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Okay so I completely agree but I want to add something to what’s going on Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive. The foundation of the communi

by pfraze 6y ago

Okay so I completely agree but I want to add something to what’s going on Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive. The foundation of the community is that a forum talking about stock investing strategies is, at its heart, really dumb. It’s harder than most people can manage to evaluate all the “DD” flying around and any advice other than playing it safe (r/investing) is stupid to take from a rando on a forum. WSB’s culture is a reaction which embraces how stupid the exercise is, and then races to the bottom on rhetoric, which makes it all about meme irony. So they (excuse the language) call themselves “retards,” “degenerates,” and “autists” (again, their words). It sometimes gets more offensive from there, but they try to keep the insults self-targeted. Generally speaking they’re pretty clever and witty in their behavior, but you know how this gets when it goes mainstream. Less clever people show up and attach to the “offensive” part without bringing along the “clever” part. My general sense is that WSB works hard to moderate within its sensibility so it stays enjoyable, but with the big influx, I’d bet Facebook and Discord are either reacting to behavior which is slipping past the WSB mods due to the influxes, or they’re reacting to the aesthetic without understanding the underlying wit. Another side-effect of going mainstream: it becomes political, and politics is perception. Frankly though, I think most people would enjoy WSB culture right now, given the underdog narrative and the embrace of the irreverent. If I were Facebook or Discord, I’d trust WSB mods to get things back under control and help them protect the community, not ban it. That said, I’d bet good money their reasons for banning are not evidence-free. So the real question is, why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community.

