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Watching HN get caught up in this Gamestop bubble over the past week has been eye-opening to me about the community. The kind of information being spread around

• yaitsyaboi 6y ago
  All the speculative mania in here was like 1/1000th of the stuff on WSB.
  • wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Yes: it was ~1‰ of WallStreetBets. That's ridiculous for a community the size of Hacker News.
• umanwizard 6y ago
  There is a similar phenomenon when Bitcoin is discussed on HN.
  • dougmwne 6y ago
    I really enjoy bitcoin speculation because it is so purely about human psychology with no inconvenient external realities or objective value to get in the way.
• clairity 6y ago
  wait til you really think about the covid bubble for more than 2 minutes. at a population level, you'll see a broad range of misperceptions everywhere. you'll see people missing the forest for the trees (private gatherings vs masks), focusing on trivialities (restaurants, fomites, masks again) and simply ignoring how much low-level emotion (fear, impotence) and instinct (othering strangers) drive our beliefs (have to protect ourselves from those selfish others, rather than the friends and family who present the highest risk).
  • tmpz22 6y ago
    Public health is a drastically different battlefield then public equity. It’s closer to seatbelt laws and geopolitics then it is to day trading. Of course there are going to be different arguments, different misinformation, etc. But you don’t hyper rationalize a public health crisis with arguments like: “I personally am low risk so...” “Actually I don’t need to wear a mask when I do this in public because...” “My political leader disagrees with public health officials so...”
    • clairity 6y ago
      > "You don’t hyper rationalize a public health crisis like you would a line of python code." when lives are at stake is exactly when we should 'hyper-rationalize' (which doesn't mean don't consider emotion at all). we don't build bridges, go into war, or write aircraft control software thinking we'll wing it.
      • tmpz22 6y ago
        Apologies I made an edit to my comment before yours posted that’s bad etiquette on my part. Hyper rationalization means following a technically correct path that misses the Forrest for the trees, in this case you could get away without wearing a mask while running through a park and maintaining a ten foot buffer, but you shouldn’t because it signals to others that it’s ok not to wear a mask and makes it less likely for others to conform if there is a list of semi exceptions.
• mberning 6y ago
  According to the moderators of HN astroturfing is not a thing on this site! You are just mad that stories disagree with your world view. Lol.
• belltaco 6y ago
  Also encountered a few QAnon believers here back in the day which completely surprised me.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• camjohnson26 6y ago
  I wouldn’t say HN is particularly evidence driven, just that that’s how they want to see themselves. The hive mind here has world class knowledge on tech and math but with financial issues it’s pretty average. And some of the philosophical points made here leave you scratching your head, look at fears of AGI or people thinking we live in a simulation. Those are hip viewpoints but to the average person they look ridiculous.
• JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > HN likes to believe it is evidence based and rational instead of emotional and greedy To offer a hopeful counterpoint, informed comments and rebuttals were honestly engaged with throughout the fiasco. There was active learning, from somewhat experts seeing cracks that hadn't been so apparent before, to novices seeing the magnificent and horrifying complexity behind our abstractions. I don't see that on Reddit. I don't see that on Twitter. I barely see it in print media, where the focus is on stoking schadenfreude and counting up who's losing to whom and by how much.
  • tl 6y ago
    /r/wallstreetbets went from less than 2 million to over 8 million in a single week, so their mods had to deal with a lot of bot spam resulting in some legitimate discussion getting destroyed in the process. The over-reaction got tempered as the community pointed out that any anti-GME settlement was being silenced. /r/investing and /r/stocks behaved about how you'd imagine HN behaves.
