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Comment by ve55 | Hacker News Reader

And they chose today as the best possible time to enact this ban? Really?

I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).

Regardless of how right or wrong this moderation choice may be, I hope that this accelerates the push for decentralization and encryption; the few companies that virtually all online humans use to communicate have far too much power over us, and we should be more willing to recognize that extreme centralization of power is dangerous.

(One final note: (EDIT: subreddit is now public again) now that this caused the subreddit to be set to private which seems to have instantly caused $GME to start tanking in AH, they are going to be in for users that are much more upset than they are used to if the narrative decides that this ban caused the crash, if it does in fact last until tomorrow)

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Some posts below said that banning for hate speech was really a charade. But if that's true, what's wrong with retail investors pooling their resources to squeeze short? How is it different from a hedge fund pooling resources to flex their muscle of financial engineering?

There wouldn't be anything wrong with that. There'd be a lot right with it, honestly - I would be trumpeting it as a clear victory of the little guy over snobby funds who don't think anyone else can understand finance.

But what's happening right now is almost certainly a pump and dump with a short squeeze as a facade. I've seen a lot of commenters who seem to be grievously misled about the actual mechanics of a short squeeze, and think that short sellers will be forced to buy all their stock at market price on Friday.

I haven't heard anything to suggest that the short sellers are forced to buy back the stock either. This is a stock has clearly caught public's attention, Once the hype cycle is over, why wouldn't it regress to the mean? Who's going to believe that the stock stays at this level over the long term?

Fun to talk about though. This is a very entertaining story.

If a short position goes hard against you the brokerage will make you to put up more collateral (money) and if you can't, then your only other option is to buy back some of your position, so yeah, short sellers can be forced to buy back stock.

Also fun, Australian company "GME Resources", trade on the ASX as GME, got to 40% up from its Monday opening price.

I wonder if this is a clever-ish social media algorithm trading, shrewd fund managers or really just desperately mistaken retail traders.

The stock Signal spiked after Elon Musk said to use signal, has nothing to do with the app. A different Zoom spiked at the beginning of COVID. A lemonade company in 2017 put blockchain in its name and watched the stock price soar. Hertz went way up after declaring bankruptcy. I’m willing to bet this is clueless speculators.

Shorts borrow the stock for a time period. Let say you borrowed a stock that is $1 from me with the promise you will give the stock back end of the week + some interest. You sell the stock for $1 end of the week the price is $100 so you are on the hook for stock + interest. As the owner of the stock I will be more interested in getting it back and selling it for $100 rather than allowing you to give me the stock later by extending the loan terms when the price might drop.

There is, large market moves down over last few days are mostly due to hedge funds selling off longs to cover their shorts. If you look at GSVIP ETF (GS ETF for most loved names by hedge funds) it was down 4% yesterday. The short squeeze is real but I think funds are mostly out of it now (or ones remaining in the short have shorted at higher prices and in reasonable proportion of AUM). There's also a direct negative correlation between short interest and Russel 2000 performance over the last few days.

okay, but if it was a pump and dump why all the media manipulation and shenanigans? why the coordinated attempts to tank the stock, etc? wouldn't u want it to skyrocket and reap the benefits? i mean that's exactly what a pump and dumper would do, just let it naturally die afterwards.

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.

I agree with this post. Although the narrative being spun on WallStreetBets and co wants you to believe in a short squeeze, it doesn't seem like any shorts were actually squeezed. This morning, Melvin Capital and Citron successfully exited their positions in Gamestop. Had there been a true squeeze, the whole point would have been to prevent an easy exit and force them to cause the price to balloon out of control. By exiting, they've proven that although shorts were obviously hurt a lot, the fabled squeeze never came. And to analyze it technically, I know a lot of people are repeating the line about GME shorts being xxx% of the float, where xxx > 100. It's cute, but for a stock with such crazy volume as in the past few days, the shorts being above the float doesn't really matter.

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.

Melvin lost 30% this year...this month

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gamestop-mania-reveals-power-sh...

As I said, they made a painful exit but they were able to get out. If there was a real squeeze going on, their losses would have been eye-watering and far far over 100% of their assets. In 2008, Volkswagen became the most valuable company in the world for a day because short sellers literally _could not_ exit their position. There were no shares to acquire at any price. Gamestop, with 90M trade volume in the last day, does not resemble a squeeze at all. Short sellers are able to leave and lick their wounds. In a squeeze they'd be trapped.