aquaticsunset 6y ago
Discord has since taken the stance of helping the mods, instead of permaban. I liked hearing that news earlier today. https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254339/discord-r-wallstreetbets-server-help-moderation-ban https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254339/discord-r-wallst...
- pfraze 6y ago
  That’s really encouraging to hear
  - Zak 6y ago
    Perhaps, but not as encouraging as a migration to self-hosted Matrix servers on traditional paid dedicated/virtual server hosting that's much less interested in policing its customers' content than platforms are.
    - ralston3 6y ago
      The thing with me is, WSB is a group of what? A few million at least? I saw that they were up to 1.2 million maybe yesterday. And they're having a hard time on most if not all platforms. If not technically, then in terms of some form of censorship (as is the case here). There was the Discord issue, this Facebook issue. I've heard Reddit devs has been helpful with scaling r/wallstreetbets, but even still, the number of users and the (crazy yet benign) content is proving too much for a single subreddit to handle. This is a real-life use case for a possibly open-source, scalable message board. I feel like people are suddenly seeing the downsides of these backdoor-dealing, self-interested walled gardens. The era of the walled garden will end. #RemindMe
      - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
        /r/wallstreetbets has 5.3mil members right now, up from ~2mil a week or so ago. Reddit has not been helpful at all. The mods made a post after they shut down the sub saying that the Reddit API can't handle the amount of traffic they need to moderate, and they've asked for special permissions.
      - loopz 6y ago
        It's a great irony people will stick it to the man using a private closed walled garden. Pump and dump is market manipulation. We all know the system will mitigate, both for survival but also stability and preventing bubbles.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Discord seems to be the one of the least bad of the social/ messaging platforms.
  - young_unixer 6y ago
    For now. Wait till they get bigger and Vice or the NYT writes an article about how Discord is a "safe haven for hate speech and white supremacy".
    - scrollaway 6y ago
      That's still a long way away. Maybe negative two years. https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/discord-safe-space-white-supremacists.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/discord-safe-space-whit...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  Do i read that article right and this "Helping the mods" is an euphemism? They banned all bad words and image memes (due to lack of ability to check the content with a bot) and told the mods to rigorously enforce compliance with Discords standards or the group gets removed again. Maybe they helped configuring the mod-bot ...
- colllectorof 6y ago
  Discord is probing how much censorship they can get away with. This is a standard tactic for social media companies today. They ban first then backpedal later if there is too much backlash. This helps them normalize censorship while minimizing reputation loss.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    Yes, this is generally the path to maximizing power. It is helpful to test limits periodically.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> My general sense is that WSB works hard to moderate within its sensibility so it stays enjoyable, but with the big influx, I’d bet Facebook and Discord are either reacting to behavior which is slipping past the WSB mods due to the influxes, This is possible, they are a victim of their own success in a way... or The banks are looking for a way—any way—to shut them down. This is costing millions of dollars. Paying a few shills to jump into the group ramp up the BS and a few others to jump into the group and take offense at every little thing might just be what it takes to overwhelm the mods. Not Facebook collusion, just a little discourse sabotage.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  Given the number of new people being the size of a substantial city, the worst of them is statistically guaranteed to be worse than the most horrible professional troll, I would argue.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    From the sounds of it, you don't even need to be a professional troll. Just flag every offensive post there is.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  What banks? And why banks? Banks are not involved in the short squeezes at all.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
    I agree with your skepticism but it is possible, even likely, that maple and melvin were levered as part of their short strategy. I think its far more likely that the poison would be released by funds themselves, but do not think for a second that banks will not intervene to safeguard their revolvers...
  - swader999 6y ago
    Banks back the primary dealers who take and back these leveraged trades. They are up to their noses in this.
dalbasal 6y ago
Agreed on WSB culture but.... The "real question," imo is not about how FB, discord or reddit handle WSB's culture. It's why have they all decided to act right now, just as this gamestop maneuver is happening? That is the fishy part... and it's too fishy to leave it unaddressed and talk content. Either way, this just shows why we can't have a handful of companies moderating most of the internet under a TOS regime.
- wvenable 6y ago
