So much this. /r/wallstreetbets is going to struggle to recover. It's absolutely Eternal September.

I've been subbed to WSB for about 5 years, ever since someone at work (prop trading) mentioned it as basically being a bunch of 25-30 yo finance people hanging out and doing dumb shit in their personal accounts for fun. I'll admit, I did some dumb stuff myself, trying to time UVXY/TVIX plays. (Basically netted 0 of course). But it was fun to shitpost about it. This is astrology for finance bros.

And it'd been going a bit down-hill already, but most people were still that same description: young blood, day job in finance, knows what they're doing at both a mechanical and risk level, etc. And the content reflected it.

Then somehow, one of those internet things happened. WSB became a hit, people flooded in, the mod team was overwhelmed, media attention flooded in making everything worse, etc. I feel like this is what a lot of /r/the_donald people ended up now that they're looking for a new cause. So much of the rhetoric I saw once the WSB Old Guard had been overwhelmed mirrored the kind of stuff you saw out of the_donald back in 2016.

Seems the daily thread grows so big so fast that it becomes dog slow to even browse.

But yeah, a lot of the comments are just one liner garbage memes: HODL! TO THE MOOOOOON! FISTS ON CHEST NO FEAR! TO VALHALLA! DIAMOND HANDS! As well as echo chamber "encouragement" to HODL! until $1000/$9000/the moon because Mark Cuban is on our side!

The GME threads grew so fast that reddit couldn't keep up and every 4-6 hours a new thread was spawned and pinned.

I struggle to see the political claim that these people are being flooded with Trumpers. This event was and has been pretty bipartisan.

From what I’ve seen thus far is the media trying to use the Q / Trumper angle against this community to tarnish its public perception and recent novelty.

I am happy to be proven wrong though, I just don’t see it.

There are some elements of something The_Donald-like, but it's true that it's not (yet?) the same thing.

They push a lot of very strong and completely unsubstantiated conspiracy claims in particular, and they'll quickly accuse anybody dissenting of being a shill or having an ulterior purpose.

Here's a good example I think: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l93d18/gme_...

This is good OG WSB content, written by one of the users that was in on the play from the very start.

But there's the problem: since he knew what he was doing, he managed to sell at the right moment and make huge benefits. That doesn't fit the narrative nu-WSB wants to push. So this very good old-school WSB post can't even get half a thousand upvotes.

Meanwhile post some vaguely conspirationist anti-wall street article and skyrocket to the top of the frontpage.

So yeah, it's not The_Donald, but there's definitely this strong anti-system, populist, "everybody is out to get me" conspirationist, fact-adverse mindset that you find in these types of communities.

Note in particular that, somewhat ironically, WSB calls itself "4chan with a bloomberg terminal", so it seems fitting that it's following a similar trajectory of ironic edgyness turning genuine as new people get in and take it at face value.

> This is good OG WSB content, written by one of the users that was in on the play from the very start.

He is one of the few people that used a LIMIT order.

While gp is right about the influx of users (Ive only been around wsb for 4 years or so), which I will address later, I agree with you on the tarnishing tactic being used. What I saw was very open "fuck the big money people" that transcended party lines, often explicitly.

That said, there are sure to be a large portion of "the right", on the sub, as the fact of the matter is that a significant percentage of the US is!

As for what caused the influx, I think you can blame reddit for getting rid of all the edgier communities, and lots of people like that sort of thing, so over the years as a wsb post hit /all the numbers would jump because people would say " hey, I like this place, its edgy and self-deprecating" and over time it changed the demographics. I think back then though people mostly lurked, this influx has caused a lot more mime-posting.

Aren't "the right" typically pro big business people? That's been the big joke. Trailer park white trash right wingers defending big business. Why would you assume they're all right wingers when they're all "fuck the big money people". Aren't leftists the first ones to say, "fuck the big money people"?

Why would any part of the media even want to do that? This is a classic man-bites-dog story, and is being treated as such everywhere I look.

I'm seeing it implied fairly regularly here and on Reddit that journalists are somehow anti-WSB, but I just don't see it, and I don't know why it would ever be the case.

Maybe people are mixing up market analysts (who work for financial institutions) with finance journalists (who work for news organisations)?

Maybe people think journalists are afraid of losing valuable sources in big banks if they don't denigrate the day traders (even though all those big firms also made a fortune in this mess)?

What am I missing?

I'm necessarily saying it's "Trumpers", just that lots of the rhetoric, especially stuff that gets to the front page of r/all, seems to be the kind of all-caps, hyper-reductionist, chest-beating "SO MUCH WINNING" kind of rhetoric we saw in 2016. I do think this is bipartisan, in that there's no one side of the political spectrum that's flooding in here, but I think we're seeing the kind of hype devices that were used to (apparently) great effect in 2016.

And that's always step #1. This type of content (DIAMOND HANDS HODL TO THE MOON APE STRONGS!!!!) is easy to spam everywhere, so more reasonable people are driven away or drowned in the noise.

Even if the userbase is bipartisan these extreme, emotional takes are guaranteed to take over by sheer volume unless the moderation steps in hard. I can't really blame the mods for failing to do that at the moment though, if I were them I'd probably have closed the sub temporarily...

This is entirely true, and easily verified by checking subreddit user overlap. WSB overlaps heavily with a number of right-wing subreddits, and, naturally, /r/unemployment.

>Whatever is left of it has been diluted when literally millions of people flooded it.

Just as an illustration, a number of /r/wallstreetbets/ subscribers:

26/1: 2,390,238

27/1: 3,336,749

28/1: 5,036,912

29/1: 6,317,967

30/1: 6,965,330

31/1: 7,508,966

1/2: 7,977,780

2/2: 8,278,750

3/2: 8,427,584

(via https://archive.md/https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ )

The amount of misinformation being propagated in the subreddit has reached absurd levels. I wonder where the voices of reason will migrate to once this fiasco dies down further.