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Comment by dd_roger | Hacker News Reader

I think most legacy users from WSB know very well what they are doing.

I've been on this sub for 5 years and it has always been so that everytime the wsb hivemind finds a good deal it gets media attention and the number of clueless users/investors skyrockets. But people who stick around outside of these short periods under the spotlights know very well what they are doing despite the memes.

I don't believe in the theory that there are few people manipulating the entire sub for a pump and dump, rather the entire sub (the few tens of thousands regular active users) knew it was a pump and dump. That this story attracted the attention and money of thousands of clueless newbies is to be blamed on people that reported on it carelessly (medias, celebritites, etc.), not on the people who were doing their things on an internet forum expecting nothing out of it.

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This was a unique setup for a lot of reasons. It started purely as a value play, then dynamically morphed into a growth play _and_ an attack on the shorts based on technicals. Once the price broke ~30 it then escalated into a full on short-attack and ultimately became pump-and-dump (in my opinion). The whole thing was fluid though, and its important to understand that the initial snowball was formed on the back of fundamentals analysis and through a lens of value investing, so you had plenty of "true believers" gathering together to form the initial crowd attacking the shorts.

Once it became clear the momentum was dead (i.e. when brokerages forbade buys) a lot of the "in the know" crowd had already planned their exit and took it. The only reason it hasnt plummeted to ~40$ at this point is that there were a lot of "true believer converts" picked up along the way that are now stubbornly bagholding in disbelief. This is where the _real_ pump and dump starts to occur, because this whole crowd is now on the hook for massive losses unless they can recreate the initial rise.

On the day the price was $350, I tried making a bunch of comments on HN to warn people this was a pump and dump. I got called a shill and downvoted repeatedly. Check my comment history. I hope those people got out in time.

> I got called a shill and downvoted repeatedly

To be fair, your line of comments was pretty similar to the wealth of sockpuppet a which were unleased on reddit to force GameSpot's stock down while pumping up silver. Even if you were one of the rare cases where there's a flesh and bone person expressing honest personal opinions, it's hard to spot the good apples in a shipping container of rotten apples.

same here. actually someone is still going through all of my comments to downvote it out of spite (I mentioned an old playstation game and apparently it was not to their liking :D).

said person seems to have no life of their own and thinks what they are doing is productive use of their time.

Didn't quite get out in time. Lost what is a lot of money to me, but very little to most people on HN. I think there is a weird dynamic with us complete investing noobs though. A lot of us are kinda poor, or at least in debt. The "yolo" strategy doesn't seem that bad in many ways.

Even though it's a lot of money to me, the unrealized gains I didn't take and the amount I lost really don't put me in a very different position. Just have to keep grinding away on student loans in either case, only a ~2.5 month swing on my estimated time to finish paying my loans from my bad bet compared to selling at the top, and only 1 month worse compared to not trying at all.

Learned some stuff too, hopefully it'll make me a better investor when I'm able to save some money starting in my mid 30s.

Hi, it's me, you from the future.

But actually, I had student loans and lost a chunk of money during the last BTC spike (literally bought at the very top). It set me back on paying them off which was a big bummer, but in reality, it was a moment that let me truly focus and probably put me ahead in the end. Any time a wild finance story would hit, I'd think about that BTC and remember that investing in your debt is a guaranteed return. And in my case, it was like 7%, so a good return. Now they're paid off and I get to invest like 1% of my money in fun things without worrying if I lose it.

the people who are sitting on unrealize gains are the ones that keep creating the threads with rocket emojis and some pseudo academic reasons for why the short squeeze hasn't happened yet.

The reality that they have created seem awfully like the ones that Trump supporters created including conspiracy involving the deep state, hedge fund colluding with journalists and pinning the blame on just a few people.

They are very good at hyping things up like they do over at r/bitcoin, absolutely refusing to believe that the market price is whatever they hype it to be (note that strong correlation of US equities and bitcoin when it shouldn't if it was like Gold, contrary to their storage of value argument.)

I think that WSB overplayed their hand and now will bring scrutiny and severe restrictions on retail margin option traders.

Not only that I think there will be new rules talking about stocks on social media, similar to how email spammers took advantage of the exact same FOMO narratives to pump up penny stocks in the early days of the internet.

Right now there is nothing that stops a group of people from purchasing large number of aged reddit accounts and using the downvote, upvotes to shape the narrative. The SEC has NO resources to fight this type of sophisticated mass social engineering and the laws are murky too.

> this story attracted the attention and money of thousands of clueless newbies

As an exercise in this theory earlier today I looked up the profile for 5 or 6 of the top posts on the subreddit advocating for "diamond hands", and about half of them made their first post on WSB within the past 5 days. It's very clear that the users going down with the ship are not the same users who pumped it up for massive profits in the first place.

> It's very clear that the users going down with the ship are not the same users who pumped it up for massive profits in the first place.

Same as every pump and dump ever.

I like following WSB, been there for years as well. There has been some incredible gains for me -- AMD, NIO, and TLRY to name a few. They were spotted early by the sub, it's up to the individual to decide when they want to exit their trade.

Are you two sure WSB hasn't reached an eternal September event? I find that with 8MM subs, the signal-to-noise ratio will likely remain just too high.

I've been looking for alternative subs, but besides e.g. theta gang I haven't really found anything useful

Yes, I think it has too many followers right now. Perhaps it returns to 'normal' after the hype wears off. It has happened before just not to this scale.

Subreddits never return to normal after mass subscriber events. The users might not contribute, but so long as a fraction remain active on the same account, WSB posts will stay in their feed, and they will have the power to vote, and therefore dictate the content of the sub. The participating community will always be a minority, and will inevitably grow to disagree with the majority of users, nonparticipants, who simply dictate the content of the sub because of their higher voting power. The number of votes on a post always exceeds the number of unique posters in the post. I've seen it ruin several subreddits already, with easy-to-consume, low effort content swamping the frontpage.

I think if and when the newbies get burned, they will disappear and forever write off WSB as a personal scam. I'm thinking like the common folks that bought BTC at $19K in 2017. I really don't think too many of them have bought back in after they sold for a loss and likely want nothing to do with it ever again.

The big difference here is that holding GME isn't like holding BTC. Sure, many people say BTC is a scam or that it'll crash and burn, but holding through dips with BTC has historically been the correct move. I highly doubt holding GME is going to turn out well for anybody, so those losses are more "permanent" than say BTC. But you're right, a lot of people that got "burned" on BTC might not come back, but there's also a lot of people that held and are actually better off for it.

Sure, I'm not making any statements about BTC's future trajectory, just that those who bought at the last peak and panic sold near the bottom even after waiting for months or years are not coming back. Same with GME, except I'll bet a pretty penny it's not surpassing its peak again like BTC did. If you put your faith into a community (WSB) and lost all your money, you're not coming back. You might not even invest in the S&P500 for a long time because it will all feel like it's rigged against you.

But that has been ruined now. From 2M to 8M in like 2 weeks. The noise is going to be overwhelming.

All but a small percentage of the newcomers will angrily disappear once this all blows over. This is by far the largest growth wave but not the first or the last.

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