For large public* groups. The large private groups are basically 1990s Yahoo! chat rooms, complete with racism, bullying, criminal activity and child grooming. They only get caught when they get infiltrated, or when members self-report.
Indeed, I saw it with my own eyes when my daughter went on it, luckily we manage to realise what is going on. It is crazy that they ban WSB or Trump but let pedos do their thing without a problem.
The r word isn’t nice. But that cannot be the reason to ban the server.
This sounds like an excuse. They mention fraud several times -but say it’s NOT because of fraud— but I almost perceive a wink when they mention it like that.
You’d be surprised what kind of asinine bullshit they will ban a server over. Feels like everywhere you go these days some real or virtual administrator is pre-determining how much risk you’re allowed to put yourself in.
I joined the server and the first thing I saw was a mod saying the N word with hard R. Check their history and there's literally pages of it.
I didn't appreciate that so I reported it and left.
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Lots of people confusing this with not liking WSB.
The other WSB discord which was linked to the subreddit was fine even though it was barely moderated. Rough around the edges like WSB tends to be... but fine as a place to hang out and see funny things.
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This second server was extreme even by WSB standards.
The joke is "4chan found a bloomberg terminal" but really it's like Reddit found one... no one is as down right randomly gross or racist as people are on deep end 4chan or Reddit would have banned it a long time.
This server was really like if the worst part of 4chan pretended to know what a stock is. It wasn't even coherent by WSB standards, and the signal to noise made WSB proper look like an actual Bloomberg Terminal
Different platforms have different baseline moderation policies, and in some cases that remains the differentiator in the platform itself (e.g. Parler). I dont think acting within the values of another site is a good excuse to not get banned by the one a community currently occupies
Discord is absolutely in their right to do as it may please with the platform. My point is more to the effect of the ethos of WSB is not a place for civil discourse and expecting otherwise is foolish. The only reason it exists on reddit is heavy moderation, and that's/was going to be impossible on Discord.
Here is my position, as this seems to be increasingly foreign for many people I talk with. A private entity (person or enterprise) should be able to manage their servers without outside interference. If I open up a server privately, I should have the right to moderate it, or not, however I see fit. 4chan still exists (as of now), and IMO, should not be interfered with. If somebody wants to create an LDS chatroom where swearing and drinking coffee lands you a ban, more power to you. We should be allowed to freely associate as we see fit, and those who own the space can decide the rules for discourse.
Now, am I saying corporate interests would never actively coordinate with government or other powerful interests to maintain a certain narrative or obtain power, absolutely not. That is a totally different discussion, and probably relies on a bottom up approach. The plebs aren't going to change Twitter's TOS or the programming on FOX, and we shouldn't expect to either. The corporate media sphere is carefully curated for whatever drives their interests. That maybe engagement, supporting commercial or policy positions beneficial to immediate or patron interests, or just old fashioned Operation Mockingbird interference. It's best if we ditch it altogether.
So you joined a server and went crying to teacher since you saw a bad word you didn't like instead of just leaving the server and letting it be. It is people like you who are the problem. Banning benign communities for using bad words is what drives people into fringes and into the arms of actual bad actors.
> The mention fraud several times -but say it’s NOT because of fraud— but I almost receive a wink when they mention it like that.
Their full statement as quoted in the linked article denies that the ban is for "financial fraud" but includes "spreading misinformation" as one of the reasons for the ban. I don't see any contradiction or winking involved. People who repeatedly spread hate speech and discriminatory content and glorify violence after repeated warnings not to do so are pretty likely to be spreading a wide variety of misinformation other than financial fraud.
As for whether such things can be the reason to ban the server, I'm sure Discord's terms of service allow them to ban for this reason. Historically a lot of tech companies were hands-off in practice, but ever since the January 6 violence in the US and the related online activities, many of these companies would right now prefer to err in the opposite direction.
> People who repeatedly spread "hate speech" and "discriminatory content" and "glorify violence" after repeated warnings not to do so are pretty likely to be spreading a wide variety of "misinformation" other than financial fraud.
None of these things (in quotes) can even be defined, and anyone who believes that the government or some tech oligarch is going to be a fair judge must have been born yesterday. It's ridiculous how we can both simultaneously criticize countries like China, but at the same time encourage the exact same types of suppression in our own Westernized way.
There has never been either a legal or moral right in any tradition of freedom of speech throughout history, including the US tradition, to insist that other private parties who disagree with your speech continue to do business with you. The strong US freedom of speech protections are about government action only, and even those have exceptions. Every judgment of this sort has some subjectivity, and that's fine.
If someone dislikes Discord's judgment on that matter, they can switch providers or run their own service. If every viable provider stops dealing with them, that kind of implicit collective judgment and its consequences have always been part of humanity.
Also, most Western countries other than the US do have laws or judicial precedents which define terms like hate speech and provide penalties for engaging in it that are routinely adjudicated and enforced by courts. Even US judges consider hate speech as evidence an aggravating factor in how they handle crimes with hate as a motivation, accept the illegality of incitement to imminent violence, etc.
> There has never been either a legal or moral right in any tradition of freedom of speech throughout history, including the US tradition, to insist that other private parties who disagree with your speech continue to do business with you.
How would that work, practically? Let's say I prefer to get my hair cut by a barber that makes public statements in favor of gender equality instead of patronizing one that publicly advocates for the dynamics of Western society's traditional gender roles. For the sake of this scenario, let's say there's no other relevant difference between the two barbers, except where noted. Should my disfavored barber be able to insist that I shift some or all of my hair care business to them since the reason I'm not using them is their speech? How much of my business should they be able to force?
Would it be any different if I preferred the traditionalist and the one who wanted to force my business were the equality advocate? What if my preferred barber just stayed quiet and it were the one who vocally advocated either view who insisted on my business? What if the business terms of the barber with distasteful speech were worse, and how much worse would they need to be for that difference to outweigh their free speech rights?
None of this seems very plausible to enforce well.
More importantly, who would decide among all these possibilities? That's quite the power of imposing one's views (and financial policies) on others. I'm not sure I trust any government or private regulatory authority with that much control over private lives and livelihoods.
But that's the thing - not everyone does think less of such people, under the view that only people with privilege can even have the luxury of tuning out the impact of politics on their lives at work, since marginalized colleagues still suffer the impacts of politics daily at the office (or indirectly elsewhere in ways attributable to the actions and inactions of their employer) and they shouldn't be blamed for mixing politics and business when they speak up about it. I realize that's not your view, but it's a plenty common view.
Further, not everyone who wants to keep politics and business separate even agrees on what mixing politics and business means.
Is it politics for a company to go out of its way to make bathrooms explicitly gender-neutral, put pronouns in staff directories, encourage even people who are not trans to indicate their pronouns so that trans people don't feel singled out by doing so, discipline people for persistent or intentional use of the wrong pronouns in the workplace, and cover common trans needs like hormone replacement therapy in the company health insurance plan?
Many people on the right of the US political spectrum would call that politics. Many other people conclude that some good workers happen to be trans and would feel more comfortable working at such employers than at ones with traditional attitudes toward them, meaning that these changes have the apolitical good business consequence of maximizing the ability of the company to attract and retain workers.
Does one have to inquire into the motivation of the employer for adopting these policies to decide if they're mixing politics or business, or just engaging in business?
Lots of subjectivity even on moral rights questions like this.
Though, I will say that my use of the word "enforce" is really only applicable to legal rights, not moral rights, outside of some kind of dystopian enforcement of what people are allowed to think.
Both sides of that case agreed that the company was choosing to deny its custom wedding cake services to a gay wedding because of the owner's religious beliefs against gay weddings, not because of anyone's speech. In other words, they objected to making a wedding cake because of attributes inherent to who the engaged couple were, not anything that was being said or expressed.
I view it as plenty consistent to forbid businesses which serve the public from choosing not to serve customers based on innate aspects of who they are, like being the same sex or gender as each other, while still allowing them to make such choices in reaction to the customer's speech. Sometimes the line is clear (no speech was at issue in this case), and sometimes it's blurry, but that's absolutely a consistent rule whether or not it's the one you support.
The reason the Supreme Court ruled for the bakeshop was very narrow. The ruling acknowledged that states can constitutionally have non-discrimination laws that apply neutrally to businesses without making available exemptions due to religious beliefs. The ruling was just about the behavior of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in applying their state law to this case, which the Supreme Court majority viewers as hostile to the owner's religious beliefs and not religiously neutral as the government must be. So it was about religious bias in the government action, only. One member of the 5-4 majority wrote that he might well have ruled the other way had the commission acted neutrally.
The concern expressed by the cakeshop was primarily about making a custom wedding cake for a gay wedding, not the message. Put differently, they wouldn't have made a custom cake for this particular wedding, knowing it was a gay wedding, even if there were no message requested. The ruling was not on free speech grounds.
Anyway, the cakeshop scenario is a bit different in another way: it can be argued to involve expressive activity on the part of the employees who create the custom cake, since it's far more artistic than mechanical, and since they do literally write any requested message with decoration. By contrast, Discord's actions against the customer are simply a choice of which speech by others they choose to allow to flow through the platform they control, plus a statement of their own speech which they choose to put out about their action.
(For what it's worth, they've chosen to partially reverse their ban since we started out discussion, if I understand right.)
If you want to ensure there is a content neutral platform, maybe the best way (at least under US free speech concepts) is to advocate for a government-owned/run Internet group communication platform, just like we have in offline life when you go to the nearby park or plaza to protest, or when you send mail to everyone in your local community through USPS.
Everyone agrees that, in the US, the government can't constitutionally censor that on the basis of content or viewpoint, with a few exceptions such as forbidding child pornography. I'm guessing that platform wouldn't keep getting funding from the politicians if it got too much offensive content, but if it wasn't shut down entirely, they couldn't be selective about which speech to permit.
There is nothing wrong with the word retard. It’s a legitimate dictionary word. Every few years the PC police has to arbitrarily decide that something is morally unfashionable and then they convince everyone that if they don’t replace it with an equivalent string, they’re somehow bad people. It makes no sense and everyone goes along with it. Whatever the current replacement is, that will probably be disallowed in a few years too. There’s nothing “not nice” about directing it toward one’s self as a joke. It’s not like they’re using it to bully a disabled person. People who can even afford the bandwidth to complain and choose that hill to die on have far too few problems in their life.
Well, sure, in that it's a word with lots of nonproblematic uses.
> It’s a legitimate dictionary word.
This implies probably a more normative role for dictionaries than is appropriate, but, sure, it is. However, as a noun applied to people (as distinct from the verb meaning “to slow down” or the noun meaning “a slowing down”) it’s one which every dictionary I can find flags explicitly as “offensive”, so insofar as one uses dictionaries as arbiters of usage, I think there clearly is a problem with the use of “retards” in question.
Maybe I’m a bad person, but this is my take. If someone uses the r word once in a while. Like it slips out when High school slang mode kicks in, I’m Okay. If it’s someone’s go to word, I feel that person is on the uncouth side of things. I’m not going to report someone to HR over it, or terminate a friendship, but I may minimize interaction with them.
But that goes for all excess vulgarity not just the r word. It’s not that I’m offended, but it’s a personal taste for less crassness.
Can you see how rtard is perhaps similar to the homophobic f-slur? The word is used as a pejorative with the implication that the group it is most commonly used towards (disabled, gay) is being used as a point of negative comparison. While I think we should be aware that the use of language is incredibly context-rich, we also need to recognise that the words we use have side-effects. Would you feel comfortable if a friend of yours dropped something and said "oh damn, I'm such a <n-word>"?
Speaking of the f-word, I’ve seen it used non pejoratively at the embarcadero farmers’s market. One of the vendors sells them for home decorative purposes along with cattails, lavender, etc.
Being from the UK, I hear it all the time to refer to cigarettes. When I worked in a shop, my colleagues would just walk through the shop and say "just taking a f* break". While it was totally inoffensive, it did make me a bit uncomfortable. Piquing my sjw sensitivities, I guess
There isn't any relation other than the word being used. It's not something I ever complained about because I understood that it wasn't offensive in any way and is, like I said, just the response I have to hearing that word.
Personally I find it disturbing that adults discussing the word feel the need to type things like “f-word” instead of just typing the word fag. You’re talking about a cigarette. It’s a configuration of 3 particular letters. There’s no reason to react to them in that context.
I think there's a public/private divide here. You can use whatever language you want with people you know, because you know how they'll react and that it genuinely won't cause offence. In a public space though, I'd be wary. A black person walking past a group of white kids making racist jokes and using racial slurs is only going to make them feel less comfortable, even if the white kids genuinely mean no harm.
I think even if words like that aren't used to intentionally bully or harm someone, it certainly sets the tone of an environment. We all have to make the choice as individuals about what tone we want our words and actions to bring to the world around us.
Right, but that's the in-joke. People refer to themselves as mentally disabled. It does set the tone - namely, of leaving your ego at the door. I fail to see how this is a negative.
I mean, in a locker-room context, yeah, for sure, the externalities might be limited. At the same time, the comparison made there strikes as one oozing with value judgements. To be frank, I feel like the sentiments behind said value judgements would make the world a worse-off place.
I wouldn't want to contribute to a world where someone with mental disabilities feels like they're the indirect butt of someone else's joke. I feel like there's a way to be humble (and witty, likely!) without having to punch sideways.
“retard” is the most ironic example of the ineffectiveness of the euphemism treadmill.
And now, on GameFAQs, I could not include the term “tardive dyskinesia” in a post. It was refused because apparently the four character sequence “tard” cannot occur in any word.
They could, at the very least, simply implement a system that a human moderator receives an immediate notification when a any of their banned words is used, who will then use good human judgement, rather than such wide blanket bans of four character strings.
I would assume one can't talk of one's tardiness on GameFAQs, yes.
I would also assume that in class, context would be more easy. Of course, some people were fired over the use of the word “niggard”, but it's a fairly obscure word, but I did once see it in an English translation of the Qurʾān.
An instructor or professor of linguistics almost got cancelled because he was using Chinese words as an example of the usefulness in speech of useless filler words. “That one” which if you want to or make yourself to, can be made to sound like a racial insult.
That’s to say it’s no surprise that ignorant people will take offense before they understand words that might be uncommon in their lexicon.
I looked up this story and of course it happened in the U.S.A.
Verily, what is with the U.S.A.-man's unparalleled ability to be offended by a word, or any word phonetically similar, regardless of the context? — I am really quite glad I do not live there. It seems stressful to be able to loose one's profession so quickly over it's infamous “cancel culture”.
I also heard about a problem with a chat platform that kicked
german users for using the common word "weniger"
("less"/"fewer"). Meaning not only didn't it care about context,
it even banned incorrect spelling of words, which in this
example made it impossible to mention the Republic of the Niger.
On another one, someone with the name “Hui” couldn't even post anything, because apparently it's a romanization of a Russian profanity and they had applied a global filter which would surely leave out quite a bit.
Or the online palæontological conference where the word “bone” was filtered...
How can one ever think such blanket filters will not go awry.
WSB is notorious for also posting a lot of anti-LGBT slurs (for example, one of WSBs favorite insults is calling someone a "gay bear", or more commonly a rainbow emoji followed by a bear emoji, or even calling people f*gs).
Also worth noting that the Discord group is so much worse than WSB the subreddit. Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
I've never heard of this subreddit before, nor it's Discord Server, but I do know that one doesn't just stumble upon either on accident. The only people being hurt here are the ones that went looking to be hurt.
What we have here is a group of immature people, emboldened by internet anonymity, saying stupid things for the "lolz".
Does anyone think they'll be more mature because their server was banned? Of course not... they'll just make a new one, further emboldened by the obvious censorship. Let idiots be idiots, folks... we all know one when we see one.
Recall not too long ago the drama over github when one of the employers simply said to "watch out for nazis" during the DC Capitol incident.
We are at a point where certain languages are being banned and made illegal, you can't blame people for being worried that we are on the cusp of totalitarianism.
The banning of discord and r/wsb going private is quite scary, especially given the timing.
I guess hedge fund managers are just like mob bosses, they do not like being played.
edit: why is it that ANY mention of the github nazi incident gets INSTANTLY mass downvoted and flagged? Every single comment about this on HN gets censored.
I didn't follow the GH drama too closely, especially not on HN, but the "apology" seemed to be very thoughtful and almost exactly what you'd want a company to offer in response to the complaints being made against them. I think using it as an example of language being banned/made illegal is something a lot of people would disagree with, and thus the disagreement with your comment.
>WSB is notorious for also posting a lot of anti-LGBT slurs (for example, one of WSBs favorite insults is calling someone a "gay bear", or more commonly a rainbow emoji followed by a bear emoji, or even calling people f*gs).
For what is worth, they pretty much never use it actually insultingly, and do not seem to harbor any ill-will against LGBT people (and some of them are lgbt). They also mostly use those words to describe themselves, and do it more as a nod to boiler room talk/4chan.
>Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
As far as I know, a lot of that is done by bots, though possibly set by other users to prank the discord.
Agree. I'm fairly certain a lot of the posts are self-deprecating - eg. "my wife's boyfriend", "i'm a r**d", "someone smarter than me", "i'm a gay bear". My wife doesn't have a boyfriend (hopefully), but I'd say that in a post there.
This isn't necessarily inflammatory. It is - like it or not - WSB's culture. It is not meant to be taken literally.
It is a frothy place, full of herd mentality. That is part of the clique. Going against that does incur the same tone of language against you. But it's not for who you are personally. It's the same language they use to describe the "in group", but it _seems_ worse to the out group.
Is the intent to mock people? No. Does it mean anything negative? No, 99% of it is literally re. the financials. Are there bad people in every group? Yes.
It's not, and for the record I said "gay bear", not just "gay". For that matter, if pressed I would identify as pansexual. The intent is that it's not meant to be degrading.
Please don't go looking for people to be bad guys - maybe instead assume good intent. You don't have to nit everything people say to find something to prove them wrong. You didn't focus on anything I was communicating - you tried to pick an argument with the smallest aspect of the thread.
I’m not nitpicking anything. Your argument was that it’s all just a joke, that calling yourself gay was self-deprecating. “I’m gay, I’m a retard, laugh at me.”
And now you contradict yourself saying it’s not meant to be degrading because it’s all just a joke.
