized healthcare? How is that the central banks are now printing so much money that it will devalue all peoples personal savings by 10-20% over the years without really explaining thats what they are doing, without any approval? How can you keep desperately clinging to some illusion that institutions safeguard society when every institution is failing so badly?
Social media is just the evil boogieman media loves to blame for every modern problem, when in fact it only surfaces the problems that have always existed but been completely ignored by traditional media. Heck even the problem of people being easily fooled by fake news is a reflection of how education completely fails to teach critical thinking. The institutions have failed us all for FAR too long - they cannot be reformed. Burn them down and build new ones.
Thank you for this post.
Why, what makes you think that nurturing more viewpoints leads better outcomes? You've just agreed with me that recent experience tends to say it doesn't. Why do you think that part of the adaptation to this new world we find ourselves in might not be a bit more control. I think exposure to views is fine, but it seems likely to me that social media doesn't just expose it converts. It gives people the impression that their niche viewpoint is widely supported and our brains are hardwired to go with consensus so when presented with one they hop on, but because it fragments that consensus we're left with hundreds of fractions each lapping up a nice densely connected graph of agreement.
On institutional failure. I agree that institutions have failed us. It's hard to look around and argue, but not all institutions and not all the way. The vaccine is getting out. The US is in top handful of countries in terms of distribution and well ahead in terms of total doses administered. While the death of the single provider household is partially to blame Bowling Alone a book about the decline in social capital in the US credits a lot of the fault with TV with some interesting natural experiments to back it up (it came out in 2000 so social media wasn't really a thing yet). Burning institutions to the ground basically never happens and is incredibly destructive when it does. Like great leap forward levels of destructive. I for one am not ready for that to happen.
Thanks to WSB, I learned how to make tons of money and a lot of interesting stuff about how markets, businesses and the world really work. Stuff you could never, ever learn anywhere else unless you really worked at wall street. Thanks to Twitter I learned to aim higher and that weird people like me often do great things and can be happy. Also lots of weird niche information that is never found anywhere else.
When I look at the way normal people use social media, there is one common thread that they just don't f**ing understand - STOP USING IT to read about politics. Endlessly debating or reading about politics online does not affect any change in the world whatsoever. Its a pointless addiction that makes you unhappy, much like smoking. People have forgotten how much more there is to media besides freaking politics. The younger generation already understands this - its only millennials who have forgotten there is media beyond politics, aging at the outgroup and all manner of bullshit to make you believe the world is ending. Its just a ploy for eyeballs, nothing more.
I think older people will eventually learn the same stuff I did and be better off for it. I don't believe in paternalism one bit. I was raised by overprotective parents and it simply does not work. You have to learn to fend for yourself, including how to think for yourself in this world, the sooner the better. The younger generation already grew up in this environment and understands all of that intuitively, they don't need any rules to protect them from being brainwashed by the internets!!11!!
Yeah, but this has nothing to do with social media in my estimation. It has everything to do with the elites of the world, but in particular, America, capturing most of the wealth that gets generated.
You can't have a middle class without an enormous amount of people making a healthy sum of money. In an ever-increasing desire to capture more of that wealth, there's were we ended up. Naturally the elites that are smart enough to realize this don't care, because they won't have to bear the consequences of these actions. They'll be dead and gone by the time it degenerates into a real problem, or they just expect to move to another nation, set up shop there, and repeat the cycle.
This is where a lot of people lose the plot. Its not a political problem - its made to look that way because that keeps scrutiny off the fact that its a financial problem. 47% of Americans living in poverty. Half the citizens of the richest nation in the world, live in poverty. That's laughable.
And if everyone's busy being gainfully employed, living a mostly fulfilling life, they don't have time to LARP as a MAGA Shaman. They're busy working, grilling some hamburgers and hotdogs and ribs in the backyard, drinking a cold beer while the kids play in the pool, and the reason I can tell you that's what they're doing, is because that's what me and mine do most weekends. I don't have time to go to D.C. and act like a jackass... when I'm not busy working, I'm busy with my hobby of building furniture, and when I'm not busy doing that, I'm in the gym, and when I'm not busy doing that, I'm off doing other shit.
