The "real question," imo is not about how FB, discord or reddit handle WSB's culture. It's why have they all decided to act right now, just as this gamestop maneuver is happening? That is the fishy part... and it's too fishy to leave it unaddressed and talk content.

Either way, this just shows why we can't have a handful of companies moderating most of the internet under a TOS regime.

So why it's happening now can more multifaceted than the more conspiratorial reasons. Even increased media attention is enough for someone to act -- The Hackernews community uses that all the time to get apps unbanned from the app store, for example.

The RobinHood $GME situation is the natural next step in societal evolution once extreme censorship is given a pass. If you support the "go build it yourself" argument, you no longer have the right to complain about anything that's theoretically reproducible.

If you pay for hosting then you have a contract and then you and the company you're buying from are beholden to those terms.

You have no consideration relationship with Facebook. You haven't entered into a contract. You are just filling out forms on a website.

Theoretically, yes.

In reality, I’m too small an account to warrant anything besides boilerplate. The big boys may be able to negotiate. I cannot.

Now it's possible you are so extremely deplorable that nobody is willing to take your money but I think that is society functioning as it should. People are still willing to put up with a lot when money is involved.

Phone and Internet requires literal physical infrastructure that crosses public and private property, you pay for it, and they are natural monopolies because of that. Facebook is nothing by comparison.

Perhaps you may not like the suggestion that I offered, but you’re minimizing what Facebook has become and what it takes to run at that scale.

As for the businesses that rely on it -- they choose to use that platform, for free, knowing exactly what they're getting into. There are thousands of times more businesses that do not rely on Facebook than those that do. Facebook is not some key infrastructure; if it all went away tomorrow it's a minor inconvenience at worst.

Facebook also owns at least some of its own interconnects.

It is fine with me if you disagree on principle, but to act like anybody can just create the network effect of Facebook and compete is frankly ridiculous.

You talk like Facebook was the first ever social network and didn't start out of dorm room. You talk like there aren't any other social networks right now. Or that there aren't other media companies.

What's the end game here? What exactly do you want? The inability to moderate? Nationalized? Broken up? I guarantee you can't come up with a single remedy that isn't ridiculous.

Facebook’s scale and power are bad for capitalism and democracy. You may find it ridiculous to break them up, but plenty of serious people in this world don’t.

So break it up, how? In what way? And if you've broken Facebook up, how have you ensured that you've actually solved the problem you intend to solve.

Here's the problem as i see it.

Facebook's and other companies with data exchange driven revenue models have monopolization on some of our generations most intelligent minds and are using cutting edge psychology and algorithms to get the general populace to click that, scroll for longer and be deeper entrenched in the depths of political extremism.

What if you walk in and are somebody named wvenable so they kick you out? As you've said, you believe they have that right.

What if you walk in and are ginger so they kick you out?

Have poor eyesight?

Are dressed in the costume of a religion they don't like?

Are dressed in the costume of a political ideology they don't like?

I'm trying to work out a set of fundamental principals are would distinguish good discrimination from bad. I often see people, such as yourself, adamantly insisting that some kinds are good or some are bad but the distinction seems arbitrary.

I could reverse this and ask your the same type of questions. As a business owner, am I not allowed to have any control over who and what business that I do? If I allow posts on my website, I must allow Nazi hate posts? If I allow images, I must allow all images except those that are illegal? If you're being rude to my workers, I can't turn you away, I just have to take it? If you say yes, I'd like how that is fair to me. If you say no, then that is also arbitrary, right?

But what's so different between 2 and 3 or between 4 and 5? I could understand it if you see them as grey areas but it sounds like you're adamant they have no moral requirement to serve ginger people but that it's immoral to refuse short-sighted people. And why are religious and political ideologies distinct?

I don't have much of an answer myself, but I don't think religion should be protected. People are free to change their religion or lie about it to avoid discrimination if they want. Do you agree that excluding Muslims is wrong but excluding (nonviolent) Islamists is a right? How can you even tell the difference?

I wondered if you opinion was based on some philosophy. It seems it's just a copy of what you've absorbed from your culture and suffers from all the same problems.