You’re proving the toxic culture that those kinds of communities ferment.
"gay bears" is a play on words. Bear is a term in the gay community, just like bull is a term in the hotwife community (my wife's bf jokes apply here). Jokes happen both ways in WSB, straight or gay!
It's self deprecating to go against the market and be a bear in the biggest bull run of the decade. It's foolish to do so. I and many others being bearish have lost money. This is the entire point behind GME.
Like I said, it's all about the financials - not about you as a person.
On 4chan, “-fag” is essentially a nominalizing suffix at this point that is semantically interchangeable with “-man”; it lacks any connotation of positivity or negativity.
Not only do I second this, I would like to expand on it. This has been usage for at least a decade. Are you a musician? You are a "musicfag." And it is to such extremes that heterosexuals are "straightfags" and homosexuals are "gayfags."
It is indeed this way on many parts of the internet, including many parts of Discord and I.R.C..
I can remember this usage on NewGrounds in the early 2000s already. — I feel it's kind of sad that it's a part of internet culture that is becoming more and more obscure as the internet is experiencing an endless november of “normalfags”.
My prior for the majority of a reddit-based Discord server community being pro-LGBT is so astronomically low that the usage of that kind of language is unsettling to say the least. I'm sure there are plenty of well-meaning people just participating in the banter and picking up the 4chan lexicon, but I'm also sure there are a lot of people that use these words with no irony or awareness. It's like being scared to make an ironic offensive joke with your family because you feel like your cousin might laugh just a little too much. I'd be very cautious about assuming lack of explicitly-lgbt sentiment is the same as pro-lgbt-sentiment, especially given the culture wsb has branched from.
Given that's the same culture obsessed with traps, it's pretty clear that it hates fags, not gays.
They're not 'pro-LGBT' because that language is stultified, boring, soul-rending mainstream corporate-speak. Speaking that way is beneath human dignity.
"Are you pro-LGBT?" "Do I have a problem with gays, you mean?"
Better to be a human wallowing in the filth than a socially correct bugman standing clean, sterile, toothless to attention when the commisars come by.
It seems to hate “gays”; what it doesn't hate is homoerotica. It seems to take it's cues more from the Græco-Roman or Japanese interpretations that reject “intransient sexual orientations” as a concept altogether.
They simply want to look at pretty males without being bothered by now having to define themselves with some label that behaves more like a tribe than it does a truly descriptive term.
Most of the Japanese fiction that deals with same-sex love isn't phrased in terms of “It's okay to be gay.” but rather “Love has nothing to do with gender.”.
'Pro-LGBT' wasn't meant as corporate-speak, I genuinely just meant it as indicating a positive or even neutral sentiment towards those under the LGBT umbrella. I do agree that "Are you pro-LGBT?" as a question is not useful, as it almost feels like "Please signal your political affiliation" at this point.
I will say that the obsession with traps does for some reason feel to me as unrelated to views on homosexuality, which is weird, and possibly a misunderstanding of mine.
I meant that thinking in terms of 'LGBT' being a distinct category in your conception of the world is a worldview foreign to a lot of *chan people.
They don't slice up the world the same way you do; whoever made up that word put gays, lesbians, and transsexuals together for political reasons, and left-wing political activists your median chan-users are not- why use the language of someone else, someone who despises you and wants to crush you?
From their point of view, the mental theatre that contains actors named 'LGBT' and 'Diversity, Inclusion and Equity' as front-and-centre characters is a cold, dead place-
whereas their native memescape, filled with Colourful Words, traps, arguments, the cacophany of 'hateful memes', is alive and vibrant by comparison, if tinged by a deep despair at the leaching of vitality from the world.
It's why the NPC meme caught on.
Traps are anime, and so are idealised abstractions as much as anime girls are. They're also tinged by imported japanese culture, I'd assume.
"Gay bear" is almost exclusively used as an insult on the subreddit, and this week has been one of the primary insults used in reference to the short sellers (everyones #1 enemy on WSB right now). It would still be pejorative even if not used that way, but it's ridiculous to claim that it's not a pejorative when it is explicitly used as an insult.
The only insults being hurled at anyone right now are to CNBC and to the hedge funds and their market maker buddies. Possibly the SEC for allowing brazen market manipulation on the part of the above.
People saying "retard" isn't the real reason, they're just using it as an excuse. Powerful Wall Street types who gambled against them are losing money because of the hype train they've ignited and are crying to regulators. The discussion of coordination in the chat may be considered illegal and Discord doesn't want negative attention from regulators and the press.
Then maybe look outside your own borders for some other examples. The Arab Spring got great momentum from social media, and so do a lot of other efforts. Sometimes even bad efforts get momentum too. But it is possible to organize revolution via social media and other communication mediums.
>required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London, carrying an embossed revenue stamp.[1][2] Printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies, and it had to be paid in British currency, not in colonial paper money.[3]
The printing press was the social media of the 18th century. And just like then the powers that be have no idea what to do with it and are trying to put the Ginnie back in the bottle.
I think they actually coordinated with vines posted to their myspace pages... but easier out-of-band communication does lead to more general awareness of the populace. The American revolution might've happened much more quickly - or not at all when the Americans saw Bostonians dancing around in racist indian costumes and compared the relatively minor tax to living conditions back in England proper.
IIRC, The American revolution was coordinated and funded by the existing colonial administrations, with aid from France. It was a secessionist movement backed by regional business interests in response to a reassertion of imperial sovereignty by a previously lax British government.
Something to be proud of, certainly. But not a grassroots thing, even if it did have some degree of popular support.
Calling it a secessionist movement isn't an apt characterization, which in US history calls to mind the Southerners' attempt to Secede from the USA. The revolutionaries, rather, considered themselves a number of independent colonies, coming together in opposition to British rule, where they were lacking in representation. They would not see themselves as "part" of Britain in a way the Southerners clearly were part of the USA.
In contrast, the South was fully represented in the Northern government, and Lincoln was quite conciliatory and kind to them when he was able. However, they were fighting for an extremely immoral cause, which the 1776 Revolutionaries were not really doing as the issue of slavery was much less an issue than in the 1850's.
That deal happened 2 years before the revolution. If you read the declaration of independence you'll find that it is very critical of that proclamation:
> The History of the Present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted [...]
He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
It wasn't the only thing that caused the insurrection of the colonies, but it certainly was a component.
Please stick to the site guidelines, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If we all work together we can avoid flamewar hell, which will keep HN interesting, which is in all of our interests.
I don't see it as quite over the same line. There's something about the snark in the comment I replied to which is a degree worse. The GP was baity but I don't see it as snarky. But I suppose it's close enough that different people could reasonably make a different call.
Hey dang. Just want to say I think the new community guidelines are great and you’re doing a good job moderating HN. I stopped coming here for a long time because it seemed every comment was snarky. Everyone was just so rude to each other. I’ve noticed that has dramatically improved! So, thank you.
And they chose today as the best possible time to enact this ban? Really?
I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).
Regardless of how right or wrong this moderation choice may be, I hope that this accelerates the push for decentralization and encryption; the few companies that virtually all online humans use to communicate have far too much power over us, and we should be more willing to recognize that extreme centralization of power is dangerous.
(One final note: (EDIT: subreddit is now public again) now that this caused the subreddit to be set to private which seems to have instantly caused $GME to start tanking in AH, they are going to be in for users that are much more upset than they are used to if the narrative decides that this ban caused the crash, if it does in fact last until tomorrow)
In the last 20-30 minutes too, which suggests it was purely because of WSB getting wacked. That's weird, it seems like the sentiment of the people investing in GameStop wouldn't be changed just because of this.
We'll see if the stock recovers or not, but I remember in 2014 Bitcoin's price bubble popping from over $200 because Bitstamp was DDOS-ed. It's a great strategy generally for timing bubble pops.
It's after hours trading, which is very low volume and generally not available to most retail investors. Probably just another hedge fund getting in their shorts at these high prices. The FUD spread due to the plunge in after hours is just a bonus for their new short position.
Further, I think everyone is drastically over estimating the impact of r/wsb and retail investors in general on the GME action. This is hedge fund vs. hedge fund in an opportunity for unusually outsized gains on both the long and short positions over relatively short time frames. Good for them to keep the narrative focused on retail investors rather than capitalist titans in a financial blood bath.
The amount of leverage even small money can make using out of money call options cannot be understated either. Sure, hedge funds have to offer those options and cover with longs, but what people did looks more like buying a lottery ticket with a great expected return.
One's opinion is driven by everyone else's sentiment. Seeing literally everyone post "HOLD THE LINE" and "BUY THE DIP" and "TO THE MOON" will make you do the same.
If you don't see this, then you don't know if these people are still your allies.
Aren't they opening themselves up to a world of hurt by this ban? I admit I don't understand securities law, but surely interfering with an ongoing stock bonanza like this should raise some authorities' eyebrows, particularly if it turns out someone from Discord side had a stake in the whole thing? I mean, surely they realized that this decision will directly impact the stock price.
If anything the risk goes the other way. If the SEC construes the Discord as being responsible for a pump-and-dump scheme, then it's facing legal attention. Even if it's not a pump-and-dump scheme, there are going to be comments there that can potentially be made to look like one to a judge.
When you're able to play a video game and have a large amount of users agree to use anything besides Discord, then I'll grant this objection. Until then, I'll refer to it as a monopoly (not over all communication of course, just within its own niche).
All the voice chat options that existed in the gaming world prior to Discord's dominance still exist, except with those options you have to pay for your own hosting like every gaming clan used to do prior to Discord. This is the cost of "free". It doesn't help that Discord has the best chat client on the market, so the competitors need to step it up.
It's a good point worth making: that Discord only exists and is as usable and popular as it is because it has a profit model and significant funding, and that's definitely a large component of why FOSS has lost users to them.
Still, as long as things like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and Signal and perhaps even Firefox exist, I'll believe we can do better.
I agree, and I tried not to be too narrow in my reasoning, but it's primarily speaking from what myself and so many that I know have experienced.
I initially didn't want to use it, and I know many others that didn't. Slowly the communities they loved moved to it until they were completely excluded and felt forced to adopt it as well. At this point I only have two friends left that still refuse to use it, everyone else gave in citing network effects. It reminds me precisely of how Facebook felt when I was in school, in that you were excluded from friend groups and events if you chose not to use it.
I know there are many alternatives, but getting your favorite communities to switch to them is completely intractable. Communication shouldn't be like this and I think that we can do much better, even if it takes us awhile to get there.
I think the internet being still in it's infancy essentially has allowed us to not define monopolies narrowly enough. For example, it seems obvious to people when a monopoly exists on a railroad, cars, or planes because they are distinct. However if they were judged the way the technology industry is currently, you would just say they are all travel and so no monopoly exists. I think the technology companies will be in for a very rude awakening when these niches are realized by politicians. It will probably be when young enough to really know the niches in the internet grow old enough to become politicians. The current politicians are just beginning to get a grasp on this so it's going to be some time.
You can quantify a firm's market power by asking how much the firm could raise prices while the customers would stick with it. If raising the price one cent causes all your customers to abandon you, then you have zero market power. If you can raise prices 10x and sell just as much product, then you have total market power.
Yeah, I'm getting really tired of people saying "not a monopoly" when we're discussing de facto monopolies. Especially in the short term, and for knee-jerk reactions. Do you think any Discord competitor is going to welcome /r/wsb with open arms after that move? Ergo: monopoly.
See, the problem is that people are doing all this because they believe that it doesn’t matter. These are not idealists or indoctrinated revolutionaries.
No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core.
These are not Eastern European kids who dream to finish school and go to Western Europe and do something with their lives, these are also not Chinese who dream to go to America for a new life. They are not the American youth from the 60s or the bolsheviks from the pre-soviet era.
On the other hand, some of them must be rich now. Who knows what easily won money could bring.
You are certainly right for many participating in this short squeeze. But collectively this short squeeze is undeniable proof that what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. The hedge funds play by a separate set of rules from the rest of us.
This thread/discussion is attached to an article about Discord banning one (of multiple, only one got banned) communities and the r/wallstreebtets community going private (moderators limiting access to members who've already joined and blocking outsiders). Since then, the subreddit was opened back up. How did Reddit close it down if it everyone can still access it?
Does it prove that? I tend to agree that it's true, but I don't see what it has to do with the current situation. If anything, I expect most people to argue the opposite - when the price drops again, and some retail traders lose their shirts, there will inevitably be a flood of thinkpieces about how cruel the financial system is for permitting them to lose money on the same terms as a hedge fund.
You mean the folks who are about to walk into the storm thinking it's never going down and lose their bet? Yeah those guys are screwed and they will make wonderful emotional think pieces written by the same corporation who gave a mouthpiece to the hedge funds. The issue is it's a continuation of the equality issues in America so rational behavior may not be in scope for this one.
I tend to think people's losses will be smaller (as individuals) then everyone seems to think. This is reddit we're talking about, and people using RobinHood. I'm guessing losses for those that didn't get out will be limited to beer money. I think the reason they could squeeze the shorts is because of the size of their army, not the depth of their war chest...
I'm more worried about the retail investors that jumped on the bandwagon too late with their life savings. The ones that got in at the start will be fine or better than fine.
TBH, if people did that....they probably already lost everything on bitcoin back in 2018. There's no shortage of hype for people to fall for. Bandwagoning is a great way to make a small fortune on stocks, if you start with a large fortune.
I think it proves it in the sense that hedge fund do this kind of stuff all the time and no one ever hears about it, because those kinds of money-making strategies are what we expect of them.
Exactly! The bet has been people aren't capable of coordinating in large numbers to take advantage of this so it's not really broken. Now that they are it's officially broken and will be reviewed.
The worst, or maybe the best, part of your post is that you don't realize the American youth from the 60s literally created this generation with their greed and entitlement.
I think they're pointing out that "the hippies" were a very small % of people their own age with an out-sized popular culture representation that doesn't reflect the sentiments of the rest of that generation.
The counter culture was a minority. Recognizing that is crucial to understanding the current climate.
It just so happens the creative output from those aligned with that culture has dominated more recent generations(Sesame street, Free Willy, Fern Gully, all that). In a sense "they won". But those not on-board are still around, and there is a lot of resentment.
I'm only 36 and while I was raised on this stuff but even so a LOT has changed and "progressed" from when I was a kid. Can you imagine how much has changed for those who lived through the civil rights movement?
Not OP but it's the grown up subset rather than the Abbie Hoffman set. Hilarious pranks are hilarious but sesame street is more widely and subtly influential.
The larger point I was making with my comment -- which seems to have been insufficiently clear -- was precisely that making extreme statements to trigger deliberately contentious argument is a style of interaction I prefer to avoid. Per the HN rules of conduct, I assumed good faith and interpreted the parent in the most favorable light I could, given it bordered on trolling. What is there to argue? The idea that there's a simple binary split between The Establishment and Nihilists?
Really?! I've seen plenty of trolling in my day, and that didn't ring any of my alarm bells.
Is it really that bizarre to you to call anti-establishment /r/wsb gamblers "nihilistic"? The ethos of the subreddit is basically "eh, screw it, let's see what happens" so is it that hard to imagine a subset of members going a little further, to "eh, screw it, none of this matters"?
Do you need a hand? You seem to be on a slippery slope. I've heard this one before - it was a single cannabis cigarette at first, but soon he was out there killing grandmas for drug money.
Idk, it kind of sounds plausible to me. I don't see the Wallstreet bets sub reddit starting a revolution, protests or suddenly running for office to enact change. Do you?
"All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core"
Okay boys, french revolution, american revolutuon, british revolution were all a nihilistic mistake. Time to give up our hard-earned right and go back to being serfs governed by god-emperror.
The establishment shall never be challanged even if it's chopping off heads, tortuning the unbelievers, raping and burning women for witchcraft.
It's a moving letter, I've read it and I actually agree with the statement but having a personal vendetta isn't exactly an ideal.
Nevertheless, it doesn't really matter if they are idealists or not if it eventually pushes for a change. Woodstock was a for-profit music festival that turned into a cultural icon. As someone else in the comments said, probably Rosa Parks never meant to start a revolution.
When I say they are nihilistic, I don't mean it as an offence. I do agree that "it doesn't matter", the market is not working as a place to invest into promising companies, it's simply a gambling with extra steps and I enjoy watching many classical gamblers being destroyed. I also don't trade any stocks, I don't own any publicly traded stocks.
Rosa Parks was, as I understand it, a carefully planned stunt, which happened to get the media traction necessary. There was another person who did the exact same thing a short time before RP did, but that person was, IIRC, punished and forgotten.
20K Chinese H1B Visas are a drop in the bucket in terms of opportunity. H1Bs are for people looking to make modest living, the real money is back in China. Common thing you hear from many nouveau riche Chinese is how poor the west are, young professional couple pulling 300K household income can barely afford to live nicely after inflation. Of course, that's still a very comfortable life, but western upper middle class is not aspirationally "rich" by Chinese standards anymore.
"See, the problem is that people are doing all this because they believe that it doesn’t matter. These are not idealists or indoctrinated revolutionaries.
No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core."
I'm so happy we have mrtksn to explain the motives of about 5 million different people.
Thank you so much for enlightening us with your psycho-analysis of all those people.
Looking at this from another point of view, no other option but today.
There is probably more users violating the terms today (hate speech) then ever before. If they were already watching, then there is a threshold. Today would be the day the threshold is hit. Today is probably the tipping point of no return, moderation becomes virtually impossible.
Some posts below said that banning for hate speech was really a charade. But if that's true, what's wrong with retail investors pooling their resources to squeeze short? How is it different from a hedge fund pooling resources to flex their muscle of financial engineering?
There wouldn't be anything wrong with that. There'd be a lot right with it, honestly - I would be trumpeting it as a clear victory of the little guy over snobby funds who don't think anyone else can understand finance.
But what's happening right now is almost certainly a pump and dump with a short squeeze as a facade. I've seen a lot of commenters who seem to be grievously misled about the actual mechanics of a short squeeze, and think that short sellers will be forced to buy all their stock at market price on Friday.
I haven't heard anything to suggest that the short sellers are forced to buy back the stock either. This is a stock has clearly caught public's attention, Once the hype cycle is over, why wouldn't it regress to the mean? Who's going to believe that the stock stays at this level over the long term?