• NicoJuicy 6y ago
  Not sure what I'm missing here I'm currently awaiting 9 February for the shorts interest to be released, to see if they are right or wrong. I think it's really interesting what's happening/happened. I'm not sure if I see a fallacy, that if you can hold a squeeze that another squeeze could happen if enough shorts stay open. Anyone can elaborate on that? Taking into account that shorting costs money ( 30% interest at a certain moment, mentioned by S3 partners ), people can hold longer than shorts. And buying them would make the available pool to buy back much smaller. What is wrong with that theory? It's similar to cornering the market ( if the stocks aren't tradeable again by the brokers) and GME doesn't have that much shares. Ps. Only put some play money in it, practically nothing. Just curious what the odds are. And I don't think I'm a meme guy, but to my perception there is logic in it. ( Eg. I'm not buying conspiracy theories about RH, because the flow was logical that they just needed money. ). For reference, Data from an stock analysis firm https://twitter.com/ihors3?s=09 https://twitter.com/ihors3?s=09
  • majormajor 6y ago
    Before it was February 9 it was last Friday... ;) > Taking into account that shorting costs money, people can hold longer than shorts. And buying them would make the available pool to buy back much smaller. The volume being traded has been incredibly high, the available pool to buy hasn't been small. More than the total number of outstanding shares has traded per day over the last 10 days. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME/key-statistics https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME/key-statistics The short interest likely isn't constant, either. Some people probably got out and took a bath on old positions, and others got in with new ones when it was super high. Anyone who started shorting at 300 or 400 is feeling pretty good.
    • servercobra 6y ago
      > More than the total number of outstanding shares has traded per day over the last 10 days. This is important, but more important is what percent of those were used to cover shorts. If a large portion wind up in retail's hands or are part of the theory of hedge funds selling back and forth (I haven't seen much concrete evidence of that), that volume doesn't change the math much.
• bargl 6y ago
  There has been some solid advice from people over there, you have to filter the mania, but there are some gems over there. This morning there were two opposing top posts. 1) summarized as gamble your apes, 2) summarized as manage your risk and don't buy stocks with debt. There was also a post by a legit investor claiming they covered their losses by selling at peak and everyone should have done this explaining the benefits. Single stock trading is always a gamble, you should spread your risk and manage your losses in such a way that you win in the end (by selling losses to cover taxes on gains etc). If you want good financial advice you can find it on WSB, but in general (imo) you should go there to make yourself feel good about your index fund or bad about your index fund. Either way, don't get caught up in the fervor.
• ASalazarMX 6y ago
  > I think HN likes to believe it is evidence based and rational instead of emotional and greedy. Rational and evidence driven? Did HN became a scientific forum while I wasn't looking? This is a social network, which makes it opinion driven. Rationality and evidence are important, but they come second. Hell, some of us don't even read articles before opining.
  • rstupek 6y ago
    Most of us don't even read the articles. Usually the discussions are more informative
• toolz 6y ago
  I find that most people don't realize they are always betting. Keeping your wealth tucked under your mattress in USD is still a bet. Everything is a bet and everything has different risk profiles. If someone sees that shorts in GME are over leveraged, well in hindsight they were absolutely right to buy in to this "gambling". I find the most irrational actors with regards to investing are the people who only do "safe" bets and feel like that carries zero risk profile.
  • nytesky 6y ago
    I remember for me during 2008 I finally understood how NOTHING has intrinsic value, it’s always about what others perceive in the market. Real estate, dollars, gold, stock all arbitrary in a way I never considered. All built on sand.
    • jimbokun 6y ago
      With real estate, you may have a place to sleep even if it's market value goes to 0.
      • rightbyte 6y ago
        Ye many things has intrisic value. If your house is worth (about) zero it is probably on some cliff about to fall into the sea or there is posion in the ground, though.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • mlyle 6y ago
      Some things have utility distinct from what people are willing to pay for them. My cheeseburger with one bite out of it has a market value of 0.
      • Layke1123 6y ago
        Ha ha I love this comment. So simple and yet illustrates the point exactly. Although if I were starving and you said I could have it for one dollar and I wouldn't be able to eat for the next 72 hours, you'd probably have my dollar.
• npsimons 6y ago
  > A more enlightened and civilized corner of the internet. Oh, HN is more enlightened and civilized. It's just the bar is incredibly low. In seriousness, I've received a lot of wisdom on HN, it's just I have to approach it (as I do with any data) with a jaundiced eye, and keep in mind the community: a lot of very experienced software types, from all over the industry. On software topics, I can usually trust HN. Diet/nutrition, philosophy and finance discussions on HN, I take a much more careful view of.
