For those of us not in the know, what is so special about today regarding WSB? I know there's a feud with short sellers going on, but I haven't been following the details.
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...
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)
Is that hate speech now?
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.
Yeah, I kinda think the SEC should be in charge of whether you're doing a pump-and-dump or not.
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.
Even though r/wsb is now private, there are already 3.8m people who are subbed to it and can still see & use it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.