Fun to talk about though. This is a very entertaining story.
If a short position goes hard against you the brokerage will make you to put up more collateral (money) and if you can't, then your only other option is to buy back some of your position, so yeah, short sellers can be forced to buy back stock.
The stock Signal spiked after Elon Musk said to use signal, has nothing to do with the app. A different Zoom spiked at the beginning of COVID. A lemonade company in 2017 put blockchain in its name and watched the stock price soar. Hertz went way up after declaring bankruptcy. I’m willing to bet this is clueless speculators.
Shorts borrow the stock for a time period. Let say you borrowed a stock that is $1 from me with the promise you will give the stock back end of the week + some interest. You sell the stock for $1 end of the week the price is $100 so you are on the hook for stock + interest. As the owner of the stock I will be more interested in getting it back and selling it for $100 rather than allowing you to give me the stock later by extending the loan terms when the price might drop.
There is, large market moves down over last few days are mostly due to hedge funds selling off longs to cover their shorts. If you look at GSVIP ETF (GS ETF for most loved names by hedge funds) it was down 4% yesterday. The short squeeze is real but I think funds are mostly out of it now (or ones remaining in the short have shorted at higher prices and in reasonable proportion of AUM). There's also a direct negative correlation between short interest and Russel 2000 performance over the last few days.
okay, but if it was a pump and dump why all the media manipulation and shenanigans? why the coordinated attempts to tank the stock, etc? wouldn't u want it to skyrocket and reap the benefits? i mean that's exactly what a pump and dumper would do, just let it naturally die afterwards.
this "make the regular people mad to fake a short squeeze to pump the stock" is some weird 4D explanation. not saying it's guaranteed, but the simplest answer is sometimes the best, that they are in a position to be squeezed and it's looking more likely.
I agree with this post. Although the narrative being spun on WallStreetBets and co wants you to believe in a short squeeze, it doesn't seem like any shorts were actually squeezed. This morning, Melvin Capital and Citron successfully exited their positions in Gamestop. Had there been a true squeeze, the whole point would have been to prevent an easy exit and force them to cause the price to balloon out of control. By exiting, they've proven that although shorts were obviously hurt a lot, the fabled squeeze never came. And to analyze it technically, I know a lot of people are repeating the line about GME shorts being xxx% of the float, where xxx > 100. It's cute, but for a stock with such crazy volume as in the past few days, the shorts being above the float doesn't really matter.
And full disclosure, I made a lot of money via GME these past 2 weeks. I'm just not a believer in what's currently being pushed as the truth on social media. To me, GME seems to be a classic case of Tulipmania hiding behind a "short squeeze" mask. It's the latest Bitcoin and no one wants to miss out.
As I said, they made a painful exit but they were able to get out. If there was a real squeeze going on, their losses would have been eye-watering and far far over 100% of their assets. In 2008, Volkswagen became the most valuable company in the world for a day because short sellers literally _could not_ exit their position. There were no shares to acquire at any price. Gamestop, with 90M trade volume in the last day, does not resemble a squeeze at all. Short sellers are able to leave and lick their wounds. In a squeeze they'd be trapped.
Technically GP could know that if they have insider info. But now I'm curious, if GP can't know they exited, how do you know they didn't? Sincerely asking.
If that were true Melvin Capital would just say nothing and ride the profits. If you are a short seller with a covered position (with options) your goal would be to let as many desperate/stupid people enter before the crash because it means there will be less resistance to price drops after the crash because all the dumb and unpredictable money is gone. You would instead push propaganda that your shorts are not covered and lure people into your trap.
If your shorts are not covered then you are basically completely screwed and are willing to do absolutely anything to tank the price as soon as possible even if it means you do not get maximum possible returns. You would push propaganda that your shorts are covered and convince people that you have complete control over the situation.
If you told the truth you would be exposing yourself to unnecessary risk in both cases.
I’m not a finance expert, but the hedge funds could have bought GME stocks sometimes between opening their short position and closing it.
The short could have been naked when it was made, but there is nothing stopping the hedge fund from buying the underlying security ahead of the short position closing.
Is the total 149% short closing on this Friday? I was under the impression that the 100+% short position was for all shorts for all closing dates on GME? If the 149% short is spread over multiple weeks/months it seems misleading to quote the over 100% short position as a sure marker of an unlimited squeeze.
For reference, during the unlimited squeeze of Volkswagen’s stocks in 2008 it was estimated that less than 1% of Volkswagen shares were liquid — due to Porsche silently buying the majority of liquid stocks — to cover the short positions which led to the “unlimited squeeze”. I have a hard time believing that The number of liquid GME shares out there are nearly as low as 1%. The only way I could see the liquidity going that low is if institutional investors with tens or hundreds of billions dollars in market cap decide to buy up all liquid shares, effectively lowering the liquidity of GME to similar levels as Volkswagen during the 2008 unlimited short squeeze.
Naked shorting is when you sell the underlying stock without borrowing it first. You have 2-3 days from transaction to settlement (depending on the market), so you can enter a transaction at T and then only locate borrow at T+2. Obviously, you're running the risk that you can't find borrow in time.
In most cases, however, you short by checking for available borrow first, and _then_ shorting.
Yes, it's not generally something for a retail trader to worry about, since the broker is providing the borrow (or disallowing the trade saying it's unavailable, as many have probably seen with GME), but hypothetically if you managed it it's generally not allowed.
“ a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life”
I agree with you, but I lament that outside of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit, it’s been very hard for any social media company to gain traction.
No, it's because they became a legal risk as they were the primary host of insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol while chanting "Hang Mike Pence!".
Also, private business can do whatever they want. 1st amendment only applies to government not private business.
He said “primary host of insurrectionists” and said nothing about planning. You’re just looking to fight about some terrible app that was ran by a wannabe mark zuckerberg that prided himself on letting extremists run rampant. Zero moderation meant anyone who wanted to say “hang mike pence” could do it all day long without any fear of repurcusion. That’s a clearly violent threat. That’s the chant of a anarchist mob.
Section 230 absolves them of said risk entirely. Amazon's hand wasn't forced.
And quite frankly, I don't buy that accusation. That seems like a convenient, unfalsifiable canard, doubly so when all the tech companies acted in concern.
And please stop with the "1st amendment" thing, which nobody in this conversation even mentioned. This observation is off-topic and the very definition of a dead horse in a conversation about what the law ought to do.
A pizza place gets bashed for saying that they wouldn't serve pizza to a same sex wedding - they get bashed by one group and praised by another. Payment systems cancel Parler - one group praises private actions, the other bashes it.
I hate Parler, but it showed that both sides are rotten authoritarians.
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature. [1]
Are we going to play this game though? People stormed the Capitol hunting for members of Congress. They were chanting "Hang Mike Pence". If they weren't white, would you have any trouble calling it terrorism? Would insurrection or sedition be more agreeable?
They beat a police officer to death in the process of taking over the Capitol building, to attempt to stop democratic processes because they didn’t like the outcome.
Violence (murder!) for political motives. Terrorism.
They serve very different audiences. Facebook and Discord seem to be the most intrusive, as they displaced many mediums. I cannot communicate with my homeowner group, because I am banned by facebook for using profanities.
Then Facebook decides to leave political posts proliferate unchecked, while I can't use the word baboon. I personally hate Facebook so much that I told the recruiters to GTFO and never contact me.
The parent comment is not talking about WSB going private (which you're right, it does happen from time to time by the mods for housekeeping). But they're actually talking about Discord shutting down WSB servers - for those unfamiliar, WSB subreddit also had an official discord server which was quite active.
> I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).
What? I have never used Discord.
If you think that a company has a monopoly on your social life, that's on you. There are lots of chat services There's even gasp email, and double gasp group texts.
The problem here isn't that we need a new decentralized system, the problem is that people are too lazy to use the decentralization we have today.
Email is not comparable to Discord... Teamspeak and Mumble are dying because everyone moved to Discord -- and all the professional meeting solutions are awful.
I don't choose which platforms communities and friends move to. I have limited agency in this situation and exercising that is pointless due to network effects. I'm not annoyed about dominance, I'm annoyed about monopoly abuse.
Yes, though that's kind of irrelevant. What use is Facebook to me if all my friends are only on Discord? These companies aren't the only source of socialization for everyone, but for a lot of people they effectively are.
I think you're right and I think it's strange that we focus so much on crypto and other high-tech solutions to problems we don't have, but not on federated distributed versions of social media, messaging, video hosting. I guess it's not as new and shiny.
I've been using matrix for the past year or so and I can tell you it's been great. I'm surprised at how stable and easy it is. I text friends who are on different servers, and no one notices. The clients are all starting to get E2EE by default. Hopefully the future is as warm.
I wonder if covid has made people view online communities as the public space. In prior years treating an online community as your sole social outlet wouldn't be viewed as healthy. Now it's almost the defacto.
I remember the days when you could say some truly deplorable shit online and almost no one would care. People who didn’t want to hear it would ignore or block and move on.
Now it seems like so many topics and words are completely off limits. It’s very restrictive and I think it’s making the web a less free, a less open, and a less fun space.
It’s extremely hard to exist online when you have not only a raging group of pro censorship PC police hell bent on removing you, but coordinated networks of platforms that will remove you in unison.
So I think it’s less that people see online communities as their public squares, and more that it’s very difficult to exist online if don’t hold the same ideas and opinions of those controlling the platforms.
This is why I think it's so important that the internet begins moving towards decentralization soon.
Much of the censorship and top-down control we're witnessing today will only get worse while there's no bittorrent-like or blockchain-like decentralization.
Ok, but lets not forget how a few actors can spoil a healthy community. Remember Kuro5hin? Very healthy and thriving community destroyed by a handful of stupid trolls.
Have been following one of the decentralized web approaches, don't remember, netsomething dot net, runs in the browser, very nice interface. Started promising until it got swamped with right wing lunatics doing nothing but trolling and spewing antisemitic stuff all over the place. I am not even offended, it is just a waste of my time to wade thru this trash to find some meaningful conversation.
Any unmoderated community is going to attract these lunatics.
The only places where I find meaningful conversation are topic centered Forums.
Anything sans topic turns into a burning dumpster when unmoderated. This is humanity. The lunies get their voices amplified and the sane fall silent.
> a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life
Hmm, it's almost as if this just happened recently, but people looked the other away because it was tightly coupled to politics. I think 2021 is going to blow 2020 out of the water.
I don't think as many people looked the other way as you suspect. I was happy about the first instance for the same reason I'm happy about this instance. I want to see them all burn to the ground so we can go back to the principles of the web pre web2.0 but building it back better and more resilient to being hijacked by corporate money.
The timing is due to the insane influx of new users causing the server mods to completely lose control and trolls wreck havoc.
The subreddit did not go private due to the ban. You're reading too much into the headline. It depicts two separate events that are both caused by too many new users (too many new posts in the subreddit's case).
The Discord ban was clearly because the community itself is controversial from a legal point of view. That's why the ban happened today. But I think this is an unwise move. Each community that is censored over something legal but controversial, pushes the creative citizens of the Internet towards building more open platforms.
Hope we end up there soon, this constant censorship of communities I might want to have a look at to satisfy my curiosity gets mighty tiring.
And shorting more stock than a total company even has is not controversial? Or using massive shorting to just keep on pushing a stock down? It feels a lot more controversial to me and yet, the hedge fund managers dont't really feel anything. Well apart from the fact that they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar and now they have to pay. But I wonder if their platforms are now being censored. Classic money is power, I'm firmly on the side of WSB here.
I agree with you. But there's definitely a controversy here, in the sense that two large groups have strongly differing opinions.
To my eyes, that controversy is part of a very public power struggle. I firmly believe that the WSB community is in the right, and that any legal gray areas are subtle enough that it would require a judge to decide. So there is no reason for internet companies to pre-emptively wash their hands of the situation. But yet here we are.
Except everything they are doing is perfectly legal. They noticed some people had overextended their short position, they took action (action that "legitimate" traders were also taking) and stand to make some money.
I don't see how that is market manipulation any more than short sellers shorting over 100% of a stock.
Maybe there is an argument for regulation to prevent this but the financial sector has been staunchly against any such regulation for decades.
By definition, WSB is controversial because a lot of powerful people criticise them and would prefer them not to exist. Legally, I can see that they're moving in an uncharted gray area that might eventually require lawyers and a judge to determine whether they did something illegal, or that eventually attracts lawmakers to adapt existing regulation.
I'm firmly on the side of WSB here though, and none of the above should be considered a moral rationale for its pre-emptive censorship. Controversial certainly doesn't mean wrong, of which one might have the impression after the last months of social media purges.
I'm not at all surprised that WSB becomes the focus of such a power struggle, and very much hope it becomes another catalyst towards de-centralized, censorship-proof online communities.
For all the uneasy feelings I get about the triggerhappy banning by these platforms, there's probably a light at end of the tunnel. Boot enough people and the better alternatives might actually flourish with network effects.
The way bans on reddit have tended to work is that by dispersing the group, there's an additional barrier created to stop the spread of the idea. This has happened with fatpeoplehate, the trump reddit, and with the red pill reddit among others. Its not just a group of people of a similar knowledge level and similar ideas coming together, it is also new users happening across the subreddit and deciding to take part. Take away the new users and it becomes an echo chamber.
This is what makes Youtube, Reddit and Facebook so powerful. They can choose who can stay on their platform, and how much discoverability their ideas have if they are allowed to stay on the platform.
The only way to deal with it is through splitting these companies up - that's the only constitutional way, and we must start immediately. They're too big.
They're not going to be too big for very long. Their size depends on people being there, and if they keep banning people they'll just get smaller. Once all the interesting people are banned the regular people will go where the interesting people are. They're about to have their blockbuster moment and no bailouts can stop it.
I hope you're right - I truly believe that post 2012 social media has been a cancer on society, in addition to the 24/7 newscycle. But I somehow am not as optimistic as you are. People far underestimate the power of twitter/fb/youtube.
The power in those sites is that they are not siloed and at scale, meaning you can reach a much broader audience. Parler would never be able to influence the mass market because it was so specialized - making it ineffective at evangelization. WSB would never be what it is without the platform of reddit. Going to a small specific site will not have the same power, even though I think it is better to host your own hardware and do that.
But this approach has diminishing returns. Sure, for the past few years this had the effect of isolating these groups from polite society. But eventually, when they start banning large, main stream groups like, say, people that want to make money in the stock market, people that dislike wall street, and one of two political parties in the USA, all they're going to do is lose market share and therefore their ability to police the internet. People don't use YouTube because they like the logo, people use YouTube because they like the videos on the site. At some point all the cool kids are on other websites, and once the herd follows you've lost control over anything.
I'm very excited about it personally, I like disruption.
The fact that 4Chan itself has not been the target of deplatforming efforts is confusing to me. If I were to put my tinfoil hat on for a bit, I might speculate that it’s a honeypot that shares data with the feds.
Both also have a very undeserved reputation. I saw news reports on 8chan as if it were something similar to Stormfront. The front page was mostly video game and pornography and one had to search very deep into it's hidden circles to find racial supremacy content.
Even if 4chan host their servers, if they're not in someone's basement, they'd be in colocation, which can then be targeted, since I don't think 4chan own the full datacenter.
ISPs could just drop their customers' traffic to that server. This happens all the time and has happened to 4chan before.
Or they could go further and refuse to peer with any ISP that doesn't block 4chan, or lobby to have the government compel ISPs to block it, likely on think-of-the-children or think-of-the-terrorism grounds.
Self hosting definitely isn't some magic way of preventing all censorship.
That's a decent workaround if you're technical and stubborn, but there needs to be a solution for this that's available for everyone with just a few clicks.
You won't be able to post on 4chan and probably many other anonymous communities while on vpn unless a friend of your sets it up from a residential ip.
With TOR you have to hire someone to fill captchas just to read things.
My mobile internet provider actually did this for about a year after the New Zeeland shooting. Was quite annoying and I considered switching to another company because I quite enjoyed shitposting about bicycles on /t/
Oh it's not a secret, 4chan is and has been for decades actually proactive (or at least no supoena needed) with sharing data with LEO and has strong (albeit US free speech levels of) moderation across all of the site.
If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested. The site doesn't give protection.
I steer clear of it, but wonder if with more EU like moderation a better site could be formed.
The advice has always been and continues to be to use services such as Tor (and a properly secured computing environment) to access the less mainstream areas of the internet.
4chan rejects posting from Tor, but accepts browsing from it.
There are other anonymity networks that it doesn't filters out as well. But in principle, it does not allow posting from anonymity networks.
4chan is also quite mainstream and one of the largest websites on the internet, certainly larger than Hacker News. Similar Web ranks it around 800 world wide, but it's probably even higher, given that it's split into two domains that remain separate for advertisement reasons.
> but wonder if with more EU like moderation a better site could be formed.
> If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested.
The idea of posting something and being arrested disgusts me. The bar around the world for such an action should be just as high as it is in America. If I post that I'm going to come and kill you, thinkingemote, at 10:17 a.m. at your place of work located at <insert address here>, then by all means I deserve to be arrested. I've made a credible threat with credible information, verified by the fact I know your name and your workplace address.
However, saying something "mean" to you, or "misgendering" you, or even calling you a racial slur, should never be enough to arrest someone.
It reminds me of one of the few (maybe only...) great lines from Ghostbusters 2: "Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God-given right!"
So it should be online as well. If you don't like it, you can absent yourself from the platform(s), and in almost every case, if you don't want to do that, you can block the other person.
I thought you were a troll the first time you posted some ridiculous bullshit to one of my posts, but now I'm sure.
The sad part is, you forgot your own rule. You got your feefees hurt (which was clearly bullshit also) and said you were "done communicating" or some such nonsense.
That's the great thing about a troll. They're also liars.
The same way ThePirateBay and Sci-Hub haven't gotten deplatform even while having far more powerful forces after them. It's because the people hosting it aren't incompetent, and unlike what these people crying foul lately will have you believe, censorship on the internet isn't really a thing. You may not get a free megaphone like Twitter, but as long as you know what you're doing, you can have a voice online just fine.