• kortilla 6y ago
  > Here is a truism for you all: In any casino Wall Street is not a casino in this regard. There is no “house edge”.
  • adkadskhj 6y ago
    Eh, i know nothing on the subject - BUT - from people more informed than I, it sounds like the hedge funds were bullying the stock into the ground to make a profit. While not strictly a "house edge", i'd call that close - in that the funds available to a select few have more power than you in this case. They have the odds stacked in their favor by nature of the size of their pockets and the ease by which they can flex this muscle to manipulate stocks in the direction they choose. Sure, individuals could coordinate to flex similar levels of funds but even ignoring legality it's still difficult.
  • nprz 6y ago
    I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest the group with teams of PhDs writing high frequency trading algorithms might have an advantage over a dude with a Robinhood account.
    • optimalsolver 6y ago
      That just means they get to make bad decisions faster.
    • pfortuny 6y ago
      They have more information but time and again, they have indeed lost. Sometimes some of them, everything. They are not “the house”.
    • quantumofalpha 6y ago
      HFTs certainly have an edge on micro/milli/seconds timescales, where price moves are more predictable. But that expertise doesn't necessarily generalize to mid/low-frequency trading where human traders and the real world come into play.
  • thefounder 6y ago
• dubcanada 6y ago
  > It turns out the promise of riches is enough to make any community lose it's collective mind. Is that really news? I am fairly certain that has been true ever since humans had a currency.
• Retric 6y ago
  Only a tiny fraction of HN posts on any specific topic. HN is effectively filtering their user base to those who care about some specific topic. Often this mixes the experts with the misinformed, but it really depends on the link. For example, if you post that putting high efficiency solar panels on an EV could significantly offset the need for charging infrastructure people will respond very differently depending on what the original topic was. Aesthetics, implementation, practicality, cost, and your specific calculation etc go from critical to unimportant depending on the topic.
• jb775 6y ago
  Hindsight is 20/20. Being the guy on the sidelines saying "I knew this was gonna happen" after the fact never adds any value. It's you trying to make yourself feel special. If you were so confident in your predictions, show me where you shorted the stock and made a bunch of money off it going down. If not, please stfu with your grandmom truisms.
  • optimalsolver 6y ago
    How much did you lose?
    • thefounder 6y ago
      I guess more than you shorted
    • headsupftw 6y ago
      How much did you make?
  • cwyers 6y ago
    Uh, plenty of people knew this was gonna happen with the benefit of foresight. The problem is that short-selling is a risky position because your losses are unbounded, which means that 1) it's harder to do than taking a long position, and 2) it's possible for even a correct short bet to lose money due to volatility.
  • dougmwne 6y ago
    I'm not talking about hindsight or who was right or wrong. Honestly I have no idea how this will continue play out. Anyone who claims they do is misinformed or selling you something. The price went up and down by a huge amount so the lucky will already have big wins. Maybe there will still be more big winners to come or maybe not. Many people seem to have not been aware of what game they were playing and were caught up in hype and frenzy, even here on dear old HN.
    • jb775 6y ago
      This is what's actually happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMShFx5rThI&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMShFx5rThI&feature=youtu.be
• jpsalm 6y ago
  > Wild conspiracy theories, financial advice with no basis in reality, astroturfing, and mob behavior. Like convincing the world that 'short ladder attacks' were a thing. https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/135807/closing-shorted-positions-via-short-ladder-attacks https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/135807/closing-sho...
  • yomly 6y ago
    I'm not really convinced a low traffic SE article proves the opposite however. While wsb is on the verge of going full Q'Anon, I find it equally curious how people seem to be willing to deny foul play when you have people like Jim Cramer confessing/bragging to it.
    • tedunangst 6y ago
      Does shady stuff happen? Yes. But the short ladder attack is a dumb idea promulgated by people who don't know how things work, and the proof it's happening, fractional prices, is even more spectacularly stupid. This is "how can there be more votes than voters" levels of crazy.