But all that stuff is only possible if you've got a middle class salary. And the middle class has been asked to pay more than they can reasonably fork over, for entirely too long. Hard to take seriously the compliant of a multi-millionaire about the state of her tax bill of $4.8 million on her $11 million yearly salary, because scale matters. She can live in a $1m a year apartment in NYC, send her kids to private school that costs $40,000/yr, each, and still have, literally, millions left over for every thing else.
Meanwhile, the husband and wife making $60,000 a year as a nurse and $80,000 a year as an engineer end up with around $90,000 after taxes, if they're lucky. $7,500 a month. Two decent cars - $1000/mo. $2000/mo for a modest house in a decent part of town. Gotta throw a little something into savings, retirement, investment, etc., so knock out another $500. $1500 if they're really smart. Now we're down to $3000 and we haven't gotten to cell phones, Internet, car insurance, etc.
It adds up, and fast.
Maybe I'm just a little more jaded than you are... maybe I'm just old, and with age comes a lot of clarity about just how the world works. I'm angry, but I'm angry for the kids, not me. They're going to really bear the brunt of this, and it isn't just "unfair", its unconscionable.
Is it?
Facebook was founded in 2004; Myspace in 2003; Friendster in 2003; Livejournal in 1999; Blogger in 1999. All of those are social media. It's only the recommendation algorithms with engagement-optimizing feedback loops that are newer. It should not surprise anybody that these have become runaway AIs.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...
It's absolutely true that unpopular minorities (of whatever kind) should be able to talk. It's also absolutely true that virality can create dangerous situations which are difficult to control.
Instead of banning, which I agree has problems, I favor putting questionable communities in a 'slow mode' where people need to wait to join them (and maybe communications within the community are delayed). Then, in 5 or 10 or 15 days, you can see if the community is still 'a problem' (whatever that means in this situation) and if greater moderation is required. The idea is to preserve communities that build over time, give admins time to make decisions, and highlight the hard questions that need to be answered by platforms.
But also these discussions aren't really about the government. Full stop the government shouldn't be able to shut sites like parlor down, but part of how society works is by consensus forming and in my opinion social networks really have messed this up. FB and the other big players seem to be realizing this and trying to do better (not sure if they're succeeding), but if other players want to make it harder for this breakdown to happen I say all power to them.
edit: oh ok only the domain is, with some random content, not the network. all right
gab seems to be still on
Making their own X, which they didn't even host on their own servers? yea...ok.
Yes believe it or not there was a world where you could host your own hardware! But you sold out then, and now you're mad about it. Womp womp. We warned you.
From the wiki "Cloudflare was created in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn.[2] It received media attention in June 2011 for providing security services to the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group.[3]"
> Womp womp. We warned you.
Your multiple personalities are seeking vengeance on free speech because.. you wanted self hosted hardware??
Ultimately you can only do what you can. But let's be honest, if you can't lift a finger to install server hardware and networking switches, how on earth can you possibly advocate for change in our society?
> Your multiple personalities are seeking vengeance on free speech because.. you wanted self hosted hardware??
Please remember HN etiquette.
You say you want free speech yet people can't even invest in your own hardware. Parlor complained but removed left wing content 24/7 - no one complained about "free speech" then. Make it make sense instead of being obvious political pandering.
We already have the hardware. A modern phone has as much computing power as an early server. Computing power isn't what's lacking, it's the permission to use it.
Will Apple and our ISP's allow p2p networking using our own hardware? Apple denied bitcoin wallets from the app store because "reasons". Many ISP's have policies against hosting servers.
The real solution to this is the decentralized web and it too can be clamped down by a handful of companies. If these companies want to act like publishers they should be treated as such.
