15 ms·

Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

212 points by neom 6y ago

perryizgr8 6y ago
I don't understand why this is an issue? Reddit/Discord are companies and they get to decide who they serve or not serve. WSB guys can just go off and make their own reddit and discord if they want. Why all the hullabaloo?
chovybizzass 6y ago
- https://upvotocracy.com/a/wallstreetbets https://upvotocracy.com/a/wallstreetbets - https://www.reddit.com/r/Wallstreetbetsnew/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wallstreetbetsnew/ - https://ruqqus.com/+wallstreetbets https://ruqqus.com/+wallstreetbets - /join ##wallstreetbets on freenode You cut off the head, a dozen more emerge.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Do that enough times and you just might snowshoe it out to less effectiveness/influence.
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    This is precisely what works, unfortunately. Each time you deplatform a group, only a certain percentage of the most dedicated users follow to the next iteration.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      > only a certain percentage of the most dedicated users follow to the next iteration. And they become the seed around which the new community crystallizes. As the social media and tech oligarchies get emboldened to attack less extreme groups, the people who find themselves deplatformed end up taking refuge in the only sites that are prepared to stand against the ratcheting up of restrictions on speech. Don't be surprised if, as a result of pressure on WSB, a lot of casual traders find themselves mixing and sympathizing with violent extremists on Gab and other platforms.
      - TeaDrunk 6y ago
        > And they become the seed around which the new community crystallizes. Only if they have time to, is my concern.
        ehnto 6y ago
        I think their point was that as only the most extreme users move to the new platform, the community forms around more extreme ideals each time. For WSB I don't know what that means long term, what is an extreme trader?
      - yters 6y ago
        Yes I didn't find out about patriots.win until all the deplatforming. These purges might be helping more than hindering.
      - joubert 6y ago
        > As the social media and tech oligarchies get emboldened to attack less extreme groups To what end? Wouldn’t it hurt the bottom line too much? I don’t buy the “they’re out to get us” idea.
        dane-pgp 6y ago
        I'm not trying to suggest that "they're out to get us", just that once a group gets a taste of the power that comes from suppressing speech, it can become quite addictive and the goal posts for "safe" speech can shift. To see this dynamic played out in different circumstances, look at the Euphemism Treadmill[0] (as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) and Purity Spirals[1]. It may be bad for business to encourage this nonsense, but as echo-chambers become less diverse, they can exert more pressure on platforms to enforce their rules for them. [0] https://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadmill-replacing-r-word.html https://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadm... [1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/ https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
  - ng12 6y ago
    We clearly should not be doing this. This is the slippery slope.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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natrik 6y ago
"We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community" Key point for me. Under the guise of 'hate speech' suppression is occurring. Of course every platform has the right to dictate users of their platform yada yada...
- s5300 6y ago
  Yeah this was a low blow from Discord I get they're probably scared as hell, but they don't even take care of the child porn or child grooming Discords. It's not even slightly paranoid to say that somebody gave financial incentive to make this happen, but for them to censor with absolute bullshit reasoning behind it... This is just not good.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - riffraff 6y ago
    > I get they're probably scared as hell, I don't, what should they be scared of?
    - edoceo 6y ago
      Big money players. Some may even be holding Discord equity and could give them a headache
    - xkeysc0re 6y ago
      A media spotlight isn't helpful when they are considered (rightly or wrongly) to be responsible for a lot of people losing money
    - 6y ago
sebmellen 6y ago
> a Discord spokesperson told Gizmodo that the channel had been banned “for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” On both Discord and Reddit, WallStreetBets users frequently refer to themselves collectively as “retards” and “autists,” and have been known to deploy the kinds of racial slurs and deliberately offensive language that have become commonplace in 4chan-style posting forums. [0] [0]: https://gizmodo.com/discord-bans-r-wallstreetbets-for-hate-speech-violation-1846146314 https://gizmodo.com/discord-bans-r-wallstreetbets-for-hate-s...
- ehnto 6y ago
  Yet it wasn't an issue to them until this moment.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Agreed, it's a totally made up reason. I do wonder if there wasn't some external pressure on Discord to do this.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Btw, the SSL cert on polylab.co expired 7 days ago! Might want to check on that :)
    - ehnto 6y ago
      Thanks for the heads up!
  - jsploit 6y ago
    They were banned after "repeated warnings". It's possible that those warnings began before these market movements.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      They could've just as well "repeated" the "warning" one last time and shut them down next week. They choose to act now. At the very least, this was a PR mistake.
ng12 6y ago
> On both Discord and Reddit, wallstreetbets users frequently refer to themselves collectively as “retards” and “autists,” and have been known to deploy the kinds of racial slurs and deliberately offensive language that have become commonplace in 4chan-style posting forums. I read WSB daily for years and cannot recall a single usage of a racial slur. They definitely referred to themselves as autists/retards in a self-deprecating manner but that's hardly the same thing.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  This is one of the dangers of using "hate speech" as an nebulous term. You can then turn it around and use it as an excuse to ban whatever you want. I could easily read through any of the front page posts on Reddit, and find what I consider to be hate speech, and if I were in a position of power, I could just use that as a justification to ban the entire domain. Moreover, it easily allows adversaries the ability to plant hate speech in forums they dislike, and then pressure the authorities to ban it. At the end of the day, I am an adult, and I reject the notion that sites need to protect me from speech.
