It does feel like a watershed moment regarding hedge funds. This is the first time netizens capitalize on hedge fund short favorites and it has been surprisingly easy to cause an absolute catastrophy in the order of billion losses for them. I heard Melvin Capital may even have gone bankrupt?
And how to do it? You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up. Seriously. It's that easy. It's not illegal. It's so easy that even semiprofessionals can understand exactly which stock are hedge fund favorites. It's not hard information to come by. And, here's the kicker: There is a potential monetary reward if you enter and exit a stock at the right moment.
So it's simple to discover and execute, and there is a financial incentive, and it's not against the law. This is a trifecta of properties that makes this very interesting to follow indeed.
> And how to do it? You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up.
A lot of the people involved aren't just buying and holding. They're specifically buying/selling short dated out of the money options in order to move the price. Some understand the market microstructure and the various levers they have to make the price move using what is effectively leverage.
> Seriously. It's that easy. It's not illegal.
Finance is highly regulated and arbitrarily so. If you think the lawmakers and regulators will throw their hands up and say geez, it's technically legal, carry on, you're sorely mistaken.
Ideally finance is meant to be about allocation of capital. If a market is allocating capital to a dying company just because meme, then the market isn't serving its purpose. I don't see how this is different than what is constantly being criticized such as flash crashes, contagion and large moves based on rumors, other than the group benefiting (fiscally irresponsible internet strangers vs fiscally irresponsible professionals)
I know, hedge funds bad, and they do this crap all the time. That may be true, but this isn't going to end well for the average consumer. My prediction is reddit will shutdown wsb because that's what reddit does. And there will be more laws made targeting individuals engaging in this sort of activity (basically coordinating with groups of people). This may hurt newsletters and other financial venues. The large hedge funds will be fine, we might see a few bailouts, and life will go on.
> ... this isn't going to end well for the average consumer. My prediction is reddit will shutdown wsb because that's what reddit does. And there will be more laws made targeting individuals engaging in this sort of activity (basically coordinating with groups of people). This may hurt newsletters and other financial venues. The large hedge funds will be fine, we might see a few bailouts, and life will go on.
I totally agree, but it's not like there's a level playing field now. If the new regs enshrine the current reality in law then maybe there'll be more hope for fundamental reform.
Basically what we probably have now is a behavior that is legal so long as no one engages in it. Losing a fake option is not losing anything.
> I don't see how this is different than what is constantly being criticized such as flash crashes, contagion and large moves based on rumors, other than the group benefiting (fiscally irresponsible internet strangers vs fiscally irresponsible professionals)
Isn't that the whole point WSB is making? This is not different and the media treating it as something crazy or new is disingenuous.
> If the new regs enshrine the current reality in law then maybe there'll be more hope for fundamental reform.
This is a sideshow. Feds or regulatory body will crack down, we'll just accept another banned community that is "a threat to our democracy" and we'll move on. I don't think what is essentially financial de-regulation is a movement that's going to pick up steam some time soon. There's vagueness in securities laws and this will continue. Meanwhile banks will periodically be sued for tens of billions that will fill the coffers of attorney generals, justice departments and various state regulators [0]
> Isn't that the whole point WSB is making?
Yes, partly. I think much of it is about having some fun and having a sense of community.
Regulators and prosecutors do as industry tells them. In this case it's not clear that industry wants anything changed. The smarter hedge reptiles made some money riding the momentum of this thing, and will make more riding it back down when it collapses. Being reptiles, they won't cry because one or two of their number didn't make it out alive. Smart money is never going to outlaw dumb money.
> a market is allocating capital to a dying company just because meme, then the market isn't serving its purpose. I don't see how this is different than what is constantly being criticized such as flash crashes, contagion and large moves based
It’s not your job to decide what is an efficient place for capital. The market is serving its purpose exactly right now by allowing the free trade of shares in GME. If people want to spend their money on a GME share to be a part of something, that’s their prerogative.
You know what else the market allocates capital to? Gold funds, who do nothing but sit on giant vaults of gold. It’s about the stupidest allocation of capital possible but nobody is clutching their pearls about that.
Telling people what is inappropriate to do with their money is a great way to get them to do it more. The whole reason we have a free market is because historically the big people in charge can’t allocate capital more efficiently than free-for-alls.
But how can you regulate that people get together and buy stock? They need... 1) Internet bulletin board. That's it. The barrier of entry is just so damn low, and that's in part also why this has happened. In hindsight I'm surprised it hasn't happened before but I suppose Covid-19 brought this on.
I think it would be easier to regulate something that at least takes a certain amount of investment in terms of insight or knowledge, but here you can just take any random heavily shorted company and like... get people on a popular board to buy stocks over a day.
This time, sure, it was Reddit and the subreddit may be suspended. Next time it'll be a Discord or Telegram board or something. It's just... so easy
> This time, sure, it was Reddit and the subreddit may be suspended. Next time it'll be a Discord or Telegram board or something. It's just... so easy
It's not so easy. There are concentrated tech players. There's decentralized systems but they aren't there yet in terms of usability for millions of people to just log on and use seamlessly like they do w/ Reddit. It may get there eventually, but its nowhere close to being available.
And then you have different layers of protocol that are all more or less centralized. AWS, gcp, Azure isn't going to host illegal or risky content. And even if you get around that, you'll have to contend w/ the ISPs that can just block arbitrarily if they so choose.
Yes, you can get around all those, but not on the scale to make a meaningful impact and the barriers will deter all but the most fervent supporters, and they likely wouldn't have enough money or influence to cause the havoc they're causing today.
> There's decentralized systems but they aren't there yet in terms of usability for millions of people to just log on and use seamlessly like they do w/ Reddit.
I recently tried mastodon, but I found it kind of confusing. I wanted to get some reasonable people to follow based on my interests (programming, tech, philosophy, etc), but I couldn't really find how to find these people. I tried googling top mastodon people to follow to no avail. No beginners guides apart from the mundane how to create an account. If anyone has any tips, let me know
Why is the solution always to either shut something down or to regulate? Why is educating people to act more responsibly never ever considered an option?
We require regulation, just as we require the police, because education doesn't matter to people willing to disregard ethics and harm others for their own gains.
There are two kinds of people involved: those trying to make a point and those trying to make a buck.
Some people trying to make a point are going to make a lot of bucks as well.
And some people trying to make a buck are going to lose a lot of money. Not everyone can get out of an inflated stock with gains, pretty much by definition. And those least likely to understand the point are also probably the ones buying into the stock late (and at an inflated price).
The mix of who makes and loses money is going to affect how society sees this. It will look somewhere between an egalitarian social movement, or a few now-wealthy loudmouths who took everyone else for a ride.
Making money in a bubble is all about timing... and it gets ethically complicated when some traders have control of the timing (in this case by declaring whether the vendetta against Melvin is over or not).
Note that I have made no ethical considerations for Melvin; they knew what game they were playing and are not victims here IMO.
No, I was broadly commenting on why education cannot trump regulation.
For the sake of argument, one can say that actions of forums like WSB should also be regulated to protect them, just like laws for compulsory wearing of helmet (while riding two-wheelers) or putting seatbelts (while riding cars) exist, even though one would think that education and common sense would make them do this automatically out of self-preservation instincts.
But since I am not an expert in finance or stock markets, I really am not in any sound position to comment on the specifics here.
My broader general argument (not at all related to WSB or the financial industry) is just that education alone is insufficient, and regulation is often required too for maximum efficacy.
Pessimism and apathy are the primary things holding decent Americans in thrall to the racist war state called USA. If our votes meant something, that state could change though it has been around for 231 years. Since they don't, it must instead be replaced. In the meantime, let's be less totalitarian, not more.
See that's the thing here - people have dumbed down democracy to voting. That's just one aspect of it. The other is the right to speak, advocate and protest freely. I've heard many people advocate for compulsory military service for a few years for every citizen to "instil discipline and patriotism and understand brotherhood, hardship and sacrifice etc. etc.". I have a different take on it - I say youngsters should be encouraged to join political parties instead to really understand and appreciate democracy. (Note that I used the word "encouraged" and not "compulsory" - democracy means more choice and less compulsions).
In Greece it's very widespread for young people (higher ed people 18-25) to join political parties. The corruption that this has led to, is unfathomable. The problem is that the political parties have no interest in democracy, just power and self perpetuation.
If you believe what is happening is wrong, it needs to be regulated so that it doesn't happen. If you believe it's not wrong, it shouldn't be either regulated nor educated against.
Now, if you do believe it's wrong and it should be educated against, how would this work? Do you think that this is wrong beacsue people are going to lose money? Maybe then it makes some sense to give better education, but this is obviously a special moment and it's hard to educate people so that they don't engage in a social phenomenon. Not to mention, a lot of educated people may be making some pretty educated bets and winning a lot of money; other educated people may just be 'paying' money for a cause that they believe in.
I'm not arguing that shutting down or regulating is the best solution, but it is the most likely outcome.
How would one go about educating people? There's been a lot of ink spilled on this story and it seems to have captured the public's imagination. Not all of the reporting is accurate, but all the major media outlets get out the point that this is essentially reckless market manipulation by a group of loosely banded individuals coordinating online.
I doubt anyone participating in this will cut it out if just told to by some authoritative body.
How is borrowing then selling 140% of the available shares legal? How is that not market manipulation?
This is the market at work. This was taken too far and the market has a method for correcting this behavior and we're seeing it now. The difference is retail is going to win AND there's no backroom deal to be made to stop the bleeding.
We NEED financial reform but we need to look at what allowed this situation in the first place, not ways to silence what are effectively the whistle blowers.
> How is borrowing then selling 140% of the available shares legal? How is that not market manipulation?
Why wouldn't someone be allowed to lend out a security they own to someone else?
If not allowed, why wouldn't I be allowed to make an agreement where I pay you the difference between a future stock price and some fixed value?
> The difference is retail is going to win AND there's no backroom deal to be made to stop the bleeding.
The backroom deal will be a phone call to the CEO of reddit, discord, disqus and similar and tell them to cut it out. Simple as that. No coordinating mechanism, this will die.
You seem to be hinting at the idea that naked short selling should be illegal, which it has been for over a decade. So here’s a minor clarification for you: The short interest (140% or more for GME) is calculated on the public float. There is a significant chunk of GameStop shares that are not publicly accessible, but could be borrowed against (the shares do exist). If you consider the total outstanding shares of GME, then only 99% or so of the company was shorted. So it’s a crazy high amount, but there is no proof that any (actually illegal) naked short selling was occurring. So long as the people holding the non-public portion allowed their shares to be borrowed, then nothing illegal is going on. If, in the unlikely situation that EVERYONE needed to close their short positions at once, these non-public shares could actually be sold if the owner wanted to. Of course, they could dictate a really high price if the public market volume isn’t enough to close out the short positions in the standard three day period.
The reason that short interest is calculated on public float is because that makes the most sense for normal situations. We just happen to have stumbled into one of those unusual situations.
GME stock has been on nasdaq's "failed to deliver" list for about a month now. That means someone sold a GME share they didn't own (short) and failed to give it to the new owner within the correct timeframe (3 business days I believe.)
Guess what the SEC has done about this blatant naked short selling. Nothing.
So while in theory naked short selling is illegal, in reality it is tolerate and allowed.
Can you explain how it's possible that 99% of shares were held by owners that were willing to loan their share? Surely at least 2% of GME was owned by "regular people" whose shares just sit in their brokerage accounts?
I was completely unaware this was a thing: that means there can be a "run on the bank" if all of the customers wanted to sell on a short time period, and they don't actually have the shares to cover the sales?
Despite the fact that there are widely repeated accusations of market manipulation by specific hedge funds on reddit, there is no actual evidence for it.
I'm not saying reddit is manipulating the market either (maybe! I dunno). Just clarifying this point.
Arguably, because we don't put people into office who are able and/or willing to require people to act responsibly. If we chose our politicians more carefully, we'd see better results. But we don't, so we get what we choose.
> And there will be more laws made targeting individuals engaging in this sort of activity (basically coordinating with groups of people).
These laws will not be legal under US law, because US congress is not permitted to make a law abridging an act of speaking, or expressing an idea, or opinion.
> Finance is highly regulated and arbitrarily so.
The level of arbitrariness of legal process in legal systems of ex-UK colonies is in league of its own in the world, and USA is particularly prominent at that.
In US, financial regulations are some of the most vaguely defined of laws, in the rest of the world, they are usually are the most verbose, and formal in definition.
A law whose execution is wholly arbitrary is not a law at all, and a country allowing arbitrary interpretation of laws is lawless.
This is why what is "technically legal" is legal. What is defined in the law as legal, or not defined as illegal is what is legal. This is why no smarty pants bureaucrat should be allowed to wiggle out arbitrary powers by coming with "interpretations," "extended definitions," or "legal theories."
> If you think the lawmakers and regulators will throw their hands up and say geez, it's technically legal, carry on, you're sorely mistaken.
> These laws will not be legal under US law, because US congress is not permitted to make a law abridging an act of speaking, or expressing an idea, or opinion.
It can probably be written in such a way that this style of speech can be argued through the new law to fall under some of the exceptions, perhaps incitement or fraud.
> These laws will not be legal under US law, because US congress is not permitted to make a law abridging an act of speaking, or expressing an idea, or opinion.
They may just decide instead of policing the speech, to police the practice, and make being an investor even more arbitrarily difficult.
I can easily imagine a law getting passed that in order to invest in a brokerage account where you have autonomy over the investments requires you to be an accredited investor, and it will be worded so that it is for the benefit of the people who were taken for a ride on massive "pump-and-dump" schemes that originated on misinformation platforms and social media, regardless of whether they were truly pump-and-dump or just tom-fuckery against "big hedge".
> The level of arbitrariness of legal process in legal systems of ex-UK colonies is in league of its own in the world, and USA is particularly prominent at that.
Can you post a link to some comparison of arbitrariness of ex-UK legal systems and other systems?
> Ideally finance is meant to be about allocation of capital. If a market is allocating capital to a dying company just because meme, then the market isn't serving its purpose.
Do you believe in it's right to give power to somebody, whether it will be a government, private party, or a class to rule over allocation of capital, and decide whose capital allocation is good, and whose capital allocation is bad?
There is a country that tried, they name to it was USSR.
yes, we don't want stock manipulation from anyone. A small group of retail investors can't manipulate stock so they can be exempt. This group however just proved that they can.
Not when moving the price is the goal. If you trade specifically to create an unfair impression of the supply and demand of a stock that's market manipulation.
Thing is no one is going to prosecute a randomer on the internet for throwing $5k at an option especially when there's no proof that it was done in bad faith.
Shorting a stock because you genuinely believe the company is crap is not market manipulation.
To be clear, market manipulation is very vague and very broad, and from what I've read the SEC is only going after you if there was fraud or lying involved. Most of WSB's activity is not illegal market manipulation.
Trading (or posting) to cause impact and affect other positions you have is manipulation too. But it's not really provable in the case of WSB so they're safe.
It is not market manipulation for short interest to rise above 100%. It doesn't require anything nefarious. No collusion between institutional investors required either.
No, almost all personal trading is buying stocks. Options are derivatives that give you the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a security based on some predetermined price at or before some predetermined time. They essentially provide leverage such that $1 out of the money option has a much larger market impact than a $1 purchase of a stock.
> Ideally finance is meant to be about allocation of capital
What does it matter what it is "ideally", if it was never that in practice? Ideally communism is a stateless moneyless classless society, let's get working on dissolving the state then?
As a former fund manager, I think it mainly illuminates bad risk management practices at one specific fund. Why would you ever paint yourself in a corner where you lose 30% on a single name? It just makes me think all their other bets are also huge and simply lucky they haven't collapsed.
Funds are also diverse, though. There will be a load of funds who have taken the other side to Melvin, based either on various fundamental insights, or technical, whatever.
30% has not been lost on a single name. It's publicly available information that every known short by the fund (particularly those with high short interest) is now being targeted, and is up tens to hundreds of percent in the past couple of days.
Fair enough, I hadn't considered I might be reading a skewed view of what the PnL distribution was. However it's still not a great look that the firm can be put in such a position. It's not actually an excuse that events are unprecedented.
Thanks for your input. I've worked during such crises myself and it's stressful.
Yeah I'd like to caution that approximately everything reported about this is basically incorrect, even from reputable media. That includes PnL stuff but equally applies to...well, all the other stuff. I can't even count the number of conspiracies I've seen repeated.
I get that hedge funds are categorically unsympathetic characters in this play. But people are so angry that fact checking doesn't seem to matter. It doesn't help that a lot of things financial mechanics are esoteric and not commonly known, or that most people don't know the difference between hedge funds, banks, market makers and brokers.
I think it's moved on to incorporate substantial institutional weight at this point as well. Without going into specifics, that becomes clear if you compare stocks which rocketed up in the past few days with stock tickers mentioned in WSB posts, and select for those in the former group which don't appear in the latter.
It's not quite that easy. You have to find a stock that's overshorted (>100% of shares here) irresponsibly (if they used e.g puts they'd be fine), buy a lot and hold it long enough. Also quite likely WSB money wasnt enough and it's only because other hedge funds jumped in that we got here.
The stock doesn’t actually need to be shorted that much. We’re seeing the same thing happen with Koss, BB, and AMC right now. The infamous VW short squeeze was also caused by significantly less short interest: https://www.autoweek.com/news/industry-news/a35340727/heres-...
Very true, but the less shorted or at least the bigger the difference between available shares and the short position the harder it is.
VW in particular was shorted much less but something like 90+% of the shares were accounted for between Porsche and Germany to reach the accounted for shares + shorts position of over 100%.
We are seeing them become the next meme stock that people are trying to pump. Unlike GameStop their pumps have very little to do with short squeezes because these stocks were not being shorted anywhere near as much as GameStop was.
Short squeezes can occur with significantly less short interest than 100% if others want to maintain controlling interest in a stock or are otherwise unwilling to sell except for over market value. Even a small change in a stock's liquidity can result in a large impact on available price.
That's just building a large position. I don't think they expected to run the company into the ground by merely shorting it, that's not how market impact works. These firms generally try to minimise market impact as opposed to r/wsb who try to maximise it
Intent is very important and this keeps being lost on the layman crowd. If I go to a widely publicized open forum and say: "Let's go and squeeze the shorts so that they go bankrupt, oh and here's a picture of me doing just that." that's market manipulation and in many corners of the world, that's illegal. As in, you go to jail illegal. If I short a stock because I genuinely believe it's overpriced, that's perfectly legal.
Beyond this, I'm sure there are many funds who try and successfully manipulate the markets, but they try to do it quietly. To do in blatantly in the open is basically rubbing it in the regulators face and giving them no choice but to crack down.
Nobody would notice a bunch of idiots doing this quietly. A 1 million strong mob hivemind will get noticed and will leave no choice for regulators but to come down hard on them.
This is not rocket science. It's the same sort of crowd who planned to storm the capitol, meticulously documented the evidence, posted it online (including confirmation of identity through driving licenses) and then went ahead and did the deed. They basically handed all the evidence to the feds on a silver platter.
What is the difference between your argument and a saying "the big boys know how to benefit from the corruption inherent in the system and the regulators would rather persecute a bunch of powerless people than confront the corruption in their own industry"?
This is not about knowing how to benefit from corruption. This is like basic common sense. I'm not engaging in whataboutism or trying to excuse bad behavior. Market abuse, including market manipulation should be punished irrespective of who is doing it.
I was pointing out the fact that if you go and do it and then brag about it in a public forum, don't be surprised that you get dinged.
It's literally like robbing a bank and then going to the police to hand in the video evidence, only to be surprised when the policemen are not impressed. Yes the big guys should be prosecuted. But perhaps if you didn't explicitly stand on the corner shouting "I'm going to rob a bank and all you guys should also rob banks", the authorities wouldn't be on to you.