Yet it called into question freedom of speech.
Same thing today with WSB, but the focus is clearly not hate speech (even if Discord says so). I find today’s bans way more objectionable than Parler, yet I still cannot reason why people truly believe that any service providers owes it to us a 1st Amendment platform. Discord and Reddit are free to select whatever content they find palatable.
It sucks because I found WSB entertaining, but no one here should be mixing up Big Tech with the 1st Amendment.
While I agree that in some ways this is worse than the Parler case, it also is a free service that costs Discord a ton of money, especially with the hundreds of people constantly hanging out in voice chat [0]. A ventrilo server of that size would probably cost upwards of $100 a month [1]. So I'm not surprised with Discord wanting to enforce their ToS more readily than AWS who was actually making good money out of Parler.
[0] https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1354532238524874753
[1] https://www.ventrilo4.com/ventrilo-server-hosting-prices.php
Judging by the going rate for "server boosts", Discord would have easily had $5,000 a month in revenue tied to that server [1].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/wher...
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...
It's worse than unmoderated. That would imply some sort of free speech zone where anything goes, but in reality any sort of left leaning stance will quickly get you banned.
>Don't put your faith in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.
What happened to Georges Danton, the thunderous voice of the early French Revolution? How about Toussaint L'ouverture, avenger of the New World? Even Simon Bolivar and Manuela Saenz left behind a fractious group of nation-states.
The US is kind of an aberration in that regard, but even Ben Franklin cautioned that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
The funny thing is, if you extend that metaphor to big tech companies like FAANGs, then they would be the early revolutionaries who are about to get devoured. And that metaphor would fall apart quickly, because those companies have never professed to be revolutionary harbingers of a new and improved world.
It's E2EE and self-hosted, so unless you got snitches in your community that tattle to your hosting provider and then they go above-and-beyond and take action, you should be golden.
I've never really understood the drive to banish profanity or insults. The purpose of language is to communicate ideas and I see no reason why it should be unacceptable for someone to express their disapproval at a situation or individual in the succinct way that profanity provides.
If anything profanity is far more mundane than the kinds of words a particularly clever person can string together to convey a heinous idea.
Obviously, your choice of words becomes limited if you refrain from using offensive language. And given our predisposition towards rage and anger to give attention this seems like an important “tool” to have at your disposal.
But as the incentives stand right now, accepting this kind of behavior is likely to trigger a race to the bottom as more and more speech get’s radicalized (in either direction) as people realize it is more powerful and can grab people more easily. We see this in the republican party. We need to find stop lines for this madness and find a somewhat stable equilibrium. Some places might be overreaching in moderation but this is to be expected as it’s difficult to find the right line as we don’t really have an understanding of the “proper” balance yet.
And my point is really that I am not sure what triggered this need for redress in the first place. Why is it so important to use spiteful language now? Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Why should we support this shift?
Who is "we"? It was just some Discord server. No one forces you to be a part of it. And they're not even political. It's stock market, so obviously people will get emotional.
In this instance, I generally agree that I don’t think it is a prime example of things that need to be “shut down”. It’s probably a borderline case. But if discords terms of service disallow this type of language, I think it’s a good sign that they try to stand by it and apply it also to cases that are not clearly (also) politically motivated. If it’s about how to talk rather than what you say this is what you would expect to see.
All my comments point to this renegotiation of norms and obviously tough and contentious calls will have to be made.
I feel like there's a disconnect. Movies may not depict it so, but curses and profanity have always been a part of language. So the "shift" is happening in the opposite direction the way I see it.
That's a comedian being funny and cool. The right to say "fuck the government" isn't important. I'd rather keep the de facto right criticize the government substantively, which may de jure exist, but is drowned in the de facto drivel.
By the way, FUCK Wall Street.
Yeah, that's the problem. Too many people swayed by cheap laughs and the thrill of anger. Thus the failed insurrection earlier this year. It's hard to predict what'll be fun this week.