  It might be fishy but there is also a lot new interest in WSB and everything related. So much interest that /r/WSB voluntarily shut themselves down for a while because they couldn't handle the moderation situation. So why it's happening now can more multifaceted than the more conspiratorial reasons. Even increased media attention is enough for someone to act -- The Hackernews community uses that all the time to get apps unbanned from the app store, for example.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    Sure. I don't mean that it's unequivocally part of a conspiracy. But like I said, It can't go unaddressed. This isn't a Hacker news story about a banned app. It's international news, and the news isn't about WSB's (admittedly) bad language.
    - wvenable 6y ago
      It's international news -- so the spotlight is on. Probably most of the Internet is unsavory and nobody cares because nobody knows.
    - bravura 6y ago
      Social networks were forced to moderate with the capitol riots. Now they have to moderate left wing mob organization on their platforms to avoid the perception they will only censor the right wing.
      - 6y ago
perl4ever 6y ago
>why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community I saw a news item that said Discord is, and was, and the server is back up with improved moderation.
deepGem 6y ago
If there is any adult content (in the form of swear words) it is moderated and marked NSFW on wsb. If that was the issue, all Facebook had to do was issue a warning and make the group adults only or something like that. This outright ban is just insane.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  Which seems to be a good indicator that the motivation wasn't any form of adult content or NSFW which they have tools to deal with. It was more reactionary
newacct583 6y ago
> Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive. That's the way 4chan presented too, and it turned out that the community wasn't entirely as ironic as its members claimed. Cultures turn toxic really, really fast. And this kind of "ironic offensiveness" turns into a shield for genuine hate in a way that even long term participants don't notice until it's too late.
- pfraze 6y ago
  Not wrong. Eternal September ruins everything
  - MrMan 6y ago
    no saying "Eternal September" ruins it. That or "correlation does not equal causation"
- Teever 6y ago
  Just because someone is going to shit in the pool eventually doesn't mean that we can't enjoy the waters until someone inevitably does the dirty.
trianglem 6y ago
No the community is genuinely toxic and that is the fun of it. It’s boorish offensiveness, not some ironic satire. This is what gives it its power however.
op03 6y ago
The 6 chimp brain has no clue what its doing when it comes to group dynamics at population scale. The only moves are blunder, react, counter react, avoid, fight, flee. The chimps at FB have dug themselves into deep holes. The only way they save themselves is to pull everyone else inside and cry for Grandma to show up.
intended 6y ago
Excellent response. This line in particular > side-effect of going mainstream: it becomes political, and politics is perception. This is absolutely true. Before, when this was between a few reporters and Wallstreet / WSB, it was possible to handle. Now it has crossed the tipping point into mass politics, and the size of the audience involved is massive. Nuance is dead.
CivBase 6y ago
> So the real question is, why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community. This. At the end of the day, Facebook/Discord has the power to ban individual users. There is no good reason to nuke an entire community if the the mods running said community are being cooperative. This isn't about "hate speech" or "adult sexual exploitation" or whatever the excuse dice end up rolling next time. This is a knee-jerk reaction from a platform with a ton of power and no incentive to wield it responsibly.
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  I don't know the Discord popularity but the reddit sub has like 4 million new users this week. Its not really at a scale where doing anything to individual users is going to work.
victorbojica 6y ago
I'm thinking that their stock is also tied to the hedge funds holding short positions on GME and etc. They also took a dive because of WSB - maybe their covering their own interests?
pbreit 6y ago
Who cares?
dankw1z 6y ago
You captured how I would describe WSB pretty succinctly. It's relatively clever people just not caring to bother with grammar, being correct, making fun of often funny events in the world of MONEY.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
malwrar 6y ago
Having expressed this understanding of WSB's benign intent in their use of the term "retard", surely you see why some random person at Discord taking offense to it and whimsically banning the entire community is messed up, right? Discord is host to a massive variety of nominally private (you need a link to join) communities that have real, deep value to those who participate in them. Over time they develop their own unique history and culture that has a complex context that can't be assessed with simple, surface level judgements by some Discord employee to whom said community is the n+1th problem of the day. Banning the community comes off to me as an arbitrary exercise of an unearned moral authority, and feels deeply arrogant and ethnocentric in all the negatives that term implies. Obviously Discord is a private company etc etc. They're also the dominant platform upon which ~140 million people [1] from all over the world communicate, in all the messy ways humans do. I don't know about you, but I'd rather they focus on keeping the platform running, collect their revenue from their customers, and mind their own business. This is what everyone who uses the service expects them to do, after all. 1: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/17/discord-raises-100-million-as-its-social-hub-hits-140-million-users/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/17/discord-raises-100-millio...