I'm not sure how you get adamant from my comment. I went out of my way to claim that this description was not perfect. One could argue that ginger falls under "race". I personally don't believe you should deny someone service because of there genetic appearance. I'd go all in on appearance but then you might might have to serve naked people! Everything is grey.

Religion is a grey area too; in some cases it's more equivalent to political believes and in other cases it's more like race. People also mistake appearance and religion all the time.

> Do you agree that excluding Muslims is wrong but excluding (nonviolent) Islamists is a right?

No I don't. People like to claim their persecuted because of who they are rather than what they do and how that impacts others.

Lets be clear, we are talking about Facebook blocking content (actively posted material) that they deem unacceptable. You made this about the who rather than the what and I don't think that applies in this case at all. So we've really gone down this rabbit hole for nothing.

> I totally believe that Facebook doesn't have any legal or moral requirement to host anything they don't want to. They could literally just punt me tomorrow because they don't like my name and that's their right.

In the case of Facebook, they're just offering people a free space to post stuff. They're not obligated to continue to that forever. They don't need a good reason to punt you. But their are situations where they could have a bad reason.

The question is, is this topic a bad reason to punt people? Given the low obligation that Facebook has to host anything -- I don't think so.

Your idea of Facebook's obligation seems to be pretty much just based on what the law prohibits. That's not really an interesting thing to talk about because everyone agrees on such a simple fact.

I weakly think Facebook is so powerful that when it bans people or breaks up groups, it's capable of doing more harm than most other internet services and therefore it could be more morally wrong. If your Facebook group is turned off, what other platform can you move every member to? How can you even contact them to organize the migration? If you're personally kicked off, how can you persuade all other members of your groups to migrate to another platform just so you can join them again? I attend a real-life class and it comes with a Facebook group for students to keep in touch and share materials. If I was banned from Facebook, I'd miss out on part of this unrelated class. Since everyone assumes you can use Facebook, if you can't, then you're disadvantaged. In contrast, nobody assumes you can post to HN, so being banned from here is qualitatively different, in my opinion.

My idea of Facebook's obligation is not based on what the law prohibits but the law, hopefully, follows basic human moral tenets. If they overlap, it's not by accident.

If your Facebook group turns off, there are hundreds of other platforms you can move to. If you failed to backup your contacts, how is that the fault of Facebook? If you can't convince people to migrate, why is that their problem? If your school relies on Facebook, they shouldn't do that -- complain to them, not Facebook. And not everyone assumes you can (or want) to use Facebook.

It sounds like you want Facebook to take responsibility for things that are your own personal responsibility simply because, today, they're popular. It's not because they're the only choice but because, in some circles, they're the favored choice. Pretty significant difference.

What if your group meets at McDonald's and you got banned? You forgot to get their contact info. They don't want to meet at Starbucks instead. And your school hosts a study session at McDonalds. What is McDonald's responsibility for your misfortune?

Facebook is not the whole Internet. I have a Facebook account but generally I go months without even logging in. It's not essential. You're not forced to use it. If something you want to do requires it, it's your choice to do that or not. I've literally put my money where my mouth and decided not to upgrade to an Oculus Quest 2 because of the Facebook integration.

Personal safety requirements, such as compulsory seat belt wearing in cars.

Scammers are breaking the law by tricking people to give up their money even though the victims could just refuse to give money to whoever asks for it if they didn't want to get scammed.

Tenancy and employment law, at least in my country, doesn't allow people to contract out of certain rights. That's because some poor sucker would end up shooting himself in the foot by accepting a raw deal out of desperation.

Some companies like utilities are required to not arbitrarily ban customers, even though they're not the only choice - you can still install solar panels if you don't like the power company but it's nowhere near as convenient.

Consumer protection laws.

Restrictions on gambling.

Anti-spam laws. Email is not the only option but it has market dominance and network effects meaning normal life is harder without it.

McDonald's isn't like this because it has nowhere near the market dominance or network effects that Facebook does. It would still be a problem but a smaller one which I think doesn't outweigh the rights of the owner to ban whoever he wants or responsibility of customers to organize their groups better.

My question for you, is what do you believe should the be the rules here? I'm not against consumer protections -- if you want to compose a user bill of rights that applies to all companies online and off I might be for that depending on what you really want.