  - cambalache 6y ago
    "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." Cardinal Richelieu (Alledgelly) A lesson this generation will have to learn again.
    - theinverseidea 6y ago
      Its terribly sad, and equally confusing has to how we got here. At least they'll have a firm understanding of just how sexist light speed is.
      - thick 6y ago
        Not sad or confusing at all. It’s par for the course. WSB likes to use a line from The Dark Knight that Joker says - that it’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message. It’s very apt and I look forward to how far these things go. I’m fine being on a site that doesn’t share my views. I’ll sit and laugh as the system fucks over every last person that keep defending it against their (and everyone else’s) better interests. And then when they can’t find the downvote button anymore because it’s no longer allowed, I’ll laugh some more.
aaron695 6y ago
We'll see the media further turn against them. I think they realised the media is broken, academia is broken so why not apply that to the financial market. But they/we still need to work to how to exist within this world which militantly wants to keep the status quo.
tomglynch 6y ago
> We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn't allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven't given us special access despite asking for it. Interesting that they made software to moderate but reddit either doesn't want to or can't handle the throughput required to run it. These threads are some of the biggest ever seen on reddit. What happens if they get shut down again? Should they begin migrating to telegram groups?
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Reddit doesn't want the SEC breathing down their necks. They are looking for an excuse to ban them. ...and if they can't find one, the SEC will probably just order them to shut it.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Based on what do you think SEC can order random social media companies to shut down forums?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      They will make one phone call to the CEO saying they are opening an investigation that Reddit is facilitating and unlicensed forum for providing investment advice, and that to limit potential liability, the SEC is recommending that Reddit close the sub in question. Reddit's one lawyer will sit with the CEO, and they will have a 4 second conversation "Yeah, we're not sticking our neck out for those self-proclaimed retards.". ...and that's it. Reddit has banned subs for far far less.
      - frays 6y ago
        Although this may have been a simple explanation for you, it brought a lot of insight for me. Thank you.
tomglynch 6y ago
I think this could do with a better title, it is not clear what the content is about.
koheripbal 6y ago
Just label them as Trump supporters and tech companies will fall over themselves banning them.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Downvoted, yet doesn’t even qualify as satire anymore
- koheripbal 6y ago
  see... that's exactly what they're doing... https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6s9tb/the_financial_times_are_attempting_to_link_wsb/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6s9tb/the_...
Waterluvian 6y ago
I'm surprised they haven't formed stonkchan and begun migrating there. If they don't use this moment to formalize self-managed comms, they're not going to be a community for much longer, given they're putting the squeeze on people to the order of billions of dollars.
- el_dev_hell 6y ago
  Agreed. Reddit is catching flack. It's only a matter of time before they pull the pin for some ambiguous reason. It's the perfect time to start funneling the audience to a dedicated forum (or literally a chan).
tomcam 6y ago
> We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty... > That is why I'm throwing my support behind the Twitter handle in general. This won’t end well
- dilap 6y ago
  Out of the frying pan, into...another frying pan! I keep waiting for one of these high-profile, fucked-with groups to jump to a dentralized network. Still waiting...
- grey_earthling 6y ago
  > you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore Yeah you do, just not in someone else's space. Like if you want to bellow out some Klingon opera, you can, but they're gonna throw you out of Tesco. Is "my house, my rules" really so hard to understand?
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > Is "my house, my rules" really so hard to understand? People are waking up to the bait&switch the on-line platforms are. They do everything they say to pretend they're the public square, short of saying it, but when push comes to shove, they reveal themselves as private owners with an agenda. What's doubly annoying is that governments worldwide decided to participate. When politicians' primary channel of communicating with their constituents/subjects is through Twitter, you could morally argue that it should be treated as public square. That one is on the politicians though.
  - hoseja 6y ago
    Surely you can't be serious after what happened to Parler. You just can't period, short of building your own infrastructure.
pretendgeneer 6y ago
You have to wonder how much influence the large VC backers of reddit and discord had/will have in the treatment of WSB. Surely they're not taking too kindly to them making such an mockery of capital markets.
Nacdor 6y ago
> I read WSB daily for years and cannot recall a single usage of a racial slur. Same, I've been a subscriber of WSB since at least 4 years ago. I also check TheDonald.win (now Patriots.win) on a regular basis. Both are constantly accused of racism and/or white supremacy and yet I see none of either. People use terms like 'racist', 'nazi', 'fascist' and many others as synonyms for "any person or thing I don't like or disagree with". It's also the media's favorite new strategy for discrediting sources that contradict their chosen narrative.
- neilparikh 6y ago
