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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

Someone went from 50k to 50M by igniting a short squeeze. All eyes were on the WSB subreddit, and discord server. Now both are private or offline.

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...

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Market manipulation is not anything that "affects the market." That definition would cover pretty much any and all behavior. In this case Discord is not trading securities, is not telling any one else to trade securities, has nothing at all to do with securities.

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)

Yeah, I didn’t mean it in the legal sense. It was just interesting that this decision can cost certain people millions of dollars. But that’s true of many actions in the world, as you say.

"Market manipulation" is what we call it when you affect markets illegally. If it's not illegal, it's not manipulation. For example, if I buy a bunch of stock in a company it will usually raise the stock price. That affects the market but is not illegal and is not manipulation.

> "Market manipulation" is what we call it when you affect markets illegally. If it's not illegal, it's not manipulation.

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.

Would it change anything if someone at Discord, particularly someone involved in making this decision, had a stake in GameStop's stock performance?

How many hedge funds have had their email cut off so far?

How many have a public channel with hate speech?

hate speech as in "f*ck these dumbass hedge funds trying to bankrupt Gamestop and make thousands of people lose their jobs?"

Is that hate speech now?

Is that what was written there? Discord and the WSB team seem to think it was more serious

We weren't talking about public channels before. Also, public also means that anyone can come in and disrupt the conversation. Agent provocateurs.

>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?

Yeah, I kinda think the SEC should be in charge of whether you're doing a pump-and-dump or not.

>I’m curious why the sub went private though.

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.

Before it went private I popped in and saw a thread where they were debating and coordinating what to do b/c they apparently had big issues today with bots and so many messages. Earlier I saw a few comments about downvoting bots all day.

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.

My rough understanding is that the sub is required by Reddit admins to perform certain actions related to every submission (and even maybe every comment) which, due to API limitations, they could no longer do automatically.

Add this to the mix. The major brokerage firms go down. When users are able to login they receive messages they can no longer make call options on GME and are only allowed to sell.

> No one has any chance to coordinate now.

Even though r/wsb is now private, there are already 3.8m people who are subbed to it and can still see & use it.

> Discord’s action is effectively market manipulation in a literal sense, because this is certainly going to affect the market.

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.

> No one has any chance to coordinate now.

As with other subgroups both economic and political, the real coordination happens in Telegram and Signal. The public channels amplify.

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