I'm not sure what regulation would be, but something that protects people against surprise and troublesome problems. Ideally, I feel it should be done by enabling greater competition, perhaps with a requirement for portable user identities, friends lists and reputations or interoperability between networks. Then they would have competitive pressure to treat their users well and the government wouldn't need to micro-regulate little details.

Not for all companies online. Just those that are in a powerful enough position to cause bigger problems, otherwise it would be disproportionately burdensome on small players or even hobbyists. That's similar to how existing regulations don't apply to everyone. Eg. Home owner-occupiers can do DIY work on their own house that normal requires a licensed tradesman, kids can sell lemonade without such strict hygiene rules as a cafe, individuals can sell 2nd hand goods without providing the same consumer protections as a 2nd hand dealer, etc.

The fact that you want equal treatment for all companies, as well as other things you've said, suggests you're more of an idealist than a pragmatist. I used to be like that but then realized the real world is too complicated for simple one-size-fits-all solutions to be the best. It turns out the free market doesn't actually lead to good outcomes for people unless its natural bad tendencies (eg. monopolies, predatory sales, negative externalities, etc.) are kept under control but at the same time, too much control stifles small business and innovation so it requires ongoing active management to function well.

That's not necessary fair because everyone else is calling for change here.

> Ideally, I feel it should be done by enabling greater competition, perhaps with a requirement for portable user identities, friends lists and reputations or interoperability between networks.

Except that you're just spreading your private information even further. At least if I post my private information to Facebook, it's on Facebook. I'm not worried that, as a feature, my friends are porting my information to other platforms.

> Then they would have competitive pressure to treat their users well and the government wouldn't need to micro-regulate little details.

I agree that competition would be better. In fact, I'd say that Facebook should have been prevented from buying Instragam, Whatapp, etc. But competitive pressure alone does not necessary require companies to treat users better. Facebook would still be the same with competition from these other companies.

> Just those that are in a powerful enough position to cause bigger problems, otherwise it would be disproportionately burdensome on small players or even hobbyists.

That's hard to judge. Just look at Whatapps -- they grew to millions of users with a team of less than dozen people. Are they a small player or a big player? You might end up with a lot of social networks right on the line of being big to avoid additional regulation.

Facebook, for it's part, has been very pro-regulation as they're big enough and profitable enough. This will further make it harder for smaller players to compete even if you limit the restrictions to large players.

> The fact that you want equal treatment for all companies, as well as other things you've said, suggests you're more of an idealist than a pragmatist.

No. But I think you can't have rules for "Facebook" because in 10 years the problem is going to be some other company in some other situation. And you have to be very careful of regulatory capture.

Facebook earns money thanks to its users, providing them some service so definitely there should be a contract here.

Now, when you look on those T&C, they are very vague, especially possible reasons for account suspension are very, very vague. They refer user to some "community standards" and it is not clear, if those "standards" are part of the contract or not.

In my opinion, the first thing that should be changed is to force Facebook and other services to provide a clear, formal contract that would state what are duties of both contract parts, what rights they have, etc. Stuff that each normal contract has. No mumbling about "community", etc.

Contract should be something that is enforceable and has clear appeal path and so on. If I don't agree with Facebook I should be able to court and refer to something that is specific and well defined, not some Mark Zuckerberg views on what is good or bad.

They got "terms & conditions". This is the contract. Formalising another contract would require legal fees. Is every user willing to pay a lawyer $200 to use FB? (and another $200 for Pinterest, $200 for Twitter, etc.) Is every user willing to pay AGAIN another $200 on the next "T&C Update"? If you think $200 is too much, come up with anothe number, and then multiply it by every free service you/someone uses (Twitter, free-Dropbox, free-Gmail, free-GoogleDocs, free-HN, free-Reddit, free-Viber, free-....).

FB, Twitter, Pinterest usage comes "as-is". We/you are the products. Since when does a super market have a contract with a potato? (I don't mean to insult, but really..).