  > I also check TheDonald.win (now Patriots.win) on a regular basis. Both are constantly accused of racism and/or white supremacy and yet I see none of either. The 8th post on the homepage is this: https://patriots.win/p/11SK7JKMbx/guess-what-my-favorite-thing-to-/c/ https://patriots.win/p/11SK7JKMbx/guess-what-my-favorite-thi..., and the top comment is a list of racial slurs for Asian/Chinese people. There's a few other threads that include similar lists, as well as comments making fun of Asian/Chinese people in general. I saw a few slurs for gay people as well. I found all this in 5 minutes, so I'm surprised you haven't seen anything even though you browse it "on a regular basis".
  - yters 6y ago
    Yes I browse regularly and there is definitely prejudice on display. However the general tenor is to downvote or at least not upvote such content. Certainly not as bad as I expected given their reputation. Leads me to see them in a more sympathetic light than as a bunch of racist revolutionaries.
    - neilparikh 6y ago
      These posts are on the front page, and the comments are top of the threads. How does that result from "downvote or at least not upvote such content"?
      - yters 6y ago
boardwaalk 6y ago
This r/wsb stuff is the Internet equivalent of soap opera drama/celebrity gossip. In a way, it's amazing how fast we revert to pointless nonsense news. Hopefully the news cycle sweeps this away quickly.
reidjs 6y ago
I love the trading advice, just buy and hold. This is the next generations occupy Wall Street
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  That seems to be contrary to the sentiment expressed in the reddit post - "There's also too much political bullshit in a community that was never ever political. The only way I want to occupy Wall St is in a suit myself or rent-free in the mind of a blown up short."
  - reidjs 6y ago
    It seems to me instead of holding ineffective street protests they are actively trying to get a piece of the pie, or destroy it in the process.
- MrMan 6y ago
  It's just manipulation- as a flood of rubes come in to "buy and hold" the price explodes and then some rubes get into options trades that give them downside exposure, some short the stock, some believe the hype and think it's an investment, and some are there to speculate but can either only go long or get the timing wrong. So the buying pressure at some point subsides, and momentum to the short side builds as people exit. Participants in these forums like yahoo finance before it are constantly trying to exhort the group to move into names in which the touts already have positions setup.
thick 6y ago
Refreshing to have HN backpedaling on years of “they’re a private business they can do what they want” rhetoric. We already know you don’t have a spine, now it’s just amusing.
Nbox9 6y ago
This highlights a need in the market for tools to help moderate a community. Imagine a tool that automatically detects hate speech and either auto-deletes or brings it to a moderator’s attention. Certain communities are being highjacked by extremist, racist, and simply malicious actors. The current method of reading chat and banning users doesn’t scale when sudden growth occurs. If effective moderation can occur at smaller levels, like discord channels or subreddits, then those communities won’t been to be removed by the larger platform. This would also be helpful for startup social media platforms that have yet to bring enough revenue to afford a facebook sized moderation team. Technically speaking it can do things like: * Flag posts that contain a blacklist of words, including non-obvious spellings of said word (using non-standard Unicode characters in place of letters) * Cross reference IP addresses or user names with banned users in other communities * Notify moderators of trending slogans, phrases, or hashtags that have non-obvious extremist roots. * Identify images containing extremist/hateful content * Flag content that contains any political discussion for communities that want to be completely apolitical. * Flag pornography EDIT: To be clear, the target audience for this would be community moderators/admins or startup social networks that haven’t built their own moderation infrastructure.
- asiachick 6y ago
  This sounds dystopian to me. I already can't stand Google Docs grammar checker trying to re-write my sentences to match some AI's idea of a correct sentence. Sure, when it actually detects a mistake I'm happy but 20% of the time it's just wrong and feels like it's trying to take my personality out of my writing. Your suggestion sounds like a step to toward the Black Mirror Season 2 "White Christmas" episode where the main character gets ban from all social interaction (not just online) forever until death
  - Nbox9 6y ago
    I think the current situation where a herd of deplatformed white supremacist and conspiracy theorist cultist can hijack your community is dystopian. Leaders in a community should be given the power to determine who is and isn’t a part of it.
- 6y ago
wolverine876 6y ago
Why should I care about them? They are perpetrating a financial bubble that will harm its participants, the economy (possibly to a significant degree), and that is specifically designed to hurt certain people. They are encouraging a mechanism that could do far more damage in the future. It's an angry, violent mob, and what I see looks very much like other violent, angry mobs I've seen recently, including the portrayal of victimhood in the post, used as a justification for the behavior. Mobs don't end well for the community and especially for the mob. Those who think 'well, I don't like the target so I'll overlook some things' soon find the mob doesn't stop when and where they hoped it would. Inviting and encouraging riots in your city is not a way to solve problems. Sometimes mobs do end well for people behind the scenes that use and manipulate the mob. What good are the participants doing society? I think if you step back and take a deep breath, there's no way that this activity is a good idea.
- jakeva 6y ago
  This sounds like an aristocratic response to a revolution. I don’t mean this as dismissive, I mean that clearly there are enough people dissatisfied with the status quo that they are taking measures surprising to those satisfied with the status quo.
  - nsator 6y ago
    I think you are talking about a subject that's completely out of your depth. WSB has always been about greed and making profit. The so called revolution is just a halo that they attached to themselves so they can all look like heros. From an economic perspective, what they did is irresponsible and dangerous. I agree with most of what OP said. It's just that some facts are harder to swallow in the current political climate of poor = good and rich = evil.