> Not everyone has the time to attend your 1 hour TED talk.
I guess we should package up the science into more concise bits. How about 5 minutes instead of 1 hour?
This reminds me of a time shortly after 9/11 when an agitated old man chased my friend for a block while screaming "People like you caused 9/11" just because he stole a jack in the box mascot head car antenna topper.
On the second thought, this makes me sad. I hope someday I'll be an old man living among friends, instead of watching my neighborhood devolve. It's all perspective, of course. I've been the hipster, now I'm the gentrifier. Still, one can feel the pain of that old man.
Putting the free speech thing aside, the problem here is that it can and it is being used as a pretext to silence the dissidents and the opposition.
And I would argue the reverse to your point regarding free speech. More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. People are trying to justify more things and other people are pushing back trying to uphold formerly established civil norms about how to say or not to say things under free speech. It’s really a plot of irony.
The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. It’s really difficult to make objective judgements on this matter (also for me).
It was just in general, but even in this case, yes, there are two sides opposed to each other. One happens to be more influential, powerful and with more money behind it, and the underdog is the wallstreetbets people.
> If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms.
I guess so, but if you have thousands of people in a single server, it's virtually impossible to keep everyone calm, especially in situations such as this one, where large sums of money are involved. Also you'll have bad actors who are trying to make it look bad on purpose so they get shut down. This is Discord and people actually use this kind of tactics there.
> More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech.
Speaking strictly about the USA, this is just factually incorrect. Racism, homofobia etc. used to be fine not that long ago. And legally it's still protected under the 1A. But then it became socially unacceptable and from that point more and more speech started to become "not free". This year questioning the integrity of the elections became a fireable offense and as I found out today - anything offensive.
> The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes.
Regarding the profits, for sure, I imagine. But politically this is an apolitical "movement", you will find socialists, libertarians, nationalists and anything in between that support their efforts. I guess it really united people, in a way.
School is an environment where teachers have broad authority and try to use it to create a safe space to protect children from hurtful speech. Many people react strongly to the application of this power dynamic to adult interactions.
Derogatory speech has always been free speech, but the places where people speak are becoming more visible, and organizations are becoming more active in expanding safe spaces. Derogatory speech is probably the lowest it has ever been, but more heard than it has ever been, and more scrutinized than it has ever been.
This was always acceptable (and even common) as long as no teacher heard it. Not sure what Trump has to do with it. Maybe it is different in america, I hear that they are very puritan over there.
Imagine if HN’s host killed all of HN because someone used the “r word” and it wasn’t removed.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
Censorship is Freedom of Speech.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
"What you don't know can't hurt you."
You're only making the case that it does fit.
They go on the list because the conclusions are transparently absurd, despite the ability to rationalize your way there through doublethink.
The best and most free debates I ever had happened in environments where I knew that I was allowed to be wrong without them holding it against me.
As a European I always thought free speech was very much an American thing. In the past years I realised that debates are lead much more freely here than in the US, because your debates constantly go onto a red vs blue track. That means speakers have to reflect that constantly and signal to everybody else where they stand and which team they like.
The truth is, both environment factors into free speech and every society has to strike a balance.
This, I agree with. But the point I'm trying to make is that this cuts both ways. Alice has every right to make her point however she wants. Bob also has every right to not lend her his resources to amplify that. Charlie has a right to criticize Bob for denying resources, etc etc.
I note that the shoe never seems to be on the other foot — e.g., the crowd that gets angry about Discord banning hate speech is curiously quiet about the chilling effect white nationalist rallies have on people of color.
How you communicate is just as important as what you wish to communicate.
If one exercises their freedom of speech in certain ways one might impede the freedom of speech of others (e.g. who are objectively less free). This is one of the big differences between Europe and the US: in the US the freedom of speech of the individual (regardless of the collisions with others) is traditionally valued more, than a collective, utlitarian definition of freedom of speech which is more present in Europe.