- epistasis 6y ago
  The comment you are responding to is talking about more offensive stuff than the "benign intent" of the core WSB community. I've only been in a handful of discord communities, but none of them would tolerate even the "benign intent" WSB stuff. Also, "benign intent" does not make offensive behavior less offensive. Intent can matter, but it certainly isn't everything.
  - malwrar 6y ago
    We agree here that the term is probably offensive even in the context that WSB is using it. If someone used that term here in the same way that WSB people do, I'm sure we'd both wish that dang would remove that post and ban the poster for a bit to cool off. This doesn't address the larger question of whether or not we have a right to enforce our completely subjective standards globally on other communities which we don't belong to. Personally, I wouldn't want some outsider deciding that me and my friends weren't allowed to talk to eachother anymore if we decided to start using the term towards each other privately in jest.
cbozeman 6y ago
This is not how WallStreetBets started. I joined the community in 2017 and I can tell you, there was high-level due diligence going on that made me wonder if some of the people posting might also be working at large investment banks, but couldn't get these certain trades they were advocating past their compliance guys (at some point, "too risky" starts to overlap in the Venn diagram with "too dumb"). Like every thing in the world that gains massive popularity, it attracts the normies who want in on the action, but aren't willing to do the, quite literally months or years (depending on how deeply you throw yourself into it) of learning required to even understand most of the DD posts there. Yes, there was the occasional ridiculous trolling, like convincing posters on /r/investing that /r/wallstreetbets had a Lean Hogs Insider Trading Ring (which still makes me laugh out loud to this day), but it was far more rare. Yes, the meme posts have risen dramatically, but there's still occasional good due diligence there, its just now you have to sift through a mountain of shit instead of small hill of it.
- diehunde 6y ago
  The same Chamath Palihapitiya said in his CNBC interview that he read posts in WSB and saw better analysis than the ones coming from real wall street analysts he has worked with.
  - MrMan 6y ago
    because a lot of them are on the street or big funds
- Rapzid 6y ago
  You want to know what it looks like is happening now though? It looks like these peeps are weaponizing the sub to their own benefit in the name of "sticking it to the man". Everything about this smacks of a massive, crowd sourced "market manipulation" under the guise of righteousness. All the people screaming "YOLO I can't care if I lose X" seem to be missing the fact that their money isn't "lost"; it is ending up in the pockets of a few at their expense.
  - piva00 6y ago
Dma54rhs 6y ago
Out of morbid curiosity I was looking for all these places from to Facebook to Discord servers popping up and one obvious strong topic was about 'sticking it to wall street jews' so you can imagine where it's going.
NoOneNew 6y ago
This kind of boils down to preference in humanity as well. Do you prefer a group that makes dick/retard/cuck jokes for laughes or prefer a group that laughed when they ruined the economy, put people out in the streets and coerced the gov to bail them out because they were too important to go out on the street? Politically correct speech is bankrupt in all forms of ethics and morality if it favors the second group just because they have kinder words. Generally why lots of people are disgusted by PC rhetoric. It's bullshit to its core because it holds no real core value, it just keeps things superficially pretty for the predators of society. I'm enjoying this ride and wish there was more I could do because it's become bigger than the money. This whole thing is pulling back the curtain and we're getting to see the frail ankles of the wizard.
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  Less clever people show up and attach to the “offensive” part without bringing along the “clever” part. Going a bit off topic, but HNs constant fight against this is its best asset. Sometimes it's annoying to see a funny joke down-voted, but it's so much better than the entire comment section devolving into nonsense like slashdot did >15 years ago.
  - NoOneNew 6y ago
    Absolutely understand that position and I know (and can prove through my HN history) that I'm pretty crass as well. However, this issue comes to facebook using the sensitive speech arguement to shut them down. How many other groups are just as bad if you do a simple word search on their database? If they effectively shut down everyone and every group for the offense of saying dick immediately, fine. I'm okay with that. But arbitrarily doing so, especially when the group is hurting their financial overlords, that's where I call bullshit and stand by using that word. They got zero flak pre this short squeeze and their attitude and speech is no different. But they're embarrassing the folks who cry for gov bail outs. Focusing on them making offensive jokes is a red herring from wall street trying to cover their ass.
  - thedanbob 6y ago
    It reminds me of the one and only time I've replied-all to an email with a joke. At the time it seemed perfect, the best possible setup, something everyone would get and enjoy. But the dozen or so joke replies immediately after mine ruined it and convinced me never to do it again.