I really don't see how taking advantage of an excessively-shorted stock is market manipulation.
I've been on the right side of two short squeezes last year purely by accident, and I'd certainly like to repeat the experience if I could. What exactly would be illegal if I was on the right side of a short squeeze on purpose? Predicting it? holding stocks until it happened? Explaining to people less experienced than myself how a short squeeze works?
You say 'intent' but what intent is discussed on these message boards that is so nefarious people with better Lawyers don't discuss it openly?
It is obvious from your comment you are the laymen, it is very tiring hearing accusations of criminality from you when you get lost in the basics. You seem to be the kind of folks that the headlines 'Nazis and white supremasists are buying gamestop' are designed for.
Stock can be bough for reasons that have nothing to do with it's market value.
I can buy a stock because i want to own it, maybe i want the voting rights, maybe i want to have standing so that i can file a lawsuit for securities fraud. Maybe i am planning hostile takeover. Maybe I want to proudly hang it at my door.
What the hell are you on about? For once, you know nothing about me and second, you are attacking a strawman. I said nothing about there being only one legitimate reason to trade a stock.
I am fully aware that you can buy or sell stocks for a myriad reasons, including meming. What is against the rules is trading stocks with the express intent of manipulating the market and deliberately squeezing other participants. This is exactly what was being pushed by WSB.
If you want to engage in adult debate, please refrain from personal accusations and strawmen.
Perhaps I was a bit unfair, but I do believe that your accusations of criminality are unfunded. Noone credible has yet called it fraud, and if indeed it was, authorities would have stepped in long time ago.
No single fund deliberately pushed short interest over 100%. Short interest increasing over 100% is something that happens organically when many firms want to short the same thing. No collusion required. Someone buys a stock from a short seller and sells it short themselves.
I will add that short interest > 100% is a very common risk measure that firms with a short position actively track.
I don't know how to verify this, but I've heard one source claim that firms continued to short once it was already over 100%. Even if that's not strictly collusion, it sounds — to my admittedly untrained ear — like a position that the system should want to avoid.
I think it's reasonable for people to want to limit that. The trouble is that you would need to require brokers to prevent short selling stocks that have been already been borrowed and short sold. Aside from tracking a tree of stock ownership changes at the brokerage level, this would de facto create two similar but different assets for every equity: those which are "clean" (have never been sold short, or the short position is closed) wnd those which are "dirty" (have been sold short at some point and the position is not closed).
This is trickier than it might sound, because you are in some sense restricting the rights and capabilities of some subset of the shares. That has valuation implications.
I am not saying it can't be done or even that it's undesirable; just that the mechanics of this are nontrivial to enforce.
There's nothing mechanically wrong with short interest being over 100%. It just means that some shares will have to change hands more than once to close the shorts. This is a very widespread misunderstanding.
by limiting financial opportunity for the devaluing company to the point that it inhibits normal every day business, creating a feedback loop that the company may be unable to recover from.
This occurred to Lehman Brothers. Different industry, but they got shorted to the point that their clients withdrew their funds and they were left in a position that was ineligible/undesired for most loans.
None of the examples there really makes a lot of sense in this case. You think this pump (and coming dump) happening with GameStop would convince lenders to lend to GameStop at better rates? Maybe if they had no clue what was happening and did no due diligence, but that is not the case. And I doubt share price is the only consideration made by lenders, if their share P/E ratio was very low (which shorting would cause) then this would also affect their lending opportunities positively.
You think they were planning to issue new shares? It would have been an amazingly stupid idea which likely would not have been approved by existing shareholders anyway and would have had much the same effect as shorting.
Considerations for an investment bank is quite different from the considerations for a game retailer.
> Let's wait six months. This story is being badly reported all over. I suspect the hedge funds will mostly be fine.
Right. All of a sudden the WSJ is publishing an article about the founder getting kicked out where he claims the subreddit is full of white supremacists. Really? Give me a break. FT is claiming many are “alt-right” all of a sudden. Bad reporting all around.
> Yes, it is, it's an abusive short squeeze, which is market manipulation.
I’m not sure I buy it, and I’m not sure there is a fundamental difference between dinner club (as Matt Levine wrote) where hedge fund managers talk about their favorite stock picks and people on an open forum openly talking about companies that they think should be purchased or sold. Is it not market manipulation when a short seller publishes a scathing report, or when a CEO goes on CNBC or Bloomberg and gives a good opinion of their company or a different one? Which has more reach?
I think the most sensible and straightforward thing is further regulation of hedge funds and large financial institutions. If they are going to act irresponsibly and then cry about it, well, maybe they need adult supervision? The positions of hedge funds versus, uh, retail traders on an Internet forum is an unequal one from the start, anyway.
Not to mention the ridiculous media blitz coming from institutions. Jeez what a way to really create a lack of trust and further erode our democracy. If I find a drug dealer working for the FT can I write an article about how some people who work there are drug dealers? It’s obvious what they’re doing.
I'd argue that the last year or so of Tesla was the first major incarnation of this gamma squeeze + memes to burn short sellers but yeah GME is a while other level.
There is kind of a continuum between cases that are pure squeeze 'n memes and ones that are more based on non-linear long term value propositions. Three years ago, I think you could make a case for Tesla that it was either going to go bankrupt or grow many times over, but not stay in between. It may even be that bankruptcy was the more likely outcome. But if you gather enough support in the belief that a successful outcome is possible, then it can become self-fulfilling, especially if capital is one of the main obstacles. The company can use capital raised from the boom in the share price to lower debt and invest.
In the extreme case this could be true of almost any company. Imagine if GME were just a shell and a brand. Then they raise money, get a great board, hire industry experts, and go... whatever.. compete with Steam, turn the physical stores into e-sports venues, pivot to game development, whatever. Use the money to get the expertise, and you already have the brand and attention, which is now worth a lot more. That is kind of what happened with Tesla to some extent, although they already had a great brand a genius owner.
It's not just Tesla, either. There are a number of stocks that are grossly overvalued right now when you look at fundamentals. Lots of people have been talking here & everywhere else for the better part of the past year about how the Fed is printing money and it's all going into a stock bubble. Oh yeah, and cryptocurrencies.
This GME thing is just one little piece of an overall new zeitgeist. I'm not about to even try to predict the next crash/bubble-pop, though. I just don't have the stomach for this kind of market. When a change comes, it may not happen in a predictable way. I think there's at least a chance we could somewhat be in uncharted territory here.
I'm sorry but this is a possibly irresponsible take for at least a few reasons.
The populism on this issue is completely out of touch with reality.
1) As the stock pops due to irrational upwards pressure - the hedges funds might lose a bit, but in reality a lot of 'regular people' will be left holding the bag.
When the stock inevitably crashes, those 'regular people' will lose a lot and it will probably be a more meaningful loss to them.
2) There is no easy way to make money doing this - you're literally promoting a collective ponzi scheme (!) whereby the only money made is by people putting more money in.
3) Bankers have a role to play in markets and that's by properly valuing them. Obviously there are tons of shenanigans, but otherwise, it's an essential role. 'Pumping and dumping stocks' is not value creating it's actually quite destructive. While Game Stop may appreciate being helped in some way, they are not going to appreciate their stock going insanely volatile. Why do you think they would actually want this?
The populism on this issue is really out of hand.
"So it's simple to discover and execute, and there is a financial incentive, " - please - no, this is completely irresponsible.
With regards to number one, what will happen is exactly the reverse of what you’re saying. Hedge funds have shorted more of the stock than exists. That means that when they decide to buy back the stock to close their shorts, they will need to buy every single stock of the company, return it to the people who lent them their stock, and those people will have to now sell it, so they can buy it again to return it to other people.
It won’t happen in minutes either, it will take days for this to happen. That’s why everybody is going crazy about this. WSB saw a perfect situation and exploited it. This isn’t a case where the stock will drop in mere minutes.
No, the funds will take a haircut and move on, they likely already have.
The crash will be worse, and it will affect people personally - the plebes are going to lose a lot of money on this one in a few days when the market moves on.
That it will take days to unwind doesn't really matter - it will top out at some point, and it will go down. The timeframe is less relevant.
What about retail investors who looked at Gamestop before all this and thought it seemed like a reasonable investment, only to get wiped out by "irrational downward pressure" from hedge funds conspiring to short the stock 136%?
We'll have to wait and see a bit, but the huge pop in Gamestock was likely more the result of funds covering shorts, not retail investors continuing to buy at these prices. So it feels really disingenuous to blame retail for these wild swings when they would not have been possible without the irresponsible hedge fund trading that came before.
Hedge funds don't need to conspire for short interest to go over 100%. If a business is widely considered a viable short target, it usually just happens through regular market mechanics. Everyone wants to borrow it to sell it short, and they may end up borrowing it from someone who already bought it from a short seller.
> "So it's simple to discover and execute, and there is a financial incentive, " - please - no, this is completely irresponsible.
Do you refute my claim that it's simple to discover and execute? They're essentially just banding together on public information here. GameStop, Blackberry, Nokia, AMC, they're all affected and I'm just counting days of developments here.
As for the financial incentive, it is _absolutely_ driving this behavior. The taste of cash. Most will of course lose money on this, but this is not my point. My point? There is a financial incentive! I'm not talking about morale or ethics, I'm talking about why I think this might be a watershed moment. The masses realizing this is at all possible.
Hell, throwing away cash on lotteries is also a terrible way to build fortunes, yet it's a massive industry and lives are ruined over this as well.
What about all the people who lost jobs at GameStop when the board got pissed the stock was in the toilet? You have a case of a hedge fund that was playing games to manipulate the price of a stock downward for a quick 400% profit the last few years with what appears to be no hedge on the other side of the bet. They could've bough calls to offset potential losses but they didn't because that wouldn't have meant such impressive gains.
People who should've known better got caught with their pants down and I have absolutely no sympathy for hedge funds.
Short squeeze are nothing new, so it doesn't feel like a "watershed moment" to me. Big investors also do it to each other, e.g. the Herbalife short squeeze.
Now Robinhood has stopped allowing purchases of those securities. While I suppose Robinhood would like to have good relations with hedge funds leading up to an IPO, they just pissed off a significant fraction of their actual customers -- and boy are they ever gonna get an earful about it.
Why do you separate users of /r/wsb from traders and hedge funds, as if those are different people? My guess is that majority of users there are traders and employees of such funds, simply using yet another talking space.
WSB is an open space[1], accessible to ordinary retail investors. The majority of the money may be from large funds, but the majority of discussion is from working schmos who day trade as a hobby. That's very different from the closed environment we associate with high finance.
[1]theoretically, in practise I'll predict it's about to be Septembered into oblivion
> Why do you separate users of /r/wsb from traders and hedge funds, as if those are different people? My guess is that majority of users there are traders and employees of such funds, simply using yet another talking space.
Because the subreddit is famous for just losing money and lots of people just not knowing what they're doing. I'm sure there are a few traders on that reddit but I suspect it's like a professional programmer joining a dev bootcamp community. A whole bunch of people who are just learning and are doing crazy things. (I did crazy things when I was learning, hell, I sometimes do crazy things now)
> It does feel like a watershed moment regarding hedge funds. This is the first time netizens capitalize on hedge fund short favorites and it has been surprisingly easy to cause an absolute catastrophy in the order of billion losses for them. I heard Melvin Capital may even have gone bankrupt?
I spent all night going through many of those threads, and I have to say they are ready to join Bitcoin once the SEC cracks down on them and freezes their Robinhood accounts and possibly even their bank accounts linked to Robinhood.
If Melvin does go down it will be its own success, but now they're going full vigilante investor mode, and putting money in BB, AMC etc... this won't stop unless the State intervenes and could set a precedent and as you say create a 'watershed moment.'
It won't be long until they realize what the long con really is: central bank based fiat currency that created these boom-bust cycles in the first place.
I initially mocked them when I heard about them taking GME to its recent rise, and still kind of do as WSB is a joke even by their own admission; but that doesn't mean it cannot create positive change. After all comedians just use humour in their jokes to highlight and poke fun of some of Society's most absurd aspects with varying levels of success in reforming it.
Dave Chappelle's latest monolouge at SNL after the election highlighted this very well.
For those wondering why the sub went private for a time:
> We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad nights sleep. We've got so many comments and submissions that we can't possibly even read them all, let alone act on them as moderators. We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn't allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven't given us special access despite asking for it.
"We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore"
The issue is really that the entire feed went buggy from all the comments, even the inbuilt too, which they are probably using called AutoModerator has delays of over 10 minutes and more instead of being instant.
Reddit limits API usage mainly for IP, so you need multiple IPs to avoid this issue.
It's not impossible to have multiple instance of the same bot running in parallel, but there are too many race condition and it became too much to handle.
But then the onus is on Reddit to slacken these restrictions; WSB threads get 100K responses, which is the amount of engagement many social media can only dream of. If Reddit doesn't lift the limits and helps the WSB team out with moderation, they're shooting themselves in the foot because Reddit HAS to act if the WSB team can't moderate effectively.
It's why Twitter held off on banning Trump for so long; not so much because of public interest, but because Trump alone kept the platform up, running, active and profitable. Social media loves controversy like that.
All they had to do was set a higher minimum karma requirement to comment. Takes a few seconds to find and set that. They didn't have to shut the place down.
Here come the deplatforming (again). This time /r/wsb is the 'enemy'. Media reports it and causes the paper hands to panic; This is what the large short sellers want.
Are they sure that 'deplatforming works' this time? (The have already assembled on /r/wallstreetbetsnew)
For the tech platforms, the mainstream media, social media, etc they might as well ban every single person off of the internet at this point.
As for GME, just put on your diamond-grade hands for once and hold until Friday's squeeze.
> (The have already assembled on /r/wallstreetbetsnew)
Creating a new sub on the same topic as a previously banned sub is against the rules on Reddit. So if their sub is banned for hate speech it doesn't matter how you rephrase it they just ban any similar new subs.
This is really exciting, feels like open standards, independent internet is going to continue getting extreme motivation to expand and establish, with private "freedom of speech" censorship by for-profit platforms.
We're going to see more fragmentation, and growth of closed platforms perceived by users as "slightly less evil" such as telegram vs watsapp. This may also motivate the return to truly open internet ideals of the past.
I don't know where you even come up with these outdated ideas.
Very few people care about what you are talking about. The subset of people who care are: tech savvy, young, mostly male, and vaguely misanthropic. This demographic is already served in numerous places, and everyone else is rather glad to see these people chased off of platforms they use for sharing videos of dancing and food.
Go on Tik Tok for a while and count how many people complain that “their last video got them banned” (usually this is ethots promoting their only fans).
The alt right, internet strippers, people who like drugs, people who want to talk about stocks, people who want to talk about something their HR dept wouldn’t approve: these people all want free platforms. It’s not just weirdos and trump supporters.
And he was right. If you read what what you linked, you'd that everything his said is true when you dig down into it.
> Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats.
This is exactly the same issue that we are still debating today. He is exactly right.
> Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
He's right again. About the only thing that you can do with the government today is renew your car's registration (if you're lucky). The fundamentals of government haven't changed a bit.
The whole context of his argument is that the internet is not going to replace business as usual. You won't replace a school teacher with a CD rom. Online courses are widely regarded as being much worse than a college education. There is really no surprises in anything he said.
I sincerely thought he would just be someone who wasn't "with it"... but no, he actually has a clear understanding of how the promises that the internet didn't materialize in the 90s, and still haven't today.
...And regardless, if you need to quote literally who to find an example of someone saying the internet is bad? I mean, this is just arguing on the internet for you. Read the headline, not the substance, and dig up random factoids to "gotcha" people instead of really thinking critically about the core problems of the world. And nothing gets solved; no minds are changed.
Pretty sure when krageon said "that's not what they said" they were referring to poster of the original comment that was being replied to - not the know it alls from 90s.
It was only 2006 when I worked at a company making ASIC-based network security products and had a coworker whose actual description of the threat profile was "kids who live in their parents basements, need to see the sun more"
If you look around, tons of communities have been getting banned/quarantined/etc. recently. It began years ago with literal hate groups like FPH or coontown on reddit, pedos on 8chan, later came pickup artists and incels, TheDonald, Chapo Trap House, then Apple, Amazon and Google banning Parler, YouTube and Twitter restricting Trump, and now, finally, even WSB. In isolation, every one of them is a drop in the bucket. But overall it's definitely enough to matter. If this continues, at some point everyone but the most boring will feel the banhammer somewhere. And the most boring aren't the ones producing content (aka generating all of the value).
Things that were problems have been getting banned. Nothing has changed, except it's a little more extreme right wing platforms now. That always generates a lot of noise, because they are loud people.
> Very few people care about what you are talking about.
No, very few people care about the ethical implications of what OP 's talking about. But it's pretty hard to not start caring when you become a casualty. OP is saying that if there's enough casualties, maybe it will be the catalyst for a movement.
You don't even need a majority to care. You just need enough people who can't use or refuse to use a particular platform to trigger a mass exodus.
I think it's optimistic that we'll see that with many of the huge, well-established platforms like Facebook or Twitter. But this at least presents an opportunity to get some competing platforms off the ground.
People need to stop being so lazy and throwing around the word censorship. If a bunch or teenagers come into my coffee shop and start loudly calling each autists and retards I'm going to kick them out. I'm not censoring them by kicking them out.
This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between some kids screaming in your coffee shop and a community on a website supposedly dedicated to free discussion. A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.
And while some are screaming for these sites to get shut down over it, most of us aren't. What you see from most of us is recommendation to stop using services that silence you. This is a reasonable response, if someone doesn't like you, go somewhere where they do like you. That's what the comment you're responding to is advocating, embracing and even getting excited about. The internet needs a true public square, not a private entity masquerading as one that for some reason totally unbeknownst to them has to constantly remind everyone that they are not a public square.
"Do not organize, promote, or coordinate servers around hate speech. It’s unacceptable to attack a person or a community based on attributes such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or disabilities."
Calling someone a "retard" or "autist" is considered by Discord to be mocking people with disabilities.
Also IRC exists and is still in use by many people.
Anyone can set up a server.
I saw a comment on WSB that said they have bots that remove all swear words etc but some people use unicode etc to write the words anyway. I don't know if its true but where is the line for a ban if a genuine effort is being made to moderate?
The worst part about this observation is that this is the very reason being given for why twitter isn't getting kicked off of AWS. Because they're putting in a good faith effort to moderate, it's just "hard".
This is just about power and money, the chances that many of these HNers aren't losing money due to the actions of /wsb is low. I have no doubt many of the posters trying to defend the move are being a bit disingenuous. Not all for sure, but certainly some of them.
I'm 100% with you. People that don't want their discussion controlled by a private entity with conflicting interests should absolutely not depend on that entity's services. Everyone upset about this should stop using discord.
Have you read the content on WSB? Here's a link that I found on the top of the top thread of the subreddit [0]. Let's be completely clear here, this isn't someone speaking out about issues they face in everyday life.
> ive been folowing this saga since GME was 60 or so but sadly i was too afraid to become autistic, and have now gone full retard
They probably meant that because the guidelines discord has setup are automated bots that occasionally hit innocent people while trying to enforce the rules. I think they were speaking in the broader context of Discord servers rather than the WSB Reddit or Discord specifically.
Then they should make that clear, as the thread and the GP's comments are specifically about the situation with WSB. Otherwise, someone who comes in not knowing anything about the situation, and sees the comment and assumes that the WSB discord was banned because its uers were describing their day to day issues living with disabilities.
Yes, I was talking about hasanabi's discord server (a twitch channel) in particular, but I'm sure it's not alone and there are reasons. I don't blame them at all, it's the system that sets these incentives.