    - rland 6y ago
      If what WSB did was irresponsible and dangerous, then all of Wall Street is irresponsible and dangerous. That's the point here. The only difference is that regular people made money this time.
divs1210 6y ago
The time is ripe for Decentralized Social Media Networks and Decentralized Finance. Exciting times!
- zpeti 6y ago
  Except that they are also saying they weren't given the mod tools they needed. And I'm not sure how you moderate decentralised social media. I say this as the founder of Retalk.com, which we built exactly for this type of situation. I sincerely hope WSB decide to move platform and join us. We can give them the exact mod tools they need.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    You might not want to publicly state you don't know how to deal with moderation (centralized or decentralized) when you're running a public forum, there are tons of solutions out there in the public. Also, why would WSB decide to join you when you're stating you don't really know what you're doing?
kart23 6y ago
Hopefully they can migrate to a forum. Some subs that have been deplatformed have been very successful with phpBB, believe it or not. Moderation tools make it much easier to ban and harder for potential bad actors to have an impact on the community. Downside is growth, but I don't think you can get much better than a tweet from Elon and attention from every major news network.
proc0 6y ago
The reason censorship doesn't work is because the idea is still in the banned person's head. Denying access hardly does anything to change someone's mind. Sure, every company has the right to do what they want with their "platform", but don't be surprised if in the future these people persist into new platforms to share their ideas. New platforms that will be controlled by them with no possibility of censorship, or worse, the opposite type in an attempt to reverse the damage. "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer" And this is granting the justification for censorship, which of course most of the time is just about power and control, with innocent people paying the price.
loceng 6y ago
This thread seems half full of people downvoting who seem like they'd also be the ones to coddle those irrationally offended by people who will continue to use the words master-slave in computer contexts.
superkuh 6y ago
Discord bans everyone. You can't even talk about Team Fortress 2 bots without getting banned. What's frightening here is all the reports of the companies people were using to trade stocks cutting off the users from being able to buy gamestop stock arbitrarily. That kind of activity is surely against some sort of law.
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
Isn't the lesson to take away from this that online mega-communities simply doesn't work after they reach a certain size. Humans aren't wired in a way that allows them to gather in that number and be able to communicate with each other well. The only workable solution is software moderation which can never possess the moral agency required to legitimize tough decisions and make ethical calls. Rather than one big community, why not a whole tree of sub-communities. With some clever discovery mechanisms to share content and discussions between sub-communities, this would enable both the larger sense of community while allowing individual circles of tighter knit communities to also form. I think this is the basic idea behind federated social media too where the "clever discovery mechanisms" are human curated lists. It's a good pattern that could work in a more centralized model too.
- uzakov 6y ago
  >Rather than one big community, why not a whole tree of sub-communities Isn't this essentially Reddit?
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    Reddit owns the whole thing and can boot individual communities. I believe they are talking about self owned communities that form a shared meta-community - bottom up, rather than top down, organisation.
maxrobot 6y ago
What I really want to know is how the WSB guys learnt that these funds were shorting GME, AAL etc. Can anyone tell me? :)
- rb666 6y ago
  No :)
  - maxrobot 6y ago
    Thanks :)
- klunger 6y ago
  You, and everyone else :D
- sumedh 6y ago
  Short sellers first short the shares and then declare their position publicly that they are short because XYZ reason. If others find that the reasons given by the short sellers is legit more people short and driving down the price but instead with GME the opposite happened.
- abrookewood 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure that it is public information, though I'm not sure where to obtain it. Presumably the exchange? The WSB members know when the shorts expire etc, so it's detailed info.
  - dismalpedigree 6y ago
    Shorts don’t ever expire. Call and put options expire. Almost always on fridays. Short float stats are assembled by data aggregators who work with the exchanges and brokers. Its not directly available for free but instead with subscription services like Bloomberg or others. Many websites post the information publicly but it is ofter delayed and stripped of much additional information.
- personjerry 6y ago
teddyh 6y ago
> so the world can see that we aren't doing anything wrong here The world will see whatever the media, in aggregate, report. They got lucky that the first reports were “Elon Musk tweets about this quirky thing happening”, but the media will soon find another angle to the story. The only thing selling right now is outrage, and since people can’t be quite as outraged about Trump anymore, anything to fill the void is welcomed. You don’t have to do anything outrageous for the outrage maching to get you; they’ll get you anyway for whatever you were alleged to have been associated with, somebody who agreed with something somebody else claimed was from you. Add to this that there’s huge financial pressure for this kind of thing to be put out of business, and they’re probably completely doomed.
NDizzle 6y ago
I hope they have a backup plan for when Twitter deletes their account. I guess they’ll just have to make their own Twitter or Reddit, right?
tonetheman 6y ago
IRC to the moooon. :)
rapnie 6y ago
Time to spin up their own Lemmy server? https://lemmy.ml/docs/en/index.html https://lemmy.ml/docs/en/index.html "Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse. For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere."
astridpeth 6y ago
It's so sad what's happening
- MrMan 6y ago
  This was happening on yahoo finance years ago. Is it sad that the SEC takes an interest in such goings on?