4chan has been responsible for turning so many kids into racists using humor. I remember a whole period in like 2010 when there was a — before 4chan I used to see black people as “black person in a suit”, now I see black people as “terribly racist caricature”. I would hate to see it go but boy is that place the true breeding ground for hate.
No offence here, but if 4chan making racism "fun" was sufficient to make some kid hate real people including their neighbours or friends then it's was never a problem with the platform. It's just indication of larger problem in both society and / or upbringing.
People who can be easily radicalized or manipulated is just indication that they wasn't educated well enough to think on their own with their brain. And in any case chan culture is far better than some actual criminals or cultists who are much better at brainwashing people.
I'm not trying to justify some of chan content, but
I consider that it's greater good that some people get a lesson about how easily they could be manipulated.
What I sure about is that no one force a person to have continious exposure to such propoganda on 4chan. It's not like it's some government funded website that everyone has obligation to visit due authorities requirements.
Being exposed to this kind of "humor" is deliberate choice. And even 4chan is not some single entity: there are plenty of boards on other topics that nowhere as extreme and sometimes they better moderated than e.g reddit , facebook or linkedin.
That kind of discourse is addictive and even though you have a choice, we as a society don’t always allow kids to make their own choices — especially around addictive, societally harmful issues.
I agree with you but I don't have any uneasy feelings -- these are private companies doing whatever they want with their resources. The sooner everybody wakes up to this fact, the sooner all this pointless hand-wringing will be over.
Yep, this is for me very exciting. I like banwaves. They're digging their own graves, they'll go the way of Blockbuster soon, and the internet, public discourse, information availability and dare I say humanity will be better for it. I wish they'd do it faster.
We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back.
This seems like a DDOS attack on r/wsb well knowing that the moderators cannot keep up with moderation?
Or is this simply a case of getting too popular for Reddit? The fact that discord was banned around the same time as r/wsb going private is suspect.
edit: After hours market shows GME is has TANKED!!!! Closed at 345 and dipped to 248. Holy, there will be class action lawsuits for sure now.
edit: I've been on the phone for 2 hours waiting for my broker to answer. All of this seems weird. They SUDDENLY have volatility and decide today is the day to stop answering my calls???
edit: /u/DeepFuckingValue's posts have all been wiped!!!!! WTF!
I think the SEC thread created this morning had something to do with going private.
It isn't the first time they've gone private but this time with the discord being banned and all, im getting ban vibes.
Look if Discord can ban WSB over some cuss words, imagine what Reddit can do.
I'm on the phone with my broker as we speak and now I fear that this is a coordinated attack.
edit: so after I made that comment about github's half assed apology towards the guy that they terminated for saying "watch out for nazis", those same group of people are downvoting and flagging every single one of my comments. AGAIN. You didn't care when people were bringing attention to the anti-semitic memes being posted on Github 4 years ago, now you want to bury every fucking comment, just like the angry hedge fund managers getting their revenge on serfs making a little money.
It's private because the mods and the community cannot handle the sudden interest. (A subreddit squeeze!)
They even say this on the placeholder page.
A few hours ago zjz (a mod) posted about trying to get an unlimited API endpoint for Reddit from the admins so the mod bots can cope with the load.
"We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back."
Why do they mention ensuring reddit's content policy? That's a hammer admins bring out when they want to ban a subreddit. Did admins lean on the mods?
It's been bringing bad press on Reddit and that's usually the trigger for the admins to enforce their content policy.
(see the Donald, racist subs, fat people hate, violentacrez, jailbait - while these clearly did violate their policies, it took bad PR for enforcement to happen)
My guess is this means the mods will probably create a minimum Reddit karma amount required to post and/or comment. The goal to cut down on spam and bots.
So, new people can’t join in and immediately start trying to pump up random stocks.
WSB is getting flooded right now, so the mods are building in some auto-moderator things to get a handle on the subreddit.
Probably additional cover so that people reporting on this issue remember that there exists a reddit wide content policy that all subreddits have to enforce - so if there is any issue, reddit is also in the picture.
It's because there was too much noise. Spam, new 0 karma accounts creating threads and posting the wrong kind of shitposts, etc. It was virtually inevitable.
I tried to comment there with a 14+ day old throwaway account 4 hours ago and was met with a bot deleting the comment.
"It looks like your account is too new to use /r/wallstreetbets. Sorry about that, but people use new accounts to spam us all the time. Please don't ask when you can be approved because we're going to say no and then laugh at you. Your account must be one month old at least."
Denying communication completely could be a disaster in this case. In the absence of their precious DD, what number do you think the WSB'rs are going to choose to set their limits at? 420.69 seems a little too low right now. My bet would be 42,069 at least.
Reddit servers were really unstable for a bit, I've noticed user pages don't load when that happens. Seems a lot of people see conspiracies in caching issues.
I joined and had an extremely negative experience immediately, left, and reported it.
This was months ago. Imagine suddenly thousands of people are doing this and now Discord is being flooded with reports.
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Something some people might not know as well, there was another WSB Discord started by Jartek that used to be linked on the subreddit
That Discord was much more tame even with minimal moderation. No racial or homophobic slurs, but still allowing most if not all content people wanted to bring up short of porn...
Post scandal the subreddit changed back to this Discord, which was a mistake. It really was a vile server.
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Edit because now I'm rate limited over vindicating downvotes from people mourning that dumpster :)
Crazy how every direct reply to me has needed someone else to correct them. I guess my comment was coherent enough for people not foaming at the mouth to cry over some racist dumpster fire of a server...
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Again, there were two servers
One was linked in the subreddit, had minimal moderation, policed really hard slurs like ni*er, allowed shitposting all you wanted otherwise.
That one gained traction while WSBGod's saga was going on.
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The one I referenced which is the one deleted today, where mods were throwing n bombs for fun, was mostly regarded as an embarrassing weird place people might stumble upon from Google.
You couldn't even find it easily, someone had to invite you directly and some of them weirdly saw those invites as a favor (that's how I was invited there, someone liked one of my DDs in the main server and thought they were inviting me to sit with the cool kids... right.)
It wasn't tied to the subreddit and referred to itself as the "OG Discord" because it existed before the subreddit officially tied itself to a discord server.
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Jartek's "saga" took place, and because he had created the well regarded Discord server the link was replaced with one to the outright vile server.
Here's a thought experiment. In a few hours of coding, Google, Discord, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could all spin up map/reduce searches across all their channels, groups, links, results... for any wordlist you'd care to provide.
If a flagged word is used past a certain frequency, the channel can be closed, the page can be delisted, the accounts can be banned, or the site can be terminated. So clean, simple, and really quite easy.
They can even just start with the really really awful words if you like.
But they don't do this. Generally speaking they (at least historically) tend to support the ability of people to say Bad Things on the internet! You can even enter these Bad Words right into the front page of the world's biggest search engine and get hundreds of millions of hits in 0.33 seconds.
Yet somehow a channel of particular notoriety which is causing serious financial damage to some very Important People can disappear in an instant, maybe even right on the day of its peak exposure, and those trivially, easily, obviously detectable Bad Words can be blamed.
And no one even has to think too hard about if that was really what just happened here. Because who would ever step up, particularly in our current political environment, to say that anyone or any channel used to espouse such Bad Words (or Wrong Think) should be tolerated?
You know you can be against arbitrary and unfair enforcement and think it's good to act against bigoted speech, right?
The way you're talking about "Bad Words" sounds like you think discord should ignore these problems entirely. It solves the biased enforcement problem but it's a pretty awful way to do it.
> Generally speaking they (at least historically) tend to support the ability of people to say Bad Things on the internet!
Who is they? Discord has not been supportive of the ability to say arbitrary bad things on their hosting.
I'm black, I didn't like seeing a guy say ni*er hundreds of times in charge of the place where WSB users end up, I reported it :)
(and don't give me some dumb bullshit about "wElL yOu GuYS sAy Ni*a" it's not the same no matter how upset that makes you)
Took a while but I'm glad it's gone :)
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I spent a lot of time on the main Discord that existed before this one (which most people had abandoned at the time since it was devoid of intelligent speech even by WSB)
WSB by it's nature has some rough edges, it's not the most politically correct place.
But a mod, a real mod with admin, not the joke WSB mod stuff... saying that stuff so much? Nah I'm going to report it.
WSB is on the edge of satire and outright toxicity but it toes the line fairly well.
That server was the opposite, mostly toxic (and not even in a humorous or satirical way) with very occasional coherency.
... what? I did have an intention, the mod killed that intention.
I had enjoyed the other WSB discord very much, and was looking forward to a new server I'd enjoy and because of a jackass mod who say nig*er a lot I couldn't enjoy that.
So a very proportional response is to report the server they moderate!
I didn't lie, I didn't misconstrue anything, I said "this server has a moderator that spams nig*er very casually"
Are you defending that? Or blaming me for their behavior? Or faulting me for not liking that? Which is it?
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Because make no mistake, if this wasn't an admin level mod saying this I wouldn't report them. I even get the WSB "everyone is a mod" meme. And I get moderation is tough, things slip, that's life.
But when your admin says nig*er hundreds of times for fun... you're crossing a line.
Did you read his post? He was active in the community. Was active in the one Discord server. Wanted to continue being active in the other, and saw all this racist crap.
I will admit that racist clubs aren’t for me. However since they are against me, my race, and the continued breathing of my family... I reserve the right to report them.
Racist groups start with talk, then inevitably end with burning crosses and dangling nooses.
I was part of a community, someone from the community hanging out on server A (which the community has designated as official at the time) says, hey come join us on server B, we're the same community (and they do indeed use the name of the community)!
Server B is racist vitriol garbage against the TOS of the platform.
I report them.
Easy as that :)
I think WSB will last longer if we don't get sucked into that kind of garbage. "4chan with a Bloomberg Terminal" is satire, not a goal.
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Off topic, but your anger is so delicious, you're exactly the kind of person I live for, it's like my very existence is kryptonite for you :)
People who think I don't have a right to be offended at something enough to report it... but are offended enough that a black man reported someone who's spamming the word nigger on a platform that bans hate speech that you called the black guy an asshole.
People who think that banning racist speech and homophobia is creating a safe space... but whine that no one will host their safe space for white supremacy.
The reverse-snowflakes, if you will :)
You're all being chased off the internet, Parler's dead, whatever trash platform you come up with next will be dead, Trump's out, all the companies that run the world kowtow to the dirty liberal agenda of being against racism and homophobia and white supremacy, and even if you think it's just lip service, here's a great example of it working out just fine :)
We were all worried wrong-think would end up being anything that goes against those in power... turns out wrong-think is saying nigger hundreds of times, and I'm ok with that as a black guy :)
> "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"
... this would be a great reply if my situation didn't happen months ago.
Discord didn't ban them after they got proof an admin was spamming the word nigger, you think they got banned over some unicode letters?
The place was choc full of racist garbage, not typical WSB edgy satire, rtfa.
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There is another WSB discord which used to be the one linked, had tens if not hundreds of thousands of users, and never devolved to the level that one did.
Know why? Because the mods weren't the type of people who spam nigger.
Risk of SEC involvement. This admin is probably nowhere near as lenient on this kind of stuff as the last was, and the recent nonsense with GameStop is probably bad enough to attract negative regulatory attention.
That’s the joke. The SEC pursues the mostly harmless while letting the sharks go free. Did they do anything about naked short selling of Overstock stock? Nope, and now that it’s happened again and retail took advantage of a bad trade, the rules suddenly change “to protect the little guy.”
It’s disingenuous at a minimum, and crony capitalism when taken to the maximum.
Are they doing anything about Nancy Pelosi (her husband Paul to be specific) buying Tesla calls before bills were brought forth with generous EV charging network subsidies? “Nothing to see here.” (Nothing against Pelosi and not intended as whataboutism, picked because it was top of mind from some research today and the disparity of enforcement)
Edit: Pump and dump schemes absolutely should not be supported. Piling into a short squeeze is not a pump and dump scheme.
It's crony capitalism at minimum, and absolutely disgustingly oppressive at the maximum. These people seemingly are physically unable to let "the little guy" have even a whiff of financial independence.
Nothing against Pelosi? If that's as it appears to me (trading on insider information, by a person in a position of public trust no less) she needs to be heavily fined, in prison, or both.
What makes me ill is that the insider trading rule makes sense. It protects congress from lawsuits when their mutual fund or ETF owns Tesla and they benefit by enacting laws that benefit their constituents, but that have downsides for others.
The rule however assumes that congress conducts themselves ethically, and evidently that is clearly not the case.
My spouse was an elected official in California, and we had to fill out Form 700; diversified mutual funds didn't need to be disclosed as long as they met the definitions (at least 100 investors, at least 15 issuers, not a sector fund). Of course, Form 700 doesn't apply to federal officials elected to represent California; but a similar disclosure requirement / duty to avoid apparent conflict of interest would be nice at the federal level.
It should be pretty simple for most elected officials to dump their publicly traded stock and get into a diversified mutual fund before they start campaigning and while they hold office. For those who have concentrated holdings that are hard to dump, they could put it into a blind trust or whatever. Office holders really shouldn't be making a lot of trades; equity based compensation aside (either of their spouse or if they're a part time officer where those still exist, and have a part time job with equity based compensation)
There are ways to deal with that. For example, I’m not allowed to buy or sell my own company’s shares outside of specific trading windows, but index funds are fine as long as the company represents less than 10% of the fund.
There's a WORLD of a difference between a mutual fund or ETF that owns Tesla, and buying call options on the stock, that make money only if the stock moves in a definite time-frame. We have other examples too, for example Kelly Loeffler, whose husband is head honcho of the NYSE, sold a lot of stocks just before the Feb/March crash in 2020, based on insider information that she got from attending the Congress briefings that showed it was not just a flu.
EDIT: LOL, the WSB sort are here downvoting everything that doesn't parrot their embarrassing horseshit. YEAH, TAKE DOWN THE BIG WIGS!
That isn't remotely insider trading, and the slur is farcical.
Ignoring that Tesla is one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world (it's what, 5th largest in the world now?), anyone on the planet knew that the Biden admin was going to push low emissions, green energy, etc. This was all public plans. There is positively nothing "insider" about that. And buying some call options when it's at some all-time highs is about the shittiest way to exercise "insider" info.
> EDIT: LOL, the WSB sort are here downvoting everything that doesn't parrot their embarrassing [expletive]. YEAH, TAKE DOWN THE BIG WIGS!
Chillax, you’re breaking at least one of the site guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments. Edit: specifically “Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.” Would appreciate if I could get similar clarification on exactly why my comment has lost karma.
There’s already ways to give negative feedback on a comment. You can downvote or flag, or even just collapse a comment so it doesn’t bother you. It comes off as presumptuous when people point at rules, thereby pulling the thread into a tangential meta conversation.
Then all you get is people asking why they were downvoted. IMO downvoting should include a comment if one doesn't already exist sufficiently explaining your reason for downvoting.
That doesn't mean it needs to turn into a discussion if they defend themselves, but I think some indication of why is almost always warranted.
Common misconception, as most didn't hear much about it beyond its initial signing. Congress still has that exemption. I believe you're referring to the STOCK Act, of 2012, which cramped their style for a little over a year.
In 2013, Senator Harry Reid introduced S.716, which after 14 seconds of discussion was passed by unanimous consent. Its net effect was to make the rest of STOCKS untrackable, and therefore unreportable and unenforceable.
Congress is famous for being extremely lucky in their trades. Somehow their timing is way better than for common plebes, there's much research around about it. But of course laws are for the little people, including insider trading laws, so...
"Pump and dump schemes absolutely should not be supported. Piling into a short squeeze is not a pump and dump scheme."
LOL. Give me a break.
This is ___100%___ a P&D scam. They can squeeze shorts because they target trash stocks of failing businesses (you know -- the stocks that get shorted), then create a positively ridiculous story about a value proposition. A bunch of moron retail investors on Reddit aren't going to do shit to squeeze shorts, but they're the front for a couple of very well financed players.
But...something something Nancy Pelosi. Christ. Yeah, she's really scamming the system playing a stock at all time highs. Real elite moves.
Yes, GME's current price does not reflect the value of the company. That being said, anybody that feels that staying involved in a short play involving a profitable retailer with significant activist investor interest when short interest is exceeding 100% is a good idea shouldn't be allowed within 10 miles of a risk management office. If someone's definition of pump and dump scheme includes investors making awful decisions and contractually obligating themselves to handing their money over to other people at insane losses, then this is one. For the rest of the world that is willing to call a bad trade what it is (even when the winners have quite the potty mouth), it doesn't even come close.
I bought TSLA around about the same time she must have, with no insider knowledge.
Honestly I think we need some new rules about securities and elected officials, but the obvious ones would not cover a sitting president patronizing his own failing businesses in order to increase revenues using taxpayer money.
We want rules against people buying stock or taking bribes from oil companies, but nothing about using your own company to 'provide services' to federal officials. But even if you transfer control of your holdings to a third party, you still know what was in there when you started. And if 'what was in there' was your nephew's business...
The point is that the SEC’s measures are half hearted at best.
The purpose of the system is what it does, and the capital market operators, institutional participants, and regulators prioritize their interests. This exercise is simply exposing those efforts to daylight for all to see.
Dr Byrne from Overstock puts it better then I can (from your citation): “The SEC once again opts for nerf penalties for financial rapists.”
If one thinks WSB or retail in this are the problem, you haven’t been paying attention.
Disgusting but not surprising take from the Nasdaq CEO. A few managers with access to billions are able to coordinate their funds because they own them all, but a diverse mob of retail investors couldn't do this up until now because they're all subject to game-theoretic prisoner's dilemma forces.
It's only because so many people are rallying around the ideological worth of the stock that keeps the price from crashing. As the fad dissipates naturally over time, its ideological worth will decline and bring the price down with it. Time is on the side of the hedge funds.
I'm not sure the decline will be gradual. Also, prices unsupported by the actual company's fundamentals will now absolutely bring in more shorts, perhaps even the same people that got squeezed on the way up, recouping their losses and maybe profiting at the expense of retailers that wait too long.
I thought occupy wall street was backed more by those who identify as democrats or at least leaning that way. And I see this short squeeze just as a more concrete way to f*ck with the big money. Granted, big money rules them all.