Utilitarian freedom of speech would mean that we try to optimized for a society where everybody can speak freely even if this means cutting of some individuals that go to extremes.
Individual freedom of speech means you let everybody say what they wanna say, even if it means that the discourse of the society as a whole gets harder, muffled or destroyed.
I don't say any one of those things is better, but both have their pros and cons and we certainly need to be aware of the downsides and complexities involved when we ask ourselves what society we want to live in.
And of course I'm not saying there aren't limits to freedom of speech. There are legitimate limits. But a social media company deciding they don't want you on their platform anymore without any due process seems wrong.
I just don't buy the overly literal "this is private property and I get to decide what you're allowed to say here", when that private property is our primary medium for communication.
But I do not think Discord is at that level yet, while Facebook, Twitter and YouTube most definitely are.
All you can reasonably ask a normal company is that they do not act to harm society in their pursuit of profit. And they may argue that they believe the dynamic of WSB is harmful to society. I think that position in this case and for WSB is defensible, and I am yet undecided personally if I actually agree with it or not. (I do believe that WSB may grow to become clearly harmful, but I'm not sure they're there yet)
Living in Germany with laws that ban you from displaying Nazi insignia or spouting certain phrases in public, I don't really believe in the whole "if we ban a certain thing there is a slippery slope and suddenly everyhing is banned". German society more or less collectively decided that tolerance for the intolerant is stupid and did something about it.
This might seem a little extrem from an US perspective, but just like that the prudeness of US society seems extreme to us Europeans. You talk about freedom of speech and censor every female nipple there is? Really?
What we will and won't tolerate in public forums is a mirror of our respective societies and values. And there is always something we will have to ban or at least frown uppon. E.g. even in the US child molesters won't be very able to talk about how their believes are okay etc.
And because all out free speech is destructive we have to strike a balance somewhere inbetween disincentivising people who use free speech to get rid of it and not turning into thought police.
Seen from a German perspective the US is so polarized that the polarization alone disencourages most people from leading a free and meaningful discourse.
If you let people use their freedom of speech to be anti-free-speech we will end up with a society that does not have this freedom. This is the logic on why licenses like the GPL were created, restrict some freedoms in order to keep the rest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym
I read in a circular delivered by the express that sometimes words express different meanings then the mean read of the word.
And it wasn't written in resource-hungry Electron.
There's not much left from that specific era.
Now gaming has hit main stream and is accepted by everyone. Forum concept has been dead in the water for years and everyone has moved go mobile first social medias, but none of the other social medias fill the niche of IM & VoIP.
As side note: we can gripe about Discord being electron based all we want, but that is actually a huge selling point. Discord just works on all platforms with all features. Even Linux is not some shitty after thought that has 3rd party gobbled together client that requires 10 hours of tweaking each week just to keep running. Then obviously the same code base runs on browsers.
Wikipedia says:
> Discord is an American VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform designed for creating communities.
Don't we have a metric fton of instant messengers which support VoIP and some file transfer?
What's so special about Discord?
To me as an outsider it merely seems like the kids have decided TeamSpeak isn't cool anymore and now Discord is cool.
Perhaps in a few weeks they will flock to the next voice chat which they decide is now cool. What's the big deal?
Additionally, it was stupid easy to evade bans on those platforms and troll for hours if Admins weren't on.
For TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble (which were the big 3 in my youth at least) you have to have different clients, you have to pay for servers, and the chat support is very rudimentary and bad. Channels aren't as easy to create and admin. Lastly they don't support inlined links/images or emojis. Which makes them just as user friendly as IRC.
Discord took what was good about Slack's UI and added on top good VoIP. It might not be perfect but it quite literally covers most what anyone could want and it scales really well. To beat it you must have 100% feature coverage + another killed feature. First part probably isn't that hard, but the second is. There needs to be a reason to install yet another communication program on your PC/tablet/phone because all of the communities wont just uproot and leave to a new platform over night.