212 points by neom 6y ago

I don't understand why this is an issue? Reddit/Discord are companies and they get to decide who they serve or not serve. WSB guys can just go off and make their own reddit and discord if they want. Why all the hullabaloo?

chovybizzass 6y ago

- https://upvotocracy.com/a/wallstreetbets https://upvotocracy.com/a/wallstreetbets - https://www.reddit.com/r/Wallstreetbetsnew/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Wallstreetbetsnew/ - https://ruqqus.com/+wallstreetbets https://ruqqus.com/+wallstreetbets - /join ##wallstreetbets on freenode You cut off the head, a dozen more emerge.

sokoloff 6y ago
Do that enough times and you just might snowshoe it out to less effectiveness/influence.
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  This is precisely what works, unfortunately. Each time you deplatform a group, only a certain percentage of the most dedicated users follow to the next iteration.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    > only a certain percentage of the most dedicated users follow to the next iteration. And they become the seed around which the new community crystallizes. As the social media and tech oligarchies get emboldened to attack less extreme groups, the people who find themselves deplatformed end up taking refuge in the only sites that are prepared to stand against the ratcheting up of restrictions on speech. Don't be surprised if, as a result of pressure on WSB, a lot of casual traders find themselves mixing and sympathizing with violent extremists on Gab and other platforms.
    - TeaDrunk 6y ago
      > And they become the seed around which the new community crystallizes. Only if they have time to, is my concern.
      - ehnto 6y ago
        I think their point was that as only the most extreme users move to the new platform, the community forms around more extreme ideals each time. For WSB I don't know what that means long term, what is an extreme trader?
    - yters 6y ago
      Yes I didn't find out about patriots.win until all the deplatforming. These purges might be helping more than hindering.
    - joubert 6y ago
      > As the social media and tech oligarchies get emboldened to attack less extreme groups To what end? Wouldn’t it hurt the bottom line too much? I don’t buy the “they’re out to get us” idea.
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        I'm not trying to suggest that "they're out to get us", just that once a group gets a taste of the power that comes from suppressing speech, it can become quite addictive and the goal posts for "safe" speech can shift. To see this dynamic played out in different circumstances, look at the Euphemism Treadmill[0] (as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) and Purity Spirals[1]. It may be bad for business to encourage this nonsense, but as echo-chambers become less diverse, they can exert more pressure on platforms to enforce their rules for them. [0] https://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadmill-replacing-r-word.html https://englishcowpath.blogspot.com/2011/06/euphemism-treadm... [1] https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/ https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
- ng12 6y ago
  We clearly should not be doing this. This is the slippery slope.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

natrik 6y ago

"We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community" Key point for me. Under the guise of 'hate speech' suppression is occurring. Of course every platform has the right to dictate users of their platform yada yada...

s5300 6y ago
Yeah this was a low blow from Discord I get they're probably scared as hell, but they don't even take care of the child porn or child grooming Discords. It's not even slightly paranoid to say that somebody gave financial incentive to make this happen, but for them to censor with absolute bullshit reasoning behind it... This is just not good.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- riffraff 6y ago
  > I get they're probably scared as hell, I don't, what should they be scared of?
  - edoceo 6y ago
    Big money players. Some may even be holding Discord equity and could give them a headache
  - xkeysc0re 6y ago
    A media spotlight isn't helpful when they are considered (rightly or wrongly) to be responsible for a lot of people losing money
  - 6y ago

sebmellen 6y ago

> a Discord spokesperson told Gizmodo that the channel had been banned “for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” On both Discord and Reddit, WallStreetBets users frequently refer to themselves collectively as “retards” and “autists,” and have been known to deploy the kinds of racial slurs and deliberately offensive language that have become commonplace in 4chan-style posting forums. [0] [0]: https://gizmodo.com/discord-bans-r-wallstreetbets-for-hate-speech-violation-1846146314 https://gizmodo.com/discord-bans-r-wallstreetbets-for-hate-s...

ehnto 6y ago
Yet it wasn't an issue to them until this moment.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Agreed, it's a totally made up reason. I do wonder if there wasn't some external pressure on Discord to do this.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Btw, the SSL cert on polylab.co expired 7 days ago! Might want to check on that :)
  - ehnto 6y ago
    Thanks for the heads up!
- jsploit 6y ago
  They were banned after "repeated warnings". It's possible that those warnings began before these market movements.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    They could've just as well "repeated" the "warning" one last time and shut them down next week. They choose to act now. At the very least, this was a PR mistake.

ng12 6y ago

> On both Discord and Reddit, wallstreetbets users frequently refer to themselves collectively as “retards” and “autists,” and have been known to deploy the kinds of racial slurs and deliberately offensive language that have become commonplace in 4chan-style posting forums. I read WSB daily for years and cannot recall a single usage of a racial slur. They definitely referred to themselves as autists/retards in a self-deprecating manner but that's hardly the same thing.

