4 ms·

Okay a serious question: at what point does it make sense for these hedge fund guys to just purchase reddit and shut it down? To be clear: I don't think that w

by blhack 6y ago

Okay a serious question: at what point does it make sense for these hedge fund guys to just purchase reddit and shut it down? To be clear: I don't think that would work, but I think we're at the point where stuff like that is going to be tried. These guys are losing BILLIONS of dollars. Billions. Can they spend $1B to prevent the loss of $2B? (Is reddit worth more than $1B?) Other stuff I won't be surprised if we see: * Massive astroturf campaigns (the WSB mods are claiming that this is already happening. * DDOS attacks on reddit * Attacks against the mods of WSB * "Institutional" attacks like SEC involvement It's just sortof crazy to think what it looks like when there is this much money on the line. Everything goes out the window.

vmception 6y ago
Gotta hit discord and telegram too Telegram has threads now on announcement channels that are unlinked from discussion channels
- blhack 6y ago
  Discord and telegram are big, but there's no way they're as big as WSB. I can just go to reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets and watch the show, I don't even know how to begin finding the same thing on discord. And to put into focus how many people are involved here: the GME discussion threads go to tens of thousands of replies within MINUTES of being posted.
  - omni 6y ago
    r/wallstreetbets has an official Discord, I think that's probably what parent is referencing. It's linked in their sidebar with a giant Discord logo, not hard to find
    - rasz 6y ago
      had a discord https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935511
      - grej 6y ago
        Decentralization now
- boringg 6y ago
  WallStreetBets hit their threshold on discord - no more invites.
goatcode 6y ago
> * Massive astroturf campaigns (the WSB mods are claiming that this is already happening. That's 75% of the site as it is.
Blackstone4 6y ago
Hedge funds and other investors have rules in place to limit what they can invest in which would probably rule out a purchase of Reddit. Secondly, the Reddit crowd would move else where. Thirdly, working in investments myself, hedge fund types dont even think like this. It is hard to explain how far off the mark you are...I know financial services can look like a black box....but what is happening is much more boring than you might think. All the drama is happening on Reddit...the SEC is worried about retail investors creating a bubble and losing money....hedge funds and traders just want to make money.....they may take a loss here and move on quickly to the next thing. Doing crazy sheeeeet like you suggested would have them potentially lose all of their investors money or be blacklisted....
paxys 6y ago
It would probably take $5-$10 billion to purchase Reddit outright today. Its last funding round a couple of years ago valued it at $3 billion, and it has grown a lot since.
rantwasp 6y ago
the cat is out of the bag. you can suppress maybe one or two of these squeezes but fundamentally this changes what they are going to try in the future (ie they need to rewrite their playbooks)
bonestamp2 6y ago
> I don't think that would work, but I think we're at the point where stuff like that is going to be tried Agreed it won't work. A lot of the discussion has already moved from Reddit to discord, and then to another discord channel after the first, and it will move again too if it needs to. I don't have any skin in the game, but it's fascinating to observe.
onion2k 6y ago
It would be much cheaper just to pay some kids to make nice looking but ultimately loss making bets on there. If WSB looks like a place where people go to lose money then it's popularity will drop.
- andoriyu 6y ago
  uhm, have you ever been to WSB? Loss Porn is a thing.
- fumar 6y ago
  This is how WSB started. It was about sharing ineffective and losing positions.
- wing-_-nuts 6y ago
  >If WSB looks like a place where people go to lose money then it's popularity will drop. Have you... seen WSB? Yes, it's absolutely a place kids go to lose money. It's literally a sub that glorifies stupid investment decisions.
- imtringued 6y ago
  As fumar said, losing money is the entire point.
- scubbo 6y ago
  > If WSB looks like a place where people go to lose money then it's popularity will drop. This is how I know you have 0 idea what you're talking about.
asdfman123 6y ago
It's probably not a good idea to buy reddit when you're losing your shirt just in hopes of turning it around in the short term. The momentum is already there for the short. Instead hedge funds will learn from this example and get smarter about using and manipulating social media. I wouldn't be surprised if they start leading secret PR campaigns to start trends like this on reddit--screw their competitors and make a lot of money. Why try to swim upstream when it's so much easier to make money swimming with the current? And why buy social media when you can just manipulate it anonymously?
throw0101a 6y ago
> Okay a serious question: at what point does it make sense for these hedge fund guys to just purchase reddit and shut it down? It would be irrelevant even if they could. The problem is/was not Reddit/WSB, but rather the positions that the hedge funds put themselves in. Where are/were the PhDs in risk analysis at these places? How do you get into a position of shorts being >120% of the total float? Take Willian Gibson's 'Law': * The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed. And take the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH): * The price of a security reflects all the available information about it. And when you combine them you have the principle that the information is out there (too many short contracts), but it wasn't evenly distributed—yet.† Until someone noticed it, and it started to spread, and that caused people to change their positions in GME. Shutting down Reddit, or any other random forum, isn't going to stop someone from noticing the shorts. This is no different than what happened in The Big Short: some folks noticed discrepancies (e.g., mortgage delinquencies) and acted first, and as that information spread the market "corrected" its price. It's just that it ended up causing the Great Recession. The spread of information isn't instantaneous either: at the very least it is limited by the speed of light. After that, it's limited by either (a) human attention spans, and/or (b) the machine learning systems that humans programmed in automated systems. † Edit: I propose this phenomenon, if not labelled already, be called "Gibson's Market Corollary". -- Now the price of GME is kind of meta though, in that it doesn't reflect on what's know about GameStop, but rather someone 'related' to GameStop.
twostorytower 6y ago
If reddit were a public company today, it would have a market cap of over $100B. Public valuations don't follow logic anymore, it's just supply and demand.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Just make 5 accounts and report the subreddit for hate speech. Works every time.