They did not exit and even if they did somehow you can't know that.

Technically GP could know that if they have insider info. But now I'm curious, if GP can't know they exited, how do you know they didn't? Sincerely asking.

Melvin has not closed anything, the stock is still shorted by over 135% of float.

Citron has been coping for over a week now, and is still in it.

If that were true Melvin Capital would just say nothing and ride the profits. If you are a short seller with a covered position (with options) your goal would be to let as many desperate/stupid people enter before the crash because it means there will be less resistance to price drops after the crash because all the dumb and unpredictable money is gone. You would instead push propaganda that your shorts are not covered and lure people into your trap.

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.

Do you believe CNBC or where are you getting your info that they have covered all their shorts?

Discord is the new SEC now?

No, it would be just another wallstreet company covering for Melvin Capital.

> short sellers will be forced to buy all their stock at market price on Friday.

Isn’t that what it means when someone is naked short?

I’m not a finance expert, but the hedge funds could have bought GME stocks sometimes between opening their short position and closing it.

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.

Yes, but you cannot do that when you are short 149% of all stock. There simply is not enough stock available to cover your short position.

Which is why GME was targeted in the first place.

Is the total 149% short closing on this Friday? I was under the impression that the 100+% short position was for all shorts for all closing dates on GME? If the 149% short is spread over multiple weeks/months it seems misleading to quote the over 100% short position as a sure marker of an unlimited squeeze.

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 have a hard time believing that The number of liquid GME shares out there are nearly as low as 1%.

I believe the float is between 30-40%, hovering around 37%.

Surely if anything they've got 'more naked' - there's more held long, almost conspiratorial borrow disallowing, and >100% short interest.

No.

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.

Usually you borrow stock to sell short. You're short it because you sold it without owning it (and still have to give it back later).

Naked short is selling without even borrowing it.

I thought only market makers can short sale without the share. Is that correct?

Yes, it's not generally something for a retail trader to worry about, since the broker is providing the borrow (or disallowing the trade saying it's unavailable, as many have probably seen with GME), but hypothetically if you managed it it's generally not allowed.

Haven't you read their punch line? Buy high, sell never. They don't care.

I wonder if covid has made people view online communities as the public space. In prior years treating an online community as your sole social outlet wouldn't be viewed as healthy. Now it's almost the defacto.

I remember the days when you could say some truly deplorable shit online and almost no one would care. People who didn’t want to hear it would ignore or block and move on.

Now it seems like so many topics and words are completely off limits. It’s very restrictive and I think it’s making the web a less free, a less open, and a less fun space.

It’s extremely hard to exist online when you have not only a raging group of pro censorship PC police hell bent on removing you, but coordinated networks of platforms that will remove you in unison.

So I think it’s less that people see online communities as their public squares, and more that it’s very difficult to exist online if don’t hold the same ideas and opinions of those controlling the platforms.

This is why I think it's so important that the internet begins moving towards decentralization soon.

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.

Ok, but lets not forget how a few actors can spoil a healthy community. Remember Kuro5hin? Very healthy and thriving community destroyed by a handful of stupid trolls.

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.

WSB goes private all the time. They do it to "cool the jets" so to speak. They will likely be doing it a lot more in the coming days.

The parent comment is not talking about WSB going private (which you're right, it does happen from time to time by the mods for housekeeping). But they're actually talking about Discord shutting down WSB servers - for those unfamiliar, WSB subreddit also had an official discord server which was quite active.

They are talking about both. Read the post again.

The timing is due to the insane influx of new users causing the server mods to completely lose control and trolls wreck havoc.

The subreddit did not go private due to the ban. You're reading too much into the headline. It depicts two separate events that are both caused by too many new users (too many new posts in the subreddit's case).

The Discord ban was clearly because the community itself is controversial from a legal point of view. That's why the ban happened today. But I think this is an unwise move. Each community that is censored over something legal but controversial, pushes the creative citizens of the Internet towards building more open platforms.

Hope we end up there soon, this constant censorship of communities I might want to have a look at to satisfy my curiosity gets mighty tiring.

