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WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days
- victorp13 6y agoGeneric question: I see a lot of news articles stating that WSB has "10 million members". Does being a 'member' go beyond clicking the 'join' button on that subreddit? If so it's more like a 'follow this channel', isn't it?
- SyzygistSix 6y agoCorrect. Although that sounds more like the entire number of reddit users, not just WallStreetBets.
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoReddit is much larger than you think. It has over 52 million daily active users and 50+ billion monthly views. https://www.redditinc.com/ https://www.redditinc.com/
- akie 6y agoNo, it's indeed the number of users in that subreddit alone. The daily threads there regularly amass 100k comments. Reddit has grown really quite large.
- dunefox 6y agoOh sweet summer child.
- vmception 6y agojust WallStreetBets
- mgerullis 6y agoIf you don’t have a certain number of karma points you cannot even post there, I guess the largest part there is only lurking.
- asdff 6y agoIt is striking how just about any subreddit is several orders of magnitude larger than their average engagement. It's seemingly no matter the size and affects huge and tiny subeditors. I guess there really are that many bot accounts on reddit.
- bradlys 6y agoMany people (including myself) will just not post. If you want to see what’s going on with a subreddit in your feed, you have to subscribe/join it. You can manually visit all your favorite subreddits but that can be very tedious and doesn’t fit the “news feed” type of behavior that people want to use.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoAbout 95% of reddit users are lurkers and not commentators. Just there for the lolz and linked articles/pictures/memes
- eindiran 6y agoSee: the 1% rule and participation inequality. It seems to be a constant of human engagement on internet platforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_inequality
- hammock 6y agoWhat does it matter?
- lowdose 6y agoWhy not give them more places on earth to habitat?
- imtringued 6y agoThat's a cool idea but isn't that the problem? Humans destroying their habitat?
- string 6y agoWhere do we find this extra space?
- TLightful 6y agoAllocate some of that to a Harambe memorial. The rest to habitat nurturing and protection.
- dmschulman 6y agoThis is pretty much what they're already doing. It's all a throwback to a meme. Meme "investors" turned meme "philanthropists"
- checker 6y agoHarambe is definitely a factor. But it's probably primarily related to the somewhat recent, self-deprecating meme of calling themselves "monkes"/apes (implying some acknowledgement that they are less "sophisticated" investors than traditional retail or institutional). I'm kind of glad to see this new meme because the older self-deprecating memes were pretty insensitive and made it easier to paint the crowd as malicious.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoWell, meme-powered philanthropy is certainly better than meme-powered speculative investment.
- mattowen_uk 6y agoHarumbe is/was a lowland gorilla, the gorillas we're talking about are mountain gorillas.
- xwdv 6y agoWhy doesn't hackernews adopt something or do something like this? Software developers are rolling in money, and it's not that expensive. Guess we're too busy eating the world.
- abhisuri97 6y agoI think it’s just because HN isn’t really a community that has many consistent themes/cohesion. It’s very active but only on individual news items rather than across posts. But I think if the mods could potentially put up a link for donating to something, it’d get decent traffic. I just wouldn’t expect that initiative to arise organically from the user base and get significant traction.
- mcv 6y agoGo ahead and do it. On Reddit, it started because some people just did it, and others followed their example.
- mancerayder 6y agoWe're too busy spying on the world and selling the data to advertisers. That's essentially what the highest paid developers do, right?
- xwdv 6y agoCorrect, but that's why we should find some way to offset our unethical activities.
- chad_strategic 6y agoWhen I was a software/web developer, I never worked with any software developers that could agree on anything. For example: variable names So I like your idea... but execution is going to be an issue.
- Spoiled_toast 6y agoThe HR platform is built upon an entirely different ethic. There is no room for this behavior to grow. Thank the one without humour.
- fractal618 6y ago100 bucks a piece?
- skripp 6y ago$128
- escapecharacter 6y agoMy understanding is that these are depreciating assets; what’s their long-term outlook?
- runawaybottle 6y agoAs the saying goes on WSB: ‘What the fuck is this long term shit you are talking about?’. Yolo.