by blhack 6y ago

vmception 6y ago

Gotta hit discord and telegram too Telegram has threads now on announcement channels that are unlinked from discussion channels

blhack 6y ago
Discord and telegram are big, but there's no way they're as big as WSB. I can just go to reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets and watch the show, I don't even know how to begin finding the same thing on discord. And to put into focus how many people are involved here: the GME discussion threads go to tens of thousands of replies within MINUTES of being posted.
- omni 6y ago
  r/wallstreetbets has an official Discord, I think that's probably what parent is referencing. It's linked in their sidebar with a giant Discord logo, not hard to find
  - rasz 6y ago
    had a discord https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935511
    - grej 6y ago
      Decentralization now
boringg 6y ago
WallStreetBets hit their threshold on discord - no more invites.

goatcode 6y ago

> * Massive astroturf campaigns (the WSB mods are claiming that this is already happening. That's 75% of the site as it is.

Blackstone4 6y ago

Hedge funds and other investors have rules in place to limit what they can invest in which would probably rule out a purchase of Reddit. Secondly, the Reddit crowd would move else where. Thirdly, working in investments myself, hedge fund types dont even think like this. It is hard to explain how far off the mark you are...I know financial services can look like a black box....but what is happening is much more boring than you might think. All the drama is happening on Reddit...the SEC is worried about retail investors creating a bubble and losing money....hedge funds and traders just want to make money.....they may take a loss here and move on quickly to the next thing. Doing crazy sheeeeet like you suggested would have them potentially lose all of their investors money or be blacklisted....

paxys 6y ago

It would probably take $5-$10 billion to purchase Reddit outright today. Its last funding round a couple of years ago valued it at $3 billion, and it has grown a lot since.

rantwasp 6y ago

the cat is out of the bag. you can suppress maybe one or two of these squeezes but fundamentally this changes what they are going to try in the future (ie they need to rewrite their playbooks)

bonestamp2 6y ago

> I don't think that would work, but I think we're at the point where stuff like that is going to be tried Agreed it won't work. A lot of the discussion has already moved from Reddit to discord, and then to another discord channel after the first, and it will move again too if it needs to. I don't have any skin in the game, but it's fascinating to observe.

onion2k 6y ago

It would be much cheaper just to pay some kids to make nice looking but ultimately loss making bets on there. If WSB looks like a place where people go to lose money then it's popularity will drop.

andoriyu 6y ago
uhm, have you ever been to WSB? Loss Porn is a thing.
fumar 6y ago
This is how WSB started. It was about sharing ineffective and losing positions.
wing-_-nuts 6y ago
>If WSB looks like a place where people go to lose money then it's popularity will drop. Have you... seen WSB? Yes, it's absolutely a place kids go to lose money. It's literally a sub that glorifies stupid investment decisions.
imtringued 6y ago
As fumar said, losing money is the entire point.
scubbo 6y ago
> If WSB looks like a place where people go to lose money then it's popularity will drop. This is how I know you have 0 idea what you're talking about.

asdfman123 6y ago

It's probably not a good idea to buy reddit when you're losing your shirt just in hopes of turning it around in the short term. The momentum is already there for the short. Instead hedge funds will learn from this example and get smarter about using and manipulating social media. I wouldn't be surprised if they start leading secret PR campaigns to start trends like this on reddit--screw their competitors and make a lot of money. Why try to swim upstream when it's so much easier to make money swimming with the current? And why buy social media when you can just manipulate it anonymously?

throw0101a 6y ago

> Okay a serious question: at what point does it make sense for these hedge fund guys to just purchase reddit and shut it down? It would be irrelevant even if they could. The problem is/was not Reddit/WSB, but rather the positions that the hedge funds put themselves in. Where are/were the PhDs in risk analysis at these places? How do you get into a position of shorts being >120% of the total float? Take Willian Gibson's 'Law': * The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed. And take the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH): * The price of a security reflects all the available information about it. And when you combine them you have the principle that the information is out there (too many short contracts), but it wasn't evenly distributed—yet.† Until someone noticed it, and it started to spread, and that caused people to change their positions in GME. Shutting down Reddit, or any other random forum, isn't going to stop someone from noticing the shorts. This is no different than what happened in The Big Short: some folks noticed discrepancies (e.g., mortgage delinquencies) and acted first, and as that information spread the market "corrected" its price. It's just that it ended up causing the Great Recession. The spread of information isn't instantaneous either: at the very least it is limited by the speed of light. After that, it's limited by either (a) human attention spans, and/or (b) the machine learning systems that humans programmed in automated systems. † Edit: I propose this phenomenon, if not labelled already, be called "Gibson's Market Corollary". -- Now the price of GME is kind of meta though, in that it doesn't reflect on what's know about GameStop, but rather someone 'related' to GameStop.

twostorytower 6y ago

If reddit were a public company today, it would have a market cap of over $100B. Public valuations don't follow logic anymore, it's just supply and demand.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Just make 5 accounts and report the subreddit for hate speech. Works every time.