Unless they (FB, or any service provider - paid or free) clearly discriminates against someone (e.g. "you are man/woman/black/asian/etc. and we don't like people like you here") and then they kick out FB every man/woman/black/asian/etc. person, feel free to sue them (more legal fees.. I see a pattern here) :)

But if it's not a discrimination issue, then please tell me ONE person that hasn't dropped an f-bomb "f... you/this/him/her/them/.." or some other profanity on a FB post, a FB comment, on FB-messenger message. In that spirit everyone is eligible to receive a red card, and it's down to FB to kick someone out anytime they want or anytime they get provoked. E.g. HenryBemis is trashing us on HN.. HenryBemis wrote "f... this <name_of_politician>", thus HenryBemis violated the policy about swearing, threatening violence, sexual content, yada-yada-yada.

A couple of days ago we saw a post on someone sending a "accidentally, partial nude photo" over messenger to a friend of his, and this got him expelled from FB. I clearly understand the capabilities of FB vs mine. I think more people should see these facts coldly.

It should give people pause what full privatization and deregulation may mean.

There's a definite middle ground between facebook should be able to do whatever it wants with impunity and facebook should never be able to moderate anything ever.

Not every opinion is informed only by partisan position. I just believe in private ownership and personal rights. I believe in free speech but not in compelled speech.

Re: Robinhood, it is a completely different story. What Robinhood did in this case is market manipulation. They only allowed people to sell the stock and not to buy it. That is (I think) illegal.

0 - https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstocks/nasdaq-ceo-suggest...

https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/28/janet-yellen-gamestop-cit...

I don't care how people get there. New platform. Use the correct technologies to be more impervious to top down arbitrary decisions, build a real appeals process, build representatives.

They haven't been a private company since 2012.

Because when you're short a few billion on a position, and your counterparty is a toxic stream of garbage, its a profitable strategy to paying someone to report all the toxic b.s. and disrupt their organization. In 2021, we figured out how to get hedge funds to pay content moderator salaries!

No. They pay the trolls to make content moderation a misery

They don't want the content moderated, that's the excuse to shut down the thing that outsmarted them.

Are we ok with this? We talk about endemic corruption like it's the most normal thing in the world. But it isn't. Reform or perish.

To make super-sure that the currently fashionable unspeakables are well and truly said. Stalinist trolling would have done the job in the past, fascist trolling now.

Of course if you can already point at it you might proceed straight to getting some momentum behind the outrage with some astroturfing and making sure there's more than one media story focusing on that very small amount of trolling as "the story". This is not much trouble to go to for the sums of money involved. Enron closed whole power stations, many of them, to rape California on electricity derivatives. The sums here are measured in billions, there's not much that would be too much trouble.

Genuinely baffled why so many HNers have spent the last couple of days forgetting everything they know about how the internet actually works to imagine that hedge funds whose couple of dozen employees are busy firefighting are somehow controlling the conversation.

How is this implausible to you?

Do you really think the timing of this is purely coincidental? I mean you will have trolls on both the Democrat and Republican official groups. They aren't going to be shut.

I guess it could be coincidental and incompetent but it's not the highest on my list of the likely.

It's interesting that this phenomenon is obvious in a commercial situation, but rarely considered in political situations. Are we sure that the activists most salient to social media are anything like the groups they claim to represent?

the demonstrated power and financial success of WSB, even if fleeting and temporary, provides a lot of implicit credibility and validation to the "retard/YOLO" non-PC culture of WSB. The modern society worships success, and the people pay oversized attention to what successful people do - like what they eat, how exercise, how they stay motivated, etc. And now instead of respectable, successful, well dressed, educated, smart, cool, etc. Wall Street-ers a bunch of "retards" crawled from under the rock, teared a new one to those Wall Street-ers and got right on top of that podium of success veneration and idolation (like the "nerds" did 20 years ago with their tech startups). No surprise all the establishment (which these days naturally includes successful "nerds" of the previous generation) fights back. The established interests are always scared of changes, and especially when changes look like paradigm shift (while we wouldn't know for quite some time whether it is a true paradigm shift or just an aberration, the scare is real)

A week ago, nobody what so ever, cared about WSB.

Today, I just had a conversation with my dad about WSB... Everyone is talking about it, I'm not surprised that someone even talked about it on some facebook board-meeting or whatever...

Oh please. If that was true, they wouldn't have banned TheDonald, especially so close to the election. That sub drove a huge amount of traffic.