koheripbal 6y ago
This is one of the dangers of using "hate speech" as an nebulous term. You can then turn it around and use it as an excuse to ban whatever you want. I could easily read through any of the front page posts on Reddit, and find what I consider to be hate speech, and if I were in a position of power, I could just use that as a justification to ban the entire domain. Moreover, it easily allows adversaries the ability to plant hate speech in forums they dislike, and then pressure the authorities to ban it. At the end of the day, I am an adult, and I reject the notion that sites need to protect me from speech.
- cambalache 6y ago
  "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." Cardinal Richelieu (Alledgelly) A lesson this generation will have to learn again.
  - theinverseidea 6y ago
    Its terribly sad, and equally confusing has to how we got here. At least they'll have a firm understanding of just how sexist light speed is.
    - thick 6y ago
      Not sad or confusing at all. It’s par for the course. WSB likes to use a line from The Dark Knight that Joker says - that it’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message. It’s very apt and I look forward to how far these things go. I’m fine being on a site that doesn’t share my views. I’ll sit and laugh as the system fucks over every last person that keep defending it against their (and everyone else’s) better interests. And then when they can’t find the downvote button anymore because it’s no longer allowed, I’ll laugh some more.

aaron695 6y ago

We'll see the media further turn against them. I think they realised the media is broken, academia is broken so why not apply that to the financial market. But they/we still need to work to how to exist within this world which militantly wants to keep the status quo.

tomglynch 6y ago

> We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn't allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven't given us special access despite asking for it. Interesting that they made software to moderate but reddit either doesn't want to or can't handle the throughput required to run it. These threads are some of the biggest ever seen on reddit. What happens if they get shut down again? Should they begin migrating to telegram groups?

koheripbal 6y ago
Reddit doesn't want the SEC breathing down their necks. They are looking for an excuse to ban them. ...and if they can't find one, the SEC will probably just order them to shut it.
- emteycz 6y ago
  Based on what do you think SEC can order random social media companies to shut down forums?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    They will make one phone call to the CEO saying they are opening an investigation that Reddit is facilitating and unlicensed forum for providing investment advice, and that to limit potential liability, the SEC is recommending that Reddit close the sub in question. Reddit's one lawyer will sit with the CEO, and they will have a 4 second conversation "Yeah, we're not sticking our neck out for those self-proclaimed retards.". ...and that's it. Reddit has banned subs for far far less.
    - frays 6y ago
      Although this may have been a simple explanation for you, it brought a lot of insight for me. Thank you.

tomglynch 6y ago

I think this could do with a better title, it is not clear what the content is about.

koheripbal 6y ago

Just label them as Trump supporters and tech companies will fall over themselves banning them.

tomcam 6y ago
Downvoted, yet doesn’t even qualify as satire anymore
koheripbal 6y ago
see... that's exactly what they're doing... https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6s9tb/the_financial_times_are_attempting_to_link_wsb/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6s9tb/the_...

Waterluvian 6y ago

I'm surprised they haven't formed stonkchan and begun migrating there. If they don't use this moment to formalize self-managed comms, they're not going to be a community for much longer, given they're putting the squeeze on people to the order of billions of dollars.

el_dev_hell 6y ago
Agreed. Reddit is catching flack. It's only a matter of time before they pull the pin for some ambiguous reason. It's the perfect time to start funneling the audience to a dedicated forum (or literally a chan).

tomcam 6y ago

> We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty... > That is why I'm throwing my support behind the Twitter handle in general. This won’t end well

dilap 6y ago
Out of the frying pan, into...another frying pan! I keep waiting for one of these high-profile, fucked-with groups to jump to a dentralized network. Still waiting...
grey_earthling 6y ago
> you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore Yeah you do, just not in someone else's space. Like if you want to bellow out some Klingon opera, you can, but they're gonna throw you out of Tesco. Is "my house, my rules" really so hard to understand?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Is "my house, my rules" really so hard to understand? People are waking up to the bait&switch the on-line platforms are. They do everything they say to pretend they're the public square, short of saying it, but when push comes to shove, they reveal themselves as private owners with an agenda. What's doubly annoying is that governments worldwide decided to participate. When politicians' primary channel of communicating with their constituents/subjects is through Twitter, you could morally argue that it should be treated as public square. That one is on the politicians though.
- hoseja 6y ago
  Surely you can't be serious after what happened to Parler. You just can't period, short of building your own infrastructure.

pretendgeneer 6y ago

You have to wonder how much influence the large VC backers of reddit and discord had/will have in the treatment of WSB. Surely they're not taking too kindly to them making such an mockery of capital markets.

Nacdor 6y ago

> I read WSB daily for years and cannot recall a single usage of a racial slur. Same, I've been a subscriber of WSB since at least 4 years ago. I also check TheDonald.win (now Patriots.win) on a regular basis. Both are constantly accused of racism and/or white supremacy and yet I see none of either. People use terms like 'racist', 'nazi', 'fascist' and many others as synonyms for "any person or thing I don't like or disagree with". It's also the media's favorite new strategy for discrediting sources that contradict their chosen narrative.