With all due respect, that's not what you said in your comment, and it read to me as an attempt to deliberately spread FUD about discord's moderation practices. If you're thinking of a specific incident, and introducing it as a discussion point, you need to actually mention it. Re-reading your original comment, I still can only read it as Discord banning WSB because people are speaking out about their real life issues
It's not discord themselves who enact the harsh moderation (which quite often includes bots banning some words, with punishments from alerting a mod to banning you for a bit), but rather server "owners" who risk platforming if discord deems them unable to police themselves.
The problem is, that discord uses certain criteria to determine if a server is able to police itself, and those criteria happen to be fairly harsh on repeat (even if swallowed by the noise/message stream) disability mocking.
I'm criticizing the incentives Discord's polices create for moderation.
I'm sorry my wording was bad. I certainly did not intend any FUD spreading.
I have worked as a tutor at university. The best and most "free" discussions I experienced were all happening in a space where everybody was after finding some sort of insight.
This delicate balance was at times destoyed by a single person that started attacking people aggresively for who they were rather than attacking the argument they made in a way that makes them understand. Allowing that person to freely speak was reducing the classes freedom over all, because that person wanted to dominate the discussion so much, they fostered a climate were all other discussion was not possible anymore and free speech was prevented from happening.
In that case throwing someone out is a totally acceptable option. In fact this is the reason why discussion on this very site work out: because we are after insight and we punish behavior that is pure sophistry, aggressive, snarky, etc.
I am convinced that to speak freely as a collective, sometimes we must stop certain individuals from abusing their freedom of speech within our forums.
Not everyone shares your ideas about what the "best" and most "free" discussions are. Apparently, the crowd at this Discord channel were ok with calling each other gays, autists, retards, or whatever. It may not be the highbrow enough for some, but that is no reason to shutdown their community.
Sure, but most people agree on what makes a discussion worse. E.g. if one person constantly interrupts others and leads agressively voiced monologous with no real substance, most people might agree that person might not improve the climate of the discussion to much
I have seen a few times now what happen when optimistic people goes with such rationale and attempt to apply it universally. To be more precise, people have tried to ban generalizations of group of people, banning the usage of gender where specifying gender is unnecessary, and of course banning the attacking people for who they were rather than attacking the argument. I have yet to see one community where it worked.
The outcome of such experiments always end up the same. People want to generalize about groups of people when its against the right group of people. We want to specifying gender when it is unnecessary, as long it not in the wrong situation. And we want to attacking people for who they were rather than attacking the argument, if its against people which is socially accepted to attack and dismiss.
People just love violence when its done for the right reasons and abhor it when it done for the wrong reasons. At the same time we try to apply principles like freedom of speech and find it completely incompatible with our split view on violence.
Unless we rise above it. Certain things are never okay. But being intolerant and demanding tolerance is a shitty move as well. And it is nowhere near as clever as the people who try this think it is.
The discourse about whether and how much we should tolerate the intolerant is old and has be well discussed by post WWII philosophy. If we want to defend the freedom of all, we need to restrict those freedoms for the people who try to get rid of them.
Or as a neo nazi once said to me: "we want to establish the old power again, so we can silence you. until that happens, we want free speech".
Being consistent and avoiding hypocrisy is not the same thing as tolerating the intolerant. Our most common tool to do so are laws that governments everyone equally, and which enforcement is designed for consistency.
The trouble comes back to the issue when a community and places such as universities tries to mimic laws without actually consider the problem of consistency, and at the same time wanting to believe in principles that they then don't apply to everyone. The result is inconsistency, hypocrisy, and often in order to escape the fact, removal of transparency.
>This delicate balance was at times destoyed by a single person that started attacking people aggresively for who they were rather than attacking the argument they made in a way that makes them understand.
I'm sorry I don't understand, are you arguing on behalf or against Discord who called the wsb crowd a bunch of white supremacist Nazis? I'm not being snarky, I genuinely can't tell if you're defending the open discussion about stock trading or the people that came in and called them names and got them shut down.
I am all for a discussion focused group having rules and expecting participants to adhere to them and booting them out if they don't. What I am opposed to is businesses that market themselves as places to freely discuss, wait til they have market control, then change their terms and kick people out based on tenuous accusations, in this case for the apparent reason of protecting hedge funds from the market. It is egregious what Discord did.
Because when you can brand any idea as radical or dangerous, you get to dictate what radical or dangerous is, and when you do that, you control the narrative and people.
Yes this most recent operation was a smashing success, in terms of convincing shallow thinkers that it's wrong for subjects to bother their rulers. Just look at what Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant has to deal with right now. Amazon is sponsoring a recall election "justified" because she had the audacity to talk to protesters who were physically inside city hall. (In reality, because she wants Amazon to pay taxes.) Perfect timing!
Unequivocally. What is the alternative? Banning every single idea besides a pre-approved list of topics? That's Nineteen Eighty Four all over again.
If anything, public discourse enables people to observe and see potential clusters, covid could be traced to tweets talking about pneumonia in November and December of 2019.
If, instead of squashing them, we figured out the underlying problem, which almost always is lack of prospects, we can act accordingly.
Oh come off it. There was no "insurrection at the capital." There was a bunch of rowdy types running around with their shirts off and a bunch of old people taking selfies. A few bad things happen. I'd call it a mostly peaceful protest and you would too if you were using objective criteria that was equally applied.
It's a primary source of information for over a billion people at this point. It's probably not a good idea to have that monopolized by corporate or government interest
Because when the people are allowed to freely share their ideas with one another and talk about them without interference the cream rises to the top.
There is historical evidence of this, the monarchs of the centuries past, the Catholic church, they all stifled the ability for people to freely discuss ideas, and even killed people for sharing the wrong ones. As soon as the printing press was invented that allowed people to share ideas freely you had revolts against them all over the next few centuries leading to representative democracies and republics, the enlightenment and development of ideas such as human dignity and individual rights, diversity of religion in the west took hold, the end of theocratic rule over Europe, and it all culminated in the creation of the US and an end to global colonialism mid 20th century. We owe our great way of life and our emergence from theocratic and monarchical shackles in large part to the ability to express and share ideas freely, this is a big reason why western societies hold that right in high esteem, it was a resounding success, it worked for us up until now and it will continue to do so if we let it.
For one thing, conversations are a lot easier to have when there is an implicit rule that context is always considered when evaluating word usage. For example, the word 'autist' in the context of 'stonks' and 'wsb' is not understood to mean an attempt to mock people with disabilities and therefore unlikely to get anyone offended as a result.
People get offended because they want to get offended. They then rationalize it after the fact, usually by resorting to “certain words are always wrong”. But if a friend occasionally does something annoying, you could either elect to ignore it, or you could take a stand and make it a make-or-break issue. But the choice to make it an issue is yours.
So that those with the currently loudest voices can silence all others?
So that the "invisible hand of the market" may decide who is wisest (as demonstrated when we look at all the instances where this happened)?
I think all of these wishes of a true public space are usually colored by the (mis?)perception of certain opinions being opressed, when in fact they are often just socially unacceptable because of their destructive nature.
Not to be that guy, but I grew up in Austria inbetween old Nazis and young Neo-Nazis. When they said: "you are trying to silence us" what they meant is "we want to establish the old power again, so we can silence you. until that happens, we want free speech". This is literally (translated from a very thick accent in Austrian German) what one of the neo nazis said to me after the 8th beer and a heated discussion. To assume these people want free speech for anybody other than themselves is naive. For them tolerating others is a vehicle to convince them of their cause: Once they have what they want they will get rid of it.
The question how much tolerance we have to show those who themselves are intolerant is a old one and still not easy to answer. However to me it is quite clear that we should sacrifice the free society we have without a fight.
It appears to me that our society is currently threatened by a group using the exact strategy that those Nazis were using in your home country, except they're at the next stage, past the using free speech and actively now attempting to destroy it.
I'm of the belief that to protect your free society you protect it's virtue, even when people take advantage of it. If you hold steadfast to "free speech", no group ever gets past that first stage, so they can never take power. It means sometimes tolerating hearing reprehensible views of the world, but it is either that or giving someone all the guns and the power to control what you say, and if history teaches us anything, that always ends badly for the regular people no matter the initial intention of the person doing the censoring, a power like that is irresistible to those who want to use it to benefit themselves.
> A more apt comparison would be a group in a corner having a conversation at a rock concert. Suddenly this argument appears less apt.
This is a tired old argument and it isn't convincing or effective. There's a big difference between having a conversation in a corner at a rock concert, and having a conversation in an online service hosted by someone else outside of that conversation, in a territory owned by a state where the host has to comply with laws which place the accountability of user-generated content on the host. A more apt comparison would be... I don't know, I actually don't have any idea. How about simply not being deliberately offensive or hateful or using whatever rhetoric that could ultimately translate into real-world violence?
Do you want a change in this society? I'd guess you do, most people want to change something. Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive. The right to speak is the right to offend.
Real world violence, sure. Let's ban that. And asking people to be nice, that's not a bad thing. And banning name calling in your private forum to promote substantiative discussion, that's probably a good idea. But deciding what unappetizing ideas are allowed and are not allowed to be discussed is a bad idea, I thought we learned that lesson in the last century. Free speech isn't what leads to fascist dictatorship, control of ideas does.
All this and I just want to remind you that we are discussing a web site using "white supremacist Nazis" as a pretext to prevent people from organizing against wall street hedge funds.
> Espousing a desire for any change will always be offensive to someone, and so wanting any improvement necessarily includes being deliberately offensive.
This is not true. Whatever you’re disagreeing with another person, you don’t have to call that person any politically incorrect slur, which is really the kind of “offensive” that we are talking about here.
It seems once a platform gets to a certain size, an entitlement to service regardless of whether it's against the terms of service grows.
"Retard" is considered a slur by some. It doesn't matter if others don't consider it to be. The one making the judgement is the service provider.
Same with Parlour complaining about being kicked off AWS when they violated their terms of service.
There's a copy of the letter AWS sent to them that's public [0]
"
Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. {...} You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t “feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform.”"
"
It's just a desire to have freedom from consequences.
If they self hosted in Alabama, I'm sure they would have been fine.
Your coffee shop is not relevant on the global scale. But with big platforms like Facebook, it's not easy to opt out from them. Facebook and other platforms aren't just social media for teenagers. Many companies nowadays only have a Facebook/Whatsapp profile as their only contact point. If you get banned from these services you miss out on accessing a wide share of services, not related to social media.
Also, if you have people coming to your coffee shop and acting badly, people can judge it for themselves and form their own opinion. On the internet, bans are quiet and you can easily silence a large chunk of the userbase without making a noise.
You may cheer these big platforms now because it's only "racists, white supremacists and crooks" being banned, but as soon as the first group of people you agree with gets blocked from these platforms you'll be the first one to fight for freedom of speech.
By your standard every newspaper, every TV channel, every website that refuses to publish my views is censoring me. It's an absurd standard to call censorship.
Discord has made no attempt to stop anyone saying anything, they're just chosen not to lend these people their megaphone.
This is one of the more stupid soundbites the pro-censorship crowd has come up with. A good red flag, though.
Discord reacted to how the platform they had already given was being used. That's different, practically and morally, from NBC not giving them a TV show.
"Pro-censorship" is such a ridiculous, extremist term. You can't just pretend everyone in the world falls into either a "for" or "against" censorship group. Everybody (well, 99.99%, maybe) accepts that some censorship is necessary, but that not everything should be censored.
Let's start with the basics. Forget the selective enforcement aspect and the lawyering over the definition of "censorship" - can anything a private company does with its private property ever be criticized?
Terms of service are not above criticism, did not say it and did not imply it. I don't understand how you came to think that considering that in your previous post there is no criticism of discords TOS.
I was simply replaying to your statement that: "Discord reacted to how the platform they had already given was being used.". I don't understand why anyone would think that the owner of the platform should not be able to dictate the terms of use of their platform or react if those terms are not followed.
Lets apply this idea further: google maps could refuse to probide navigation to strip club, water company could cut off water supply if they think you are having a swinger party, and electric company could threaten to cut you off if you install solar panels.
Can you point me to where I said that TOS can not be criticised or where I said that private entities can apply any rules they want? No? Can you then explain how what you wrote applies to what I wrote?
Discord is not a public utility. Discord guilds are not public service points either. All the services offered by Discord are strictly capped too. This is the opposite of what you get from a public utility.
Discord did lend these people their megaphone, though. What they
did is like a news show interviewing a guest and then quickly
cutting to advertisements because the guest started to make
uncomfortable statements. And that sort of thing is very unusual
in democratic countries, maybe unless a certain political figure
starts spreading obvious misinformation with the goal of
undermining the election process.
and it just "happened to be" done after the short fiasco. Or is your argument that they weren't using dirty words until after the fiasco started?
That they can is not being argued, that they did it now is the issue.
In the same vein, no one would argue that a male manager shouldn't be able to schedule a female employee on their shifts. But when that male manager asks for a date and is refused, the action takes on an entirely different tone.
Why is it a wrong comparison are you not being censored (according to the definition you provided).
I’m pointing out a ridiculous application of what you’ve pointed out, private business, or an individual stoping you from speaking while technically censorship, happens all the time and no one raises an eyebrow.
Would shushing a whole crowd of people talking in the cinema be untoward?
True, great point. Reddit is not part of the “real world”. Got it!
But in this case, it’s a perfect analogue, that illustrates why decrying censorship here is odd.
Reddit can kick people out if they don’t like the behaviour. This happens every day in businesses all over the world (virtual and non virtual) and it is not decried and for the most part is approved of.
I haven't said that. I said that there isn't always a real world counterpart for virtual things. You can replace "real" with physical. At least you tried to not make the usual car comparison.
No it's not a perfect analogue. To make the cinema comparison work: There is a cinema. You can rent rooms in that cinema. You and your friends go in to talk about stuff. Someone else comes in and "shushes" you instead of going to another room where nobody is in.
Reddit can also kick out people for having the wrong opinion, as they do, as was observed. Banning for the wrong opinion is of course censorship. Banning for specific lingo used by those people is also censorship.
There is difference between banning for wrong opinions and banning for eg. spamming. The line is slim.
Supposedly, until you criticize the idea of taking their money and giving it to everyone who claims to need it more than them.
Arguments like these are all to often made out of convenience, but should be made in good faith and on principle. Do you truly believe in their right to private property?
Are you trying to argue some kind of Marxist position in order to show censorship can exist without government involvement.
I’m happy to have a discussion on why capital owners probably stole their wealth at some point. But you need to take me on the journey to how that’s related to censorship
My point is, this argument that "they're a private company" is great, and I 100% agree with it. But I usually find that people that make this argument don't actually believe that these companies have the right to their private property, they just use it because they're ideologically opposed to the people getting banned for whatever reason. They'll say that a private company has the right to it's property and then in the next breath call them evil for having a lot of property and demand that they get taxed out of existence.
You can if you want, but if you don't believe corporations should have a right to their property, tossing "they have a right to ban you from speaking" in someone's face is a bit disingenuous.
And also, counterproductive. If you'd like to change the rules, perhaps defending them every time they're used to hurt your ideological opponents is not the way to do that. Maybe it would be more effective to agree with them and help them.
I don’t have any ideological opponents... I’m pretty happy to be convinced either way on most issues. But colour me unconvinced on this one.
They aren’t banning you from speaking, just stopping you from doing it in their house, you can continue your message everywhere else.
This meta discussion about the actual point feels awkward. Is the alternative you are suggesting that you have to accept whatever anyone says always? Is it more nuanced than that?
It's more like a group of people open a coffee shop in your mall and you decide to close their shop once you learn they serve people who don't speak your language.
I don't think the metaphore holds. Everyone can hear the coffee shop kids regardless of whether they want to or not, but only those who seek it out can read the discord.
Okay cool, let's invent a new term. How about: "Politically motivated minority persecution?"
Maybe a bit too much. How about: "Social Engineering via Targeted Group Deplatforming?"
Because that is how these look-like to me and to a lot of these "persecuted" groups. These groups aren't necessarily "hateful" or "organizing" violence. A lot of the time it's just distasteful, kinda sexist etc and the "platform" owners simply don't like them and want to keep them from growing because (I think) they think that there is a real fear that societal opinion might swing their way. However the missing key here is that a lot of times, these are genuine "political movements" before they've cooled & solidified, and exist solely as mis-directed or nebulous emotion, hence the "hateful" and distasteful content.
Not all, but a good chunk of them of course. Sometimes you just get bad groups, but in a lot of those cases, I think it's more clear that they're doing something blatantly evil. For lack of a better example: coordinating and sharing info on how to sabotage deforestation using dangerous methods like putting nails inside trees, which would cause chainsaws to snap and hurt the operators.
You would also be censoring people if you ran an upscale restaurant with a dress code and standards of behavior, or if you didn't let them post ads on the walls.
As long as you make your rules clear and enforce them fairly, censorship and standards of behavior are completely fine.
The very large social media platforms all market themselves as being neutral. They got to be the largest by providing a space for everyone.
So the ask here is "please enforce the rules fairly the way you have always promised you would." Asking a business to deliver on the promises they've made and continue to make is not an entitled attitude.
After all, all these businesses are in complete control of what they promise. If they don't like the old promise, they have a first amendment right to make a new promise that suits them better.
Anyone has community guidelines, i could write on my wall with a crayon "we get pissed at the pub on tuesday' and call that community guideline. It does not convey moral rights or place you above criticism
I think you're confused. Their community guidelines are part of their terms of service. You can write whatever on your wall, it's your home, your community.
If you want to use their service you have to follow their rules.
Turns out that Discord doesn't like people using the terms "Retard" and "Autist" in a disparaging way.
They don't want that kind of discourse to be part of their community.
In the same way, I'm guessing that you're not going get far on this forum calling people "retards"
If you want to have your own community where you want to have that kind of discourse, you can self host a forum.
Instead of Discord consider IRC, it's an open standard, and anyone can host a server.
You don't need AWS, you just need an internet connection. You just need to find a hosting provider that's willing to host it. Of which there are plenty.
"Turns out that Discord doesn't like people using the terms "Retard" and "Autist" in a disparaging way."
I dont think you have any proof of that - it's not actually written clearly in their term of service what level of calling each other names is allowed.
Considering that people were calling each-other retards on Discord for years, any judge would conclude that they are happy with this behaviour.
On the other hand, timing of these bans are very suspicious, maybe they recieved a phonecall and banned the community under false pretences.
I really hope we can subponea some documents and find out if this is coming from corruption or cosmic coincedence
It would only be a fair parable if your coffee shop was the only coffeshop in the entire city or that it exists like 1-3 others but you all talk with eachother on the phone and collectively agree to deny those people service.
There are many coffee shops in the city and there are plenty of social media platforms online (Youtube, Facebook, Tiktok, Reddit, Twitter, Whatsapp, Telegram, Twitch, Pinterest, WeChat, Snapchat). Also, there's really no evidence they're coordinating. If the guys I kick out of my coffee shop walk down the road and start shouting Retard at each other in a different coffee shop they're going to get kicked out of that one too. Not because we're in some big cabal to censor these people, but because actually most people have a fairly similar definition of offensive language, and most coffee shop owners know what's going to drive customers away. At no point does that suddenly turn into censorship.
I disagree, it is censorship. We all know how hard it is to build a community. To just say go use another platform is really not a fair comparison.
Discord and Reddit in this case, even if they're not banned from Reddit yet, is their only means of communicating with eachother. Sure people can create some kind of group / channel on another platform, but if they are banned from one there is no way for them to know where to go.
Obviously the group is going to be mostly dispanded when they are banned or removed. I would say this is a kind of censorship. If they would've been given some time, like a week or a month before the banning then I would agree it would not be censorship because then they can assemble somewhere else.
All of the big social media networks are corporate property. It is not a public space. So it is their house rules. And rightfully so. If you took their free cookie, choke on it, but don't complain.