If you think the Occupy Wall Street crowd is the one currently in control of democratic politics, then you have not been paying attention to democratic politics.
The response should have been "What situation? And why you expect the government to handle it - can't you wipe your own bottom without the government help?" But of course these times have passed - now the federal government should be everybody's nanny and hall monitor.
Lie of omission, transcription of the relevant part of the video for anyone who doesn't click, Jen Psaki said: "I'm also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary and a team that's surrounding her, and often questions about market we'll send to them, but our team is of course - our economic team including Secretary Yellen and others - are monitoring uh the situation. It's a good reminder though that the stock market isn't the only measure of the health of our economy" [etc].
Why does everybody assume there is not some hedge fund behind this short squeeze?
Do hedge funds not know how to do social media marketing?
Why go on CNBC to announce your position when you can pay some kids and influencers to shitpost on wsb to rile up an online mob and leave no fingerprints?
It is crazy to me how ppl continually fall for this stuff? How does any mass online movement not trigger skepticism? I mean look at the history of this stuff from Kony 2012 to the Arab spring to Russian troll farms.
I do however think that this is a significant new front in the battles between Wall Street behemoths. Market manipulation by stirring up online mobs of mooks. If this one is organic, the next won’t be.
Cant you easily tell where the invested money is coming from? if its coming from corporate accounts then it would obviously be another hedge fund but as far as I was aware these were lots of accounts from armchair investment platforms like robinhood etc
Ironically it probably brought a lot more attention to Discord than they would've had otherwise. I didn't see a single news article mention the Discord group until it was banned. Why would they? It was just a minor subset of the main group. Although... maybe that was the play here? Plenty of fresh eyes checking out and learning about Discord now.
The description of wallstreetbets is literally "as if 4chan found a bloomberg terminal", so I don't know what else anyone expected other than 4chan-like-behavior.
/biz/ has been flooded with r/wallstreetbets traffic for days and days now. /smg/ threads hit bump limit in 20 minutes sometimes ever since this GME thing really got going. It's even outdone the usual crypto posting on /biz/ which I didn't ever think would happen.
I'm sure there's plenty of technically minded Wall Street bets people who are capable of setting up synapse, for a self-hosted, non federated matrix/element based chat solution.
With his r/WallStreetBets posts and comments hidden (due to the sub going private), it's interesting to see the u/DeepFuckingValue's comments[1] from a year ago:
The guy has turned $50k into $50M in the one year since those first comments were made, with half of that made yesterday.
I doubt it's connected directly, however Discord's only current and future revenue stream is "growth and engagement", aka they don't have any real product to sell and are bound to rely on the "goodwill" of future investors.
In this case, it makes sense to try and appeal to them, even though from a purely moral point of view you could argue that the r/WSB people did nothing wrong and it's Melvin Capital (and whatever parent hedge fund is now bailing them out) who did wrong by betting more than they could afford to lose.
They'll ban you when you're talking politics,
They'll ban you when you're trying to get your licks,
They'll ban you when you try to make a buck,
They'll ban you and say it's just your luck,
But don't feel so all alone,
Everybody will get banned.
(With apologies to Bob Dylan...)
Serious point, though: They can decide to ban (almost?) anyone at any point. They will state a justification, but it looks a lot like banning anyone whenever they decide to.
The bots were getting overwhelmed, u/zjz said that they set up more strict moderation rules and were running into rate limiting due to the traffic. Maybe reddit can whitelist them or something.
Wow. Considering both the Discord server and the Subreddit are publicly available to everyone, there's no illegal activity that could have occurred on them. I wonder is someone trying to prevent the public/retail investors legally rallying on legal actions?
For those of us not in the know, what is so special about today regarding WSB? I know there's a feud with short sellers going on, but I haven't been following the details.
Someone went from 50k to 50M by igniting a short squeeze. All eyes were on the WSB subreddit, and discord server. Now both are private or offline.
No one has any chance to coordinate now. Discord’s action is effectively market manipulation in a literal sense, because this is certainly going to affect the market.
I’m curious why the sub went private though.
EDIT: I regret my phrasing. I didn’t mean this was illegal market manipulation, just that discord is literally manipulating the market by cutting off one of two primary coordination channels.
But they’re within their legal rights to do so, of course.
They considered making it private [and did briefly] during previous fiascos. At the time there were threads by the mods in which you can post so you are included but the alternative was by post history. It's very possible they've left e.g. the 10% most active posters in the sub and can still coordinate to an extent.
Edit: That seems to be the case, as their new message is
"WallStreetBets is under in tents load and is only for approved submitters. In the meantime, please enjoy some spaghetti. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW1GR7BECq4"
Edit2: Now changed to "We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back.
Before it went private I popped in and saw a thread where they were debating and coordinating what to do b/c they apparently had big issues today with bots and so many messages. Earlier I saw a few comments about downvoting bots all day.
They were debating whether it would be worthwhile and feasible to limit posting to people who had commented in the reddit 6 months prior as a filter.
Market manipulation is not anything that "affects the market." That definition would cover pretty much any and all behavior. In this case Discord is not trading securities, is not telling any one else to trade securities, has nothing at all to do with securities.
If I run an email service and find that a user is running a pump-and-dump scam through it, do you really think I shouldn't be able to shut down their account?
Yeah, I didn’t mean it in the legal sense. It was just interesting that this decision can cost certain people millions of dollars. But that’s true of many actions in the world, as you say.
"Market manipulation" is what we call it when you affect markets illegally. If it's not illegal, it's not manipulation. For example, if I buy a bunch of stock in a company it will usually raise the stock price. That affects the market but is not illegal and is not manipulation.
> "Market manipulation" is what we call it when you affect markets illegally. If it's not illegal, it's not manipulation.
This is backwards. The label "manipulation" is applied (or not) retroactively based on whether something was determined to be illegal or not. It's not something you can know in advance; two copies of the exact same action might be judged differently.
>If I run an email service and find that a user is running a pump-and-dump scam through it, do you really think I shouldn't be able to shut down their account?
Yeah, I kinda think the SEC should be in charge of whether you're doing a pump-and-dump or not.
> Discord’s action is effectively market manipulation in a literal sense, because this is certainly going to affect the market.
It certainly will have an effect, but I'm not sure it meets the definition of "manipulation". I think (though am not certain) that the manipulating party would need to have a stake in the market asset for manipulation to apply. Many definitions (though not investor.gov) imply that personal gain is a requirement. No doubt there will be a legal case made here.
My rough understanding is that the sub is required by Reddit admins to perform certain actions related to every submission (and even maybe every comment) which, due to API limitations, they could no longer do automatically.
Add this to the mix. The major brokerage firms go down. When users are able to login they receive messages they can no longer make call options on GME and are only allowed to sell.
They've officially ticked off rich and well-connected people, so regulators are coming to shake the tree branch (I have no idea whether what they're doing is illegal or not) and the platforms want to distance themselves from that ASAP.
Acting alone it’s not inherently illegal. Real question is whether pooling your strength (ie assets) with others to force a squeeze is illegal collusion and market manipulation.
In particular, it's hard to see a short squeeze as market manipulation, which is why nobody has been penalized for it.
What is a hedge fund except more explicit coordination of many people's money on a much greater scale? The classic example of Porsche's squeeze on VW stock was Porsche's management coordinating many people's pooled assets.
Incredibly naive to think that WSB itself isn't filled with rich and well-connected people. In its early days, WSB was almost entirely a bunch of rich wall street traders with extra tens/hundreds of thousands to spare on crazy bets. Nowadays, it's one of the largest subreddits on one of the largest websites in the world. WSB isn't some niche gathering of "average joes" - all of the major wall street firms monitor it, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that many of them downright manipulate it via astroturfing.
I’m convinced that this is just a “win the battle, lose the war” moment. I can imagine well funded financial institutions doing whatever they can to make sure this doesn’t happen again and if they can, punishing those who took part.
I agree with you regarding the war between populists and establishment, but I don’t think Trump fits into that as more than a cataclyst. The Obama story was the same: Hope and Change Populism.
Trump is business establishment through and through and has managed to wake a populist movement for his own enrichment.
He (and his sycophantic cronies) were (and continue to be) very much part of the “I got mine” greed establishment.
Instead of answering to the Population, it seems that Trump and his crew care only for self-enrichment. How he managed to capture the imagination of a Populist movement is indication of the total lack of alternatives.
“If big business is on your side, everyone on TV is on your side, Hollywood is on your side, every university faculty is on your side, and almost every union is on your side, then you are not The Resistance.” -Apocryphal
His companies have been battered, protested, and boycotted. He also donated his entire presidential salary. No one asked him to. WSB bets top posts are literally AOC, a democrat congresswoman, supporting them right now and somehow someone is still finding a way to blame Trump?
You're right, I read that Trump started a populist movement for his own enrichment and assumed he was relating that to the WSB populist movement getting started, since I just read an article stating that.
I definitely was not blaming Trump for this situation.
If I was saying anything about the relationship between Trump and WSB at all, I was ascribing the opposite blame: populist movements like WSB explain Trump.
I'm incredibly naive to think something I didn't claim, allude to, or comment on at all? Rich and well-connected people can tick off other rich and well-connected people.
This is a really good example of a type of hidden bigotry in a good chunk of the rhetoric from the left. Of course you made said claim because all rich people are in cahoots because their wealth is the single dimension which completely defines them.
Not sure what the "narrative" you're projecting on me is? The administration literally announced they are monitoring the online stock pumping situation. That's a pretty fair motivation for Discord to drop a stock pumping server.
How does that reconcile with literally hundreds of other servers involving stocks that are still up?
Including literally the WSB discord that used to be linked in the subreddit!
> To be clear, we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks. Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.
That server was vile. And not because of WSB tongue-in-cheek "retard" "gay-bear" stuff, just actual hateful usage of racial slurs actual, homophobia not just based on using certain words, and more
Your narrative that this is a response to "stock pumping" is completely off base.
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Edit reply:
There's proof for my side... Discord said they were banned from getting tons of reports.
There's no proof for a narrative where Discord self-censors over an intentionally vague tweet about social media and stocks.
"We deleted the server to not implicate ourselves in a tool of securities fraud" would have been a pretty damn good reason by itself... no need to lie about that.
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Edit reply:
If enough upset people crying over their banned cesspool downvote you, you can't reply to comments anymore :)
I guess in the face of your lack of even "proof", I'm brazenly suggesting that having an admin saying ni*er hundreds of times will get your server banned.
Obviously the answer is the large volume of eyeballs (or eardrums in this case) and attention on the server that was banned.
I'm not sure how you would know whether they were being genuine in their stated reason (unless you work for discord?) but obviously the timing strains credulity for many. There's no proof on either side here, so I'd prefer to stop arguing.
Reply-reply (not sure what the purpose of the edit was?):
Clearly discord doesn't want to actively suggest illegal activity happened on their platform, so they're not going to state that as their reason.
I guess in the face of your "proof", I'm brazenly suggesting that this marks the first time in history a corporate PR department has lied about the company's motivations.
To be clear, the one banned is the only WSB discord server with an active connection to the subreddit. The other one is a legacy server run by a former moderator who was banned for using the /r/WSB for personal gain. It's much less active these days (although people are flocking to it now that the active one is banned). It's not like we're talking about two equal servers where one is offensive and one isn't.
This is ignoring the fact that during the most prominent times WSB experienced prior to this, including when they crossed 1M subs, that was the main discord server the subreddit was linked to.
The other server is (or was) 100% more tame, and at the time experienced more traffic than the one that was just banned (obviously this changed once the link was removed).
There was no way you were going to find a mod spamming the n-word, in fact people were regularly banned for using slurs.
I mean being founded by the guy who was running the sub, it was in line with the subreddit, edgy, but with nuggets of clarity and an understanding that it's possible to take things too far.
I have an alternative theory: the events of three weeks ago in the USA made these platforms much more trigger-happy than usual. Where before they might have let it slide, nowadays (and for a while) they will want to take no risks.
However, with each such decision that happened recently (and I swear it's something of a third high-profile ban after the capitol thing), they're angering ever larger groups of people all across the political spectrum. I feel this will bite them hard. This is going to be interesting to watch.
As of now there have been few repercussions for turning the knob up on censorship. Power begets power, and we'll see whether or not it burns them in the end.
The details: a hedge fund decided to short retail stocks during the pandemic. They overextended with a naked short position against GameStop (that brick and mortar video game retailer) that exceeds not only the share float by a large margin but even the total number of shares in existence.
u/DeepFuckingValue on r/wallstreetbets discovered this a month or so ago, took out a $50k position, and let the rest of the sub in on it. That position is now worth $50M, a 1,000x increase.
Now there is literally no limit to the upside of a short squeeze. The price goes up high enough and the short sellers declare bankruptcy and liquidate their positions to cover the cost of purchasing shares. If they still come up short, then the same happens to the banks that lend to them . If that comes short, the brokerage must step up. At that point there’d probably be government intervention and a bailout. The WSB motto has become “we can stay retarded longer than they can stay solvent.”
According to a naïve view of the law, at least, that is correct. Far more likely there will be market outages and regulator shenanigans at undo the situation. Nobody is more of a sore loser than the establishment.
Remember: they just want to ban the BAD guys. It’s just the bad guys they’re going to go after. They will never go after you as long as you’re the good guys.
How much do you think it would cost to pay the top mod of /r/wsb (which is now private) to make the sub private? How much to some discord admins to ban the discord?
Is that amount more or less than the billions these hedgies were losing?
Ridiculous. Can’t believe we’re raising a generation of such fragile people. The WSB banter is pretty tame, if not pretty juvenile. Who cares. Don’t join the chat if you don’t enjoy their company. That’s the route I took.
I'm guessing: probability estimates. Realistically speaking, they had every opportunity to enact this ban before, and freedom to do so after the #gamestonk bonanza dies down. So why act now?
Realistically speaking those particular forums weren't major news stories and flooded with new users (many of them not working for hedge funds!) who don't like what they see before.
From the point of view of someone with no stake in the outcome, the possibility some WSB regulars' strategy for cashing out their profits was based around these newbies being encouraged to buy as much GSE as possible probably isn't an argument in favour of delaying action
So rules are only enforced when things are in the news?
> the possibility some WSB regulars' strategy for cashing out their profits was based around these newbies being encouraged to buy as much GSE as possible probably isn't an argument in favour of delaying action
That argument would make sense if the justification of the ban had been about legality, not use of language. If it's about use of language then it's not relevant.
> So rules are only enforced when things are in the news?
Sure, punitive sanctions are more likely to be taken when the volume of complaints goes up, the trolling goes up and the forum ceases to be an insider's club and starts being representative of how your platform is perceived by the general public. That's been the case for every platform ever and particularly recently, with no conspiracies involving Wall St bribery required.
> That argument would make sense if the justification of the ban had been about legality, not use of language. If it's about use of language then it's not relevant.
It's an obvious retort to the suggestion Discord could have delayed enforcement action until after it blew over [if they weren't in cahoots with Wall St]. The only reason to delay when they're getting complaints now is to help one set of their users unload financial positions onto another, so keeping it open until that happens shouldn't be a consideration precisely because it's irrelevant to their stated reason for the ban.
(I mean, I'm sure Discord had internal discussions about the legal liability of [not] taking action whilst people pumped stocks too, but the answer was likely 'none whatsoever, do whatever you think is best for your reputation')
Did you're read the article, and the statement Discord put out? I think the stated reason is the believable.
> Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
Yeah. I’m no fan of Wall Street but there is definitely a lot of rabid vitriol around, for example, Citron, and I really would not be surprised if people were stepping over the line and calling for violence.
The discord for WSB was a bit more than just ablest slurs but the timing of this is just a bad business move unless there's more to it. It doesn't make any real sense from a liability aspect unless they were going to plan some kind of insurrection against the government... you can just as easily ban them for this same reason "multiple warnings" next week. There had to have been external pressure on someone higher up or someone with a stake in the game.
I think at this point every single unpopular or questionable action made by an institution is going to go with a "it's to prevent hate/discrimination" justification. It's an easy way to get a credulous mob on your side; you can always nutpick random examples; and if someone argues against it they just prove they're one of the racists/whatever.
I mean your comment is based on the assumption that hate speech doesn't happen online. in my experience, places like discord and a bunch of subreddits are sweltering with it. it is not surprising at all that something that blew up as fast as this had trouble moderating hate speech out and became a host for it.
I think he’s saying you don’t ban the entire room just because some of the people say naughty words. And also why is someone deciding for me how much risk I can take? Just let me be exposed to hateful speech, I think I can handle it, and if not I can leave. It’s not like they can argue that hearing bad language will overflow their hospital and thus I must be on lockdown just in case.
Nobody disputes that they have the right to make that choice. That doesn't mean it's the right choice.
If your entire justification for something boils down to "I'm technically allowed to do this" it should be pretty obvious that you're doing something shitty.
> I mean your comment is based on the assumption that hate speech doesn't happen online.
How so? "Institutions will publicly blame hate speech as an excuse to do things they wanted to do otherwise" in no way requires an assumption that "hate speech doesn't exist on the internet."
Selective enforcement of laws is an old strategy to legally discriminate. It has been used many times to discriminate against blacks. What makes you think it can't be used to discriminate against other groups, like for example r/WallStreetBets?
Of course we can't say for sure. But at the same time we can't say for sure that specific policemen were actually racist when they attacked black people, or if they would do the same thing against white people in similar situation. You can find statistical patterns there, but similarly you can also find statistical patterns that certain groups on message boards gets banned for less than certain other groups.
You can take almost any discord down for this, and they often do if it gets reported enough times. In this case it got enough attention so they enforced the rules.
I notice certain pattern among some internet communities.
Extreme hype / popularity around a community, followed by degeneration (or increased visibility of prior degeneracy) of that community, followed by bans and/or deplatforming. Off the top of my head FatPeopleHate, TheDonald, and recently Parler are prior examples, I bet there are others though.
WallStreetBets seems like it's heading down a similar path. In fact, I bet a lot of the people in these communities overlap, though I have no proof.
2 of those examples are entirely political and manipulated instances.
The Donald was quarantined and moved out of site (not outright banned) under accusations of wanting to harm police (which was out of character considering all the our boys in blue memes). Then they were slowly destroyed, mods replaced and finally banned. In the meantime, dozens of subs called for death of cops before, during and after BLM and nothing happened.