neilparikh 6y ago
> I also check TheDonald.win (now Patriots.win) on a regular basis. Both are constantly accused of racism and/or white supremacy and yet I see none of either. The 8th post on the homepage is this: https://patriots.win/p/11SK7JKMbx/guess-what-my-favorite-thing-to-/c/ https://patriots.win/p/11SK7JKMbx/guess-what-my-favorite-thi..., and the top comment is a list of racial slurs for Asian/Chinese people. There's a few other threads that include similar lists, as well as comments making fun of Asian/Chinese people in general. I saw a few slurs for gay people as well. I found all this in 5 minutes, so I'm surprised you haven't seen anything even though you browse it "on a regular basis".
- yters 6y ago
  Yes I browse regularly and there is definitely prejudice on display. However the general tenor is to downvote or at least not upvote such content. Certainly not as bad as I expected given their reputation. Leads me to see them in a more sympathetic light than as a bunch of racist revolutionaries.
  - neilparikh 6y ago
    These posts are on the front page, and the comments are top of the threads. How does that result from "downvote or at least not upvote such content"?
    - yters 6y ago

boardwaalk 6y ago

This r/wsb stuff is the Internet equivalent of soap opera drama/celebrity gossip. In a way, it's amazing how fast we revert to pointless nonsense news. Hopefully the news cycle sweeps this away quickly.

reidjs 6y ago

I love the trading advice, just buy and hold. This is the next generations occupy Wall Street

ALittleLight 6y ago
That seems to be contrary to the sentiment expressed in the reddit post - "There's also too much political bullshit in a community that was never ever political. The only way I want to occupy Wall St is in a suit myself or rent-free in the mind of a blown up short."
- reidjs 6y ago
  It seems to me instead of holding ineffective street protests they are actively trying to get a piece of the pie, or destroy it in the process.
MrMan 6y ago
It's just manipulation- as a flood of rubes come in to "buy and hold" the price explodes and then some rubes get into options trades that give them downside exposure, some short the stock, some believe the hype and think it's an investment, and some are there to speculate but can either only go long or get the timing wrong. So the buying pressure at some point subsides, and momentum to the short side builds as people exit. Participants in these forums like yahoo finance before it are constantly trying to exhort the group to move into names in which the touts already have positions setup.

thick 6y ago

Refreshing to have HN backpedaling on years of “they’re a private business they can do what they want” rhetoric. We already know you don’t have a spine, now it’s just amusing.

Nbox9 6y ago

This highlights a need in the market for tools to help moderate a community. Imagine a tool that automatically detects hate speech and either auto-deletes or brings it to a moderator’s attention. Certain communities are being highjacked by extremist, racist, and simply malicious actors. The current method of reading chat and banning users doesn’t scale when sudden growth occurs. If effective moderation can occur at smaller levels, like discord channels or subreddits, then those communities won’t been to be removed by the larger platform. This would also be helpful for startup social media platforms that have yet to bring enough revenue to afford a facebook sized moderation team. Technically speaking it can do things like: * Flag posts that contain a blacklist of words, including non-obvious spellings of said word (using non-standard Unicode characters in place of letters) * Cross reference IP addresses or user names with banned users in other communities * Notify moderators of trending slogans, phrases, or hashtags that have non-obvious extremist roots. * Identify images containing extremist/hateful content * Flag content that contains any political discussion for communities that want to be completely apolitical. * Flag pornography EDIT: To be clear, the target audience for this would be community moderators/admins or startup social networks that haven’t built their own moderation infrastructure.

asiachick 6y ago
This sounds dystopian to me. I already can't stand Google Docs grammar checker trying to re-write my sentences to match some AI's idea of a correct sentence. Sure, when it actually detects a mistake I'm happy but 20% of the time it's just wrong and feels like it's trying to take my personality out of my writing. Your suggestion sounds like a step to toward the Black Mirror Season 2 "White Christmas" episode where the main character gets ban from all social interaction (not just online) forever until death
- Nbox9 6y ago
  I think the current situation where a herd of deplatformed white supremacist and conspiracy theorist cultist can hijack your community is dystopian. Leaders in a community should be given the power to determine who is and isn’t a part of it.
6y ago

wolverine876 6y ago

Why should I care about them? They are perpetrating a financial bubble that will harm its participants, the economy (possibly to a significant degree), and that is specifically designed to hurt certain people. They are encouraging a mechanism that could do far more damage in the future. It's an angry, violent mob, and what I see looks very much like other violent, angry mobs I've seen recently, including the portrayal of victimhood in the post, used as a justification for the behavior. Mobs don't end well for the community and especially for the mob. Those who think 'well, I don't like the target so I'll overlook some things' soon find the mob doesn't stop when and where they hoped it would. Inviting and encouraging riots in your city is not a way to solve problems. Sometimes mobs do end well for people behind the scenes that use and manipulate the mob. What good are the participants doing society? I think if you step back and take a deep breath, there's no way that this activity is a good idea.

jakeva 6y ago
This sounds like an aristocratic response to a revolution. I don’t mean this as dismissive, I mean that clearly there are enough people dissatisfied with the status quo that they are taking measures surprising to those satisfied with the status quo.
- nsator 6y ago
  I think you are talking about a subject that's completely out of your depth. WSB has always been about greed and making profit. The so called revolution is just a halo that they attached to themselves so they can all look like heros. From an economic perspective, what they did is irresponsible and dangerous. I agree with most of what OP said. It's just that some facts are harder to swallow in the current political climate of poor = good and rich = evil.
  - rland 6y ago
    If what WSB did was irresponsible and dangerous, then all of Wall Street is irresponsible and dangerous. That's the point here. The only difference is that regular people made money this time.

