you may be overestimating the responsibility of the people involved

I remember reading about people mortgaging their house to get into bitcoin, etc.

I don't know how the coming days will play out, but I'm quite confident when this is all over we'll be treated to stories in the NYT about how someone lost their life savings, alongside calls for regulation.

I used to hang out in that subreddit before I deleted my account. Most of them are a) lurking b) goofing around with maybe a few hundred dollars (I was in that category) c) people from hedge funds

There was a tiny minority that did stupid things like buy $20k of options on credit cards but there's a minority of stupid people like that everywhere.

That subreddit was built around losing money on bad trades.

Things may have changed since you last used reddit but now I regularly see people playing with $1000s of dollars joking about buying weekly options and trading on leverage that they don't have and then not understanding the implications of that when things come crashing down.

The subreddit has ~65,000 weekly active users (ignoring this week), and the screenshots of "big" positions aren't that common, and often from the same accounts.

It's a bit disingenuous for people to make it seem like there's thousands of people putting their life savings and retirements into stocks - and even so, I would guess that many of the people who do claim to use "life savings" actually mean "the 10k I had in my bank savings account" because they're only 23.

There's been a lot more of this in the last 8 months when it's been pretty difficult to actually lose in the stock market.