All journalists, nearly all politicians, and lots of other people as well communicate largely on social networks owned by these giant amoral artificial creations. What does "public space" even mean anymore? Should we stand on the stroad median with the panhandlers? Would anyone even read our signs?
It is possible for citizens to impose conditions on the existence of the corporations their elected government creates.
No ofc not, but that is a coffeshop and not a place where the business is sharing stuff. If the business is a town square where everyone is and your excluding a specific group that is censorship.
And you need to review the code of conduct for this platform, as you are in violation and, according to your own logic, should be kicked. (Which I oppose)
No, it's like a bunch of teenagers came into your coffee shop, and before you could throw them out your coffee shop [in a mall] was permanently closed down by the mall owners.
//Been told I'm posting too fast again by the benevolent left wing moderators on HN so this is what I would have replied:
"From the comment on WSB that was a story on here before it got flagged off the front page:
"We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore."
In other words, they told the kids not to swear and enforced it but someone came up with a new swearword that the cafe owner didn't recognise (it's hard to think of an analogy for using weird characters to say a bad word) and so the cafe got shut down. "
At most, it is a mall telling a coffee shop owner that they need to take care of a small subset of regulars - the teenagers - because they are regularly using offensive speech. If they don't, the coffee shop is in violation of the malls' leasing agreement. Coffee shop does nothing, so they are evicted.
It isn't like a place got shut down because they let the general public in.
This is about as exciting as a mob of 10000 people rushing a restaurant at the same time to 'save it' and then forgetting it the next day.
Unfortunately, there is no more new math here.
Even worse, it looks like stocks may become unduly hyper volatile due to such things and none of the people in the underlying economy actually want that, it's a huge headache and risk for them.
Whenever people say this, I wonder whether they are considering the possibility that once the internet goes in the direction of fragmentation, more states would swoop in with regulation to barricade their own internet in the same way that China has a great firewall. There are plenty of incentives into banning US-based tech companies--states would then have access to data about their citizens instead of being at the mercy of Facebook or the US, and local software companies would begin to thrive.
Independent internet, exactly what is that? Governments will simply crack down on any site which does not do what the politicians demand and better yet they have a ready made army of SJWs who will name and shame anyone they can identify; or if your reddit totally botch it and name the wrong people.
sadly far too many people are in the camp of protecting freedoms and rights they personally deem acceptable and anything falling outside of their honest narrow view they will follow the crowd and jump on it with glee.
the same levels of censorship and oppression people bemoan existing in some other countries is nearly here in the West and sadly all I hear is cheering.
"Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.
For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere."
I'm slightly sceptical, because with open standards you still need to do moderation somehow. The WSB are complaining that Reddit didn't give them the mod tools they need.
I believe we're going to see fragmentation in platforms rather than open standards. And I say that because we've just launched our own reddit alternative, Retalk.com. It's also moderated, but by different standards.
There is nothing preventing an open standard moderation tag that each user selects how to treat.
With such moderation tagging in place, for example, if I wanted to use Reddit but mistrust moderators, with an open treatment of data, I would be able to select to ignore their rating/per entry and use ratings by a group of users I select. (impossible to imagine Reddit doing something like this)
However, it requires I have access to core data. Today, the superusers or platform admins can prevent "controversial" entries from even being visible on the platform/subplatform/subreddit.
This seems to misunderstand the purpose of moderation entirely.
Moderation serves many purposes, but only one of them is to save your delicate eyes from seeing things you don't want to see. Perhaps the more important one are things like: ensuring that your social media service doesn't have a bad reputation so that people other than disaffected white guys will actually want to use it.
If your site is overrun with porn, then sure, each user could just block those millions of posters with your open standard... but every new user still sees it, and decides "this service isn't built for me" and never comes back.
At the core of community moderation is community. If the community looks like it's full of people doing gray-illegal things, then normal people (and advertisers) will generally shy away... and lawsuits will not be far behind.
This seems to be easily solvable by just making moderation an opt-out default. HN itself has the "showdead" setting, which defaults to false. Anyone who forms their opinion on a community after deliberately turning off moderation is either a moron or trying to intentionally discredit that community.
It doesn't work. Moderation has it's name precisely because suppressing content that is crated to incite emotional reactions keeps the mood in a community. All free-speech platforms I know of devolve into a hotbed of Neonazis and trolls. As a consequence, I am no longer interested in trying out "censorship resistant" platforms because I precisely know what will happen a couple months down the road.
Social media without meaningful moderation (ie. FB and Twitter before the latest crackdown) was an error.
I wasn't talking about a "free speech platform", I just think that moderation should be transparent, and that users should be able to view content deleted/hidden by moderators if they wish.
Many times I've read a discussion about someone being fired for a social media post. Some people will defend them, some people will say the reaction was justified. And I can't make up my own mind, because that post was swiftly deleted by moderators and now everyone's just acting on their own memory of the post.
And they chose today as the best possible time to enact this ban? Really?
I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).
Regardless of how right or wrong this moderation choice may be, I hope that this accelerates the push for decentralization and encryption; the few companies that virtually all online humans use to communicate have far too much power over us, and we should be more willing to recognize that extreme centralization of power is dangerous.
(One final note: (EDIT: subreddit is now public again) now that this caused the subreddit to be set to private which seems to have instantly caused $GME to start tanking in AH, they are going to be in for users that are much more upset than they are used to if the narrative decides that this ban caused the crash, if it does in fact last until tomorrow)
Some posts below said that banning for hate speech was really a charade. But if that's true, what's wrong with retail investors pooling their resources to squeeze short? How is it different from a hedge fund pooling resources to flex their muscle of financial engineering?
There wouldn't be anything wrong with that. There'd be a lot right with it, honestly - I would be trumpeting it as a clear victory of the little guy over snobby funds who don't think anyone else can understand finance.
But what's happening right now is almost certainly a pump and dump with a short squeeze as a facade. I've seen a lot of commenters who seem to be grievously misled about the actual mechanics of a short squeeze, and think that short sellers will be forced to buy all their stock at market price on Friday.
okay, but if it was a pump and dump why all the media manipulation and shenanigans? why the coordinated attempts to tank the stock, etc? wouldn't u want it to skyrocket and reap the benefits? i mean that's exactly what a pump and dumper would do, just let it naturally die afterwards.
this "make the regular people mad to fake a short squeeze to pump the stock" is some weird 4D explanation. not saying it's guaranteed, but the simplest answer is sometimes the best, that they are in a position to be squeezed and it's looking more likely.
I haven't heard anything to suggest that the short sellers are forced to buy back the stock either. This is a stock has clearly caught public's attention, Once the hype cycle is over, why wouldn't it regress to the mean? Who's going to believe that the stock stays at this level over the long term?
Fun to talk about though. This is a very entertaining story.
If a short position goes hard against you the brokerage will make you to put up more collateral (money) and if you can't, then your only other option is to buy back some of your position, so yeah, short sellers can be forced to buy back stock.
The stock Signal spiked after Elon Musk said to use signal, has nothing to do with the app. A different Zoom spiked at the beginning of COVID. A lemonade company in 2017 put blockchain in its name and watched the stock price soar. Hertz went way up after declaring bankruptcy. I’m willing to bet this is clueless speculators.
Shorts borrow the stock for a time period. Let say you borrowed a stock that is $1 from me with the promise you will give the stock back end of the week + some interest. You sell the stock for $1 end of the week the price is $100 so you are on the hook for stock + interest. As the owner of the stock I will be more interested in getting it back and selling it for $100 rather than allowing you to give me the stock later by extending the loan terms when the price might drop.
There is, large market moves down over last few days are mostly due to hedge funds selling off longs to cover their shorts. If you look at GSVIP ETF (GS ETF for most loved names by hedge funds) it was down 4% yesterday. The short squeeze is real but I think funds are mostly out of it now (or ones remaining in the short have shorted at higher prices and in reasonable proportion of AUM). There's also a direct negative correlation between short interest and Russel 2000 performance over the last few days.
Naked shorting is when you sell the underlying stock without borrowing it first. You have 2-3 days from transaction to settlement (depending on the market), so you can enter a transaction at T and then only locate borrow at T+2. Obviously, you're running the risk that you can't find borrow in time.
In most cases, however, you short by checking for available borrow first, and _then_ shorting.
I’m not a finance expert, but the hedge funds could have bought GME stocks sometimes between opening their short position and closing it.
The short could have been naked when it was made, but there is nothing stopping the hedge fund from buying the underlying security ahead of the short position closing.
Is the total 149% short closing on this Friday? I was under the impression that the 100+% short position was for all shorts for all closing dates on GME? If the 149% short is spread over multiple weeks/months it seems misleading to quote the over 100% short position as a sure marker of an unlimited squeeze.
For reference, during the unlimited squeeze of Volkswagen’s stocks in 2008 it was estimated that less than 1% of Volkswagen shares were liquid — due to Porsche silently buying the majority of liquid stocks — to cover the short positions which led to the “unlimited squeeze”. I have a hard time believing that The number of liquid GME shares out there are nearly as low as 1%. The only way I could see the liquidity going that low is if institutional investors with tens or hundreds of billions dollars in market cap decide to buy up all liquid shares, effectively lowering the liquidity of GME to similar levels as Volkswagen during the 2008 unlimited short squeeze.
Yes, it's not generally something for a retail trader to worry about, since the broker is providing the borrow (or disallowing the trade saying it's unavailable, as many have probably seen with GME), but hypothetically if you managed it it's generally not allowed.
I agree with this post. Although the narrative being spun on WallStreetBets and co wants you to believe in a short squeeze, it doesn't seem like any shorts were actually squeezed. This morning, Melvin Capital and Citron successfully exited their positions in Gamestop. Had there been a true squeeze, the whole point would have been to prevent an easy exit and force them to cause the price to balloon out of control. By exiting, they've proven that although shorts were obviously hurt a lot, the fabled squeeze never came. And to analyze it technically, I know a lot of people are repeating the line about GME shorts being xxx% of the float, where xxx > 100. It's cute, but for a stock with such crazy volume as in the past few days, the shorts being above the float doesn't really matter.
And full disclosure, I made a lot of money via GME these past 2 weeks. I'm just not a believer in what's currently being pushed as the truth on social media. To me, GME seems to be a classic case of Tulipmania hiding behind a "short squeeze" mask. It's the latest Bitcoin and no one wants to miss out.
As I said, they made a painful exit but they were able to get out. If there was a real squeeze going on, their losses would have been eye-watering and far far over 100% of their assets. In 2008, Volkswagen became the most valuable company in the world for a day because short sellers literally _could not_ exit their position. There were no shares to acquire at any price. Gamestop, with 90M trade volume in the last day, does not resemble a squeeze at all. Short sellers are able to leave and lick their wounds. In a squeeze they'd be trapped.
Technically GP could know that if they have insider info. But now I'm curious, if GP can't know they exited, how do you know they didn't? Sincerely asking.
If that were true Melvin Capital would just say nothing and ride the profits. If you are a short seller with a covered position (with options) your goal would be to let as many desperate/stupid people enter before the crash because it means there will be less resistance to price drops after the crash because all the dumb and unpredictable money is gone. You would instead push propaganda that your shorts are not covered and lure people into your trap.
If your shorts are not covered then you are basically completely screwed and are willing to do absolutely anything to tank the price as soon as possible even if it means you do not get maximum possible returns. You would push propaganda that your shorts are covered and convince people that you have complete control over the situation.
If you told the truth you would be exposing yourself to unnecessary risk in both cases.
I wonder if covid has made people view online communities as the public space. In prior years treating an online community as your sole social outlet wouldn't be viewed as healthy. Now it's almost the defacto.
I remember the days when you could say some truly deplorable shit online and almost no one would care. People who didn’t want to hear it would ignore or block and move on.
Now it seems like so many topics and words are completely off limits. It’s very restrictive and I think it’s making the web a less free, a less open, and a less fun space.
It’s extremely hard to exist online when you have not only a raging group of pro censorship PC police hell bent on removing you, but coordinated networks of platforms that will remove you in unison.
So I think it’s less that people see online communities as their public squares, and more that it’s very difficult to exist online if don’t hold the same ideas and opinions of those controlling the platforms.
This is why I think it's so important that the internet begins moving towards decentralization soon.
Much of the censorship and top-down control we're witnessing today will only get worse while there's no bittorrent-like or blockchain-like decentralization.
Ok, but lets not forget how a few actors can spoil a healthy community. Remember Kuro5hin? Very healthy and thriving community destroyed by a handful of stupid trolls.
Have been following one of the decentralized web approaches, don't remember, netsomething dot net, runs in the browser, very nice interface. Started promising until it got swamped with right wing lunatics doing nothing but trolling and spewing antisemitic stuff all over the place. I am not even offended, it is just a waste of my time to wade thru this trash to find some meaningful conversation.
Any unmoderated community is going to attract these lunatics.
The only places where I find meaningful conversation are topic centered Forums.
Anything sans topic turns into a burning dumpster when unmoderated. This is humanity. The lunies get their voices amplified and the sane fall silent.
The parent comment is not talking about WSB going private (which you're right, it does happen from time to time by the mods for housekeeping). But they're actually talking about Discord shutting down WSB servers - for those unfamiliar, WSB subreddit also had an official discord server which was quite active.
The timing is due to the insane influx of new users causing the server mods to completely lose control and trolls wreck havoc.
The subreddit did not go private due to the ban. You're reading too much into the headline. It depicts two separate events that are both caused by too many new users (too many new posts in the subreddit's case).
The Discord ban was clearly because the community itself is controversial from a legal point of view. That's why the ban happened today. But I think this is an unwise move. Each community that is censored over something legal but controversial, pushes the creative citizens of the Internet towards building more open platforms.
Hope we end up there soon, this constant censorship of communities I might want to have a look at to satisfy my curiosity gets mighty tiring.
And shorting more stock than a total company even has is not controversial? Or using massive shorting to just keep on pushing a stock down? It feels a lot more controversial to me and yet, the hedge fund managers dont't really feel anything. Well apart from the fact that they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar and now they have to pay. But I wonder if their platforms are now being censored. Classic money is power, I'm firmly on the side of WSB here.
I agree with you. But there's definitely a controversy here, in the sense that two large groups have strongly differing opinions.
To my eyes, that controversy is part of a very public power struggle. I firmly believe that the WSB community is in the right, and that any legal gray areas are subtle enough that it would require a judge to decide. So there is no reason for internet companies to pre-emptively wash their hands of the situation. But yet here we are.
By definition, WSB is controversial because a lot of powerful people criticise them and would prefer them not to exist. Legally, I can see that they're moving in an uncharted gray area that might eventually require lawyers and a judge to determine whether they did something illegal, or that eventually attracts lawmakers to adapt existing regulation.
I'm firmly on the side of WSB here though, and none of the above should be considered a moral rationale for its pre-emptive censorship. Controversial certainly doesn't mean wrong, of which one might have the impression after the last months of social media purges.
I'm not at all surprised that WSB becomes the focus of such a power struggle, and very much hope it becomes another catalyst towards de-centralized, censorship-proof online communities.
Except everything they are doing is perfectly legal. They noticed some people had overextended their short position, they took action (action that "legitimate" traders were also taking) and stand to make some money.
I don't see how that is market manipulation any more than short sellers shorting over 100% of a stock.
Maybe there is an argument for regulation to prevent this but the financial sector has been staunchly against any such regulation for decades.
“ a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life”
I agree with you, but I lament that outside of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit, it’s been very hard for any social media company to gain traction.
They serve very different audiences. Facebook and Discord seem to be the most intrusive, as they displaced many mediums. I cannot communicate with my homeowner group, because I am banned by facebook for using profanities.
Then Facebook decides to leave political posts proliferate unchecked, while I can't use the word baboon. I personally hate Facebook so much that I told the recruiters to GTFO and never contact me.
No, it's because they became a legal risk as they were the primary host of insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol while chanting "Hang Mike Pence!".
Also, private business can do whatever they want. 1st amendment only applies to government not private business.
Section 230 absolves them of said risk entirely. Amazon's hand wasn't forced.
And quite frankly, I don't buy that accusation. That seems like a convenient, unfalsifiable canard, doubly so when all the tech companies acted in concern.
And please stop with the "1st amendment" thing, which nobody in this conversation even mentioned. This observation is off-topic and the very definition of a dead horse in a conversation about what the law ought to do.
A pizza place gets bashed for saying that they wouldn't serve pizza to a same sex wedding - they get bashed by one group and praised by another. Payment systems cancel Parler - one group praises private actions, the other bashes it.
I hate Parler, but it showed that both sides are rotten authoritarians.
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature. [1]
Are we going to play this game though? People stormed the Capitol hunting for members of Congress. They were chanting "Hang Mike Pence". If they weren't white, would you have any trouble calling it terrorism? Would insurrection or sedition be more agreeable?
They beat a police officer to death in the process of taking over the Capitol building, to attempt to stop democratic processes because they didn’t like the outcome.
Violence (murder!) for political motives. Terrorism.
He said “primary host of insurrectionists” and said nothing about planning. You’re just looking to fight about some terrible app that was ran by a wannabe mark zuckerberg that prided himself on letting extremists run rampant. Zero moderation meant anyone who wanted to say “hang mike pence” could do it all day long without any fear of repurcusion. That’s a clearly violent threat. That’s the chant of a anarchist mob.
> a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life
Hmm, it's almost as if this just happened recently, but people looked the other away because it was tightly coupled to politics. I think 2021 is going to blow 2020 out of the water.
I don't think as many people looked the other way as you suspect. I was happy about the first instance for the same reason I'm happy about this instance. I want to see them all burn to the ground so we can go back to the principles of the web pre web2.0 but building it back better and more resilient to being hijacked by corporate money.
Yes, though that's kind of irrelevant. What use is Facebook to me if all my friends are only on Discord? These companies aren't the only source of socialization for everyone, but for a lot of people they effectively are.
> I really think they should have put more thought into the timing of this decision; a lot of users are going to be upset and will suddenly start to realize that a single company has a monopoly on their online social life (this may seem like an exaggeration, but it feels quite true to me colloquially, especially if you're a younger US male and/or play video games).
What? I have never used Discord.
If you think that a company has a monopoly on your social life, that's on you. There are lots of chat services There's even gasp email, and double gasp group texts.
The problem here isn't that we need a new decentralized system, the problem is that people are too lazy to use the decentralization we have today.
Email is not comparable to Discord... Teamspeak and Mumble are dying because everyone moved to Discord -- and all the professional meeting solutions are awful.
I don't choose which platforms communities and friends move to. I have limited agency in this situation and exercising that is pointless due to network effects. I'm not annoyed about dominance, I'm annoyed about monopoly abuse.
Aren't they opening themselves up to a world of hurt by this ban? I admit I don't understand securities law, but surely interfering with an ongoing stock bonanza like this should raise some authorities' eyebrows, particularly if it turns out someone from Discord side had a stake in the whole thing? I mean, surely they realized that this decision will directly impact the stock price.
If anything the risk goes the other way. If the SEC construes the Discord as being responsible for a pump-and-dump scheme, then it's facing legal attention. Even if it's not a pump-and-dump scheme, there are going to be comments there that can potentially be made to look like one to a judge.
In the last 20-30 minutes too, which suggests it was purely because of WSB getting wacked. That's weird, it seems like the sentiment of the people investing in GameStop wouldn't be changed just because of this.
One's opinion is driven by everyone else's sentiment. Seeing literally everyone post "HOLD THE LINE" and "BUY THE DIP" and "TO THE MOON" will make you do the same.
If you don't see this, then you don't know if these people are still your allies.
We'll see if the stock recovers or not, but I remember in 2014 Bitcoin's price bubble popping from over $200 because Bitstamp was DDOS-ed. It's a great strategy generally for timing bubble pops.
It's after hours trading, which is very low volume and generally not available to most retail investors. Probably just another hedge fund getting in their shorts at these high prices. The FUD spread due to the plunge in after hours is just a bonus for their new short position.