by pfraze 6y ago

aquaticsunset 6y ago

Discord has since taken the stance of helping the mods, instead of permaban. I liked hearing that news earlier today. https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254339/discord-r-wallstreetbets-server-help-moderation-ban https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254339/discord-r-wallst...

pfraze 6y ago
That’s really encouraging to hear
- Zak 6y ago
  Perhaps, but not as encouraging as a migration to self-hosted Matrix servers on traditional paid dedicated/virtual server hosting that's much less interested in policing its customers' content than platforms are.
  - ralston3 6y ago
    The thing with me is, WSB is a group of what? A few million at least? I saw that they were up to 1.2 million maybe yesterday. And they're having a hard time on most if not all platforms. If not technically, then in terms of some form of censorship (as is the case here). There was the Discord issue, this Facebook issue. I've heard Reddit devs has been helpful with scaling r/wallstreetbets, but even still, the number of users and the (crazy yet benign) content is proving too much for a single subreddit to handle. This is a real-life use case for a possibly open-source, scalable message board. I feel like people are suddenly seeing the downsides of these backdoor-dealing, self-interested walled gardens. The era of the walled garden will end. #RemindMe
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      /r/wallstreetbets has 5.3mil members right now, up from ~2mil a week or so ago. Reddit has not been helpful at all. The mods made a post after they shut down the sub saying that the Reddit API can't handle the amount of traffic they need to moderate, and they've asked for special permissions.
    - loopz 6y ago
      It's a great irony people will stick it to the man using a private closed walled garden. Pump and dump is market manipulation. We all know the system will mitigate, both for survival but also stability and preventing bubbles.
ogre_codes 6y ago
Discord seems to be the one of the least bad of the social/ messaging platforms.
- young_unixer 6y ago
  For now. Wait till they get bigger and Vice or the NYT writes an article about how Discord is a "safe haven for hate speech and white supremacy".
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    That's still a long way away. Maybe negative two years. https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/discord-safe-space-white-supremacists.html https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/discord-safe-space-whit...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
Do i read that article right and this "Helping the mods" is an euphemism? They banned all bad words and image memes (due to lack of ability to check the content with a bot) and told the mods to rigorously enforce compliance with Discords standards or the group gets removed again. Maybe they helped configuring the mod-bot ...
colllectorof 6y ago
Discord is probing how much censorship they can get away with. This is a standard tactic for social media companies today. They ban first then backpedal later if there is too much backlash. This helps them normalize censorship while minimizing reputation loss.
- aeternum 6y ago
  Yes, this is generally the path to maximizing power. It is helpful to test limits periodically.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> My general sense is that WSB works hard to moderate within its sensibility so it stays enjoyable, but with the big influx, I’d bet Facebook and Discord are either reacting to behavior which is slipping past the WSB mods due to the influxes, This is possible, they are a victim of their own success in a way... or The banks are looking for a way—any way—to shut them down. This is costing millions of dollars. Paying a few shills to jump into the group ramp up the BS and a few others to jump into the group and take offense at every little thing might just be what it takes to overwhelm the mods. Not Facebook collusion, just a little discourse sabotage.

perl4ever 6y ago
Given the number of new people being the size of a substantial city, the worst of them is statistically guaranteed to be worse than the most horrible professional troll, I would argue.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  From the sounds of it, you don't even need to be a professional troll. Just flag every offensive post there is.
fractionalhare 6y ago
What banks? And why banks? Banks are not involved in the short squeezes at all.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  I agree with your skepticism but it is possible, even likely, that maple and melvin were levered as part of their short strategy. I think its far more likely that the poison would be released by funds themselves, but do not think for a second that banks will not intervene to safeguard their revolvers...
- swader999 6y ago
  Banks back the primary dealers who take and back these leveraged trades. They are up to their noses in this.

dalbasal 6y ago

Agreed on WSB culture but.... The "real question," imo is not about how FB, discord or reddit handle WSB's culture. It's why have they all decided to act right now, just as this gamestop maneuver is happening? That is the fishy part... and it's too fishy to leave it unaddressed and talk content. Either way, this just shows why we can't have a handful of companies moderating most of the internet under a TOS regime.

wvenable 6y ago
It might be fishy but there is also a lot new interest in WSB and everything related. So much interest that /r/WSB voluntarily shut themselves down for a while because they couldn't handle the moderation situation. So why it's happening now can more multifaceted than the more conspiratorial reasons. Even increased media attention is enough for someone to act -- The Hackernews community uses that all the time to get apps unbanned from the app store, for example.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Sure. I don't mean that it's unequivocally part of a conspiracy. But like I said, It can't go unaddressed. This isn't a Hacker news story about a banned app. It's international news, and the news isn't about WSB's (admittedly) bad language.
  - wvenable 6y ago
    It's international news -- so the spotlight is on. Probably most of the Internet is unsavory and nobody cares because nobody knows.
  - bravura 6y ago
    Social networks were forced to moderate with the capitol riots. Now they have to moderate left wing mob organization on their platforms to avoid the perception they will only censor the right wing.
    - 6y ago

perl4ever 6y ago

>why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community I saw a news item that said Discord is, and was, and the server is back up with improved moderation.

deepGem 6y ago

If there is any adult content (in the form of swear words) it is moderated and marked NSFW on wsb. If that was the issue, all Facebook had to do was issue a warning and make the group adults only or something like that. This outright ban is just insane.