Parler was a twitter competitor and number 1 at that. The coordinated assault on it using moderation as an excuse was simply atrocious and hypocritical knowing what we know of Facebook and Twitter as tools for coordination and crime enablement.
You're perpetuating the good vs bad narrative. Convenient, but false.
I think it is complete crap that companies using legal platform protections can ban people by arbitrarily declaring speech they don't like as hate speech. There should be legal requirements that any companies which enjoy platform protections must prove in a court of law that speech can accurately be classified as hateful before banning anyone.
They didn't even ban the people. They literally banned the server because individuals used inappropriate language on the server. That makes absolutely no sense.
> 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.
The mods were moderating. Discord didn't even try to claim otherwise. The group was just huge and things inevitably slipped past the mods now and then. That happens in every platform. It's not the server's fault.
Bottom line is Discord has the power to deal with the individual users but they chose to nuke the server instead. What a convenient decision.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 566 ms ] threadbanned for posting memes like https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/135439073542503628...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/discord-where-teens-rule-and-pa...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/01/29/disco...
This sounds like an excuse. They mention fraud several times -but say it’s NOT because of fraud— but I almost perceive a wink when they mention it like that.
I didn't appreciate that so I reported it and left.
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Lots of people confusing this with not liking WSB.
The other WSB discord which was linked to the subreddit was fine even though it was barely moderated. Rough around the edges like WSB tends to be... but fine as a place to hang out and see funny things.
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This second server was extreme even by WSB standards.
The joke is "4chan found a bloomberg terminal" but really it's like Reddit found one... no one is as down right randomly gross or racist as people are on deep end 4chan or Reddit would have banned it a long time.
This server was really like if the worst part of 4chan pretended to know what a stock is. It wasn't even coherent by WSB standards, and the signal to noise made WSB proper look like an actual Bloomberg Terminal
Here is my position, as this seems to be increasingly foreign for many people I talk with. A private entity (person or enterprise) should be able to manage their servers without outside interference. If I open up a server privately, I should have the right to moderate it, or not, however I see fit. 4chan still exists (as of now), and IMO, should not be interfered with. If somebody wants to create an LDS chatroom where swearing and drinking coffee lands you a ban, more power to you. We should be allowed to freely associate as we see fit, and those who own the space can decide the rules for discourse.
Now, am I saying corporate interests would never actively coordinate with government or other powerful interests to maintain a certain narrative or obtain power, absolutely not. That is a totally different discussion, and probably relies on a bottom up approach. The plebs aren't going to change Twitter's TOS or the programming on FOX, and we shouldn't expect to either. The corporate media sphere is carefully curated for whatever drives their interests. That maybe engagement, supporting commercial or policy positions beneficial to immediate or patron interests, or just old fashioned Operation Mockingbird interference. It's best if we ditch it altogether.
Their full statement as quoted in the linked article denies that the ban is for "financial fraud" but includes "spreading misinformation" as one of the reasons for the ban. I don't see any contradiction or winking involved. People who repeatedly spread hate speech and discriminatory content and glorify violence after repeated warnings not to do so are pretty likely to be spreading a wide variety of misinformation other than financial fraud.
As for whether such things can be the reason to ban the server, I'm sure Discord's terms of service allow them to ban for this reason. Historically a lot of tech companies were hands-off in practice, but ever since the January 6 violence in the US and the related online activities, many of these companies would right now prefer to err in the opposite direction.
None of these things (in quotes) can even be defined, and anyone who believes that the government or some tech oligarch is going to be a fair judge must have been born yesterday. It's ridiculous how we can both simultaneously criticize countries like China, but at the same time encourage the exact same types of suppression in our own Westernized way.
If someone dislikes Discord's judgment on that matter, they can switch providers or run their own service. If every viable provider stops dealing with them, that kind of implicit collective judgment and its consequences have always been part of humanity.
Also, most Western countries other than the US do have laws or judicial precedents which define terms like hate speech and provide penalties for engaging in it that are routinely adjudicated and enforced by courts. Even US judges consider hate speech as evidence an aggravating factor in how they handle crimes with hate as a motivation, accept the illegality of incitement to imminent violence, etc.
I don't care - there bloody well should be.
Would it be any different if I preferred the traditionalist and the one who wanted to force my business were the equality advocate? What if my preferred barber just stayed quiet and it were the one who vocally advocated either view who insisted on my business? What if the business terms of the barber with distasteful speech were worse, and how much worse would they need to be for that difference to outweigh their free speech rights?
None of this seems very plausible to enforce well.
More importantly, who would decide among all these possibilities? That's quite the power of imposing one's views (and financial policies) on others. I'm not sure I trust any government or private regulatory authority with that much control over private lives and livelihoods.
Further, not everyone who wants to keep politics and business separate even agrees on what mixing politics and business means.
Is it politics for a company to go out of its way to make bathrooms explicitly gender-neutral, put pronouns in staff directories, encourage even people who are not trans to indicate their pronouns so that trans people don't feel singled out by doing so, discipline people for persistent or intentional use of the wrong pronouns in the workplace, and cover common trans needs like hormone replacement therapy in the company health insurance plan?
Many people on the right of the US political spectrum would call that politics. Many other people conclude that some good workers happen to be trans and would feel more comfortable working at such employers than at ones with traditional attitudes toward them, meaning that these changes have the apolitical good business consequence of maximizing the ability of the company to attract and retain workers.
Does one have to inquire into the motivation of the employer for adopting these policies to decide if they're mixing politics or business, or just engaging in business?
Lots of subjectivity even on moral rights questions like this.
Though, I will say that my use of the word "enforce" is really only applicable to legal rights, not moral rights, outside of some kind of dystopian enforcement of what people are allowed to think.
The problem with modern leftism is consistency in beliefs. It's why I had to just walk away despite still agreeing with most leftist policy ideas.
Both sides of that case agreed that the company was choosing to deny its custom wedding cake services to a gay wedding because of the owner's religious beliefs against gay weddings, not because of anyone's speech. In other words, they objected to making a wedding cake because of attributes inherent to who the engaged couple were, not anything that was being said or expressed.
I view it as plenty consistent to forbid businesses which serve the public from choosing not to serve customers based on innate aspects of who they are, like being the same sex or gender as each other, while still allowing them to make such choices in reaction to the customer's speech. Sometimes the line is clear (no speech was at issue in this case), and sometimes it's blurry, but that's absolutely a consistent rule whether or not it's the one you support.
The reason the Supreme Court ruled for the bakeshop was very narrow. The ruling acknowledged that states can constitutionally have non-discrimination laws that apply neutrally to businesses without making available exemptions due to religious beliefs. The ruling was just about the behavior of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in applying their state law to this case, which the Supreme Court majority viewers as hostile to the owner's religious beliefs and not religiously neutral as the government must be. So it was about religious bias in the government action, only. One member of the 5-4 majority wrote that he might well have ruled the other way had the commission acted neutrally.
FWIW I also disagree with the ruling, for the same reasons I oppose online censorship by private companies.
Anyway, the cakeshop scenario is a bit different in another way: it can be argued to involve expressive activity on the part of the employees who create the custom cake, since it's far more artistic than mechanical, and since they do literally write any requested message with decoration. By contrast, Discord's actions against the customer are simply a choice of which speech by others they choose to allow to flow through the platform they control, plus a statement of their own speech which they choose to put out about their action.
(For what it's worth, they've chosen to partially reverse their ban since we started out discussion, if I understand right.)
If you want to ensure there is a content neutral platform, maybe the best way (at least under US free speech concepts) is to advocate for a government-owned/run Internet group communication platform, just like we have in offline life when you go to the nearby park or plaza to protest, or when you send mail to everyone in your local community through USPS.
Everyone agrees that, in the US, the government can't constitutionally censor that on the basis of content or viewpoint, with a few exceptions such as forbidding child pornography. I'm guessing that platform wouldn't keep getting funding from the politicians if it got too much offensive content, but if it wasn't shut down entirely, they couldn't be selective about which speech to permit.
Well, sure, in that it's a word with lots of nonproblematic uses.
> It’s a legitimate dictionary word.
This implies probably a more normative role for dictionaries than is appropriate, but, sure, it is. However, as a noun applied to people (as distinct from the verb meaning “to slow down” or the noun meaning “a slowing down”) it’s one which every dictionary I can find flags explicitly as “offensive”, so insofar as one uses dictionaries as arbiters of usage, I think there clearly is a problem with the use of “retards” in question.
But that goes for all excess vulgarity not just the r word. It’s not that I’m offended, but it’s a personal taste for less crassness.
It’s okay, we’re adults. We can handle discussion about a word.
I wouldn’t be so sure.
I wouldn't want to contribute to a world where someone with mental disabilities feels like they're the indirect butt of someone else's joke. I feel like there's a way to be humble (and witty, likely!) without having to punch sideways.
And now, on GameFAQs, I could not include the term “tardive dyskinesia” in a post. It was refused because apparently the four character sequence “tard” cannot occur in any word.
They could, at the very least, simply implement a system that a human moderator receives an immediate notification when a any of their banned words is used, who will then use good human judgement, rather than such wide blanket bans of four character strings.
Are kids going to be prohibited from saying “tardy” When they’re late?
I would also assume that in class, context would be more easy. Of course, some people were fired over the use of the word “niggard”, but it's a fairly obscure word, but I did once see it in an English translation of the Qurʾān.
That’s to say it’s no surprise that ignorant people will take offense before they understand words that might be uncommon in their lexicon.
Verily, what is with the U.S.A.-man's unparalleled ability to be offended by a word, or any word phonetically similar, regardless of the context? — I am really quite glad I do not live there. It seems stressful to be able to loose one's profession so quickly over it's infamous “cancel culture”.
Or the online palæontological conference where the word “bone” was filtered...
How can one ever think such blanket filters will not go awry.
Also worth noting that the Discord group is so much worse than WSB the subreddit. Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
I've never heard of this subreddit before, nor it's Discord Server, but I do know that one doesn't just stumble upon either on accident. The only people being hurt here are the ones that went looking to be hurt.
What we have here is a group of immature people, emboldened by internet anonymity, saying stupid things for the "lolz".
Does anyone think they'll be more mature because their server was banned? Of course not... they'll just make a new one, further emboldened by the obvious censorship. Let idiots be idiots, folks... we all know one when we see one.
We are at a point where certain languages are being banned and made illegal, you can't blame people for being worried that we are on the cusp of totalitarianism.
The banning of discord and r/wsb going private is quite scary, especially given the timing.
I guess hedge fund managers are just like mob bosses, they do not like being played.
edit: why is it that ANY mention of the github nazi incident gets INSTANTLY mass downvoted and flagged? Every single comment about this on HN gets censored.
For what is worth, they pretty much never use it actually insultingly, and do not seem to harbor any ill-will against LGBT people (and some of them are lgbt). They also mostly use those words to describe themselves, and do it more as a nod to boiler room talk/4chan.
>Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
As far as I know, a lot of that is done by bots, though possibly set by other users to prank the discord.
This isn't necessarily inflammatory. It is - like it or not - WSB's culture. It is not meant to be taken literally.
It is a frothy place, full of herd mentality. That is part of the clique. Going against that does incur the same tone of language against you. But it's not for who you are personally. It's the same language they use to describe the "in group", but it _seems_ worse to the out group.
Is the intent to mock people? No. Does it mean anything negative? No, 99% of it is literally re. the financials. Are there bad people in every group? Yes.
Please don't go looking for people to be bad guys - maybe instead assume good intent. You don't have to nit everything people say to find something to prove them wrong. You didn't focus on anything I was communicating - you tried to pick an argument with the smallest aspect of the thread.
And now you contradict yourself saying it’s not meant to be degrading because it’s all just a joke.
You’re proving the toxic culture that those kinds of communities ferment.
It's self deprecating to go against the market and be a bear in the biggest bull run of the decade. It's foolish to do so. I and many others being bearish have lost money. This is the entire point behind GME.
Like I said, it's all about the financials - not about you as a person.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=74I7Nl1mKig
I can remember this usage on NewGrounds in the early 2000s already. — I feel it's kind of sad that it's a part of internet culture that is becoming more and more obscure as the internet is experiencing an endless november of “normalfags”.
They're not 'pro-LGBT' because that language is stultified, boring, soul-rending mainstream corporate-speak. Speaking that way is beneath human dignity. "Are you pro-LGBT?" "Do I have a problem with gays, you mean?"
Better to be a human wallowing in the filth than a socially correct bugman standing clean, sterile, toothless to attention when the commisars come by.
https://desuarchive.org/a/thread/213247621/#213261293
It seems to hate “gays”; what it doesn't hate is homoerotica. It seems to take it's cues more from the Græco-Roman or Japanese interpretations that reject “intransient sexual orientations” as a concept altogether.
They simply want to look at pretty males without being bothered by now having to define themselves with some label that behaves more like a tribe than it does a truly descriptive term.
Most of the Japanese fiction that deals with same-sex love isn't phrased in terms of “It's okay to be gay.” but rather “Love has nothing to do with gender.”.
I will say that the obsession with traps does for some reason feel to me as unrelated to views on homosexuality, which is weird, and possibly a misunderstanding of mine.
They don't slice up the world the same way you do; whoever made up that word put gays, lesbians, and transsexuals together for political reasons, and left-wing political activists your median chan-users are not- why use the language of someone else, someone who despises you and wants to crush you?
From their point of view, the mental theatre that contains actors named 'LGBT' and 'Diversity, Inclusion and Equity' as front-and-centre characters is a cold, dead place-
whereas their native memescape, filled with Colourful Words, traps, arguments, the cacophany of 'hateful memes', is alive and vibrant by comparison, if tinged by a deep despair at the leaching of vitality from the world.
It's why the NPC meme caught on.
Traps are anime, and so are idealised abstractions as much as anime girls are. They're also tinged by imported japanese culture, I'd assume.
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/08/ableist-language-and-th...
A platform of gaming community chat rooms, actually.
https://i.imgur.com/VySvxSL.png
Why are you on HN then in the first place?
>required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London, carrying an embossed revenue stamp.[1][2] Printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies, and it had to be paid in British currency, not in colonial paper money.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamp_Act_1765
The printing press was the social media of the 18th century. And just like then the powers that be have no idea what to do with it and are trying to put the Ginnie back in the bottle.
Something to be proud of, certainly. But not a grassroots thing, even if it did have some degree of popular support.
In contrast, the South was fully represented in the Northern government, and Lincoln was quite conciliatory and kind to them when he was able. However, they were fighting for an extremely immoral cause, which the 1776 Revolutionaries were not really doing as the issue of slavery was much less an issue than in the 1850's.
Didn't the British make a deal with the natives to not expand west?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763
That deal happened 2 years before the revolution. If you read the declaration of independence you'll find that it is very critical of that proclamation:
> The History of the Present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted [...] He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
It wasn't the only thing that caused the insurrection of the colonies, but it certainly was a component.
https://www.history.com/news/remembering-the-proclamation-of...
"Eschew flamebait."
Please stick to the site guidelines, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If we all work together we can avoid flamewar hell, which will keep HN interesting, which is in all of our interests.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).
Regardless of how right or wrong this moderation choice may be, I hope that this accelerates the push for decentralization and encryption; the few companies that virtually all online humans use to communicate have far too much power over us, and we should be more willing to recognize that extreme centralization of power is dangerous.
(One final note: (EDIT: subreddit is now public again) now that this caused the subreddit to be set to private which seems to have instantly caused $GME to start tanking in AH, they are going to be in for users that are much more upset than they are used to if the narrative decides that this ban caused the crash, if it does in fact last until tomorrow)
Further, I think everyone is drastically over estimating the impact of r/wsb and retail investors in general on the GME action. This is hedge fund vs. hedge fund in an opportunity for unusually outsized gains on both the long and short positions over relatively short time frames. Good for them to keep the narrative focused on retail investors rather than capitalist titans in a financial blood bath.
If you don't see this, then you don't know if these people are still your allies.
Still, as long as things like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and Signal and perhaps even Firefox exist, I'll believe we can do better.
I initially didn't want to use it, and I know many others that didn't. Slowly the communities they loved moved to it until they were completely excluded and felt forced to adopt it as well. At this point I only have two friends left that still refuse to use it, everyone else gave in citing network effects. It reminds me precisely of how Facebook felt when I was in school, in that you were excluded from friend groups and events if you chose not to use it.
I know there are many alternatives, but getting your favorite communities to switch to them is completely intractable. Communication shouldn't be like this and I think that we can do much better, even if it takes us awhile to get there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_power#Elasticity_of_dem...
For a free product, the analogy to "raising prices" would be "adding annoyances or other negatives to the product".
https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/sso-google.html
No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core.
These are not Eastern European kids who dream to finish school and go to Western Europe and do something with their lives, these are also not Chinese who dream to go to America for a new life. They are not the American youth from the 60s or the bolsheviks from the pre-soviet era.
On the other hand, some of them must be rich now. Who knows what easily won money could bring.
As a Long time lurker of the sub, I’m not happy with reddit closing it down.
[0]: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/unprecedented-move-td-amer...
After all, its all about the lulz...
It just so happens the creative output from those aligned with that culture has dominated more recent generations(Sesame street, Free Willy, Fern Gully, all that). In a sense "they won". But those not on-board are still around, and there is a lot of resentment.
I'm only 36 and while I was raised on this stuff but even so a LOT has changed and "progressed" from when I was a kid. Can you imagine how much has changed for those who lived through the civil rights movement?
Off-topic, I know, but I'm trying to understand how you picked these three things as the epitome of culture produced by the counter-culture.
JTA: I don't mean to use a potentially prejudicial term here, and not clear on the distinction between "hippies" and "60s counterculture" myself.
Don't blame them. They've just adapted to cut throat capitalism. The society they live in has molded them into what they are.
Sweeping generalities like this are anathema to discourse.
Really?! I've seen plenty of trolling in my day, and that didn't ring any of my alarm bells.
Is it really that bizarre to you to call anti-establishment /r/wsb gamblers "nihilistic"? The ethos of the subreddit is basically "eh, screw it, let's see what happens" so is it that hard to imagine a subset of members going a little further, to "eh, screw it, none of this matters"?
