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.

Same exact thing that they are trying to do to Trump. The war between populists and establishment is just getting started.

This is probably not a popular (ha) opinion on HN right now, but just wait and see!

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.

We apparently live in different realities.

“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

It takes some effort to blame this on Trump. Trump literally gave up his fortune to serve.

A) he didn’t give up what he already had, and B) “fortune” is being pretty generous

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?

> 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?

Missing the mark here, mate. No one in this chain said that. Maybe re-read the actual criticism?

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.

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...

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.

Are you memeing right now?

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.

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.

I don't think that's necessarily alternative. Probably, both your theory and mine are parts of the explanation.

I don't think anybody has ever suffered negative regulatory action for doing a short squeeze. Even Martin Shkreli didn't get in trouble for his.

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.

It has happened in the past: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/squeeze-on-goldman-put-fal... and https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2012-2012-122htm

It looks like Falcone may have been ok both sides of the squeeze, or at least treating its customers differently in order to execute it?

I made another comment, people are really letting logic fail them in order to push a narrative.

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!

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.

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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.

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.

I think the user clarified elsewhere, that there were 2 discord servers, and this particular one ended up hosting some genuinely vile speech.

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.

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.