Avicebron 6y ago
Which seems to be a good indicator that the motivation wasn't any form of adult content or NSFW which they have tools to deal with. It was more reactionary

newacct583 6y ago

> Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive. That's the way 4chan presented too, and it turned out that the community wasn't entirely as ironic as its members claimed. Cultures turn toxic really, really fast. And this kind of "ironic offensiveness" turns into a shield for genuine hate in a way that even long term participants don't notice until it's too late.

pfraze 6y ago
Not wrong. Eternal September ruins everything
- MrMan 6y ago
  no saying "Eternal September" ruins it. That or "correlation does not equal causation"
Teever 6y ago
Just because someone is going to shit in the pool eventually doesn't mean that we can't enjoy the waters until someone inevitably does the dirty.

trianglem 6y ago

No the community is genuinely toxic and that is the fun of it. It’s boorish offensiveness, not some ironic satire. This is what gives it its power however.

op03 6y ago

The 6 chimp brain has no clue what its doing when it comes to group dynamics at population scale. The only moves are blunder, react, counter react, avoid, fight, flee. The chimps at FB have dug themselves into deep holes. The only way they save themselves is to pull everyone else inside and cry for Grandma to show up.

intended 6y ago

Excellent response. This line in particular > side-effect of going mainstream: it becomes political, and politics is perception. This is absolutely true. Before, when this was between a few reporters and Wallstreet / WSB, it was possible to handle. Now it has crossed the tipping point into mass politics, and the size of the audience involved is massive. Nuance is dead.

CivBase 6y ago

> So the real question is, why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community. This. At the end of the day, Facebook/Discord has the power to ban individual users. There is no good reason to nuke an entire community if the the mods running said community are being cooperative. This isn't about "hate speech" or "adult sexual exploitation" or whatever the excuse dice end up rolling next time. This is a knee-jerk reaction from a platform with a ton of power and no incentive to wield it responsibly.

lazyasciiart 6y ago
I don't know the Discord popularity but the reddit sub has like 4 million new users this week. Its not really at a scale where doing anything to individual users is going to work.

victorbojica 6y ago

I'm thinking that their stock is also tied to the hedge funds holding short positions on GME and etc. They also took a dive because of WSB - maybe their covering their own interests?

pbreit 6y ago

Who cares?

dankw1z 6y ago

You captured how I would describe WSB pretty succinctly. It's relatively clever people just not caring to bother with grammar, being correct, making fun of often funny events in the world of MONEY.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

malwrar 6y ago

Having expressed this understanding of WSB's benign intent in their use of the term "retard", surely you see why some random person at Discord taking offense to it and whimsically banning the entire community is messed up, right? Discord is host to a massive variety of nominally private (you need a link to join) communities that have real, deep value to those who participate in them. Over time they develop their own unique history and culture that has a complex context that can't be assessed with simple, surface level judgements by some Discord employee to whom said community is the n+1th problem of the day. Banning the community comes off to me as an arbitrary exercise of an unearned moral authority, and feels deeply arrogant and ethnocentric in all the negatives that term implies. Obviously Discord is a private company etc etc. They're also the dominant platform upon which ~140 million people [1] from all over the world communicate, in all the messy ways humans do. I don't know about you, but I'd rather they focus on keeping the platform running, collect their revenue from their customers, and mind their own business. This is what everyone who uses the service expects them to do, after all. 1: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/17/discord-raises-100-million-as-its-social-hub-hits-140-million-users/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/17/discord-raises-100-millio...