She was just reacting to what she perceived as unfair.
Hoping/imagining that society can do better isn't nihilistic.
Okay boys, french revolution, american revolutuon, british revolution were all a nihilistic mistake. Time to give up our hard-earned right and go back to being serfs governed by god-emperror.
The establishment shall never be challanged even if it's chopping off heads, tortuning the unbelievers, raping and burning women for witchcraft.
"Who knows what easily won money could bring"
Did you ask this question in 2008?
Nevertheless, it doesn't really matter if they are idealists or not if it eventually pushes for a change. Woodstock was a for-profit music festival that turned into a cultural icon. As someone else in the comments said, probably Rosa Parks never meant to start a revolution.
When I say they are nihilistic, I don't mean it as an offence. I do agree that "it doesn't matter", the market is not working as a place to invest into promising companies, it's simply a gambling with extra steps and I enjoy watching many classical gamblers being destroyed. I also don't trade any stocks, I don't own any publicly traded stocks.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core."
I'm so happy we have mrtksn to explain the motives of about 5 million different people.
Thank you so much for enlightening us with your psycho-analysis of all those people.
We will try to be less nihilistic next time boss.
But what's happening right now is almost certainly a pump and dump with a short squeeze as a facade. I've seen a lot of commenters who seem to be grievously misled about the actual mechanics of a short squeeze, and think that short sellers will be forced to buy all their stock at market price on Friday.
Fun to talk about though. This is a very entertaining story.
I wonder if this is a clever-ish social media algorithm trading, shrewd fund managers or really just desperately mistaken retail traders.
this "make the regular people mad to fake a short squeeze to pump the stock" is some weird 4D explanation. not saying it's guaranteed, but the simplest answer is sometimes the best, that they are in a position to be squeezed and it's looking more likely.
Matt Levine seemed to have agreed with this take on Monday: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/the-ga...
And full disclosure, I made a lot of money via GME these past 2 weeks. I'm just not a believer in what's currently being pushed as the truth on social media. To me, GME seems to be a classic case of Tulipmania hiding behind a "short squeeze" mask. It's the latest Bitcoin and no one wants to miss out.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gamestop-mania-reveals-power-sh...
Citron has been coping for over a week now, and is still in it.
If your shorts are not covered then you are basically completely screwed and are willing to do absolutely anything to tank the price as soon as possible even if it means you do not get maximum possible returns. You would push propaganda that your shorts are covered and convince people that you have complete control over the situation.
If you told the truth you would be exposing yourself to unnecessary risk in both cases.
Isn’t that what it means when someone is naked short?
The short could have been naked when it was made, but there is nothing stopping the hedge fund from buying the underlying security ahead of the short position closing.
Which is why GME was targeted in the first place.
For reference, during the unlimited squeeze of Volkswagen’s stocks in 2008 it was estimated that less than 1% of Volkswagen shares were liquid — due to Porsche silently buying the majority of liquid stocks — to cover the short positions which led to the “unlimited squeeze”. I have a hard time believing that The number of liquid GME shares out there are nearly as low as 1%. The only way I could see the liquidity going that low is if institutional investors with tens or hundreds of billions dollars in market cap decide to buy up all liquid shares, effectively lowering the liquidity of GME to similar levels as Volkswagen during the 2008 unlimited short squeeze.
I believe the float is between 30-40%, hovering around 37%.
Naked shorting is when you sell the underlying stock without borrowing it first. You have 2-3 days from transaction to settlement (depending on the market), so you can enter a transaction at T and then only locate borrow at T+2. Obviously, you're running the risk that you can't find borrow in time.
In most cases, however, you short by checking for available borrow first, and _then_ shorting.
Naked short is selling without even borrowing it.
I agree with you, but I lament that outside of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit, it’s been very hard for any social media company to gain traction.
Also, private business can do whatever they want. 1st amendment only applies to government not private business.
And quite frankly, I don't buy that accusation. That seems like a convenient, unfalsifiable canard, doubly so when all the tech companies acted in concern.
And please stop with the "1st amendment" thing, which nobody in this conversation even mentioned. This observation is off-topic and the very definition of a dead horse in a conversation about what the law ought to do.
A pizza place gets bashed for saying that they wouldn't serve pizza to a same sex wedding - they get bashed by one group and praised by another. Payment systems cancel Parler - one group praises private actions, the other bashes it.
I hate Parler, but it showed that both sides are rotten authoritarians.
I guess most ineffectual terrorist on the world.
Are we going to play this game though? People stormed the Capitol hunting for members of Congress. They were chanting "Hang Mike Pence". If they weren't white, would you have any trouble calling it terrorism? Would insurrection or sedition be more agreeable?
1. https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/terrorism
Ok. Let's. Are BLM and the riots they caused terrorist acts? By your definition - yes.
I would argue no. I think there needs to be more extreme threshold for something to be labeled as a terrorist group.
as long as no one dies, it is not terrorism for you ?
One who literally set himself on fire, only to get kicked in the testicles by an irate baggage handler?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Airport_attack
We still call that a terrorist attack, because it was.
Not that Al-Quaida was deserving of the liberties that were sacrifced for it...
Violence (murder!) for political motives. Terrorism.
They serve very different audiences. Facebook and Discord seem to be the most intrusive, as they displaced many mediums. I cannot communicate with my homeowner group, because I am banned by facebook for using profanities.
Then Facebook decides to leave political posts proliferate unchecked, while I can't use the word baboon. I personally hate Facebook so much that I told the recruiters to GTFO and never contact me.
What? I have never used Discord.
If you think that a company has a monopoly on your social life, that's on you. There are lots of chat services There's even gasp email, and double gasp group texts.
The problem here isn't that we need a new decentralized system, the problem is that people are too lazy to use the decentralization we have today.
What should I use if it's so easy?
WTF? Get over yourself.
Isn’t that what people are also basically saying of Twitter. And Facebook. And ...?
Facebook is the dangerous one.
You feel that cold breeze? The future is coming and it's chilly.
I've been using matrix for the past year or so and I can tell you it's been great. I'm surprised at how stable and easy it is. I text friends who are on different servers, and no one notices. The clients are all starting to get E2EE by default. Hopefully the future is as warm.
The Discord spaces on the other hand have split up into a bunch of other broken spaces.
Now it seems like so many topics and words are completely off limits. It’s very restrictive and I think it’s making the web a less free, a less open, and a less fun space.
It’s extremely hard to exist online when you have not only a raging group of pro censorship PC police hell bent on removing you, but coordinated networks of platforms that will remove you in unison.
So I think it’s less that people see online communities as their public squares, and more that it’s very difficult to exist online if don’t hold the same ideas and opinions of those controlling the platforms.
Much of the censorship and top-down control we're witnessing today will only get worse while there's no bittorrent-like or blockchain-like decentralization.
Have been following one of the decentralized web approaches, don't remember, netsomething dot net, runs in the browser, very nice interface. Started promising until it got swamped with right wing lunatics doing nothing but trolling and spewing antisemitic stuff all over the place. I am not even offended, it is just a waste of my time to wade thru this trash to find some meaningful conversation.
Any unmoderated community is going to attract these lunatics.
The only places where I find meaningful conversation are topic centered Forums. Anything sans topic turns into a burning dumpster when unmoderated. This is humanity. The lunies get their voices amplified and the sane fall silent.
Hmm, it's almost as if this just happened recently, but people looked the other away because it was tightly coupled to politics. I think 2021 is going to blow 2020 out of the water.
The subreddit did not go private due to the ban. You're reading too much into the headline. It depicts two separate events that are both caused by too many new users (too many new posts in the subreddit's case).
Hope we end up there soon, this constant censorship of communities I might want to have a look at to satisfy my curiosity gets mighty tiring.
To my eyes, that controversy is part of a very public power struggle. I firmly believe that the WSB community is in the right, and that any legal gray areas are subtle enough that it would require a judge to decide. So there is no reason for internet companies to pre-emptively wash their hands of the situation. But yet here we are.
I don't see how that is market manipulation any more than short sellers shorting over 100% of a stock.
Maybe there is an argument for regulation to prevent this but the financial sector has been staunchly against any such regulation for decades.
Thus, it is "controversial". That is the question I was answering.
By definition, WSB is controversial because a lot of powerful people criticise them and would prefer them not to exist. Legally, I can see that they're moving in an uncharted gray area that might eventually require lawyers and a judge to determine whether they did something illegal, or that eventually attracts lawmakers to adapt existing regulation.
I'm firmly on the side of WSB here though, and none of the above should be considered a moral rationale for its pre-emptive censorship. Controversial certainly doesn't mean wrong, of which one might have the impression after the last months of social media purges.
I'm not at all surprised that WSB becomes the focus of such a power struggle, and very much hope it becomes another catalyst towards de-centralized, censorship-proof online communities.
This is what makes Youtube, Reddit and Facebook so powerful. They can choose who can stay on their platform, and how much discoverability their ideas have if they are allowed to stay on the platform.
The power in those sites is that they are not siloed and at scale, meaning you can reach a much broader audience. Parler would never be able to influence the mass market because it was so specialized - making it ineffective at evangelization. WSB would never be what it is without the platform of reddit. Going to a small specific site will not have the same power, even though I think it is better to host your own hardware and do that.
I'm very excited about it personally, I like disruption.
8chan, which was far better, went under for it though.
Cloudflare did drop 8chan for political pressure.
Both also have a very undeserved reputation. I saw news reports on 8chan as if it were something similar to Stormfront. The front page was mostly video game and pornography and one had to search very deep into it's hidden circles to find racial supremacy content.
https://i.warosu.org/data/g/img/0689/86/1545245294211.jpg
ISPs could just drop their customers' traffic to that server. This happens all the time and has happened to 4chan before.
Or they could go further and refuse to peer with any ISP that doesn't block 4chan, or lobby to have the government compel ISPs to block it, likely on think-of-the-children or think-of-the-terrorism grounds.
Self hosting definitely isn't some magic way of preventing all censorship.
There is no perfect pill. People who self host have higher protections than those that don't.
With TOR you have to hire someone to fill captchas just to read things.
If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested. The site doesn't give protection.
I steer clear of it, but wonder if with more EU like moderation a better site could be formed.
There are other anonymity networks that it doesn't filters out as well. But in principle, it does not allow posting from anonymity networks.
4chan is also quite mainstream and one of the largest websites on the internet, certainly larger than Hacker News. Similar Web ranks it around 800 world wide, but it's probably even higher, given that it's split into two domains that remain separate for advertisement reasons.
https://www.4channel.org/pass
Passes can be used to get exemptions from i.p. address range blocks, they do not permit posting from Tor.
That page is probably very deliberately not super clear about that, but it you will find that buying a pass will not allow one to post from Tor.
> If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested.
The idea of posting something and being arrested disgusts me. The bar around the world for such an action should be just as high as it is in America. If I post that I'm going to come and kill you, thinkingemote, at 10:17 a.m. at your place of work located at <insert address here>, then by all means I deserve to be arrested. I've made a credible threat with credible information, verified by the fact I know your name and your workplace address.
However, saying something "mean" to you, or "misgendering" you, or even calling you a racial slur, should never be enough to arrest someone.
It reminds me of one of the few (maybe only...) great lines from Ghostbusters 2: "Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God-given right!"
So it should be online as well. If you don't like it, you can absent yourself from the platform(s), and in almost every case, if you don't want to do that, you can block the other person.
US citizens can be arrested for posting material such as child pornography too.
In that case the porn is like the specific death threat. A crime on its own. Actual speech is different
> A crime on its own
With that logic in the UK it is a crime to do what the posters end up being arrested for so it's ok.
That's why doxxing is also an issue.
> Nobody is dying from mis-gendering
And nobody is dying from CP, what is your point?
The sad part is, you forgot your own rule. You got your feefees hurt (which was clearly bullshit also) and said you were "done communicating" or some such nonsense.
That's the great thing about a troll. They're also liars.
People who can be easily radicalized or manipulated is just indication that they wasn't educated well enough to think on their own with their brain. And in any case chan culture is far better than some actual criminals or cultists who are much better at brainwashing people.
I'm not trying to justify some of chan content, but I consider that it's greater good that some people get a lesson about how easily they could be manipulated.
Subjected to enough propaganda, literally anyone will succumb to the propagated viewpoint with very few exceptions.
Being exposed to this kind of "humor" is deliberate choice. And even 4chan is not some single entity: there are plenty of boards on other topics that nowhere as extreme and sometimes they better moderated than e.g reddit , facebook or linkedin.
That link is now banned on Wikipedia even though...
Or is this simply a case of getting too popular for Reddit? The fact that discord was banned around the same time as r/wsb going private is suspect.
edit: After hours market shows GME is has TANKED!!!! Closed at 345 and dipped to 248. Holy, there will be class action lawsuits for sure now.
edit: I've been on the phone for 2 hours waiting for my broker to answer. All of this seems weird. They SUDDENLY have volatility and decide today is the day to stop answering my calls???
edit: /u/DeepFuckingValue's posts have all been wiped!!!!! WTF!
Edit: that seems to be private now too?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868680#25935933
I think the SEC thread created this morning had something to do with going private.
It isn't the first time they've gone private but this time with the discord being banned and all, im getting ban vibes.
Look if Discord can ban WSB over some cuss words, imagine what Reddit can do.
I'm on the phone with my broker as we speak and now I fear that this is a coordinated attack.
edit: so after I made that comment about github's half assed apology towards the guy that they terminated for saying "watch out for nazis", those same group of people are downvoting and flagging every single one of my comments. AGAIN. You didn't care when people were bringing attention to the anti-semitic memes being posted on Github 4 years ago, now you want to bury every fucking comment, just like the angry hedge fund managers getting their revenge on serfs making a little money.
They even say this on the placeholder page.
A few hours ago zjz (a mod) posted about trying to get an unlimited API endpoint for Reddit from the admins so the mod bots can cope with the load.
"We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back."
It's been bringing bad press on Reddit and that's usually the trigger for the admins to enforce their content policy.
(see the Donald, racist subs, fat people hate, violentacrez, jailbait - while these clearly did violate their policies, it took bad PR for enforcement to happen)
So, new people can’t join in and immediately start trying to pump up random stocks.
WSB is getting flooded right now, so the mods are building in some auto-moderator things to get a handle on the subreddit.
"It looks like your account is too new to use /r/wallstreetbets. Sorry about that, but people use new accounts to spam us all the time. Please don't ask when you can be approved because we're going to say no and then laugh at you. Your account must be one month old at least."
Diamond hands all the way.
Doesn't look like they were wiped?
They're not fuckin leaving that easily and the show goes on.
> edit: After hours market shows GME is has TANKED!!!! Closed at 345 and dipped to 248. Holy, there will be class action lawsuits for sure now.
Good. Great time to buy more til the big short squeeze.
Can't stop, won't stop, next stop? GameStop.
This was months ago. Imagine suddenly thousands of people are doing this and now Discord is being flooded with reports.
-
Something some people might not know as well, there was another WSB Discord started by Jartek that used to be linked on the subreddit
That Discord was much more tame even with minimal moderation. No racial or homophobic slurs, but still allowing most if not all content people wanted to bring up short of porn...
Post scandal the subreddit changed back to this Discord, which was a mistake. It really was a vile server.
-
Edit because now I'm rate limited over vindicating downvotes from people mourning that dumpster :)
Crazy how every direct reply to me has needed someone else to correct them. I guess my comment was coherent enough for people not foaming at the mouth to cry over some racist dumpster fire of a server...
-
Again, there were two servers
One was linked in the subreddit, had minimal moderation, policed really hard slurs like ni*er, allowed shitposting all you wanted otherwise.
That one gained traction while WSBGod's saga was going on.
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The one I referenced which is the one deleted today, where mods were throwing n bombs for fun, was mostly regarded as an embarrassing weird place people might stumble upon from Google.
You couldn't even find it easily, someone had to invite you directly and some of them weirdly saw those invites as a favor (that's how I was invited there, someone liked one of my DDs in the main server and thought they were inviting me to sit with the cool kids... right.)
It wasn't tied to the subreddit and referred to itself as the "OG Discord" because it existed before the subreddit officially tied itself to a discord server.
-
Jartek's "saga" took place, and because he had created the well regarded Discord server the link was replaced with one to the outright vile server.
Today the outright vile one was banned.
Good riddance.
Here's a thought experiment. In a few hours of coding, Google, Discord, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could all spin up map/reduce searches across all their channels, groups, links, results... for any wordlist you'd care to provide.
If a flagged word is used past a certain frequency, the channel can be closed, the page can be delisted, the accounts can be banned, or the site can be terminated. So clean, simple, and really quite easy.
They can even just start with the really really awful words if you like.
But they don't do this. Generally speaking they (at least historically) tend to support the ability of people to say Bad Things on the internet! You can even enter these Bad Words right into the front page of the world's biggest search engine and get hundreds of millions of hits in 0.33 seconds.
Yet somehow a channel of particular notoriety which is causing serious financial damage to some very Important People can disappear in an instant, maybe even right on the day of its peak exposure, and those trivially, easily, obviously detectable Bad Words can be blamed.
And no one even has to think too hard about if that was really what just happened here. Because who would ever step up, particularly in our current political environment, to say that anyone or any channel used to espouse such Bad Words (or Wrong Think) should be tolerated?
It all just seems so implausibly convenient.
The way you're talking about "Bad Words" sounds like you think discord should ignore these problems entirely. It solves the biased enforcement problem but it's a pretty awful way to do it.
> Generally speaking they (at least historically) tend to support the ability of people to say Bad Things on the internet!
Who is they? Discord has not been supportive of the ability to say arbitrary bad things on their hosting.
Are you suggesting we shouldn't be mad about it now?
I'm black, I didn't like seeing a guy say ni*er hundreds of times in charge of the place where WSB users end up, I reported it :)
(and don't give me some dumb bullshit about "wElL yOu GuYS sAy Ni*a" it's not the same no matter how upset that makes you)
Took a while but I'm glad it's gone :)
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I spent a lot of time on the main Discord that existed before this one (which most people had abandoned at the time since it was devoid of intelligent speech even by WSB)
WSB by it's nature has some rough edges, it's not the most politically correct place.