And shorting more stock than a total company even has is not controversial? Or using massive shorting to just keep on pushing a stock down? It feels a lot more controversial to me and yet, the hedge fund managers dont't really feel anything. Well apart from the fact that they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar and now they have to pay. But I wonder if their platforms are now being censored. Classic money is power, I'm firmly on the side of WSB here.

I agree with you. But there's definitely a controversy here, in the sense that two large groups have strongly differing opinions.

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.

How exactly is WSB controversial from a legal point of view?

Stock market manipulation.

Except everything they are doing is perfectly legal. They noticed some people had overextended their short position, they took action (action that "legitimate" traders were also taking) and stand to make some money.

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.

It might be. But it is also dangerously close to market manipulation.

Thus, it is "controversial". That is the question I was answering.

Maybe I was imprecise to use the term legal.

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.

“ a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life”

I agree with you, but I lament that outside of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit, it’s been very hard for any social media company to gain traction.

It doesn't help that one of the most recent ones to try was deplatformed as it was gaining many new users.

No, it's because they became a legal risk as they were the primary host of insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol while chanting "Hang Mike Pence!".

Also, private business can do whatever they want. 1st amendment only applies to government not private business.

Please stop spreading misinformation, the capital riot was primarily organized on Facebook.

He said “primary host of insurrectionists” and said nothing about planning. You’re just looking to fight about some terrible app that was ran by a wannabe mark zuckerberg that prided himself on letting extremists run rampant. Zero moderation meant anyone who wanted to say “hang mike pence” could do it all day long without any fear of repurcusion. That’s a clearly violent threat. That’s the chant of a anarchist mob.

Private business can't do whatever they want when their behavior is regulated/encouraged by congress. See https://www.wsj.com/articles/save-the-constitution-from-big-...

Section 230 absolves them of said risk entirely. Amazon's hand wasn't forced.

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.

Section 230 only protects against civil suits, not criminal activity.

Parler showed how hypocritical people are.

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.

Comparing a wedding to a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol is absurd.

Terrorist? Really?

I guess most ineffectual terrorist on the world.

Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature. [1]

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?

1. https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/terrorism

> Are we going to play this game though?

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.

more extreme than storming the capitol and calling to kill people ?

as long as no one dies, it is not terrorism for you ?

They should be prosecuted for inciting violence, trespassing on government property. Not terrorism.

What is more extreme than attempting to violently overthrow the government?

I guess we should also label George Washington a terrorist.

More ineffectual than the terrorists involved in the Glasgow Airport attack?

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.

So one officer dead and four "terrorist" dead. Damn. If Al-Quaeda had this level of efficacy they wouldn't last a year.

Not that Al-Quaida was deserving of the liberties that were sacrifced for it...

They beat a police officer to death in the process of taking over the Capitol building, to attempt to stop democratic processes because they didn’t like the outcome.

Violence (murder!) for political motives. Terrorism.

Instagram = Facebook.

They serve very different audiences. Facebook and Discord seem to be the most intrusive, as they displaced many mediums. I cannot communicate with my homeowner group, because I am banned by facebook for using profanities.

Then Facebook decides to leave political posts proliferate unchecked, while I can't use the word baboon. I personally hate Facebook so much that I told the recruiters to GTFO and never contact me.

> a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life

Hmm, it's almost as if this just happened recently, but people looked the other away because it was tightly coupled to politics. I think 2021 is going to blow 2020 out of the water.

I don't think as many people looked the other way as you suspect. I was happy about the first instance for the same reason I'm happy about this instance. I want to see them all burn to the ground so we can go back to the principles of the web pre web2.0 but building it back better and more resilient to being hijacked by corporate money.

> that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life

Isn’t that what people are also basically saying of Twitter. And Facebook. And ...?

Yes, though that's kind of irrelevant. What use is Facebook to me if all my friends are only on Discord? These companies aren't the only source of socialization for everyone, but for a lot of people they effectively are.

Twitter is a news feed, not a social network.

Facebook is the dangerous one.

> I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).

What? I have never used Discord.

If you think that a company has a monopoly on your social life, that's on you. There are lots of chat services There's even gasp email, and double gasp group texts.

