What if they disabled trading, the stock slowly lost value, and people who were long the stock couldn't exit their position?

Someone's gonna complain and ask "why didn't they just disallow buying but allow selling".

This stock was short over 100% of the float and dealers were short gamma. They got out of this in the way that would guarantee they could save themselves, forced liquidation.

They picked the least painful option for themselves. Three options existed:

- Halt all trading - Halt buying - Halt selling

Everyone is pissed no matter what. The first is perhaps the most fair. The last helps the big institutions in this circumstance, the second retail traders.

So you're arguing that, instead of just disabling buying, they should have disabled buying and selling? That would expose them to far more substantial and direct liability than disabling new positions.

These securities should have been frozen so people could capitalize enough to supply the liquidity that was demanded instead of just letting institutions buy whatever they needed to cover their positions while forcing liquidations across the board.

Perhaps, but that’s not Robinhood’s call. Under the (likely) assumption that RH had liquidity issues, it’s hard to see what other choice they had.

Who is "they" here?