Further, I think everyone is drastically over estimating the impact of r/wsb and retail investors in general on the GME action. This is hedge fund vs. hedge fund in an opportunity for unusually outsized gains on both the long and short positions over relatively short time frames. Good for them to keep the narrative focused on retail investors rather than capitalist titans in a financial blood bath.
The amount of leverage even small money can make using out of money call options cannot be understated either. Sure, hedge funds have to offer those options and cover with longs, but what people did looks more like buying a lottery ticket with a great expected return.
I think you're right and I think it's strange that we focus so much on crypto and other high-tech solutions to problems we don't have, but not on federated distributed versions of social media, messaging, video hosting. I guess it's not as new and shiny.
I've been using matrix for the past year or so and I can tell you it's been great. I'm surprised at how stable and easy it is. I text friends who are on different servers, and no one notices. The clients are all starting to get E2EE by default. Hopefully the future is as warm.
See, the problem is that people are doing all this because they believe that it doesn’t matter. These are not idealists or indoctrinated revolutionaries.
No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core.
These are not Eastern European kids who dream to finish school and go to Western Europe and do something with their lives, these are also not Chinese who dream to go to America for a new life. They are not the American youth from the 60s or the bolsheviks from the pre-soviet era.
On the other hand, some of them must be rich now. Who knows what easily won money could bring.
The worst, or maybe the best, part of your post is that you don't realize the American youth from the 60s literally created this generation with their greed and entitlement.
The counter culture was a minority. Recognizing that is crucial to understanding the current climate.
It just so happens the creative output from those aligned with that culture has dominated more recent generations(Sesame street, Free Willy, Fern Gully, all that). In a sense "they won". But those not on-board are still around, and there is a lot of resentment.
I'm only 36 and while I was raised on this stuff but even so a LOT has changed and "progressed" from when I was a kid. Can you imagine how much has changed for those who lived through the civil rights movement?
Not OP but it's the grown up subset rather than the Abbie Hoffman set. Hilarious pranks are hilarious but sesame street is more widely and subtly influential.
I think they're pointing out that "the hippies" were a very small % of people their own age with an out-sized popular culture representation that doesn't reflect the sentiments of the rest of that generation.
"All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core"
Okay boys, french revolution, american revolutuon, british revolution were all a nihilistic mistake. Time to give up our hard-earned right and go back to being serfs governed by god-emperror.
The establishment shall never be challanged even if it's chopping off heads, tortuning the unbelievers, raping and burning women for witchcraft.
It's a moving letter, I've read it and I actually agree with the statement but having a personal vendetta isn't exactly an ideal.
Nevertheless, it doesn't really matter if they are idealists or not if it eventually pushes for a change. Woodstock was a for-profit music festival that turned into a cultural icon. As someone else in the comments said, probably Rosa Parks never meant to start a revolution.
When I say they are nihilistic, I don't mean it as an offence. I do agree that "it doesn't matter", the market is not working as a place to invest into promising companies, it's simply a gambling with extra steps and I enjoy watching many classical gamblers being destroyed. I also don't trade any stocks, I don't own any publicly traded stocks.
Rosa Parks was, as I understand it, a carefully planned stunt, which happened to get the media traction necessary. There was another person who did the exact same thing a short time before RP did, but that person was, IIRC, punished and forgotten.
Idk, it kind of sounds plausible to me. I don't see the Wallstreet bets sub reddit starting a revolution, protests or suddenly running for office to enact change. Do you?
The larger point I was making with my comment -- which seems to have been insufficiently clear -- was precisely that making extreme statements to trigger deliberately contentious argument is a style of interaction I prefer to avoid. Per the HN rules of conduct, I assumed good faith and interpreted the parent in the most favorable light I could, given it bordered on trolling. What is there to argue? The idea that there's a simple binary split between The Establishment and Nihilists?
Really?! I've seen plenty of trolling in my day, and that didn't ring any of my alarm bells.
Is it really that bizarre to you to call anti-establishment /r/wsb gamblers "nihilistic"? The ethos of the subreddit is basically "eh, screw it, let's see what happens" so is it that hard to imagine a subset of members going a little further, to "eh, screw it, none of this matters"?
Do you need a hand? You seem to be on a slippery slope. I've heard this one before - it was a single cannabis cigarette at first, but soon he was out there killing grandmas for drug money.
You are certainly right for many participating in this short squeeze. But collectively this short squeeze is undeniable proof that what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. The hedge funds play by a separate set of rules from the rest of us.
This thread/discussion is attached to an article about Discord banning one (of multiple, only one got banned) communities and the r/wallstreebtets community going private (moderators limiting access to members who've already joined and blocking outsiders). Since then, the subreddit was opened back up. How did Reddit close it down if it everyone can still access it?
Does it prove that? I tend to agree that it's true, but I don't see what it has to do with the current situation. If anything, I expect most people to argue the opposite - when the price drops again, and some retail traders lose their shirts, there will inevitably be a flood of thinkpieces about how cruel the financial system is for permitting them to lose money on the same terms as a hedge fund.
I tend to think people's losses will be smaller (as individuals) then everyone seems to think. This is reddit we're talking about, and people using RobinHood. I'm guessing losses for those that didn't get out will be limited to beer money. I think the reason they could squeeze the shorts is because of the size of their army, not the depth of their war chest...
I'm more worried about the retail investors that jumped on the bandwagon too late with their life savings. The ones that got in at the start will be fine or better than fine.
TBH, if people did that....they probably already lost everything on bitcoin back in 2018. There's no shortage of hype for people to fall for. Bandwagoning is a great way to make a small fortune on stocks, if you start with a large fortune.
I think it proves it in the sense that hedge fund do this kind of stuff all the time and no one ever hears about it, because those kinds of money-making strategies are what we expect of them.
Exactly! The bet has been people aren't capable of coordinating in large numbers to take advantage of this so it's not really broken. Now that they are it's officially broken and will be reviewed.
You mean the folks who are about to walk into the storm thinking it's never going down and lose their bet? Yeah those guys are screwed and they will make wonderful emotional think pieces written by the same corporation who gave a mouthpiece to the hedge funds. The issue is it's a continuation of the equality issues in America so rational behavior may not be in scope for this one.
"See, the problem is that people are doing all this because they believe that it doesn’t matter. These are not idealists or indoctrinated revolutionaries.
No one is going to do anything if it’s not going to bring lulz or cash quickly because nothing matters anyway.
All the anti establishment movement is nihilistic in its core."
I'm so happy we have mrtksn to explain the motives of about 5 million different people.
Thank you so much for enlightening us with your psycho-analysis of all those people.
20K Chinese H1B Visas are a drop in the bucket in terms of opportunity. H1Bs are for people looking to make modest living, the real money is back in China. Common thing you hear from many nouveau riche Chinese is how poor the west are, young professional couple pulling 300K household income can barely afford to live nicely after inflation. Of course, that's still a very comfortable life, but western upper middle class is not aspirationally "rich" by Chinese standards anymore.
When you're able to play a video game and have a large amount of users agree to use anything besides Discord, then I'll grant this objection. Until then, I'll refer to it as a monopoly (not over all communication of course, just within its own niche).
All the voice chat options that existed in the gaming world prior to Discord's dominance still exist, except with those options you have to pay for your own hosting like every gaming clan used to do prior to Discord. This is the cost of "free". It doesn't help that Discord has the best chat client on the market, so the competitors need to step it up.
It's a good point worth making: that Discord only exists and is as usable and popular as it is because it has a profit model and significant funding, and that's definitely a large component of why FOSS has lost users to them.
Still, as long as things like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and Signal and perhaps even Firefox exist, I'll believe we can do better.
I think the internet being still in it's infancy essentially has allowed us to not define monopolies narrowly enough. For example, it seems obvious to people when a monopoly exists on a railroad, cars, or planes because they are distinct. However if they were judged the way the technology industry is currently, you would just say they are all travel and so no monopoly exists. I think the technology companies will be in for a very rude awakening when these niches are realized by politicians. It will probably be when young enough to really know the niches in the internet grow old enough to become politicians. The current politicians are just beginning to get a grasp on this so it's going to be some time.
I agree, and I tried not to be too narrow in my reasoning, but it's primarily speaking from what myself and so many that I know have experienced.
I initially didn't want to use it, and I know many others that didn't. Slowly the communities they loved moved to it until they were completely excluded and felt forced to adopt it as well. At this point I only have two friends left that still refuse to use it, everyone else gave in citing network effects. It reminds me precisely of how Facebook felt when I was in school, in that you were excluded from friend groups and events if you chose not to use it.
I know there are many alternatives, but getting your favorite communities to switch to them is completely intractable. Communication shouldn't be like this and I think that we can do much better, even if it takes us awhile to get there.
You can quantify a firm's market power by asking how much the firm could raise prices while the customers would stick with it. If raising the price one cent causes all your customers to abandon you, then you have zero market power. If you can raise prices 10x and sell just as much product, then you have total market power.
Yeah, I'm getting really tired of people saying "not a monopoly" when we're discussing de facto monopolies. Especially in the short term, and for knee-jerk reactions. Do you think any Discord competitor is going to welcome /r/wsb with open arms after that move? Ergo: monopoly.
Looking at this from another point of view, no other option but today.
There is probably more users violating the terms today (hate speech) then ever before. If they were already watching, then there is a threshold. Today would be the day the threshold is hit. Today is probably the tipping point of no return, moderation becomes virtually impossible.
For all the uneasy feelings I get about the triggerhappy banning by these platforms, there's probably a light at end of the tunnel. Boot enough people and the better alternatives might actually flourish with network effects.
Yep, this is for me very exciting. I like banwaves. They're digging their own graves, they'll go the way of Blockbuster soon, and the internet, public discourse, information availability and dare I say humanity will be better for it. I wish they'd do it faster.
The fact that 4Chan itself has not been the target of deplatforming efforts is confusing to me. If I were to put my tinfoil hat on for a bit, I might speculate that it’s a honeypot that shares data with the feds.
Both also have a very undeserved reputation. I saw news reports on 8chan as if it were something similar to Stormfront. The front page was mostly video game and pornography and one had to search very deep into it's hidden circles to find racial supremacy content.
ISPs could just drop their customers' traffic to that server. This happens all the time and has happened to 4chan before.
Or they could go further and refuse to peer with any ISP that doesn't block 4chan, or lobby to have the government compel ISPs to block it, likely on think-of-the-children or think-of-the-terrorism grounds.
Self hosting definitely isn't some magic way of preventing all censorship.
My mobile internet provider actually did this for about a year after the New Zeeland shooting. Was quite annoying and I considered switching to another company because I quite enjoyed shitposting about bicycles on /t/
You won't be able to post on 4chan and probably many other anonymous communities while on vpn unless a friend of your sets it up from a residential ip.
With TOR you have to hire someone to fill captchas just to read things.
That's a decent workaround if you're technical and stubborn, but there needs to be a solution for this that's available for everyone with just a few clicks.
Even if 4chan host their servers, if they're not in someone's basement, they'd be in colocation, which can then be targeted, since I don't think 4chan own the full datacenter.
Oh it's not a secret, 4chan is and has been for decades actually proactive (or at least no supoena needed) with sharing data with LEO and has strong (albeit US free speech levels of) moderation across all of the site.
If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested. The site doesn't give protection.
I steer clear of it, but wonder if with more EU like moderation a better site could be formed.
> but wonder if with more EU like moderation a better site could be formed.
> If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested.
The idea of posting something and being arrested disgusts me. The bar around the world for such an action should be just as high as it is in America. If I post that I'm going to come and kill you, thinkingemote, at 10:17 a.m. at your place of work located at <insert address here>, then by all means I deserve to be arrested. I've made a credible threat with credible information, verified by the fact I know your name and your workplace address.
However, saying something "mean" to you, or "misgendering" you, or even calling you a racial slur, should never be enough to arrest someone.
It reminds me of one of the few (maybe only...) great lines from Ghostbusters 2: "Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God-given right!"
So it should be online as well. If you don't like it, you can absent yourself from the platform(s), and in almost every case, if you don't want to do that, you can block the other person.
I thought you were a troll the first time you posted some ridiculous bullshit to one of my posts, but now I'm sure.
The sad part is, you forgot your own rule. You got your feefees hurt (which was clearly bullshit also) and said you were "done communicating" or some such nonsense.
That's the great thing about a troll. They're also liars.
The advice has always been and continues to be to use services such as Tor (and a properly secured computing environment) to access the less mainstream areas of the internet.
4chan rejects posting from Tor, but accepts browsing from it.
There are other anonymity networks that it doesn't filters out as well. But in principle, it does not allow posting from anonymity networks.
4chan is also quite mainstream and one of the largest websites on the internet, certainly larger than Hacker News. Similar Web ranks it around 800 world wide, but it's probably even higher, given that it's split into two domains that remain separate for advertisement reasons.
The same way ThePirateBay and Sci-Hub haven't gotten deplatform even while having far more powerful forces after them. It's because the people hosting it aren't incompetent, and unlike what these people crying foul lately will have you believe, censorship on the internet isn't really a thing. You may not get a free megaphone like Twitter, but as long as you know what you're doing, you can have a voice online just fine.
4chan has been responsible for turning so many kids into racists using humor. I remember a whole period in like 2010 when there was a — before 4chan I used to see black people as “black person in a suit”, now I see black people as “terribly racist caricature”. I would hate to see it go but boy is that place the true breeding ground for hate.
No offence here, but if 4chan making racism "fun" was sufficient to make some kid hate real people including their neighbours or friends then it's was never a problem with the platform. It's just indication of larger problem in both society and / or upbringing.
People who can be easily radicalized or manipulated is just indication that they wasn't educated well enough to think on their own with their brain. And in any case chan culture is far better than some actual criminals or cultists who are much better at brainwashing people.
I'm not trying to justify some of chan content, but
I consider that it's greater good that some people get a lesson about how easily they could be manipulated.
What I sure about is that no one force a person to have continious exposure to such propoganda on 4chan. It's not like it's some government funded website that everyone has obligation to visit due authorities requirements.
Being exposed to this kind of "humor" is deliberate choice. And even 4chan is not some single entity: there are plenty of boards on other topics that nowhere as extreme and sometimes they better moderated than e.g reddit , facebook or linkedin.
That kind of discourse is addictive and even though you have a choice, we as a society don’t always allow kids to make their own choices — especially around addictive, societally harmful issues.
The way bans on reddit have tended to work is that by dispersing the group, there's an additional barrier created to stop the spread of the idea. This has happened with fatpeoplehate, the trump reddit, and with the red pill reddit among others. Its not just a group of people of a similar knowledge level and similar ideas coming together, it is also new users happening across the subreddit and deciding to take part. Take away the new users and it becomes an echo chamber.
This is what makes Youtube, Reddit and Facebook so powerful. They can choose who can stay on their platform, and how much discoverability their ideas have if they are allowed to stay on the platform.
The only way to deal with it is through splitting these companies up - that's the only constitutional way, and we must start immediately. They're too big.
They're not going to be too big for very long. Their size depends on people being there, and if they keep banning people they'll just get smaller. Once all the interesting people are banned the regular people will go where the interesting people are. They're about to have their blockbuster moment and no bailouts can stop it.
I hope you're right - I truly believe that post 2012 social media has been a cancer on society, in addition to the 24/7 newscycle. But I somehow am not as optimistic as you are. People far underestimate the power of twitter/fb/youtube.
The power in those sites is that they are not siloed and at scale, meaning you can reach a much broader audience. Parler would never be able to influence the mass market because it was so specialized - making it ineffective at evangelization. WSB would never be what it is without the platform of reddit. Going to a small specific site will not have the same power, even though I think it is better to host your own hardware and do that.
But this approach has diminishing returns. Sure, for the past few years this had the effect of isolating these groups from polite society. But eventually, when they start banning large, main stream groups like, say, people that want to make money in the stock market, people that dislike wall street, and one of two political parties in the USA, all they're going to do is lose market share and therefore their ability to police the internet. People don't use YouTube because they like the logo, people use YouTube because they like the videos on the site. At some point all the cool kids are on other websites, and once the herd follows you've lost control over anything.
I'm very excited about it personally, I like disruption.
I agree with you but I don't have any uneasy feelings -- these are private companies doing whatever they want with their resources. The sooner everybody wakes up to this fact, the sooner all this pointless hand-wringing will be over.
Please stick to the site guidelines, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. If we all work together we can avoid flamewar hell, which will keep HN interesting, which is in all of our interests.
I don't see it as quite over the same line. There's something about the snark in the comment I replied to which is a degree worse. The GP was baity but I don't see it as snarky. But I suppose it's close enough that different people could reasonably make a different call.
Hey dang. Just want to say I think the new community guidelines are great and you’re doing a good job moderating HN. I stopped coming here for a long time because it seemed every comment was snarky. Everyone was just so rude to each other. I’ve noticed that has dramatically improved! So, thank you.
IIRC, The American revolution was coordinated and funded by the existing colonial administrations, with aid from France. It was a secessionist movement backed by regional business interests in response to a reassertion of imperial sovereignty by a previously lax British government.
Something to be proud of, certainly. But not a grassroots thing, even if it did have some degree of popular support.
Calling it a secessionist movement isn't an apt characterization, which in US history calls to mind the Southerners' attempt to Secede from the USA. The revolutionaries, rather, considered themselves a number of independent colonies, coming together in opposition to British rule, where they were lacking in representation. They would not see themselves as "part" of Britain in a way the Southerners clearly were part of the USA.
In contrast, the South was fully represented in the Northern government, and Lincoln was quite conciliatory and kind to them when he was able. However, they were fighting for an extremely immoral cause, which the 1776 Revolutionaries were not really doing as the issue of slavery was much less an issue than in the 1850's.
That deal happened 2 years before the revolution. If you read the declaration of independence you'll find that it is very critical of that proclamation:
> The History of the Present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted [...]
He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
It wasn't the only thing that caused the insurrection of the colonies, but it certainly was a component.
Then maybe look outside your own borders for some other examples. The Arab Spring got great momentum from social media, and so do a lot of other efforts. Sometimes even bad efforts get momentum too. But it is possible to organize revolution via social media and other communication mediums.
I think they actually coordinated with vines posted to their myspace pages... but easier out-of-band communication does lead to more general awareness of the populace. The American revolution might've happened much more quickly - or not at all when the Americans saw Bostonians dancing around in racist indian costumes and compared the relatively minor tax to living conditions back in England proper.
>required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London, carrying an embossed revenue stamp.[1][2] Printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies, and it had to be paid in British currency, not in colonial paper money.[3]
The printing press was the social media of the 18th century. And just like then the powers that be have no idea what to do with it and are trying to put the Ginnie back in the bottle.
Assuming it (like others) gets taken down, here's a copy+paste with some cleanup:
<snip>
Note that Discord has had significant investment from private equity funds including FirstMark Capital, Greenoaks Capital Partners, Index Ventures, IVP, Greylock Partners, Benchmark, Accel, General Catalyst, Ridge Ventures, Spark Capital, and Tencent Holdings. At least one of these firms has invested with Point72 Ventures, which recently helped Melvin Capital. So it's not too surprising that strings were pulled to get the Discord channel banned for "hate speech" (which is a very useful brush to tar anyone with, as anyone who challenges it can easily be dismissed as a nazi).
<snip>
Reddit is owned by Advance Publications, which is owned by Donald Newhouse and the Newhouse family (some details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Newhouse). Fortunately, Newhouse's family office (think a private hedge fund dedicated to investing just the family's money) is pretty far removed from the hedge fund world afaik. The family office's CIO (details here: https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1g6j2tztzpb3t...) got her career started in the investment bank world and did not work for hedge funds, at least according to her Linkedin profile. So the Donaldson family has limited motive to stick their necks out and force a ban of this subreddit.