I'm only a sample of 1 but on IRC I never felt surrounded by trigger happy mods. on discord I got regularly kicked without notice for some not even heated argument.
if I extrapolate, this side of the web is becoming a way for people to craft tiny bubbles to fit their own little views on life.
Discord servers filled with former/current IRC users rarely have any issues in my experience.
[1] topics could be from science, to collapse, to dev ..
The target audience for Discord is kids, of course they're going to have harsher moderation policies than IRC did back in the day.
In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.
I've seen server moderators removing completely legit messages afterwards and they've openly admitted that they can't risk someone perusing the chat history for ToS breaches, screenshotting individual lines of text and sending them to Discord abuse team, because Discord does not care about context, only actual words (see their anti-reclamation policy - even black hip-hop artists have been deplatformed for using the well known mother of all bad words in a positive context).
This only applies to partnered and/or verified guilds. All other guilds are only checked on user complaints and otherwise unmoderated (bar the explicit content filter, that applies at the gateway level, before the event gets propagated) by Discord staff.
On a hundred of IRC channels (which had mods) over many years I had like 3 such interactions (and I have to flex to remember). On discord it was 50% in a month.
discord make people very very attached to their virtual space. They craft it, install emojis, makes per room rules, lots of decisions .. it changes how you connect with others, very defensive by nature.
I think for better or worse old days IRC was more of a locker room, while most Discords are wide audience places, more of the restaurants kind.
You still have a galaxy of locker room types of community, I see no real need to try to carve that out of every service.
In such places speech is a privilege and not a right.
The only remarkable thing here in this article is the size of the discord. The problem with huge size is that the amplification effect is a lot bigger and that tends to get noticed. In the real world you don’t have bars with tens of thousands of guests.
The last line you mention is true-ish if said rather derogatory, but if you value freedom of speech, you can also extrapolate that everyone has a right on their view of life, nothing little about it.
The problem that is not being mentioned is cause and effect. If your view on life is basically violent and emotional, that helps nothing when it comes to public discourse. In all my years when I was a mod on IRC, never did name calling or derogatory names further an argument or improve communication, except when we were maybe discussing the topic itself.
Maybe I didn't see the sign 'no complaints about tea temperature allowed in here or you will be removed asap' but I found the whole ordeal ridiculously immature.
What I am looking forward though is a good in-depth review of what happened, preferably from a neutral party. Because there seem to be politics involved as well (as in wall street influencing)
I'm tired of getting downvoted with every post I make. I can understand when I defend freedom of speech or attack Apple or Google or China that I offend people, but it's happening all the time on totally benign posts.
It's making me cynical about the community. HN is great for information discovery and diversity of experience, but it feels like people are becoming increasingly vicious.
Discord has zero ads, FYI.
Mailing lists for slow stuff and IRC for throw away realtime chats.
If you have too much ADHD there's delta chat.
A ban for a channel that for after repeated warnings still is full of insults, threats and abusive language? Bravo!
You're being moderated for rudeness and not your opinion.
This is an effective excuse because not many will come to the defense of socially unacceptable behavior. Look no further than this thread for examples of that.
They aren't. I'm in like three different Discords and retard is just another common word.
Why aren't they policed/banned over using retard?
I think it’s complicated, and that banning them is just another sad example of how sensitive the world has become to these things.
I don’t get offended by the ways people move their mouth or words they substitute for what they say.
If you have been around a racist, you will learn all the secret terms they use or not so secret. Go ahead and look up slang terms for light or dark skinned people in other languages.
Discord just so happened to enforce their rules at a very opportunistic time.
"Hate speech" is a leftist boogeyman.
We know the power of habits and we know that if you’re a user of the word “retard” in a derogatory sense, your very first thoughts when seeing an actual mentally challenged person won’t be positive.
If you’re not a bigot then stop using bigot language. It’s so easy there is no excuse.