5 ms·

I guess that's true for wire fraud, but the similarity to MLM is undeniable: participants end up financially interested in perpetuating the bubble, enticing mor

I guess that's true for wire fraud, but the similarity to MLM is undeniable: participants end up financially interested in perpetuating the bubble, enticing more victims. The last ones in end up holding the bag, the first ones in get the profits. But there are differences too of course. The virality built into modern tech makes it easy to amplify opinions into full on bubbles. You don't need to create your of Herbalife to defraud people. Now you just need to find an organic idea / trend that you could profit from ("Buy GME because short squeeze, let's show wall street!"), and hype it up with bots and followers to bootstrap the bubble, hoping that it will snowball on the same kind of virality that put it on your radar in the first place. The new scheme is better because you don't need to create a company that can be sued. You're just a redditor caught in a meme / joke with thousands of others like you. Some newbies took this too seriously and lost their money. Well duh, their fault, should have been more careful. Nice and clean, see.

newswasboring 6y ago
Ok in your second and third paragraph you have described an actual person doing stuff. That's where I disagree. I have not seen any proof that there was real malicious player in at least the GameStop fiasco. (But I'm not upto date on this so I might be wrong). It all just feels like a bunch of people half jokingly egged each other on
- nikitaga 6y ago
  Was there an active schemer who kick started all this GME stuff? I don't know, and we'll probably never know. But then, does it matter (for your decisions on participating) whether the source of the hype is purely organic, or if it was helped along by some person? Does it matter how many people helped it along? All those HODL posts, billboards, journalists, etc. It doesn't really matter if there's an OG evil schemer in there somewhere or if a bunch of people organically / accidentally filled in the role. MLMs perpetuate first and foremost by the actions of regular participants, not the OG schemer, and so do meme stocks. MLMs are / were distributed under the pretense of running your own business and selling products for e.g. skin care. Meme stocks are driven by, well, memes, jokes, politics in this case. It's just a cover story, it doesn't matter. Up until the crash I've seen zero jokes / memes about selling it all. Every single post I've seen was about holding and buying more. That's not an accident. People who bought into the hype with their money upvote these jokes and not others to bring more people in because they need it to make a profit (or to minimize their loss). But there were people who legitimately treated this as a joke, right? Of course, just like there were people who legitimately believed in the quality and usefulness of MLM products they sell. Can you tell such people from those who deliberately pump and dump? No. Then, the only role of those people is to add legitimacy to the cover story of the bubble. My point here is not to blame redditors for this fiasco, it's to hopefully prevent people from jumping into such schemes because they seem organic or funny or whatever. It doesn't matter. The bubble works the same regardless.

newswasboring 6y ago

Ok in your second and third paragraph you have described an actual person doing stuff. That's where I disagree. I have not seen any proof that there was real malicious player in at least the GameStop fiasco. (But I'm not upto date on this so I might be wrong). It all just feels like a bunch of people half jokingly egged each other on

nikitaga 6y ago
Was there an active schemer who kick started all this GME stuff? I don't know, and we'll probably never know. But then, does it matter (for your decisions on participating) whether the source of the hype is purely organic, or if it was helped along by some person? Does it matter how many people helped it along? All those HODL posts, billboards, journalists, etc. It doesn't really matter if there's an OG evil schemer in there somewhere or if a bunch of people organically / accidentally filled in the role. MLMs perpetuate first and foremost by the actions of regular participants, not the OG schemer, and so do meme stocks. MLMs are / were distributed under the pretense of running your own business and selling products for e.g. skin care. Meme stocks are driven by, well, memes, jokes, politics in this case. It's just a cover story, it doesn't matter. Up until the crash I've seen zero jokes / memes about selling it all. Every single post I've seen was about holding and buying more. That's not an accident. People who bought into the hype with their money upvote these jokes and not others to bring more people in because they need it to make a profit (or to minimize their loss). But there were people who legitimately treated this as a joke, right? Of course, just like there were people who legitimately believed in the quality and usefulness of MLM products they sell. Can you tell such people from those who deliberately pump and dump? No. Then, the only role of those people is to add legitimacy to the cover story of the bubble. My point here is not to blame redditors for this fiasco, it's to hopefully prevent people from jumping into such schemes because they seem organic or funny or whatever. It doesn't matter. The bubble works the same regardless.