Because they all have fairly loose monitoring and mostly complaint-based policy enforcement, and people being pissed off at you for any reason makes it more likely that complaints get reported.

I suspect a large part of it would be to protect themselves in case the recent publicity brings forth some undesired attention from regulator with regards to market manipulation.

They might have decided in many cases to act now, but with this specific case it seems to have been 11 days ago:

>Facebook suspended his group on Jan. 7

> Facebook Inc took down a popular Wall Street discussion group, Robinhood Stock Traders, in a move that its founder on Thursday described as backlash for conversations buoying shares of GameStop Corp and other companies this week.

First, a typo, "buoying". But it also says "this week". So what they meant is probably Jan. 27.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/buoyi...

And let's not euphemize this, it's not a "maneuver", it's market manipulation. Coordinating a collective buy to effect a short squeeze is clear market manipulation. Enticing a horde of gullible forum users to buy the same ballooned stock based on ideas like "stick it to the man" and "turn their tricks back on them" is an even clearer pump and dump scheme.

This doesn't end well for anyone (except Gamestop's pre-existing shareholders I guess). The hedge fund got fleeced, the gullible WSB users are going to lose a ton, Robinhood flushed their brand down the toilet trying to avoid being an accomplice to all of this, and the only folks who made money on the deal are more likely than not in the SEC crosshairs now.

In my view, hedge funds have implicitly colluded for years on short positions because it's in their best interests not to screw each other over the long haul. Imagine going against Citadel as a fund. Your career is over. The fact the short interest rose to 140% is proof of that.

This trade should have been shaken out sooner, but no one would dare given the powers that be who were backing it. Also, consider the bond holders as true original victims here. Is it right that they had people artificially putting downward pressure on the security of a company that is indebted to them? If you believe in reflexivity, this is depriving lenders of a fair security valuation, which is an asset of sorts, and further driving them towards a delisting or bankruptcy.

But now that it has been done once, more people will be interested in these opportunities in the future. Quoting from Iron Man 2: If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in him. There will be blood in the water, the sharks will come.

Reality says otherwise. Hedge funds get into trouble at the expense of hedge funds taking the other side of the bet all the time. Their entire business model is based around claiming the ability to beat the market by winning zero-sum bets, and in the long run the more funds they screw over the better their reputation and the more fund management fees they collect. Not going against downward pressure on a security if you think the other fund is undervaluing it and the risk is tolerable is literally leaving money on the table.

As for Citadel, they'll be delighted that a fund got into so much trouble it begged them for a bailout on whatever terms Citadel was willing to offer (and used the funds to unwind its exposure to that market).

See, this is why someone is going to jail. This explanation is wrong. Someone lied to you, and they probably lied to you to make this look like a sure bet so that you'd buy (and thus pump) a stock that is otherwise going to crash, so that they can unload their position before it does. You got scammed, and the person who did it is guilty of a crime.

FWIW: Short leverage higher than 100% is not naked selling. It just means (as an example) that you borrowed a share, sold it, then later on that buyer loaned the same share back to you, and you sold it again. This is not a good idea, but it's not naked selling (which is itself securities fraud).

Step 2: convince a lot of people to buy GME "for entertainment value"

Step 3: sell GME after it rises well above what it is worth

Perhaps you don't care that you got fleeced, but that doesn't change the fact that you did.

Politically correct speech is bankrupt in all forms of ethics and morality if it favors the second group just because they have kinder words. Generally why lots of people are disgusted by PC rhetoric. It's bullshit to its core because it holds no real core value, it just keeps things superficially pretty for the predators of society.

I'm enjoying this ride and wish there was more I could do because it's become bigger than the money. This whole thing is pulling back the curtain and we're getting to see the frail ankles of the wizard.

Going a bit off topic, but HNs constant fight against this is its best asset. Sometimes it's annoying to see a funny joke down-voted, but it's so much better than the entire comment section devolving into nonsense like slashdot did >15 years ago.

Like every thing in the world that gains massive popularity, it attracts the normies who want in on the action, but aren't willing to do the, quite literally months or years (depending on how deeply you throw yourself into it) of learning required to even understand most of the DD posts there.