divs1210 6y ago

The time is ripe for Decentralized Social Media Networks and Decentralized Finance. Exciting times!

zpeti 6y ago
Except that they are also saying they weren't given the mod tools they needed. And I'm not sure how you moderate decentralised social media. I say this as the founder of Retalk.com, which we built exactly for this type of situation. I sincerely hope WSB decide to move platform and join us. We can give them the exact mod tools they need.
- capableweb 6y ago
  You might not want to publicly state you don't know how to deal with moderation (centralized or decentralized) when you're running a public forum, there are tons of solutions out there in the public. Also, why would WSB decide to join you when you're stating you don't really know what you're doing?

kart23 6y ago

Hopefully they can migrate to a forum. Some subs that have been deplatformed have been very successful with phpBB, believe it or not. Moderation tools make it much easier to ban and harder for potential bad actors to have an impact on the community. Downside is growth, but I don't think you can get much better than a tweet from Elon and attention from every major news network.

proc0 6y ago

The reason censorship doesn't work is because the idea is still in the banned person's head. Denying access hardly does anything to change someone's mind. Sure, every company has the right to do what they want with their "platform", but don't be surprised if in the future these people persist into new platforms to share their ideas. New platforms that will be controlled by them with no possibility of censorship, or worse, the opposite type in an attempt to reverse the damage. "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer" And this is granting the justification for censorship, which of course most of the time is just about power and control, with innocent people paying the price.

loceng 6y ago

This thread seems half full of people downvoting who seem like they'd also be the ones to coddle those irrationally offended by people who will continue to use the words master-slave in computer contexts.

superkuh 6y ago

Discord bans everyone. You can't even talk about Team Fortress 2 bots without getting banned. What's frightening here is all the reports of the companies people were using to trade stocks cutting off the users from being able to buy gamestop stock arbitrarily. That kind of activity is surely against some sort of law.

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

Isn't the lesson to take away from this that online mega-communities simply doesn't work after they reach a certain size. Humans aren't wired in a way that allows them to gather in that number and be able to communicate with each other well. The only workable solution is software moderation which can never possess the moral agency required to legitimize tough decisions and make ethical calls. Rather than one big community, why not a whole tree of sub-communities. With some clever discovery mechanisms to share content and discussions between sub-communities, this would enable both the larger sense of community while allowing individual circles of tighter knit communities to also form. I think this is the basic idea behind federated social media too where the "clever discovery mechanisms" are human curated lists. It's a good pattern that could work in a more centralized model too.

uzakov 6y ago
>Rather than one big community, why not a whole tree of sub-communities Isn't this essentially Reddit?
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  Reddit owns the whole thing and can boot individual communities. I believe they are talking about self owned communities that form a shared meta-community - bottom up, rather than top down, organisation.

maxrobot 6y ago

What I really want to know is how the WSB guys learnt that these funds were shorting GME, AAL etc. Can anyone tell me? :)

rb666 6y ago
No :)
- maxrobot 6y ago
  Thanks :)
klunger 6y ago
You, and everyone else :D
sumedh 6y ago
Short sellers first short the shares and then declare their position publicly that they are short because XYZ reason. If others find that the reasons given by the short sellers is legit more people short and driving down the price but instead with GME the opposite happened.
abrookewood 6y ago
I'm pretty sure that it is public information, though I'm not sure where to obtain it. Presumably the exchange? The WSB members know when the shorts expire etc, so it's detailed info.
- dismalpedigree 6y ago
  Shorts don’t ever expire. Call and put options expire. Almost always on fridays. Short float stats are assembled by data aggregators who work with the exchanges and brokers. Its not directly available for free but instead with subscription services like Bloomberg or others. Many websites post the information publicly but it is ofter delayed and stripped of much additional information.
personjerry 6y ago

teddyh 6y ago

> so the world can see that we aren't doing anything wrong here The world will see whatever the media, in aggregate, report. They got lucky that the first reports were “Elon Musk tweets about this quirky thing happening”, but the media will soon find another angle to the story. The only thing selling right now is outrage, and since people can’t be quite as outraged about Trump anymore, anything to fill the void is welcomed. You don’t have to do anything outrageous for the outrage maching to get you; they’ll get you anyway for whatever you were alleged to have been associated with, somebody who agreed with something somebody else claimed was from you. Add to this that there’s huge financial pressure for this kind of thing to be put out of business, and they’re probably completely doomed.

NDizzle 6y ago

I hope they have a backup plan for when Twitter deletes their account. I guess they’ll just have to make their own Twitter or Reddit, right?

tonetheman 6y ago

IRC to the moooon. :)

rapnie 6y ago

Time to spin up their own Lemmy server? https://lemmy.ml/docs/en/index.html https://lemmy.ml/docs/en/index.html "Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse. For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere."

astridpeth 6y ago

It's so sad what's happening

MrMan 6y ago
This was happening on yahoo finance years ago. Is it sad that the SEC takes an interest in such goings on?