- legel 6y agoIn defiance of the bear and bull, the gorilla market rages on
- fouc 6y agoI'm printing this out and framing it
- stjohnswarts 6y agoApes together strong
- buttholesurfer 6y agoLol, still doesn't change the fact that reddit's own CEO will change users posts, ban political ideas they don't agree with and allow moderation teams to basically ban anyone for anything. It's a garbage site run by people who are power hungry and will do anything to keep that image. Stop using reddit, Facebook etc
- runawaybottle 6y agoLink to adopt your own ape: https://fosseyfund.salsalabs.org/adopthomepage/index.html https://fosseyfund.salsalabs.org/adopthomepage/index.html
- practicalpants 6y agoWorth noting they've also adopted whales, belugas, sloths, falcons, and probably a lot of other animals I didn't notice when scrolling the past few days.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThe cute baby gorilla adoption post started it though.
- savant_penguin 6y agohttps://store.gorillafund.org/ https://store.gorillafund.org/ They've added a new banner: Apes together strong Haha
- cryptica 6y agoPhilanthropy is one of the greatest evils of our time. Philanthropists steal money from workers via monetary inflation and financial schemes. Then they give away a tiny portion of it to the world's poorest. In the meantime their financial schemes squeeze everyone in the middle; those who actually produce all of the world's economic value. In this case, they steal money from working humans and give it to a bunch of gorillas who should have been left alone in the jungle in the first place. Not surprising that many of these displaced working humans turn to poaching and other illegal activities to make a living. Their salaries are constantly inflating away, they can't save anything on normal salaries. They can't start their own businesses, they can't compete against those who have access to the money printers.
- hello_friendos 6y agoYour last paragraph is something that IS being addressed by this charity. I'm not sure if you think they literally had dollar bills to apes, but they have a number of different programs addressing different aspects of 'saving' apes. Like, what is this? "In this case, they steal money from working humans and give it to a bunch of gorillas who should have been left alone in the jungle in the first place." Receiving donations is not stealing, and the entire point of protecting gorillas is that they aren't being left alone.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoI don't see how is this news on hacker news. It's PR. Good intentions. Green washing. Charity. Total BS. Philantropy. Anything you want. But just because there is reddit in the title doesn't mean it's HN related, come on. Next time, what? Twitter CTO helped a grandma cross the street?
- moooo99 6y agoHow is that greenwashing? Those are private individuals, not corporations.
- spuz 6y agoHe is saying that it may or may not be greenwashing if that's the take you want to have but either way it's not relevant to Hacker News. Not sure whether I agree or not, just trying to explain the parent comment.
- Kiro 6y agoPretty sure parent thinks this is Reddit investors (as actual investors in the company, VCs etc) randomly funding a charity project, which I would agree could be a PR piece. What's actually happening cannot be greenwashing by the definition of the term.
- pelasaco 6y agoOne could interpret it as greenwashing for sure. Like who dares to act like a reddit community of people helping cute gorillas? IMO that's exactly the kind of tension that they want to create. Transforming it in a meme, would be the superhero sweating, having to decide between button A (Save Wallstreet) or button B (Save the cute Gorillas)
- skohan 6y ago> that's exactly the kind of tension that they want to create Who's the "they" referring to in this sentence? We're talking about an online forum where people don't know eachother's names for the most part. It's a community known for reckless spending in the pursuit of humor. I see no reason to believe this is anything other than an action that a particular user took in an effort to be funny catching on and becoming a meme. There's no PR firm planning their actions in a centralized way.
- tener 6y agoThe title is confusing, perhaps worth changing "Reddit investors" to "Wall Street Bets users" or something similar. I genuinely thought the article would talk about owners of Reddit, not it's users.
- geoduck14 6y agoI agree
- CobsterLock 6y agoI made the same mistake. I thought this was a corporate outreach thing
- make3 6y agoalso they don't adopt them, they fund their caretaking. this title is pretty poor.
- jedimastert 6y agousing the phrase "adopt" to mean "funding the ongoing care of" is pretty common parlance, at least in US-based charities. You can, for example, adopt a highway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adopt-a-Highway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adopt-a-Highway
- emteycz 6y ago"Adopting" is what they pay for. It's symbolic of course, but it is called exactly that.
- skohan 6y ago"adoption" is the terminology used by the foundation, and symbolic adoption is a known quantity in this type of operation so I don't have a problem with it. However referring to wallstreet bets users as "investors" does seem like a bit of a misnomer...