The problem here isn't that we need a new decentralized system, the problem is that people are too lazy to use the decentralization we have today.

Email is not comparable to Discord... Teamspeak and Mumble are dying because everyone moved to Discord -- and all the professional meeting solutions are awful.

What should I use if it's so easy?

TFW you complain about a player being dominate, and then immediately refuse to use any smaller rival because they aren’t dominate.

WTF? Get over yourself.

I don't choose which platforms communities and friends move to. I have limited agency in this situation and exercising that is pointless due to network effects. I'm not annoyed about dominance, I'm annoyed about monopoly abuse.

Well that’s the crux isn’t it? You want to complain, but declare yourself helpless in the face of multiple options. You’re the problem here.

None of the day traders on WSB are doing after hours trading.

It's been reported the mods temporarily killed the subreddit; it was part of the plan.

probably just an excuse and the real reason is that they want to stay out of trouble. (to state the obvious)

Aren't they opening themselves up to a world of hurt by this ban? I admit I don't understand securities law, but surely interfering with an ongoing stock bonanza like this should raise some authorities' eyebrows, particularly if it turns out someone from Discord side had a stake in the whole thing? I mean, surely they realized that this decision will directly impact the stock price.

If anything the risk goes the other way. If the SEC construes the Discord as being responsible for a pump-and-dump scheme, then it's facing legal attention. Even if it's not a pump-and-dump scheme, there are going to be comments there that can potentially be made to look like one to a judge.

I agree decentralized platforms need more push, but we also need better advertising than WSB type of case, so we get nice communities on them.

It worked, Gamestop postmarket price is down from market close.

In the last 20-30 minutes too, which suggests it was purely because of WSB getting wacked. That's weird, it seems like the sentiment of the people investing in GameStop wouldn't be changed just because of this.

Paper hands...

We'll see if the stock recovers or not, but I remember in 2014 Bitcoin's price bubble popping from over $200 because Bitstamp was DDOS-ed. It's a great strategy generally for timing bubble pops.

It's after hours trading, which is very low volume and generally not available to most retail investors. Probably just another hedge fund getting in their shorts at these high prices. The FUD spread due to the plunge in after hours is just a bonus for their new short position.

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.

The amount of leverage even small money can make using out of money call options cannot be understated either. Sure, hedge funds have to offer those options and cover with longs, but what people did looks more like buying a lottery ticket with a great expected return.

One's opinion is driven by everyone else's sentiment. Seeing literally everyone post "HOLD THE LINE" and "BUY THE DIP" and "TO THE MOON" will make you do the same.

If you don't see this, then you don't know if these people are still your allies.

r/wallstreetbets is back online as of now.

The Discord spaces on the other hand have split up into a bunch of other broken spaces.

Don't kid yourself. It was intentional. We should all be getting really worried about these platforms.

You feel that cold breeze? The future is coming and it's chilly.

There's a solution here. In the past it was fidonet, today it might be the fediverse.

I have a different view. This will create a need for better decentralization tech. That’s a warm future to me.

I think you're right and I think it's strange that we focus so much on crypto and other high-tech solutions to problems we don't have, but not on federated distributed versions of social media, messaging, video hosting. I guess it's not as new and shiny.

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.

See, the problem is that people are doing all this because they believe that it doesn’t matter. These are not idealists or indoctrinated revolutionaries.

No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.

All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core.

These are not Eastern European kids who dream to finish school and go to Western Europe and do something with their lives, these are also not Chinese who dream to go to America for a new life. They are not the American youth from the 60s or the bolsheviks from the pre-soviet era.

On the other hand, some of them must be rich now. Who knows what easily won money could bring.

You are certainly right for many participating in this short squeeze. But collectively this short squeeze is undeniable proof that what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. The hedge funds play by a separate set of rules from the rest of us.

That’s why they believe that it doesn’t matter in first place. I’m not a nihilist but I think they have a point.

As a Long time lurker of the sub, I’m not happy with reddit closing it down.

This thread/discussion is attached to an article about Discord banning one (of multiple, only one got banned) communities and the r/wallstreebtets community going private (moderators limiting access to members who've already joined and blocking outsiders). Since then, the subreddit was opened back up. How did Reddit close it down if it everyone can still access it?