But a mod, a real mod with admin, not the joke WSB mod stuff... saying that stuff so much? Nah I'm going to report it.
WSB is on the edge of satire and outright toxicity but it toes the line fairly well.
That server was the opposite, mostly toxic (and not even in a humorous or satirical way) with very occasional coherency.
I had enjoyed the other WSB discord very much, and was looking forward to a new server I'd enjoy and because of a jackass mod who say nig*er a lot I couldn't enjoy that.
So a very proportional response is to report the server they moderate!
I didn't lie, I didn't misconstrue anything, I said "this server has a moderator that spams nig*er very casually"
Are you defending that? Or blaming me for their behavior? Or faulting me for not liking that? Which is it?
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Because make no mistake, if this wasn't an admin level mod saying this I wouldn't report them. I even get the WSB "everyone is a mod" meme. And I get moderation is tough, things slip, that's life.
But when your admin says nig*er hundreds of times for fun... you're crossing a line.
Racist groups start with talk, then inevitably end with burning crosses and dangling nooses.
This isn’t hyperbole.
Truly amazing the ability of some people to get worked up over bog-standard shitposting.
That's for people disrupting a community's conversation...you can just leave.
Server B is racist vitriol garbage against the TOS of the platform.
I report them.
Easy as that :)
I think WSB will last longer if we don't get sucked into that kind of garbage. "4chan with a Bloomberg Terminal" is satire, not a goal.
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Off topic, but your anger is so delicious, you're exactly the kind of person I live for, it's like my very existence is kryptonite for you :)
People who think I don't have a right to be offended at something enough to report it... but are offended enough that a black man reported someone who's spamming the word nigger on a platform that bans hate speech that you called the black guy an asshole.
People who think that banning racist speech and homophobia is creating a safe space... but whine that no one will host their safe space for white supremacy.
The reverse-snowflakes, if you will :)
You're all being chased off the internet, Parler's dead, whatever trash platform you come up with next will be dead, Trump's out, all the companies that run the world kowtow to the dirty liberal agenda of being against racism and homophobia and white supremacy, and even if you think it's just lip service, here's a great example of it working out just fine :)
We were all worried wrong-think would end up being anything that goes against those in power... turns out wrong-think is saying nigger hundreds of times, and I'm ok with that as a black guy :)
- I don't think a fedora would fit over my afro.
- If you'd be too embarrassed to stand up to someone calling you an asshole for not tolerating racist drivel, you need to work on your self-esteem :)
IRC/Usenet groups, meshnets, bathroom walls, it doesn't matter: if people have ideas, they will express them, unless Totalitarianism.
Best to refute, even if it doesn't scale.
Discord didn't ban them after they got proof an admin was spamming the word nigger, you think they got banned over some unicode letters?
The place was choc full of racist garbage, not typical WSB edgy satire, rtfa.
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There is another WSB discord which used to be the one linked, had tens if not hundreds of thousands of users, and never devolved to the level that one did.
Know why? Because the mods weren't the type of people who spam nigger.
It’s disingenuous at a minimum, and crony capitalism when taken to the maximum.
Are they doing anything about Nancy Pelosi (her husband Paul to be specific) buying Tesla calls before bills were brought forth with generous EV charging network subsidies? “Nothing to see here.” (Nothing against Pelosi and not intended as whataboutism, picked because it was top of mind from some research today and the disparity of enforcement)
Edit: Pump and dump schemes absolutely should not be supported. Piling into a short squeeze is not a pump and dump scheme.
Edit 2: https://i.imgur.com/SZJ9XEa_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&...
Nothing against Pelosi? If that's as it appears to me (trading on insider information, by a person in a position of public trust no less) she needs to be heavily fined, in prison, or both.
Looking at the starting and retiring net worth of a Congress person is a bit painful.
The rule however assumes that congress conducts themselves ethically, and evidently that is clearly not the case.
It should be pretty simple for most elected officials to dump their publicly traded stock and get into a diversified mutual fund before they start campaigning and while they hold office. For those who have concentrated holdings that are hard to dump, they could put it into a blind trust or whatever. Office holders really shouldn't be making a lot of trades; equity based compensation aside (either of their spouse or if they're a part time officer where those still exist, and have a part time job with equity based compensation)
That isn't remotely insider trading, and the slur is farcical.
Ignoring that Tesla is one of the largest publicly traded companies in the world (it's what, 5th largest in the world now?), anyone on the planet knew that the Biden admin was going to push low emissions, green energy, etc. This was all public plans. There is positively nothing "insider" about that. And buying some call options when it's at some all-time highs is about the shittiest way to exercise "insider" info.
Chillax, you’re breaking at least one of the site guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments. Edit: specifically “Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.” Would appreciate if I could get similar clarification on exactly why my comment has lost karma.
That doesn't mean it needs to turn into a discussion if they defend themselves, but I think some indication of why is almost always warranted.
In 2013, Senator Harry Reid introduced S.716, which after 14 seconds of discussion was passed by unanimous consent. Its net effect was to make the rest of STOCKS untrackable, and therefore unreportable and unenforceable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act#Amendment
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/04/16/17749...
LOL. Give me a break.
This is ___100%___ a P&D scam. They can squeeze shorts because they target trash stocks of failing businesses (you know -- the stocks that get shorted), then create a positively ridiculous story about a value proposition. A bunch of moron retail investors on Reddit aren't going to do shit to squeeze shorts, but they're the front for a couple of very well financed players.
But...something something Nancy Pelosi. Christ. Yeah, she's really scamming the system playing a stock at all time highs. Real elite moves.
Honestly I think we need some new rules about securities and elected officials, but the obvious ones would not cover a sitting president patronizing his own failing businesses in order to increase revenues using taxpayer money.
We want rules against people buying stock or taking bribes from oil companies, but nothing about using your own company to 'provide services' to federal officials. But even if you transfer control of your holdings to a third party, you still know what was in there when you started. And if 'what was in there' was your nephew's business...
http://investors.overstock.com/news-releases/news-release-de...
The purpose of the system is what it does, and the capital market operators, institutional participants, and regulators prioritize their interests. This exercise is simply exposing those efforts to daylight for all to see.
Dr Byrne from Overstock puts it better then I can (from your citation): “The SEC once again opts for nerf penalties for financial rapists.”
If one thinks WSB or retail in this are the problem, you haven’t been paying attention.
> The point is that the SEC’s measures are half hearted at best.
I have no love for the SEC, but it sure did sound like you said they didn't do anything about it when they clearly did.
> If one thinks WSB or retail in this are the problem, you haven’t been paying attention.
More shifting use of "you" in context. It'll be interesting if we can teach an AI to understand these types of confusing and conflicted statements.
It's only because so many people are rallying around the ideological worth of the stock that keeps the price from crashing. As the fad dissipates naturally over time, its ideological worth will decline and bring the price down with it. Time is on the side of the hedge funds.
https://twitter.com/Quicktake/status/1354496816738422789
People seem to think they were paid off by some big players. Ha! In their dreams.
Do hedge funds not know how to do social media marketing?
Why go on CNBC to announce your position when you can pay some kids and influencers to shitpost on wsb to rile up an online mob and leave no fingerprints?
It is crazy to me how ppl continually fall for this stuff? How does any mass online movement not trigger skepticism? I mean look at the history of this stuff from Kony 2012 to the Arab spring to Russian troll farms.
I do however think that this is a significant new front in the battles between Wall Street behemoths. Market manipulation by stirring up online mobs of mooks. If this one is organic, the next won’t be.
I always thought that Kony 2012 was just a dry-run for these sorts of things. I've never been able to figure out who did it though.
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13542078551094108...
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13546095155645603...
A good time to shill Aether :https://getaether.net/
Like reddit, but decentralized and distributed.
They even have a wsb sub.
Edit: for the curious, according to my open tabs minutes before going private the sub had '3,218,594 readers. 778,127 users here now'
Edit2: The sub is back online and up to '3,577,830 readers' and counting.
The guy has turned $50k into $50M in the one year since those first comments were made, with half of that made yesterday.
[1]. https://www.reddit.com/user/deepfuckingvalue
is this because of the SEC??? or are we witnessing a Godfather 2 ending where Michael whacks everybody just before the credits roll?
Something is incredibly fishy about this, the ban and subreddit going private happened not too far from each other.
Really worried about what will happen on Friday, there is no way to read the wsb subreddit anymore!
In this case, it makes sense to try and appeal to them, even though from a purely moral point of view you could argue that the r/WSB people did nothing wrong and it's Melvin Capital (and whatever parent hedge fund is now bailing them out) who did wrong by betting more than they could afford to lose.
(With apologies to Bob Dylan...)
Serious point, though: They can decide to ban (almost?) anyone at any point. They will state a justification, but it looks a lot like banning anyone whenever they decide to.
All the subtopics are bleeding through all the threads though.
No one has any chance to coordinate now. Discord’s action is effectively market manipulation in a literal sense, because this is certainly going to affect the market.
I’m curious why the sub went private though.
EDIT: I regret my phrasing. I didn’t mean this was illegal market manipulation, just that discord is literally manipulating the market by cutting off one of two primary coordination channels.
But they’re within their legal rights to do so, of course.
EDIT2: WSB Subreddit is back; mods issued a statement: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/wher...
They considered making it private [and did briefly] during previous fiascos. At the time there were threads by the mods in which you can post so you are included but the alternative was by post history. It's very possible they've left e.g. the 10% most active posters in the sub and can still coordinate to an extent.
Edit: That seems to be the case, as their new message is "WallStreetBets is under in tents load and is only for approved submitters. In the meantime, please enjoy some spaghetti. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW1GR7BECq4"
Edit2: Now changed to "We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back.
They were debating whether it would be worthwhile and feasible to limit posting to people who had commented in the reddit 6 months prior as a filter.
If I run an email service and find that a user is running a pump-and-dump scam through it, do you really think I shouldn't be able to shut down their account?
(If you're interested in the actual law on market manipulation, it's here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/78i)
This is backwards. The label "manipulation" is applied (or not) retroactively based on whether something was determined to be illegal or not. It's not something you can know in advance; two copies of the exact same action might be judged differently.
Is that hate speech now?
Yeah, I kinda think the SEC should be in charge of whether you're doing a pump-and-dump or not.
It certainly will have an effect, but I'm not sure it meets the definition of "manipulation". I think (though am not certain) that the manipulating party would need to have a stake in the market asset for manipulation to apply. Many definitions (though not investor.gov) imply that personal gain is a requirement. No doubt there will be a legal case made here.
As with other subgroups both economic and political, the real coordination happens in Telegram and Signal. The public channels amplify.
Even though r/wsb is now private, there are already 3.8m people who are subbed to it and can still see & use it.
What is a hedge fund except more explicit coordination of many people's money on a much greater scale? The classic example of Porsche's squeeze on VW stock was Porsche's management coordinating many people's pooled assets.
This is probably not a popular (ha) opinion on HN right now, but just wait and see!
Trump is business establishment through and through and has managed to wake a populist movement for his own enrichment.
He (and his sycophantic cronies) were (and continue to be) very much part of the “I got mine” greed establishment.
Instead of answering to the Population, it seems that Trump and his crew care only for self-enrichment. How he managed to capture the imagination of a Populist movement is indication of the total lack of alternatives.
“If big business is on your side, everyone on TV is on your side, Hollywood is on your side, every university faculty is on your side, and almost every union is on your side, then you are not The Resistance.” -Apocryphal
Missing the mark here, mate. No one in this chain said that. Maybe re-read the actual criticism?
Edit: Here's the article I was reading: "How Trumpism explains the GameStop Surge" https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/politics/gamestop-stock-surge...
If I was saying anything about the relationship between Trump and WSB at all, I was ascribing the opposite blame: populist movements like WSB explain Trump.
The server was vile. Moderation used racial slurs casually.
Suddenly thousands of new people are flooding into the server from WSB on Reddit where the standard is obviously higher than that.
What do you think happens to report numbers? They skyrocket with user count!
Suddenly all eyes are on a truly vile corner of Discord of course they're going to ban them!
Including literally the WSB discord that used to be linked in the subreddit!
> To be clear, we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks. Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.
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https://discord.me/server/join/protected/c3fe5f4361
That server was vile. And not because of WSB tongue-in-cheek "retard" "gay-bear" stuff, just actual hateful usage of racial slurs actual, homophobia not just based on using certain words, and more
Your narrative that this is a response to "stock pumping" is completely off base.
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Edit reply:
There's proof for my side... Discord said they were banned from getting tons of reports.
There's no proof for a narrative where Discord self-censors over an intentionally vague tweet about social media and stocks.
"We deleted the server to not implicate ourselves in a tool of securities fraud" would have been a pretty damn good reason by itself... no need to lie about that.
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Edit reply:
If enough upset people crying over their banned cesspool downvote you, you can't reply to comments anymore :)
I guess in the face of your lack of even "proof", I'm brazenly suggesting that having an admin saying ni*er hundreds of times will get your server banned.
I'm not sure how you would know whether they were being genuine in their stated reason (unless you work for discord?) but obviously the timing strains credulity for many. There's no proof on either side here, so I'd prefer to stop arguing.
Clearly discord doesn't want to actively suggest illegal activity happened on their platform, so they're not going to state that as their reason.
I guess in the face of your "proof", I'm brazenly suggesting that this marks the first time in history a corporate PR department has lied about the company's motivations.
The other server is (or was) 100% more tame, and at the time experienced more traffic than the one that was just banned (obviously this changed once the link was removed).
There was no way you were going to find a mod spamming the n-word, in fact people were regularly banned for using slurs.
I mean being founded by the guy who was running the sub, it was in line with the subreddit, edgy, but with nuggets of clarity and an understanding that it's possible to take things too far.
u/DeepFuckingValue on r/wallstreetbets discovered this a month or so ago, took out a $50k position, and let the rest of the sub in on it. That position is now worth $50M, a 1,000x increase.
Now there is literally no limit to the upside of a short squeeze. The price goes up high enough and the short sellers declare bankruptcy and liquidate their positions to cover the cost of purchasing shares. If they still come up short, then the same happens to the banks that lend to them . If that comes short, the brokerage must step up. At that point there’d probably be government intervention and a bailout. The WSB motto has become “we can stay retarded longer than they can stay solvent.”
According to a naïve view of the law, at least, that is correct. Far more likely there will be market outages and regulator shenanigans at undo the situation. Nobody is more of a sore loser than the establishment.
How much do you think it would cost to pay the top mod of /r/wsb (which is now private) to make the sub private? How much to some discord admins to ban the discord?
Is that amount more or less than the billions these hedgies were losing?
People just don’t seem to care about their freeze peach and it’s impact on democratic integrity.
From the point of view of someone with no stake in the outcome, the possibility some WSB regulars' strategy for cashing out their profits was based around these newbies being encouraged to buy as much GSE as possible probably isn't an argument in favour of delaying action
> the possibility some WSB regulars' strategy for cashing out their profits was based around these newbies being encouraged to buy as much GSE as possible probably isn't an argument in favour of delaying action
That argument would make sense if the justification of the ban had been about legality, not use of language. If it's about use of language then it's not relevant.
Sure, punitive sanctions are more likely to be taken when the volume of complaints goes up, the trolling goes up and the forum ceases to be an insider's club and starts being representative of how your platform is perceived by the general public. That's been the case for every platform ever and particularly recently, with no conspiracies involving Wall St bribery required.
> That argument would make sense if the justification of the ban had been about legality, not use of language. If it's about use of language then it's not relevant.
It's an obvious retort to the suggestion Discord could have delayed enforcement action until after it blew over [if they weren't in cahoots with Wall St]. The only reason to delay when they're getting complaints now is to help one set of their users unload financial positions onto another, so keeping it open until that happens shouldn't be a consideration precisely because it's irrelevant to their stated reason for the ban.
(I mean, I'm sure Discord had internal discussions about the legal liability of [not] taking action whilst people pumped stocks too, but the answer was likely 'none whatsoever, do whatever you think is best for your reputation')
> Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
Not saying it isn't true, but what I am saying is that it puts in stark relief all the servers they are NOT banning due to similar/worse behavior.
How long are we going to keep falling for this same shtick?
Seriously, are you naïve or is this bad faith? I can't tell anymore.
If your entire justification for something boils down to "I'm technically allowed to do this" it should be pretty obvious that you're doing something shitty.
How so? "Institutions will publicly blame hate speech as an excuse to do things they wanted to do otherwise" in no way requires an assumption that "hate speech doesn't exist on the internet."
Of course we can't say for sure. But at the same time we can't say for sure that specific policemen were actually racist when they attacked black people, or if they would do the same thing against white people in similar situation. You can find statistical patterns there, but similarly you can also find statistical patterns that certain groups on message boards gets banned for less than certain other groups.
Extreme hype / popularity around a community, followed by degeneration (or increased visibility of prior degeneracy) of that community, followed by bans and/or deplatforming. Off the top of my head FatPeopleHate, TheDonald, and recently Parler are prior examples, I bet there are others though.
WallStreetBets seems like it's heading down a similar path. In fact, I bet a lot of the people in these communities overlap, though I have no proof.
The Donald was quarantined and moved out of site (not outright banned) under accusations of wanting to harm police (which was out of character considering all the our boys in blue memes). Then they were slowly destroyed, mods replaced and finally banned. In the meantime, dozens of subs called for death of cops before, during and after BLM and nothing happened.
Parler was a twitter competitor and number 1 at that. The coordinated assault on it using moderation as an excuse was simply atrocious and hypocritical knowing what we know of Facebook and Twitter as tools for coordination and crime enablement.
You're perpetuating the good vs bad narrative. Convenient, but false.
This situation seems bullshit but in general I think its quite logical to ban "servers" if the mods do not uphold the rules.
The mods were moderating. Discord didn't even try to claim otherwise. The group was just huge and things inevitably slipped past the mods now and then. That happens in every platform. It's not the server's fault.
Bottom line is Discord has the power to deal with the individual users but they chose to nuke the server instead. What a convenient decision.
2. if "hate speech" bans must go through the legal system, what about other bans? eg. trolling or other disruptive behavior?
3. going through the legal system takes months/years, how do you prevent actually bad actors from misusing this?