    • simias 6y ago
      Search for "short ladder" online, all the results I can find are literally days old, many from reddit itself. Beyond that, the burden of proof is clearly on the "short ladder"-believing crowd, and so far what they have come up with is frankly embarasing. I have zero problem believing that hedge funds would be more than willing to engage in shady behaviour if it can save them a billion or two, but screaming the nonsensical "SHORT LADDER" every time a highly pumped stock drops is ridiculous.
  • PartiallyTyped 6y ago
    The observation was that during the duration of restricted trading and therefore reduced momentum, there had been sequences of trades with batches of 100 shares sold at continuously smaller values with very little difference between one batch and the next and the difference was in 3rd and 4th decimals. The fact that retail was restricted to selling and hedge funds were not, further corroborates foul play.
• wayoutthere 6y ago
  Anyone who takes WSB seriously is dumb and deserves to lose their money. The sub is explicitly about using the stock market like a casino to gamble. Loss porn is real and we’re going to see a lot of it soon. To continue the casino analogy, /u/DeepFuckingValue is the dude at the craps table with the hot hand. Everyone is onboard until the winning stops, so the house is doing everything it can to reset the game.
• ditonal 6y ago
  Conspiracies happen so frequently on Wall St that “conspiracy theories” should be closer to a priori assumption than irrational fringe ideas. Were people skeptical of Moodys A+ ratings of subprime mortgages conspiracy theorists? And that’s far from the only example of financial fraud . There’s a lot of money at stake. Citadel is most of Robinhoods revenue, they put money on the opposite side of the trade via Melvin, and Robinhoods decision to restrict trading benefited the short position of the trade . The stock markets been around for over a century and online trading around over 20 years, with many volatile stocks and bubbles, yet restricting trading in one direction has no precedent. The conflict of interest Robinhood had is crystal clear and at a minimum calls for a deep investigation. Accepting their PR, which has barely explained anything is about as far from rational as possible. They described the collateral requirements as “opaque” and “pretty technical” with no real clarity, and never explained other details such as why they restricted fully cleared non-margin cash accounts or why they removed tickets from their search bars. I’m not saying with any confidence there was foul play, but there’s more than enough conflict of interest and unprecedented behavior to call for an investigation far more than what we’re getting. Especially with regards to who was buying when so many retail traders were unable to. Financial markets should be open and transparent. They are not supposed to be casinos with arbitrary hedge funds playing the house. To resign yourself to that idea is far more irrational than calling for openness and investigation into the many unanswered questions around what happened.
  • lend000 6y ago
    If you pick and choose where conspiracies happen based on your political slant, then you aren't thinking critically. By the same level of rationality that Robinhood took action to protect Citadel's positions, China could have released the coronavirus because it would have a greater impact on freer countries. Conspiracies happen everywhere, all the time, but you need to avoid applying a bias because of political implications. I highly doubt there are more conspiracies happening anywhere in the private sector than in most large governments.
  • romwell 6y ago
    Thank you so much for spelling this out. I have no dog in that race, but with everything you said, and politicians from AOC to Ted Cruz calling for an investigation, calling the allegations of wrongdoing "conspiracies" is simply being in denial.
• tqi 6y ago
  "It turns out the promise of riches is enough to make any community lose it's collective mind." It seems like something is only a "conspiracy theory" when it contradicts ones priors.
• FabHK 6y ago
  I found the discussion on HN generally ok; there were a few fervent zealots, but when they became a liability to the discussion, they were voted away. Unfounded conspiracy theories were occasionally floated, but generally quickly addressed, skeptically and adequately. There were massive gaps of knowledge, sure, but I think the discussion contributed to reducing that. > If you think any bet is a guaranteed win, you have lost your rationality. True, but there are of course better and worse opportunities, and occasionally excellent ones. For example, IPO pops are on average a risk-adjusted win, and for good (and well understood) institutional reasons.
• vpribish 6y ago
  hear, hear. I've been flagging and downvoting till I'm just disgusted. the HN community overall appears to be as credulous and naive as any other. If we don't take out the trash this place is going to stink.
• dr-detroit 6y ago
  Its called live action roleplaying and its the new popular lifestyle these days