Yep, the sub is back therefore I am no longer unhappy :)

Does it prove that? I tend to agree that it's true, but I don't see what it has to do with the current situation. If anything, I expect most people to argue the opposite - when the price drops again, and some retail traders lose their shirts, there will inevitably be a flood of thinkpieces about how cruel the financial system is for permitting them to lose money on the same terms as a hedge fund.

You mean the folks who are about to walk into the storm thinking it's never going down and lose their bet? Yeah those guys are screwed and they will make wonderful emotional think pieces written by the same corporation who gave a mouthpiece to the hedge funds. The issue is it's a continuation of the equality issues in America so rational behavior may not be in scope for this one.

Surely the retail traders will be able to convince the brokerages to set trading limits when they start to lose their shirts. [0]

[0]: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/unprecedented-move-td-amer...

I tend to think people's losses will be smaller (as individuals) then everyone seems to think. This is reddit we're talking about, and people using RobinHood. I'm guessing losses for those that didn't get out will be limited to beer money. I think the reason they could squeeze the shorts is because of the size of their army, not the depth of their war chest...

After all, its all about the lulz...

I really do hope that you're right and I'm wrong about this.

me too :-) Guess we'll find out in the next couple of days...

I'm more worried about the retail investors that jumped on the bandwagon too late with their life savings. The ones that got in at the start will be fine or better than fine.

TBH, if people did that....they probably already lost everything on bitcoin back in 2018. There's no shortage of hype for people to fall for. Bandwagoning is a great way to make a small fortune on stocks, if you start with a large fortune.

I think it proves it in the sense that hedge fund do this kind of stuff all the time and no one ever hears about it, because those kinds of money-making strategies are what we expect of them.

Exactly! The bet has been people aren't capable of coordinating in large numbers to take advantage of this so it's not really broken. Now that they are it's officially broken and will be reviewed.

The worst, or maybe the best, part of your post is that you don't realize the American youth from the 60s literally created this generation with their greed and entitlement.

The parent comment was likely talking about the hippies, who are not the same demographic as the one you are referring to.

I think they're pointing out that "the hippies" were a very small % of people their own age with an out-sized popular culture representation that doesn't reflect the sentiments of the rest of that generation.

The counter culture was a minority. Recognizing that is crucial to understanding the current climate.

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?

> Sesame street, Free Willy, Fern Gully

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.

Not OP but it's the grown up subset rather than the Abbie Hoffman set. Hilarious pranks are hilarious but sesame street is more widely and subtly influential.

3 examples of Hippie philosophy packaged as morality stories for children. Not sure offhand what the next items in the series would be.

JTA: I don't mean to use a potentially prejudicial term here, and not clear on the distinction between "hippies" and "60s counterculture" myself.

Do you have any sources for this? I am interested in learning more

> this generation with their greed and entitlement

Don't blame them. They've just adapted to cut throat capitalism. The society they live in has molded them into what they are.

You might have some points to make but you lost me at "All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core."

Sweeping generalities like this are anathema to discourse.

Or they're a starting point. You could respond with agreement or disagreement and an argument.

The larger point I was making with my comment -- which seems to have been insufficiently clear -- was precisely that making extreme statements to trigger deliberately contentious argument is a style of interaction I prefer to avoid. Per the HN rules of conduct, I assumed good faith and interpreted the parent in the most favorable light I could, given it bordered on trolling. What is there to argue? The idea that there's a simple binary split between The Establishment and Nihilists?

> given it bordered on trolling

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"?

Do you need a hand? You seem to be on a slippery slope. I've heard this one before - it was a single cannabis cigarette at first, but soon he was out there killing grandmas for drug money.

Idk, it kind of sounds plausible to me. I don't see the Wallstreet bets sub reddit starting a revolution, protests or suddenly running for office to enact change. Do you?

The point is WSB isn't all the anti establishment movement.

And wallstreet bets is the extent of antiestablishment sentiment?

I don't think Rosa Parks meant to start a revolution either.

She was just reacting to what she perceived as unfair.

> All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core.

Hoping/imagining that society can do better isn't nihilistic.

"All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core"

Okay boys, french revolution, american revolutuon, british revolution were all a nihilistic mistake. Time to give up our hard-earned right and go back to being serfs governed by god-emperror.