epistasis 6y ago
The comment you are responding to is talking about more offensive stuff than the "benign intent" of the core WSB community. I've only been in a handful of discord communities, but none of them would tolerate even the "benign intent" WSB stuff. Also, "benign intent" does not make offensive behavior less offensive. Intent can matter, but it certainly isn't everything.
- malwrar 6y ago
  We agree here that the term is probably offensive even in the context that WSB is using it. If someone used that term here in the same way that WSB people do, I'm sure we'd both wish that dang would remove that post and ban the poster for a bit to cool off. This doesn't address the larger question of whether or not we have a right to enforce our completely subjective standards globally on other communities which we don't belong to. Personally, I wouldn't want some outsider deciding that me and my friends weren't allowed to talk to eachother anymore if we decided to start using the term towards each other privately in jest.

cbozeman 6y ago

This is not how WallStreetBets started. I joined the community in 2017 and I can tell you, there was high-level due diligence going on that made me wonder if some of the people posting might also be working at large investment banks, but couldn't get these certain trades they were advocating past their compliance guys (at some point, "too risky" starts to overlap in the Venn diagram with "too dumb"). Like every thing in the world that gains massive popularity, it attracts the normies who want in on the action, but aren't willing to do the, quite literally months or years (depending on how deeply you throw yourself into it) of learning required to even understand most of the DD posts there. Yes, there was the occasional ridiculous trolling, like convincing posters on /r/investing that /r/wallstreetbets had a Lean Hogs Insider Trading Ring (which still makes me laugh out loud to this day), but it was far more rare. Yes, the meme posts have risen dramatically, but there's still occasional good due diligence there, its just now you have to sift through a mountain of shit instead of small hill of it.

diehunde 6y ago
The same Chamath Palihapitiya said in his CNBC interview that he read posts in WSB and saw better analysis than the ones coming from real wall street analysts he has worked with.
- MrMan 6y ago
  because a lot of them are on the street or big funds
Rapzid 6y ago
You want to know what it looks like is happening now though? It looks like these peeps are weaponizing the sub to their own benefit in the name of "sticking it to the man". Everything about this smacks of a massive, crowd sourced "market manipulation" under the guise of righteousness. All the people screaming "YOLO I can't care if I lose X" seem to be missing the fact that their money isn't "lost"; it is ending up in the pockets of a few at their expense.
- piva00 6y ago

Dma54rhs 6y ago

Out of morbid curiosity I was looking for all these places from to Facebook to Discord servers popping up and one obvious strong topic was about 'sticking it to wall street jews' so you can imagine where it's going.

NoOneNew 6y ago

This kind of boils down to preference in humanity as well. Do you prefer a group that makes dick/retard/cuck jokes for laughes or prefer a group that laughed when they ruined the economy, put people out in the streets and coerced the gov to bail them out because they were too important to go out on the street? Politically correct speech is bankrupt in all forms of ethics and morality if it favors the second group just because they have kinder words. Generally why lots of people are disgusted by PC rhetoric. It's bullshit to its core because it holds no real core value, it just keeps things superficially pretty for the predators of society. I'm enjoying this ride and wish there was more I could do because it's become bigger than the money. This whole thing is pulling back the curtain and we're getting to see the frail ankles of the wizard.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago
Less clever people show up and attach to the “offensive” part without bringing along the “clever” part. Going a bit off topic, but HNs constant fight against this is its best asset. Sometimes it's annoying to see a funny joke down-voted, but it's so much better than the entire comment section devolving into nonsense like slashdot did >15 years ago.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  Absolutely understand that position and I know (and can prove through my HN history) that I'm pretty crass as well. However, this issue comes to facebook using the sensitive speech arguement to shut them down. How many other groups are just as bad if you do a simple word search on their database? If they effectively shut down everyone and every group for the offense of saying dick immediately, fine. I'm okay with that. But arbitrarily doing so, especially when the group is hurting their financial overlords, that's where I call bullshit and stand by using that word. They got zero flak pre this short squeeze and their attitude and speech is no different. But they're embarrassing the folks who cry for gov bail outs. Focusing on them making offensive jokes is a red herring from wall street trying to cover their ass.
- thedanbob 6y ago
  It reminds me of the one and only time I've replied-all to an email with a joke. At the time it seemed perfect, the best possible setup, something everyone would get and enjoy. But the dozen or so joke replies immediately after mine ruined it and convinced me never to do it again.