Mate, every medium-sized company and above has an investment by PE and VC. You can literally pull any company with above $10 mm EBITDA and there will be no more than two degrees of separation between them and Steve Cohen/any other big financiier
Then this reduces to that old adage that, if you win big in the lottery, you need to put every significant law firm in your area on retainer, so that local people can't find a lawyer to sue you. If you just put a bit of money in every up-and-coming technology company, then you get to pull their strings when you need a favor. Very smart.
But by that logic anything that a company ever does can be pinned on Steve Cohen.
If he was so powerful his returns wouldn't be that shit. Last year was good for P72 but other than that they're extremely mediocre ever since they stopped insider trading lol
I don't think that great analysis and random paranoia have to be disconnected. But given how humans treat money, goods, and jobs it's highly likely that some combination of those humans will do everything they can to maintain the specifics of this status quo.
Ironically it probably brought a lot more attention to Discord than they would've had otherwise. I didn't see a single news article mention the Discord group until it was banned. Why would they? It was just a minor subset of the main group. Although... maybe that was the play here? Plenty of fresh eyes checking out and learning about Discord now.
Risk of SEC involvement. This admin is probably nowhere near as lenient on this kind of stuff as the last was, and the recent nonsense with GameStop is probably bad enough to attract negative regulatory attention.
That’s the joke. The SEC pursues the mostly harmless while letting the sharks go free. Did they do anything about naked short selling of Overstock stock? Nope, and now that it’s happened again and retail took advantage of a bad trade, the rules suddenly change “to protect the little guy.”
It’s disingenuous at a minimum, and crony capitalism when taken to the maximum.
Are they doing anything about Nancy Pelosi (her husband Paul to be specific) buying Tesla calls before bills were brought forth with generous EV charging network subsidies? “Nothing to see here.” (Nothing against Pelosi and not intended as whataboutism, picked because it was top of mind from some research today and the disparity of enforcement)
Edit: Pump and dump schemes absolutely should not be supported. Piling into a short squeeze is not a pump and dump scheme.
Nothing against Pelosi? If that's as it appears to me (trading on insider information, by a person in a position of public trust no less) she needs to be heavily fined, in prison, or both.
What makes me ill is that the insider trading rule makes sense. It protects congress from lawsuits when their mutual fund or ETF owns Tesla and they benefit by enacting laws that benefit their constituents, but that have downsides for others.
The rule however assumes that congress conducts themselves ethically, and evidently that is clearly not the case.
My spouse was an elected official in California, and we had to fill out Form 700; diversified mutual funds didn't need to be disclosed as long as they met the definitions (at least 100 investors, at least 15 issuers, not a sector fund). Of course, Form 700 doesn't apply to federal officials elected to represent California; but a similar disclosure requirement / duty to avoid apparent conflict of interest would be nice at the federal level.
It should be pretty simple for most elected officials to dump their publicly traded stock and get into a diversified mutual fund before they start campaigning and while they hold office. For those who have concentrated holdings that are hard to dump, they could put it into a blind trust or whatever. Office holders really shouldn't be making a lot of trades; equity based compensation aside (either of their spouse or if they're a part time officer where those still exist, and have a part time job with equity based compensation)
There are ways to deal with that. For example, I’m not allowed to buy or sell my own company’s shares outside of specific trading windows, but index funds are fine as long as the company represents less than 10% of the fund.
There's a WORLD of a difference between a mutual fund or ETF that owns Tesla, and buying call options on the stock, that make money only if the stock moves in a definite time-frame. We have other examples too, for example Kelly Loeffler, whose husband is head honcho of the NYSE, sold a lot of stocks just before the Feb/March crash in 2020, based on insider information that she got from attending the Congress briefings that showed it was not just a flu.
Common misconception, as most didn't hear much about it beyond its initial signing. Congress still has that exemption. I believe you're referring to the STOCK Act, of 2012, which cramped their style for a little over a year.
In 2013, Senator Harry Reid introduced S.716, which after 14 seconds of discussion was passed by unanimous consent. Its net effect was to make the rest of STOCKS untrackable, and therefore unreportable and unenforceable.
> EDIT: LOL, the WSB sort are here downvoting everything that doesn't parrot their embarrassing [expletive]. YEAH, TAKE DOWN THE BIG WIGS!
Chillax, you’re breaking at least one of the site guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments. Edit: specifically “Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.” Would appreciate if I could get similar clarification on exactly why my comment has lost karma.
There’s already ways to give negative feedback on a comment. You can downvote or flag, or even just collapse a comment so it doesn’t bother you. It comes off as presumptuous when people point at rules, thereby pulling the thread into a tangential meta conversation.
Then all you get is people asking why they were downvoted. IMO downvoting should include a comment if one doesn't already exist sufficiently explaining your reason for downvoting.
That doesn't mean it needs to turn into a discussion if they defend themselves, but I think some indication of why is almost always warranted.
Congress is famous for being extremely lucky in their trades. Somehow their timing is way better than for common plebes, there's much research around about it. But of course laws are for the little people, including insider trading laws, so...
I bought TSLA around about the same time she must have, with no insider knowledge.
Honestly I think we need some new rules about securities and elected officials, but the obvious ones would not cover a sitting president patronizing his own failing businesses in order to increase revenues using taxpayer money.
We want rules against people buying stock or taking bribes from oil companies, but nothing about using your own company to 'provide services' to federal officials. But even if you transfer control of your holdings to a third party, you still know what was in there when you started. And if 'what was in there' was your nephew's business...
Disgusting but not surprising take from the Nasdaq CEO. A few managers with access to billions are able to coordinate their funds because they own them all, but a diverse mob of retail investors couldn't do this up until now because they're all subject to game-theoretic prisoner's dilemma forces.
It's only because so many people are rallying around the ideological worth of the stock that keeps the price from crashing. As the fad dissipates naturally over time, its ideological worth will decline and bring the price down with it. Time is on the side of the hedge funds.
I'm not sure the decline will be gradual. Also, prices unsupported by the actual company's fundamentals will now absolutely bring in more shorts, perhaps even the same people that got squeezed on the way up, recouping their losses and maybe profiting at the expense of retailers that wait too long.
The point is that the SEC’s measures are half hearted at best.
The purpose of the system is what it does, and the capital market operators, institutional participants, and regulators prioritize their interests. This exercise is simply exposing those efforts to daylight for all to see.
Dr Byrne from Overstock puts it better then I can (from your citation): “The SEC once again opts for nerf penalties for financial rapists.”
If one thinks WSB or retail in this are the problem, you haven’t been paying attention.
It's crony capitalism at minimum, and absolutely disgustingly oppressive at the maximum. These people seemingly are physically unable to let "the little guy" have even a whiff of financial independence.
"Pump and dump schemes absolutely should not be supported. Piling into a short squeeze is not a pump and dump scheme."
LOL. Give me a break.
This is ___100%___ a P&D scam. They can squeeze shorts because they target trash stocks of failing businesses (you know -- the stocks that get shorted), then create a positively ridiculous story about a value proposition. A bunch of moron retail investors on Reddit aren't going to do shit to squeeze shorts, but they're the front for a couple of very well financed players.
But...something something Nancy Pelosi. Christ. Yeah, she's really scamming the system playing a stock at all time highs. Real elite moves.
Yes, GME's current price does not reflect the value of the company. That being said, anybody that feels that staying involved in a short play involving a profitable retailer with significant activist investor interest when short interest is exceeding 100% is a good idea shouldn't be allowed within 10 miles of a risk management office. If someone's definition of pump and dump scheme includes investors making awful decisions and contractually obligating themselves to handing their money over to other people at insane losses, then this is one. For the rest of the world that is willing to call a bad trade what it is (even when the winners have quite the potty mouth), it doesn't even come close.
Lie of omission, transcription of the relevant part of the video for anyone who doesn't click, Jen Psaki said: "I'm also happy to repeat that we have the first female treasury secretary and a team that's surrounding her, and often questions about market we'll send to them, but our team is of course - our economic team including Secretary Yellen and others - are monitoring uh the situation. It's a good reminder though that the stock market isn't the only measure of the health of our economy" [etc].
The response should have been "What situation? And why you expect the government to handle it - can't you wipe your own bottom without the government help?" But of course these times have passed - now the federal government should be everybody's nanny and hall monitor.
I thought occupy wall street was backed more by those who identify as democrats or at least leaning that way. And I see this short squeeze just as a more concrete way to f*ck with the big money. Granted, big money rules them all.
If you think the Occupy Wall Street crowd is the one currently in control of democratic politics, then you have not been paying attention to democratic politics.
> "We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community"
I will admit that racist clubs aren’t for me. However since they are against me, my race, and the continued breathing of my family... I reserve the right to report them.
Racist groups start with talk, then inevitably end with burning crosses and dangling nooses.
I'm black, I didn't like seeing a guy say ni*er hundreds of times in charge of the place where WSB users end up, I reported it :)
(and don't give me some dumb bullshit about "wElL yOu GuYS sAy Ni*a" it's not the same no matter how upset that makes you)
Took a while but I'm glad it's gone :)
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I spent a lot of time on the main Discord that existed before this one (which most people had abandoned at the time since it was devoid of intelligent speech even by WSB)
WSB by it's nature has some rough edges, it's not the most politically correct place.
But a mod, a real mod with admin, not the joke WSB mod stuff... saying that stuff so much? Nah I'm going to report it.
WSB is on the edge of satire and outright toxicity but it toes the line fairly well.
That server was the opposite, mostly toxic (and not even in a humorous or satirical way) with very occasional coherency.
Did you read his post? He was active in the community. Was active in the one Discord server. Wanted to continue being active in the other, and saw all this racist crap.
... what? I did have an intention, the mod killed that intention.
I had enjoyed the other WSB discord very much, and was looking forward to a new server I'd enjoy and because of a jackass mod who say nig*er a lot I couldn't enjoy that.
So a very proportional response is to report the server they moderate!
I didn't lie, I didn't misconstrue anything, I said "this server has a moderator that spams nig*er very casually"
Are you defending that? Or blaming me for their behavior? Or faulting me for not liking that? Which is it?
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Because make no mistake, if this wasn't an admin level mod saying this I wouldn't report them. I even get the WSB "everyone is a mod" meme. And I get moderation is tough, things slip, that's life.
But when your admin says nig*er hundreds of times for fun... you're crossing a line.
Here's a thought experiment. In a few hours of coding, Google, Discord, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could all spin up map/reduce searches across all their channels, groups, links, results... for any wordlist you'd care to provide.
If a flagged word is used past a certain frequency, the channel can be closed, the page can be delisted, the accounts can be banned, or the site can be terminated. So clean, simple, and really quite easy.
They can even just start with the really really awful words if you like.
But they don't do this. Generally speaking they (at least historically) tend to support the ability of people to say Bad Things on the internet! You can even enter these Bad Words right into the front page of the world's biggest search engine and get hundreds of millions of hits in 0.33 seconds.
Yet somehow a channel of particular notoriety which is causing serious financial damage to some very Important People can disappear in an instant, maybe even right on the day of its peak exposure, and those trivially, easily, obviously detectable Bad Words can be blamed.
And no one even has to think too hard about if that was really what just happened here. Because who would ever step up, particularly in our current political environment, to say that anyone or any channel used to espouse such Bad Words (or Wrong Think) should be tolerated?
You know you can be against arbitrary and unfair enforcement and think it's good to act against bigoted speech, right?
The way you're talking about "Bad Words" sounds like you think discord should ignore these problems entirely. It solves the biased enforcement problem but it's a pretty awful way to do it.
> Generally speaking they (at least historically) tend to support the ability of people to say Bad Things on the internet!
Who is they? Discord has not been supportive of the ability to say arbitrary bad things on their hosting.
We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back.
This seems like a DDOS attack on r/wsb well knowing that the moderators cannot keep up with moderation?
Or is this simply a case of getting too popular for Reddit? The fact that discord was banned around the same time as r/wsb going private is suspect.
edit: After hours market shows GME is has TANKED!!!! Closed at 345 and dipped to 248. Holy, there will be class action lawsuits for sure now.
edit: I've been on the phone for 2 hours waiting for my broker to answer. All of this seems weird. They SUDDENLY have volatility and decide today is the day to stop answering my calls???
edit: /u/DeepFuckingValue's posts have all been wiped!!!!! WTF!
Denying communication completely could be a disaster in this case. In the absence of their precious DD, what number do you think the WSB'rs are going to choose to set their limits at? 420.69 seems a little too low right now. My bet would be 42,069 at least.
Reddit servers were really unstable for a bit, I've noticed user pages don't load when that happens. Seems a lot of people see conspiracies in caching issues.
It's because there was too much noise. Spam, new 0 karma accounts creating threads and posting the wrong kind of shitposts, etc. It was virtually inevitable.
I tried to comment there with a 14+ day old throwaway account 4 hours ago and was met with a bot deleting the comment.
"It looks like your account is too new to use /r/wallstreetbets. Sorry about that, but people use new accounts to spam us all the time. Please don't ask when you can be approved because we're going to say no and then laugh at you. Your account must be one month old at least."
I think the SEC thread created this morning had something to do with going private.
It isn't the first time they've gone private but this time with the discord being banned and all, im getting ban vibes.
Look if Discord can ban WSB over some cuss words, imagine what Reddit can do.
I'm on the phone with my broker as we speak and now I fear that this is a coordinated attack.
edit: so after I made that comment about github's half assed apology towards the guy that they terminated for saying "watch out for nazis", those same group of people are downvoting and flagging every single one of my comments. AGAIN. You didn't care when people were bringing attention to the anti-semitic memes being posted on Github 4 years ago, now you want to bury every fucking comment, just like the angry hedge fund managers getting their revenge on serfs making a little money.
It's private because the mods and the community cannot handle the sudden interest. (A subreddit squeeze!)
They even say this on the placeholder page.
A few hours ago zjz (a mod) posted about trying to get an unlimited API endpoint for Reddit from the admins so the mod bots can cope with the load.
"We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back."
Why do they mention ensuring reddit's content policy? That's a hammer admins bring out when they want to ban a subreddit. Did admins lean on the mods?
It's been bringing bad press on Reddit and that's usually the trigger for the admins to enforce their content policy.
(see the Donald, racist subs, fat people hate, violentacrez, jailbait - while these clearly did violate their policies, it took bad PR for enforcement to happen)
My guess is this means the mods will probably create a minimum Reddit karma amount required to post and/or comment. The goal to cut down on spam and bots.
So, new people can’t join in and immediately start trying to pump up random stocks.
WSB is getting flooded right now, so the mods are building in some auto-moderator things to get a handle on the subreddit.
Probably additional cover so that people reporting on this issue remember that there exists a reddit wide content policy that all subreddits have to enforce - so if there is any issue, reddit is also in the picture.
Why does everybody assume there is not some hedge fund behind this short squeeze?
Do hedge funds not know how to do social media marketing?
Why go on CNBC to announce your position when you can pay some kids and influencers to shitpost on wsb to rile up an online mob and leave no fingerprints?
It is crazy to me how ppl continually fall for this stuff? How does any mass online movement not trigger skepticism? I mean look at the history of this stuff from Kony 2012 to the Arab spring to Russian troll farms.
I do however think that this is a significant new front in the battles between Wall Street behemoths. Market manipulation by stirring up online mobs of mooks. If this one is organic, the next won’t be.
Cant you easily tell where the invested money is coming from? if its coming from corporate accounts then it would obviously be another hedge fund but as far as I was aware these were lots of accounts from armchair investment platforms like robinhood etc
> Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
If only Discord - a centralized, online platform - had the power to ban individual users. Too bad. The only reasonable action was to shut down the entire server. That's all they could have possibly done. I'm sure the timing was just coincidental.
>Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
Funny how that works. If they're not careful, people might start to think 'Hate Speech' could be misused to pursue an agenda. 'It's not that I disagree with what they are doing, they should have just called each other assholes instead of the X word so now the whole thing has to go'
As an ex-scientologist, I know how labeling websites "Hate Speech" can be abused. It's only when I ignored their "Hate Speech" warnings that I was able to figure out the fraud that is Scientology.
Funny how you can have a community/forum/server for years without issues but when you go against the grain new accounts come out of the woodwork to post something rule-breaking which gets the whole place shut down.
Just looking at a site like Reddit, where over the summer most major subreddits were flooded with ACAB posts and the comments said some pretty extreme stuff without issue. But then a new account on T_D, a blue-lives-matters sub, said something anti-police and that was justification for shutting it down.
Don't let your dislike of certain communities cloud your views. Punishing the lawful majority for the actions of a few, often outsiders, and letting those few define what a community supports is not something our society needs more of.
It may not be said eloquently or politely, but assuming you know better than people because you don't like the language they use sounds elitist to me.
That said, choosing who you do and don't interact with is your own business. Perhaps "I know I know more than them because they use homophobic slurs" isn't the strongest reason though, as one does not always map to the other
It's an open chat platform. Yes it can be manually moderated, but all it takes is one guy posting something they know is bannable for admins to be within the rules to ban a server. Pretty convenient.
Maybe that's the next round in the information wars? Each side probing the automated moderating systems of large social media platforms until they find the right sequence that will trigger a shutdown. I'd assume state actors will be able to do this on their own, but for us without state sponsorship, maybe you'll be able to buy it as a service off of the dark web.
Why wouldn't the probes be automated as well? I would expect some party to eventually unleash hatespeech spambots on the Internet, posting ban-worthy comments anywhere they can reach.
The flood of those comments would both drown out any manual attempts at hatespeech, while also being so unilateral that it wouldn't really make sense to ban any individual community for having them any more.
It's not an open platform by any means. 3rd party clients are banned, and what they call "servers" are really just subareas on the company hosted infra that where the broad terms of service are selectively enforced.
> We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.
Based on the Reddit post someone got around auto-modding bots by using UTF-8 icelandic characters that look the same as the english ones to say naughty things to report the Discord.
Given that it has 250,000 users i imagine individual posts would be easy to miss manually.
I think it is complete crap that companies using legal platform protections can ban people by arbitrarily declaring speech they don't like as hate speech. There should be legal requirements that any companies which enjoy platform protections must prove in a court of law that speech can accurately be classified as hateful before banning anyone.
They didn't even ban the people. They literally banned the server because individuals used inappropriate language on the server. That makes absolutely no sense.
> You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don’t get to hang out with your friends anymore.
The mods were moderating. Discord didn't even try to claim otherwise. The group was just huge and things inevitably slipped past the mods now and then. That happens in every platform. It's not the server's fault.
Bottom line is Discord has the power to deal with the individual users but they chose to nuke the server instead. What a convenient decision.
The r word isn’t nice. But that cannot be the reason to ban the server.
This sounds like an excuse. They mention fraud several times -but say it’s NOT because of fraud— but I almost perceive a wink when they mention it like that.
You’d be surprised what kind of asinine bullshit they will ban a server over. Feels like everywhere you go these days some real or virtual administrator is pre-determining how much risk you’re allowed to put yourself in.
I joined the server and the first thing I saw was a mod saying the N word with hard R. Check their history and there's literally pages of it.
I didn't appreciate that so I reported it and left.
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Lots of people confusing this with not liking WSB.
The other WSB discord which was linked to the subreddit was fine even though it was barely moderated. Rough around the edges like WSB tends to be... but fine as a place to hang out and see funny things.
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This second server was extreme even by WSB standards.
The joke is "4chan found a bloomberg terminal" but really it's like Reddit found one... no one is as down right randomly gross or racist as people are on deep end 4chan or Reddit would have banned it a long time.
