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Comment by oip | Hacker News Reader

Hi all,

I am a mod on r/WallStreetBets and wanted to share with you that our bots haven't seen any of the tickers mentioned in the SEC press release.

We filter tickers based on a number of factors, but low market cap (below $1B), is the most common reason for content being removed.

One of our biggest issues is data reliability. If you know of an API that can provide accurate data and an exhaustive list of tickers (especially on non-US exchanges), please reach out to our modmail. [0]

Best,

OIP

[0] https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fwallstreetb...

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Can someone explain to me why this dedicated but unpaid volunteer is trying to keep Reddit compliant with SEC regulations? What other company on the planet would shift that burden to its own users???

Happy to discover I’m not understanding the situation, but that seems absolutely bonkers to me. Does Reddit not have any lawyers?

Because Reddit's answer would be to simply ban the entire community. There's not much choice on the mods' side.

Yes, Reddit would have other options of course. But they all cost money, so they wouldn't do it. Spez would just nuke WSB and move on with his day, secure in the belief that he saved Reddit from an SEC fine or whatever.

Not so sure about that. WSB buys a ridiculous amount of awards. Reddit might be willing to spend a little too keep them up.

I'm curious to see if there's publicly available data about award usage per subreddit.

I tried quick searching for "award usage per subreddit stats" but can't find anything.

You would need to scrape data via the api

Scraping data via an API? You either scrape the website or query the API.

I think you knew full well what the writer meant :)

Correcting people helps preserving the precise meaning of words rather than letting them drift into thingy words. Donate to the endangered word conservation fund today!

Maybe the API only returns HTML ;)

Reddit has two approaches they use. One is to target the sub itself with bans or quarantines as you say. The other is promote / demote mods.

And the last thing you want is Reddit moderation involved.

It’s more arbitrary and poorly due processed than Google,PayPal,FB etc.

They could also just ban SEC and NYC IP addresses instead. Ultimately information wants to be free.

Information doesn't want anything - it's not sentient. Humans wanting information to be certain things is a bit different.

> They could also just ban SEC and NYC IP addresses instead. Ultimately information wants to be free.

Because someone at the SEC can't use their home connection? Or their cell phone?

Also, there's not exactly a list of SEC IP addresses anywhere I'm aware of, and they could easily add/remove addresses at will.

> Does Reddit not have any lawyers?

Reddit's lawyers are probably the reason why it's framed as Reddit hosting "a community" whose users can have moderation ability instead of framing them as "Reddit moderators", RE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program#D...

Reddit would be happy to ensure it is compliant with SEC regulations, by banning the subreddit if necessary. Since WSB mods don’t want that, they take steps to ensure their subreddit is compliant, and doesn’t pose a legal risk to Reddit.

Reddit is not a financial market participant, the only SEC regulations it needs to remain compliant with are along the lines of "don't lie about Reddit in SEC documents and other communications to Reddit's investors". That and promptly responding to any subpoenas for user information and other related legal requests the SEC requires.

What the others said (reddit would enforced by banning) plus wallstreetbets are a group of people cooperating to make money. Our volunteer is helping the group make money and so helping himself/herself/etc-self.

IE, the "look how much reddit is exploiting these people" implication is unwarranted.

I think it comes back to the roots of reddit being a free alternative to phpbb with an easier onboarding process.

Reddit's approach to dealing with this is to ban the sub-reddit unless the sub-reddit sufficiently moderates itself. WSB moderators working so hard is what is preventing WSB from being banned.

Why would Reddit want to expose themselves to the risk when they can hide behind Section 230?

Think of subreddits as modern analogies to local clubs (chess, fencing, etc.). Just because it's happening on the internet doesn't mean the members (and especially organizers) don't have real world interfacing responsibilities.

I'm actually writing an app that extracts company names or stock symbols from reddit posts. I'm using iexcloud.io to get a list of companies and their symbols. I haven't got the part of also adding financial information for those companies/stocks, but I'm sure it's not complicated.

I'm only fetching US and Canadian stocks from iexcloud and I've got around 24k of those. It's possible to fetch stocks from other countries but it seems most companies mentioned on Reddit are listed in a US exchange anyway.

People could also agree on a language to use in Reddit that uses a ticker to get through the approval system (e.g. AAPL) but then in the content of the message, indicate the ticker actually being discussed by look at the first letter of each of the first few words of the post.

For example

Subject: AAPL is awesome

Message: Generalizing My Equations in a very interesting way ...

When the mods catch on this and write bots to deal with it, we invent a new language. It's faster to invent codes than for mods to write bots so they can never keep up.

My favorite example of filter evasion in recent memory is "$SEARS" being used for "Roblox".

To your point, a "secret language" is only useful if it can evade detection and remain in use.

The former is difficult because moderators spend an inordinate amount of time perusing the subreddit.

The latter requires a sufficiently large "speaker base" in order for messages not to go unnoticed, discouraging speakers. This can be solved by making the "secret language" more accessible (that is, more obvious to new "speakers", but also mods) or by sharing the keys to the language through other channels (which, to some extent, defeats the point of using the subreddit).

What tends to happen more often is users using emojis to bypass filters. E.g. CC $eye_emoji V to represent CCIV, or the SOS emoji to represent SOS. Another strategy is obfuscating the message with interspersed noise, E.g. "A-,-A---P,,,L".

Generally speaking, these have the same pitfalls as mentioned above and are caught quickly.

You’d need some other channel to communicate with the tribe to exchange the new ciphers, by which time you might as well just use that other channel instead of reddit.

Hiya mate, nice of you to pop on by here. I'm a passable Redditor but I only sport concrete hands (ex Civ Eng nerd), certainly not diamond, but I will never despoil myself with paper hands!

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