Yes, there was the occasional ridiculous trolling, like convincing posters on /r/investing that /r/wallstreetbets had a Lean Hogs Insider Trading Ring (which still makes me laugh out loud to this day), but it was far more rare.

Yes, the meme posts have risen dramatically, but there's still occasional good due diligence there, its just now you have to sift through a mountain of shit instead of small hill of it.

All the people screaming "YOLO I can't care if I lose X" seem to be missing the fact that their money isn't "lost"; it is ending up in the pockets of a few at their expense.

It's fascinating to see how many people really just want to fuck with the rich and how many care about normal people getting life-changing money. It's much more altruistic than I imagined.

I chucked in £30 on Free Trade.

I don't care if I get that money back. I just want to see the rich people suffer a bit, know that they don't have all the power.

Everyone is aware of that. The group of people that will get rich are those who bought the stock 2 weeks ago or earlier.

Heck, when someone put their entire life savings in ornamental gourd futures WSB crapped about that person saying how stupid that was. They aren't stupid. They are fully aware of what they are doing.

Then FD's (weekly OTM options, what it stands for is offensive) became super popular.

But I agree, it was always a good mix of memes and DD. I remember some activision DD which was along the lines of: "look at the name, act and vision! Two things a company needs to succeed".

Obviously Discord is a private company etc etc. They're also the dominant platform upon which ~140 million people [1] from all over the world communicate, in all the messy ways humans do. I don't know about you, but I'd rather they focus on keeping the platform running, collect their revenue from their customers, and mind their own business. This is what everyone who uses the service expects them to do, after all.

1: https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/17/discord-raises-100-millio...

Also, "benign intent" does not make offensive behavior less offensive. Intent can matter, but it certainly isn't everything.

This doesn't address the larger question of whether or not we have a right to enforce our completely subjective standards globally on other communities which we don't belong to. Personally, I wouldn't want some outsider deciding that me and my friends weren't allowed to talk to eachother anymore if we decided to start using the term towards each other privately in jest.

On the other hand quite a few of them would probably support stabbing each other in the back. I may have had a run in with a few too many people that like to abuse simple stuff for power plays.

This. At the end of the day, Facebook/Discord has the power to ban individual users. There is no good reason to nuke an entire community if the the mods running said community are being cooperative. This isn't about "hate speech" or "adult sexual exploitation" or whatever the excuse dice end up rolling next time. This is a knee-jerk reaction from a platform with a ton of power and no incentive to wield it responsibly.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22254339/discord-r-wallst...

They banned all bad words and image memes (due to lack of ability to check the content with a bot) and told the mods to rigorously enforce compliance with Discords standards or the group gets removed again. Maybe they helped configuring the mod-bot ...

The era of the walled garden will end. #RemindMe

Reddit has not been helpful at all. The mods made a post after they shut down the sub saying that the Reddit API can't handle the amount of traffic they need to moderate, and they've asked for special permissions.

This is possible, they are a victim of their own success in a way... or

The banks are looking for a way—any way—to shut them down. This is costing millions of dollars. Paying a few shills to jump into the group ramp up the BS and a few others to jump into the group and take offense at every little thing might just be what it takes to overwhelm the mods.

Not Facebook collusion, just a little discourse sabotage.

if you against banking, you have bigger fish to fry

I think its far more likely that the poison would be released by funds themselves, but do not think for a second that banks will not intervene to safeguard their revolvers...

> side-effect of going mainstream: it becomes political, and politics is perception.

This is absolutely true. Before, when this was between a few reporters and Wallstreet / WSB, it was possible to handle.

Now it has crossed the tipping point into mass politics, and the size of the audience involved is massive. Nuance is dead.

The only moves are blunder, react, counter react, avoid, fight, flee.

The chimps at FB have dug themselves into deep holes. The only way they save themselves is to pull everyone else inside and cry for Grandma to show up.

If that was the issue, all Facebook had to do was issue a warning and make the group adults only or something like that. This outright ban is just insane.

I saw a news item that said Discord is, and was, and the server is back up with improved moderation.

That's the way 4chan presented too, and it turned out that the community wasn't entirely as ironic as its members claimed.

Cultures turn toxic really, really fast. And this kind of "ironic offensiveness" turns into a shield for genuine hate in a way that even long term participants don't notice until it's too late.