The establishment shall never be challanged even if it's chopping off heads, tortuning the unbelievers, raping and burning women for witchcraft.

"Who knows what easily won money could bring"

Did you ask this question in 2008?

I am not arguing that the establishment are the goodies, just that the anti establishment don't do it for higher ideals.

They do. This is a way to fight back and make money. Who wouldn't take that opportunity. I highly recommend this open (motivational) letter on WSB https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6omry/an_o...

It's a moving letter, I've read it and I actually agree with the statement but having a personal vendetta isn't exactly an ideal.

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.

Rosa Parks was, as I understand it, a carefully planned stunt, which happened to get the media traction necessary. There was another person who did the exact same thing a short time before RP did, but that person was, IIRC, punished and forgotten.

Mmm is this a comment from the 60s, Chinese people don't dream to come to America, we go back to our homeland to make money sorry to burst buble

H-1B stats disagree.

20K Chinese H1B Visas are a drop in the bucket in terms of opportunity. H1Bs are for people looking to make modest living, the real money is back in China. Common thing you hear from many nouveau riche Chinese is how poor the west are, young professional couple pulling 300K household income can barely afford to live nicely after inflation. Of course, that's still a very comfortable life, but western upper middle class is not aspirationally "rich" by Chinese standards anymore.

You will never convince them. It’s the only way they avoid concluding that they are either a) screwed by the system or b) the system which screws.

The point is the demand still vastly exceeds the supply.

I don't say all Chinese are trying to move to a western country, I refer to Chinese people who do so.

"See, the problem is that people are doing all this because they believe that it doesn’t matter. These are not idealists or indoctrinated revolutionaries. No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.

All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core."

I'm so happy we have mrtksn to explain the motives of about 5 million different people.

Thank you so much for enlightening us with your psycho-analysis of all those people.

We will try to be less nihilistic next time boss.

Hey that's my opinion, sue me. You are free to have a different one.

Discord, a monopoly?

When you're able to play a video game and have a large amount of users agree to use anything besides Discord, then I'll grant this objection. Until then, I'll refer to it as a monopoly (not over all communication of course, just within its own niche).

All the voice chat options that existed in the gaming world prior to Discord's dominance still exist, except with those options you have to pay for your own hosting like every gaming clan used to do prior to Discord. This is the cost of "free". It doesn't help that Discord has the best chat client on the market, so the competitors need to step it up.

It's a good point worth making: that Discord only exists and is as usable and popular as it is because it has a profit model and significant funding, and that's definitely a large component of why FOSS has lost users to them.

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.

Not a big gamer, but I’ve done voicechat in games over jitsi and Zoom.

Anything is a monopoly if you define the niche narrowly enough.

I agree, and I tried not to be too narrow in my reasoning, but it's primarily speaking from what myself and so many that I know have experienced.

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.

I think the internet being still in it's infancy essentially has allowed us to not define monopolies narrowly enough. For example, it seems obvious to people when a monopoly exists on a railroad, cars, or planes because they are distinct. However if they were judged the way the technology industry is currently, you would just say they are all travel and so no monopoly exists. I think the technology companies will be in for a very rude awakening when these niches are realized by politicians. It will probably be when young enough to really know the niches in the internet grow old enough to become politicians. The current politicians are just beginning to get a grasp on this so it's going to be some time.

You can quantify a firm's market power by asking how much the firm could raise prices while the customers would stick with it. If raising the price one cent causes all your customers to abandon you, then you have zero market power. If you can raise prices 10x and sell just as much product, then you have total market power.

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".

Depends on the game. I've found communities whose preferred method of communication is Facebook Messenger!

You could self-host your own Mattermost installation with OAuth2 for convenience.

https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-google.html

Yeah, I'm getting really tired of people saying "not a monopoly" when we're discussing de facto monopolies. Especially in the short term, and for knee-jerk reactions. Do you think any Discord competitor is going to welcome /r/wsb with open arms after that move? Ergo: monopoly.

Looking at this from another point of view, no other option but today. There is probably more users violating the terms today (hate speech) then ever before. If they were already watching, then there is a threshold. Today would be the day the threshold is hit. Today is probably the tipping point of no return, moderation becomes virtually impossible.

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