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Comment by jug | Hacker News Reader

> Finance is highly regulated and arbitrarily so.

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

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> 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.

> 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.

https://mastodon.online

I recently tried mastodon, but I found it kind of confusing. I wanted to get some reasonable people to follow based on my interests (programming, tech, philosophy, etc), but I couldn't really find how to find these people. I tried googling top mastodon people to follow to no avail. No beginners guides apart from the mundane how to create an account. If anyone has any tips, let me know

There's discussion of WIN setting up a wallstreetbets.win site, like /r/thedonald did after they were banned.

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