This server was really like if the worst part of 4chan pretended to know what a stock is. It wasn't even coherent by WSB standards, and the signal to noise made WSB proper look like an actual Bloomberg Terminal
Different platforms have different baseline moderation policies, and in some cases that remains the differentiator in the platform itself (e.g. Parler). I dont think acting within the values of another site is a good excuse to not get banned by the one a community currently occupies
Discord is absolutely in their right to do as it may please with the platform. My point is more to the effect of the ethos of WSB is not a place for civil discourse and expecting otherwise is foolish. The only reason it exists on reddit is heavy moderation, and that's/was going to be impossible on Discord.
Here is my position, as this seems to be increasingly foreign for many people I talk with. A private entity (person or enterprise) should be able to manage their servers without outside interference. If I open up a server privately, I should have the right to moderate it, or not, however I see fit. 4chan still exists (as of now), and IMO, should not be interfered with. If somebody wants to create an LDS chatroom where swearing and drinking coffee lands you a ban, more power to you. We should be allowed to freely associate as we see fit, and those who own the space can decide the rules for discourse.
Now, am I saying corporate interests would never actively coordinate with government or other powerful interests to maintain a certain narrative or obtain power, absolutely not. That is a totally different discussion, and probably relies on a bottom up approach. The plebs aren't going to change Twitter's TOS or the programming on FOX, and we shouldn't expect to either. The corporate media sphere is carefully curated for whatever drives their interests. That maybe engagement, supporting commercial or policy positions beneficial to immediate or patron interests, or just old fashioned Operation Mockingbird interference. It's best if we ditch it altogether.
So you joined a server and went crying to teacher since you saw a bad word you didn't like instead of just leaving the server and letting it be. It is people like you who are the problem. Banning benign communities for using bad words is what drives people into fringes and into the arms of actual bad actors.
“retard” is the most ironic example of the ineffectiveness of the euphemism treadmill.
And now, on GameFAQs, I could not include the term “tardive dyskinesia” in a post. It was refused because apparently the four character sequence “tard” cannot occur in any word.
They could, at the very least, simply implement a system that a human moderator receives an immediate notification when a any of their banned words is used, who will then use good human judgement, rather than such wide blanket bans of four character strings.
I would assume one can't talk of one's tardiness on GameFAQs, yes.
I would also assume that in class, context would be more easy. Of course, some people were fired over the use of the word “niggard”, but it's a fairly obscure word, but I did once see it in an English translation of the Qurʾān.
An instructor or professor of linguistics almost got cancelled because he was using Chinese words as an example of the usefulness in speech of useless filler words. “That one” which if you want to or make yourself to, can be made to sound like a racial insult.
That’s to say it’s no surprise that ignorant people will take offense before they understand words that might be uncommon in their lexicon.
I looked up this story and of course it happened in the U.S.A.
Verily, what is with the U.S.A.-man's unparalleled ability to be offended by a word, or any word phonetically similar, regardless of the context? — I am really quite glad I do not live there. It seems stressful to be able to loose one's profession so quickly over it's infamous “cancel culture”.
I also heard about a problem with a chat platform that kicked
german users for using the common word "weniger"
("less"/"fewer"). Meaning not only didn't it care about context,
it even banned incorrect spelling of words, which in this
example made it impossible to mention the Republic of the Niger.
On another one, someone with the name “Hui” couldn't even post anything, because apparently it's a romanization of a Russian profanity and they had applied a global filter which would surely leave out quite a bit.
Or the online palæontological conference where the word “bone” was filtered...
How can one ever think such blanket filters will not go awry.
There is nothing wrong with the word retard. It’s a legitimate dictionary word. Every few years the PC police has to arbitrarily decide that something is morally unfashionable and then they convince everyone that if they don’t replace it with an equivalent string, they’re somehow bad people. It makes no sense and everyone goes along with it. Whatever the current replacement is, that will probably be disallowed in a few years too. There’s nothing “not nice” about directing it toward one’s self as a joke. It’s not like they’re using it to bully a disabled person. People who can even afford the bandwidth to complain and choose that hill to die on have far too few problems in their life.
Well, sure, in that it's a word with lots of nonproblematic uses.
> It’s a legitimate dictionary word.
This implies probably a more normative role for dictionaries than is appropriate, but, sure, it is. However, as a noun applied to people (as distinct from the verb meaning “to slow down” or the noun meaning “a slowing down”) it’s one which every dictionary I can find flags explicitly as “offensive”, so insofar as one uses dictionaries as arbiters of usage, I think there clearly is a problem with the use of “retards” in question.
Maybe I’m a bad person, but this is my take. If someone uses the r word once in a while. Like it slips out when High school slang mode kicks in, I’m Okay. If it’s someone’s go to word, I feel that person is on the uncouth side of things. I’m not going to report someone to HR over it, or terminate a friendship, but I may minimize interaction with them.
But that goes for all excess vulgarity not just the r word. It’s not that I’m offended, but it’s a personal taste for less crassness.
I think even if words like that aren't used to intentionally bully or harm someone, it certainly sets the tone of an environment. We all have to make the choice as individuals about what tone we want our words and actions to bring to the world around us.
Right, but that's the in-joke. People refer to themselves as mentally disabled. It does set the tone - namely, of leaving your ego at the door. I fail to see how this is a negative.
I mean, in a locker-room context, yeah, for sure, the externalities might be limited. At the same time, the comparison made there strikes as one oozing with value judgements. To be frank, I feel like the sentiments behind said value judgements would make the world a worse-off place.
I wouldn't want to contribute to a world where someone with mental disabilities feels like they're the indirect butt of someone else's joke. I feel like there's a way to be humble (and witty, likely!) without having to punch sideways.
Can you see how rtard is perhaps similar to the homophobic f-slur? The word is used as a pejorative with the implication that the group it is most commonly used towards (disabled, gay) is being used as a point of negative comparison. While I think we should be aware that the use of language is incredibly context-rich, we also need to recognise that the words we use have side-effects. Would you feel comfortable if a friend of yours dropped something and said "oh damn, I'm such a <n-word>"?
Speaking of the f-word, I’ve seen it used non pejoratively at the embarcadero farmers’s market. One of the vendors sells them for home decorative purposes along with cattails, lavender, etc.
Being from the UK, I hear it all the time to refer to cigarettes. When I worked in a shop, my colleagues would just walk through the shop and say "just taking a f* break". While it was totally inoffensive, it did make me a bit uncomfortable. Piquing my sjw sensitivities, I guess
Personally I find it disturbing that adults discussing the word feel the need to type things like “f-word” instead of just typing the word fag. You’re talking about a cigarette. It’s a configuration of 3 particular letters. There’s no reason to react to them in that context.
There isn't any relation other than the word being used. It's not something I ever complained about because I understood that it wasn't offensive in any way and is, like I said, just the response I have to hearing that word.
I think there's a public/private divide here. You can use whatever language you want with people you know, because you know how they'll react and that it genuinely won't cause offence. In a public space though, I'd be wary. A black person walking past a group of white kids making racist jokes and using racial slurs is only going to make them feel less comfortable, even if the white kids genuinely mean no harm.
> The mention fraud several times -but say it’s NOT because of fraud— but I almost receive a wink when they mention it like that.
Their full statement as quoted in the linked article denies that the ban is for "financial fraud" but includes "spreading misinformation" as one of the reasons for the ban. I don't see any contradiction or winking involved. People who repeatedly spread hate speech and discriminatory content and glorify violence after repeated warnings not to do so are pretty likely to be spreading a wide variety of misinformation other than financial fraud.
As for whether such things can be the reason to ban the server, I'm sure Discord's terms of service allow them to ban for this reason. Historically a lot of tech companies were hands-off in practice, but ever since the January 6 violence in the US and the related online activities, many of these companies would right now prefer to err in the opposite direction.
> People who repeatedly spread "hate speech" and "discriminatory content" and "glorify violence" after repeated warnings not to do so are pretty likely to be spreading a wide variety of "misinformation" other than financial fraud.
None of these things (in quotes) can even be defined, and anyone who believes that the government or some tech oligarch is going to be a fair judge must have been born yesterday. It's ridiculous how we can both simultaneously criticize countries like China, but at the same time encourage the exact same types of suppression in our own Westernized way.
There has never been either a legal or moral right in any tradition of freedom of speech throughout history, including the US tradition, to insist that other private parties who disagree with your speech continue to do business with you. The strong US freedom of speech protections are about government action only, and even those have exceptions. Every judgment of this sort has some subjectivity, and that's fine.
If someone dislikes Discord's judgment on that matter, they can switch providers or run their own service. If every viable provider stops dealing with them, that kind of implicit collective judgment and its consequences have always been part of humanity.
Also, most Western countries other than the US do have laws or judicial precedents which define terms like hate speech and provide penalties for engaging in it that are routinely adjudicated and enforced by courts. Even US judges consider hate speech as evidence an aggravating factor in how they handle crimes with hate as a motivation, accept the illegality of incitement to imminent violence, etc.
> There has never been either a legal or moral right in any tradition of freedom of speech throughout history, including the US tradition, to insist that other private parties who disagree with your speech continue to do business with you.
How would that work, practically? Let's say I prefer to get my hair cut by a barber that makes public statements in favor of gender equality instead of patronizing one that publicly advocates for the dynamics of Western society's traditional gender roles. For the sake of this scenario, let's say there's no other relevant difference between the two barbers, except where noted. Should my disfavored barber be able to insist that I shift some or all of my hair care business to them since the reason I'm not using them is their speech? How much of my business should they be able to force?
Would it be any different if I preferred the traditionalist and the one who wanted to force my business were the equality advocate? What if my preferred barber just stayed quiet and it were the one who vocally advocated either view who insisted on my business? What if the business terms of the barber with distasteful speech were worse, and how much worse would they need to be for that difference to outweigh their free speech rights?
None of this seems very plausible to enforce well.
More importantly, who would decide among all these possibilities? That's quite the power of imposing one's views (and financial policies) on others. I'm not sure I trust any government or private regulatory authority with that much control over private lives and livelihoods.
Both sides of that case agreed that the company was choosing to deny its custom wedding cake services to a gay wedding because of the owner's religious beliefs against gay weddings, not because of anyone's speech. In other words, they objected to making a wedding cake because of attributes inherent to who the engaged couple were, not anything that was being said or expressed.
I view it as plenty consistent to forbid businesses which serve the public from choosing not to serve customers based on innate aspects of who they are, like being the same sex or gender as each other, while still allowing them to make such choices in reaction to the customer's speech. Sometimes the line is clear (no speech was at issue in this case), and sometimes it's blurry, but that's absolutely a consistent rule whether or not it's the one you support.
The reason the Supreme Court ruled for the bakeshop was very narrow. The ruling acknowledged that states can constitutionally have non-discrimination laws that apply neutrally to businesses without making available exemptions due to religious beliefs. The ruling was just about the behavior of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in applying their state law to this case, which the Supreme Court majority viewers as hostile to the owner's religious beliefs and not religiously neutral as the government must be. So it was about religious bias in the government action, only. One member of the 5-4 majority wrote that he might well have ruled the other way had the commission acted neutrally.
The concern expressed by the cakeshop was primarily about making a custom wedding cake for a gay wedding, not the message. Put differently, they wouldn't have made a custom cake for this particular wedding, knowing it was a gay wedding, even if there were no message requested. The ruling was not on free speech grounds.
Anyway, the cakeshop scenario is a bit different in another way: it can be argued to involve expressive activity on the part of the employees who create the custom cake, since it's far more artistic than mechanical, and since they do literally write any requested message with decoration. By contrast, Discord's actions against the customer are simply a choice of which speech by others they choose to allow to flow through the platform they control, plus a statement of their own speech which they choose to put out about their action.
(For what it's worth, they've chosen to partially reverse their ban since we started out discussion, if I understand right.)
If you want to ensure there is a content neutral platform, maybe the best way (at least under US free speech concepts) is to advocate for a government-owned/run Internet group communication platform, just like we have in offline life when you go to the nearby park or plaza to protest, or when you send mail to everyone in your local community through USPS.
Everyone agrees that, in the US, the government can't constitutionally censor that on the basis of content or viewpoint, with a few exceptions such as forbidding child pornography. I'm guessing that platform wouldn't keep getting funding from the politicians if it got too much offensive content, but if it wasn't shut down entirely, they couldn't be selective about which speech to permit.
But that's the thing - not everyone does think less of such people, under the view that only people with privilege can even have the luxury of tuning out the impact of politics on their lives at work, since marginalized colleagues still suffer the impacts of politics daily at the office (or indirectly elsewhere in ways attributable to the actions and inactions of their employer) and they shouldn't be blamed for mixing politics and business when they speak up about it. I realize that's not your view, but it's a plenty common view.
Further, not everyone who wants to keep politics and business separate even agrees on what mixing politics and business means.
Is it politics for a company to go out of its way to make bathrooms explicitly gender-neutral, put pronouns in staff directories, encourage even people who are not trans to indicate their pronouns so that trans people don't feel singled out by doing so, discipline people for persistent or intentional use of the wrong pronouns in the workplace, and cover common trans needs like hormone replacement therapy in the company health insurance plan?
Many people on the right of the US political spectrum would call that politics. Many other people conclude that some good workers happen to be trans and would feel more comfortable working at such employers than at ones with traditional attitudes toward them, meaning that these changes have the apolitical good business consequence of maximizing the ability of the company to attract and retain workers.
Does one have to inquire into the motivation of the employer for adopting these policies to decide if they're mixing politics or business, or just engaging in business?
Lots of subjectivity even on moral rights questions like this.
Though, I will say that my use of the word "enforce" is really only applicable to legal rights, not moral rights, outside of some kind of dystopian enforcement of what people are allowed to think.
People saying "retard" isn't the real reason, they're just using it as an excuse. Powerful Wall Street types who gambled against them are losing money because of the hype train they've ignited and are crying to regulators. The discussion of coordination in the chat may be considered illegal and Discord doesn't want negative attention from regulators and the press.
WSB is notorious for also posting a lot of anti-LGBT slurs (for example, one of WSBs favorite insults is calling someone a "gay bear", or more commonly a rainbow emoji followed by a bear emoji, or even calling people f*gs).
Also worth noting that the Discord group is so much worse than WSB the subreddit. Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
>WSB is notorious for also posting a lot of anti-LGBT slurs (for example, one of WSBs favorite insults is calling someone a "gay bear", or more commonly a rainbow emoji followed by a bear emoji, or even calling people f*gs).
For what is worth, they pretty much never use it actually insultingly, and do not seem to harbor any ill-will against LGBT people (and some of them are lgbt). They also mostly use those words to describe themselves, and do it more as a nod to boiler room talk/4chan.
>Sometimes on the Discord server there are just people spamming the N word for no reason.
As far as I know, a lot of that is done by bots, though possibly set by other users to prank the discord.
Agree. I'm fairly certain a lot of the posts are self-deprecating - eg. "my wife's boyfriend", "i'm a r**d", "someone smarter than me", "i'm a gay bear". My wife doesn't have a boyfriend (hopefully), but I'd say that in a post there.
This isn't necessarily inflammatory. It is - like it or not - WSB's culture. It is not meant to be taken literally.
It is a frothy place, full of herd mentality. That is part of the clique. Going against that does incur the same tone of language against you. But it's not for who you are personally. It's the same language they use to describe the "in group", but it _seems_ worse to the out group.
Is the intent to mock people? No. Does it mean anything negative? No, 99% of it is literally re. the financials. Are there bad people in every group? Yes.
It's not, and for the record I said "gay bear", not just "gay". For that matter, if pressed I would identify as pansexual. The intent is that it's not meant to be degrading.
Please don't go looking for people to be bad guys - maybe instead assume good intent. You don't have to nit everything people say to find something to prove them wrong. You didn't focus on anything I was communicating - you tried to pick an argument with the smallest aspect of the thread.
I’m not nitpicking anything. Your argument was that it’s all just a joke, that calling yourself gay was self-deprecating. “I’m gay, I’m a retard, laugh at me.”
And now you contradict yourself saying it’s not meant to be degrading because it’s all just a joke.
You’re proving the toxic culture that those kinds of communities ferment.
"gay bears" is a play on words. Bear is a term in the gay community, just like bull is a term in the hotwife community (my wife's bf jokes apply here). Jokes happen both ways in WSB, straight or gay!
It's self deprecating to go against the market and be a bear in the biggest bull run of the decade. It's foolish to do so. I and many others being bearish have lost money. This is the entire point behind GME.
Like I said, it's all about the financials - not about you as a person.
On 4chan, “-fag” is essentially a nominalizing suffix at this point that is semantically interchangeable with “-man”; it lacks any connotation of positivity or negativity.
Not only do I second this, I would like to expand on it. This has been usage for at least a decade. Are you a musician? You are a "musicfag." And it is to such extremes that heterosexuals are "straightfags" and homosexuals are "gayfags."
It is indeed this way on many parts of the internet, including many parts of Discord and I.R.C..
I can remember this usage on NewGrounds in the early 2000s already. — I feel it's kind of sad that it's a part of internet culture that is becoming more and more obscure as the internet is experiencing an endless november of “normalfags”.
My prior for the majority of a reddit-based Discord server community being pro-LGBT is so astronomically low that the usage of that kind of language is unsettling to say the least. I'm sure there are plenty of well-meaning people just participating in the banter and picking up the 4chan lexicon, but I'm also sure there are a lot of people that use these words with no irony or awareness. It's like being scared to make an ironic offensive joke with your family because you feel like your cousin might laugh just a little too much. I'd be very cautious about assuming lack of explicitly-lgbt sentiment is the same as pro-lgbt-sentiment, especially given the culture wsb has branched from.
Given that's the same culture obsessed with traps, it's pretty clear that it hates fags, not gays.
They're not 'pro-LGBT' because that language is stultified, boring, soul-rending mainstream corporate-speak. Speaking that way is beneath human dignity.
"Are you pro-LGBT?" "Do I have a problem with gays, you mean?"
Better to be a human wallowing in the filth than a socially correct bugman standing clean, sterile, toothless to attention when the commisars come by.
It seems to hate “gays”; what it doesn't hate is homoerotica. It seems to take it's cues more from the Græco-Roman or Japanese interpretations that reject “intransient sexual orientations” as a concept altogether.
They simply want to look at pretty males without being bothered by now having to define themselves with some label that behaves more like a tribe than it does a truly descriptive term.
Most of the Japanese fiction that deals with same-sex love isn't phrased in terms of “It's okay to be gay.” but rather “Love has nothing to do with gender.”.
'Pro-LGBT' wasn't meant as corporate-speak, I genuinely just meant it as indicating a positive or even neutral sentiment towards those under the LGBT umbrella. I do agree that "Are you pro-LGBT?" as a question is not useful, as it almost feels like "Please signal your political affiliation" at this point.
I will say that the obsession with traps does for some reason feel to me as unrelated to views on homosexuality, which is weird, and possibly a misunderstanding of mine.
I meant that thinking in terms of 'LGBT' being a distinct category in your conception of the world is a worldview foreign to a lot of *chan people.
They don't slice up the world the same way you do; whoever made up that word put gays, lesbians, and transsexuals together for political reasons, and left-wing political activists your median chan-users are not- why use the language of someone else, someone who despises you and wants to crush you?
From their point of view, the mental theatre that contains actors named 'LGBT' and 'Diversity, Inclusion and Equity' as front-and-centre characters is a cold, dead place-
whereas their native memescape, filled with Colourful Words, traps, arguments, the cacophany of 'hateful memes', is alive and vibrant by comparison, if tinged by a deep despair at the leaching of vitality from the world.
It's why the NPC meme caught on.
Traps are anime, and so are idealised abstractions as much as anime girls are. They're also tinged by imported japanese culture, I'd assume.
I've never heard of this subreddit before, nor it's Discord Server, but I do know that one doesn't just stumble upon either on accident. The only people being hurt here are the ones that went looking to be hurt.
What we have here is a group of immature people, emboldened by internet anonymity, saying stupid things for the "lolz".