- blfr 6y ago"Adoption" is fine on the foundation website with context. Here my first thought was that this is some crazy Tiger King scenario.
- leg100 6y ago“But we all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.” ― George Eliot, Middlemarch
- TeMPOraL 6y agoWell, if the evil side can exploit this phenomenon to great success (e.g. drone strikes allowing to kill people halfway across the world, and making it feel like playing a video game from 1990s), why can't the good side? We can despair about the nature of man all we want, but if in the meantime, we can get rich people here to spend a lot of money on helping people far away, that's still a huge net benefit for the world.
- beervirus 6y agoIs it really evil to use drones to kill evil people?
- __s 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...
- nonameiguess 6y agoI'm not personally against usage of drones in some totally general way, but we should keep in mind why the Bush to Obama shift was made. Aside from the technology simply maturing and growing more viable, we went away from having teams of special operators apprehend terrorism suspects in surgical snatch and grab operations and toward just murdering them with drones for two basic reasons. One, surgical snatch and grab operations sometimes result in high profile failures where US operators are themselves captured or die in the process, which becomes a huge local media sensation. Two, when you arrest people, you run into the issue of what to do with them. Hence, all of the continuing problems with Guantanamo. Do you give them rights? Transfer them to regular prisons? Release them? Hold an actual trial at some point? We still haven't figured it out, and the easiest answer is just stop arresting people and kill them instead. I leave it to you to decide which of the two options is more ethical, but the reasons we did it have nothing to do with ethics. And drones are inherently less precise and also kill whoever happens to be nearby a lot more often than Seal Team Six.
- jwilk 6y agoWhat does it even mean to adopt a gorilla?
- oakesm9 6y agoIt's more like sponsoring them so the charity can protect them from poachers and study them
- cik 6y agoEver wonder if we're going about this all wrong. What if the real value was paying poachers to not poach?
- adflux 6y agoDefinition of perverse incentive. How do you imagine this to work?
- cik 6y agoTo be honest, I don't. I was more interested in having intelligent conversation around it. I feel (generally) that when people don't have aligned incentives, there can't be aligned outcomes. To me, that means there's a conversation to be had around how do we get groups with differing priorities to have aligned incentives.
- SyzygistSix 6y agoThere is also work going into building opportunities for the people who are likely to poach.
- imtringued 6y agoThat's a ransom. If you pay once you'll pay twice.
- mschuster91 6y agoThis is going to get extremely expensive: 1) demand, mostly from Asia, for body parts of endangered animals. Unfortunately, the customers are willing to pay a lot of money (a single rhino horn for example can fetch 15.000 $!), and don't care if they actively contribute to the extinction of a species. 2) Enormous poverty in the regions where these endangered animals live. The median wage of South Africa is 17.000 $ - so it's no surprise that many turn to poaching. Basically the West would need to impose drastic sanctions on China and other Asian countries that act as demand for rare animal parts (not made easier by the fact that the West has a shoddy history itself in that regard, e.g. ivory, and so such politics always has legitimacy/neo-colonialism issues), while at the same time directing massive amounts of money towards eliminating the poverty and establishing alternative, legit jobs for former poachers.
- skohan 6y agoJust to put this in perspective, the global population of mountain gorillas is 1,063, so this represents the symbolic adoption of over 3 times the mountain gorillas alive in the wild! I hope this unexpected boon in capital will allow for some meaningful work in preserving and protecting these rare animals. It would be an interesting footnote in history if we can look back in 50 years and draw a line between an internet meme, reckless asset trading, and a change in the trajectory of the fate an endangered species.
- tudorw 6y agoCan someone get busy wrapping endangered species as NFT's and direct the funds accordingly, timing seems about right...
- tudorw 6y ago'Virtual Trophy Hunt', the Big 5, surely owning a Lion gives you serious flex these days? Not much more genuinely limited edition than an Iberian Lynx.
- epanchin 6y agoA token that needed a regular transfer of funds to retain ownership would be really quite neat. A contract that showed I am the adoptee of Harry the gorilla, and provides a regular income for the charity. If I can’t keep up the payment I sell the token. Fail to pay or sell the token and it reverts to the charity issuer.