Does anyone think they'll be more mature because their server was banned? Of course not... they'll just make a new one, further emboldened by the obvious censorship. Let idiots be idiots, folks... we all know one when we see one.
Recall not too long ago the drama over github when one of the employers simply said to "watch out for nazis" during the DC Capitol incident.
We are at a point where certain languages are being banned and made illegal, you can't blame people for being worried that we are on the cusp of totalitarianism.
The banning of discord and r/wsb going private is quite scary, especially given the timing.
I guess hedge fund managers are just like mob bosses, they do not like being played.
edit: why is it that ANY mention of the github nazi incident gets INSTANTLY mass downvoted and flagged? Every single comment about this on HN gets censored.
I didn't follow the GH drama too closely, especially not on HN, but the "apology" seemed to be very thoughtful and almost exactly what you'd want a company to offer in response to the complaints being made against them. I think using it as an example of language being banned/made illegal is something a lot of people would disagree with, and thus the disagreement with your comment.
"Gay bear" is almost exclusively used as an insult on the subreddit, and this week has been one of the primary insults used in reference to the short sellers (everyones #1 enemy on WSB right now). It would still be pejorative even if not used that way, but it's ridiculous to claim that it's not a pejorative when it is explicitly used as an insult.
The only insults being hurled at anyone right now are to CNBC and to the hedge funds and their market maker buddies. Possibly the SEC for allowing brazen market manipulation on the part of the above.
For large public* groups. The large private groups are basically 1990s Yahoo! chat rooms, complete with racism, bullying, criminal activity and child grooming. They only get caught when they get infiltrated, or when members self-report.
The description of wallstreetbets is literally "as if 4chan found a bloomberg terminal", so I don't know what else anyone expected other than 4chan-like-behavior.
I'm sure there's plenty of technically minded Wall Street bets people who are capable of setting up synapse, for a self-hosted, non federated matrix/element based chat solution.
/biz/ has been flooded with r/wallstreetbets traffic for days and days now. /smg/ threads hit bump limit in 20 minutes sometimes ever since this GME thing really got going. It's even outdone the usual crypto posting on /biz/ which I didn't ever think would happen.
> You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and *I am not impressed with them destroying our community* instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.
It’s laughable that discord does this under the guise of “preventing the spread of misinformation” and stopping the glorification of violence. Presumably they’ll ban anyone playing first person shooters next and any games that aren’t historically accurate?
Stupidest fucking catch-all excuse I’ve heard yet. It would save everyone some time if these services just said, “we’ll kick you off if the mood strikes us.”
The bots were getting overwhelmed, u/zjz said that they set up more strict moderation rules and were running into rate limiting due to the traffic. Maybe reddit can whitelist them or something.
Wow. Considering both the Discord server and the Subreddit are publicly available to everyone, there's no illegal activity that could have occurred on them. I wonder is someone trying to prevent the public/retail investors legally rallying on legal actions?
Remember: they just want to ban the BAD guys. It’s just the bad guys they’re going to go after. They will never go after you as long as you’re the good guys.
How much do you think it would cost to pay the top mod of /r/wsb (which is now private) to make the sub private? How much to some discord admins to ban the discord?
Is that amount more or less than the billions these hedgies were losing?
They banned them for “hateful and discriminatory content” which Discord coincidentally noticed only after r/WallStreetBets became a major financial actor.
But there's no connection here, nope. Pure coincidence.
For those of us not in the know, what is so special about today regarding WSB? I know there's a feud with short sellers going on, but I haven't been following the details.
Someone went from 50k to 50M by igniting a short squeeze. All eyes were on the WSB subreddit, and discord server. Now both are private or offline.
No one has any chance to coordinate now. Discord’s action is effectively market manipulation in a literal sense, because this is certainly going to affect the market.
I’m curious why the sub went private though.
EDIT: I regret my phrasing. I didn’t mean this was illegal market manipulation, just that discord is literally manipulating the market by cutting off one of two primary coordination channels.
But they’re within their legal rights to do so, of course.
Market manipulation is not anything that "affects the market." That definition would cover pretty much any and all behavior. In this case Discord is not trading securities, is not telling any one else to trade securities, has nothing at all to do with securities.
If I run an email service and find that a user is running a pump-and-dump scam through it, do you really think I shouldn't be able to shut down their account?
Yeah, I didn’t mean it in the legal sense. It was just interesting that this decision can cost certain people millions of dollars. But that’s true of many actions in the world, as you say.
"Market manipulation" is what we call it when you affect markets illegally. If it's not illegal, it's not manipulation. For example, if I buy a bunch of stock in a company it will usually raise the stock price. That affects the market but is not illegal and is not manipulation.
> "Market manipulation" is what we call it when you affect markets illegally. If it's not illegal, it's not manipulation.
This is backwards. The label "manipulation" is applied (or not) retroactively based on whether something was determined to be illegal or not. It's not something you can know in advance; two copies of the exact same action might be judged differently.
>If I run an email service and find that a user is running a pump-and-dump scam through it, do you really think I shouldn't be able to shut down their account?
Yeah, I kinda think the SEC should be in charge of whether you're doing a pump-and-dump or not.
They considered making it private [and did briefly] during previous fiascos. At the time there were threads by the mods in which you can post so you are included but the alternative was by post history. It's very possible they've left e.g. the 10% most active posters in the sub and can still coordinate to an extent.
Edit: That seems to be the case, as their new message is
"WallStreetBets is under in tents load and is only for approved submitters. In the meantime, please enjoy some spaghetti. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW1GR7BECq4"
Edit2: Now changed to "We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back.
Before it went private I popped in and saw a thread where they were debating and coordinating what to do b/c they apparently had big issues today with bots and so many messages. Earlier I saw a few comments about downvoting bots all day.
They were debating whether it would be worthwhile and feasible to limit posting to people who had commented in the reddit 6 months prior as a filter.
My rough understanding is that the sub is required by Reddit admins to perform certain actions related to every submission (and even maybe every comment) which, due to API limitations, they could no longer do automatically.
Add this to the mix. The major brokerage firms go down. When users are able to login they receive messages they can no longer make call options on GME and are only allowed to sell.
> Discord’s action is effectively market manipulation in a literal sense, because this is certainly going to affect the market.
It certainly will have an effect, but I'm not sure it meets the definition of "manipulation". I think (though am not certain) that the manipulating party would need to have a stake in the market asset for manipulation to apply. Many definitions (though not investor.gov) imply that personal gain is a requirement. No doubt there will be a legal case made here.
They've officially ticked off rich and well-connected people, so regulators are coming to shake the tree branch (I have no idea whether what they're doing is illegal or not) and the platforms want to distance themselves from that ASAP.
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.
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.
“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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The details: a hedge fund decided to short retail stocks during the pandemic. They overextended with a naked short position against GameStop (that brick and mortar video game retailer) that exceeds not only the share float by a large margin but even the total number of shares in existence.
u/DeepFuckingValue on r/wallstreetbets discovered this a month or so ago, took out a $50k position, and let the rest of the sub in on it. That position is now worth $50M, a 1,000x increase.
Now there is literally no limit to the upside of a short squeeze. The price goes up high enough and the short sellers declare bankruptcy and liquidate their positions to cover the cost of purchasing shares. If they still come up short, then the same happens to the banks that lend to them . If that comes short, the brokerage must step up. At that point there’d probably be government intervention and a bailout. The WSB motto has become “we can stay retarded longer than they can stay solvent.”
According to a naïve view of the law, at least, that is correct. Far more likely there will be market outages and regulator shenanigans at undo the situation. Nobody is more of a sore loser than the establishment.
I'm going to respond because the conceit bears it. The people participating in perhaps this first known popular short squeeze have skin in the game. They don't care if they lose their bets.
As they say, we've seen who you cheer for, your disapproval means nothing.
As someone with no skin in the game, I find the whole situation both amusing and satisfying. I'm genuinely happy for all the WSB users who can now retire.
At the same time, it's still just people getting lucky/unlucky in the stock market. One Wall Street group got burned, but others made bank. At no point did the system change or become threatened in any way. Given all that, I don't understand why it is portrayed as some sort of heroic fight between good and evil.
The endgame is the destruction of Melvin Capital, and that's going to happen no matter what. No one can swoop in and just tank the stock price. Even if BlackRock were to dump all their shares before Friday, it likely still wouldn't be enough because that's only 13% of GME. Michael Burry's Scion Capital owns around 5%, but I don't think Dr. Burry's going anywhere either, and the reason they're going to hold is the same reason Melvin is going to go down in flames, there's simply no stock left to buy and no indication that selling makes sense right now.
The whole thing driving this is a massive buy-up of all available stock. No one wants to sell; everyone wants to buy.
If Melvin Capital were a patient in a hospital, it'd be brain dead and on life support. We're just waiting for everyone involved to say their goodbyes so the plug can be pulled.
At $90 a share, Melvin had to get a $2.75bn capital injection to stay afloat. That was the time to get out. They instead tried to force a sell-off so they could buy up cheap shares and reduce the bleeding. That failed. For roughly every $12 over $90, Melvin Capital lost $1 billion. Well at $348 a share, they're now negative $21.5bn in value. Its over. Their greed has resulted in their utter destruction.
Once Melvin's corpse is wheeled out of the hospital, BlackRock and Burry might head for the exit, especially Burry, since he bought in at $4 a share, and a 5% stake there is such an enormous return even at $200, much less $348, that at some point, you're just being a greedy asshole.
Some people on WSB a little more ruthless, and frankly with the BS that Wall Street has gotten away with for the past few decades, I can't say I blame them; they plan to hold till $1000, which hilarious and crazy as it sounds, may not be impossible, but I'd judge it unlikely.
I'd say anyone that got in $GME before the huge price spike ($20 and lower), now's a good time to cash out. You won. Your lottery ticket hit all 6 numbers. Go live your life.
To all the short-sellers, I can only bow and say, "We who are about to die, salute you."
> The endgame is the destruction of Melvin Capital, and that's going to happen no matter what.
Sure. Then what? For all the other people, that is. Just plain crashed stock prices? An unfortunate lesson in counterparty risk as they try to extract their winnings from a bankrupt hedge fund?
Exactly. We are in the middle of the story now. There always is the person who is last to sell and whoever that is stands to lose the most. It's pretty insane how sustained the rally is. You might expect it to effect prices for a day or even two thanks to the coordination until people catch on and sell, but this has been a sustained buy from various people for almost two weeks. That kind of holding power or more specifically willpower not to sell when the stock already went up 400% is what is really impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of this every single person that owns GME is from WallStreetBets. It's inevitable that at least some people from WallStreetBets gets hurt.
Aren't you scared about massive bubbles that would happen without short sellers? I don't agree with shady behavior from short sellers,
but I think it's kind of good to have the devils advocates in the market to fight against bubbles caused by the long side. And I don't know, it's all a gentleman's club, why only be angry at the short sellers? Or are they just a more easily exploited member of the establishment? (and not saying the comeuppance isn't warranted, I lean towards the side of the little guy in this)
Short sellers are a necessary group of market participants for revealing fraud and putting downward pressure on stock prices. However, this particular short seller was clearly making foolish decisions and I see no reason that he shouldn't lose it all.
Yep, totally agreed. I have no sympathy for this one, but part of me is concerned about whether or not it has a cooling effect on short selling in general and if it does, lots of people will feel some pain in the burst of the ensuing bubble.
Since Melvin shorted the stock, there's potentially no limit to their losses, we're just at -21.5 billion right now. Who knows! At this rate we might end up -100 billion by Friday... up is down and right is left in this crazy new world.
> Since Melvin shorted the stock, there's potentially no limit to their losses,
This is the narrative going around, but is there any evidence that they had a completely un-hedged position? That they had absolutely no cover at all? I know you said "potentially no limit", but you say that, and continue on to posture that they're obviously down $21.5B. As far as I understand it, their TAUM is ~13B. So you're claiming that they lost the entire fund, and are just... pretending it didn't happen?
Lets pretend that GME goes to 1500/share, and Melvin Capital materially misrepresented (ie, criminally lied, which feels like a big accusation) about exiting their position, and they find themselves down $100B. Again, they only have ~13B TAUM.
Where do you expect the other $87B to come from? Or did you switch half-way through and are not just talking about Melvin Capital anymore?
> So you're claiming that they lost the entire fund, and are just... pretending it didn't happen?
Yes. That's right. You've exactly understood it.
> is there any evidence that they had a completely un-hedged position?
The question isn't, "Did they have a completely un-hedged position?" the question is, "Can the rest of their positions in the market cover this specific position?"
There's every reason to believe they're flat out lying about having liquidated their short position in $GME.
Don't worry though. At 4 p.m. on Friday, we'll know for sure. Just hang tight and wait. I predict its going to be a painful time for Melvin.
Well, if you interpret radicalized to mean "have seen a real-world example of the benefits of federated social networks, perhaps real enough to shake the notoriously tech-apathetic public into doing something as easy as making an account somewhere else," then maybe it's a useful insight... unless, of course, nobody does anything.
Nobody does anything for awhile is the most likely result. But there's also a side effect of generating angst and resentment towards the establishment that'll get bottled up and pressurized waiting for the right opportunity to explosively release. An investment in radicalization so to speak. I think Trump is an example of that phenomenon.
I'm really bothered by Discord banning WSB. It's almost petty, like saying that a group of people shouldn't even be allowed to talk to one another because they're too dangerous. It seems like a lot of technology companies are doing all they can to keep people - many stripes of people - from congregating and sharing ideas. I wonder what would happen if these same WSB folks got together in person ... oh..right, they can't. So they can't talk online. Can't gather in person. Can't use social media. It's almost like there's a concerted effort to silence people....
I think the problem here is pretty obvious: we have laws and norms about hate speech, but why do we have nothing to prevent hate reading?. Why do we allow people to seek out and absorb hateful ideas and opinions? It's the intellectual equivalent of financing terrorism and the people engaging it are escaping justice. It's a huge blindspot for society. Who knows how much harm is caused by this 'dark thought' in every day life, as the rest of us unwittingly engage with these individuals, assuming they are not motivated by any sort of forbidden information.
This is that scene in all the casino movies where the person who found a system to win gets taken into the office by security and given a stern warning/beatdown.
I hope this invigorates even more people to start their own sites and communities and free themselves from the tyranny of the Silicon Valley oligarchs.
They're well within their rights to ban it and it was hella toxic in there... but... they should give those people the remaining time or $ on their boosts back.
They'll ban you when you're talking politics,
They'll ban you when you're trying to get your licks,
They'll ban you when you try to make a buck,
They'll ban you and say it's just your luck,
But don't feel so all alone,
Everybody will get banned.
(With apologies to Bob Dylan...)
Serious point, though: They can decide to ban (almost?) anyone at any point. They will state a justification, but it looks a lot like banning anyone whenever they decide to.
San Jose State University banned the "ok" symbol last year. Apparently it as the official symbol of the university for decades is now deemed "racist" as a symbol of "white power". We live in an age of utter madness. Literally no sane person thinks that's what it means.
So what...? The swastika used o be an Indian symbol of holiness. Some shitheads started using it, with well-known effects, and that ruined any other possible use. Symbols change, and your pseudo-naive attempts to profess ignorance say more about you than the symbol.
With his r/WallStreetBets posts and comments hidden (due to the sub going private), it's interesting to see the u/DeepFuckingValue's comments[1] from a year ago:
The guy has turned $50k into $50M in the one year since those first comments were made, with half of that made yesterday.
In all fairness, the reddit got absolutely flooded with new, unwanted, pump-and-dump _crap_ over the past few days... I wouldn't be surprised if this were a reaction less to GME and more to randos loudly announcing the laws they were breaking
Discord, which is funded fully by "growth and engagement", aka has no real product to sell and has employed enough people & burnt too much money to not be sustainable on a $1/month/user fee (even though this would be enough to sustain the operation at scale), is now trying to appeal to potential future investors and/or their friends or business partners by banning the WSB "server".
Anyone that claims that Discord is private company and can do whatever they want, read the room.
Discord did this because they were likely afraid of negative government attention, SEC, IRS, FTC, FCC etc.
If a private company censors because it thinks that's what the government regulators want them to censor, is it really private company just doing "moderation"?
There are plenty of hard to censor systems out there. You can setup your own Mastodon node or join one with lax rules. The convenience of centralized systems currently trumps the feelings about the moderation of these platforms.
If you feel strongly about it you should go ahead, switch to a decentralized platform and get your friends to follow suit.
I doubt it's connected directly, however Discord's only current and future revenue stream is "growth and engagement", aka they don't have any real product to sell and are bound to rely on the "goodwill" of future investors.
In this case, it makes sense to try and appeal to them, even though from a purely moral point of view you could argue that the r/WSB people did nothing wrong and it's Melvin Capital (and whatever parent hedge fund is now bailing them out) who did wrong by betting more than they could afford to lose.
Religion never really disappears from us, even if we claim to be atheist. What changes is who the “high priests” are, what their revelations reveal, and of course what we worship.
I notice certain pattern among some internet communities.
Extreme hype / popularity around a community, followed by degeneration (or increased visibility of prior degeneracy) of that community, followed by bans and/or deplatforming. Off the top of my head FatPeopleHate, TheDonald, and recently Parler are prior examples, I bet there are others though.
WallStreetBets seems like it's heading down a similar path. In fact, I bet a lot of the people in these communities overlap, though I have no proof.
2 of those examples are entirely political and manipulated instances.
The Donald was quarantined and moved out of site (not outright banned) under accusations of wanting to harm police (which was out of character considering all the our boys in blue memes). Then they were slowly destroyed, mods replaced and finally banned. In the meantime, dozens of subs called for death of cops before, during and after BLM and nothing happened.
Parler was a twitter competitor and number 1 at that. The coordinated assault on it using moderation as an excuse was simply atrocious and hypocritical knowing what we know of Facebook and Twitter as tools for coordination and crime enablement.
You're perpetuating the good vs bad narrative. Convenient, but false.
I'm guessing: probability estimates. Realistically speaking, they had every opportunity to enact this ban before, and freedom to do so after the #gamestonk bonanza dies down. So why act now?
Realistically speaking those particular forums weren't major news stories and flooded with new users (many of them not working for hedge funds!) who don't like what they see before.
From the point of view of someone with no stake in the outcome, the possibility some WSB regulars' strategy for cashing out their profits was based around these newbies being encouraged to buy as much GSE as possible probably isn't an argument in favour of delaying action
So rules are only enforced when things are in the news?
> the possibility some WSB regulars' strategy for cashing out their profits was based around these newbies being encouraged to buy as much GSE as possible probably isn't an argument in favour of delaying action
That argument would make sense if the justification of the ban had been about legality, not use of language. If it's about use of language then it's not relevant.
> So rules are only enforced when things are in the news?
Sure, punitive sanctions are more likely to be taken when the volume of complaints goes up, the trolling goes up and the forum ceases to be an insider's club and starts being representative of how your platform is perceived by the general public. That's been the case for every platform ever and particularly recently, with no conspiracies involving Wall St bribery required.
> That argument would make sense if the justification of the ban had been about legality, not use of language. If it's about use of language then it's not relevant.
It's an obvious retort to the suggestion Discord could have delayed enforcement action until after it blew over [if they weren't in cahoots with Wall St]. The only reason to delay when they're getting complaints now is to help one set of their users unload financial positions onto another, so keeping it open until that happens shouldn't be a consideration precisely because it's irrelevant to their stated reason for the ban.
(I mean, I'm sure Discord had internal discussions about the legal liability of [not] taking action whilst people pumped stocks too, but the answer was likely 'none whatsoever, do whatever you think is best for your reputation')
Did you're read the article, and the statement Discord put out? I think the stated reason is the believable.
> Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
I think at this point every single unpopular or questionable action made by an institution is going to go with a "it's to prevent hate/discrimination" justification. It's an easy way to get a credulous mob on your side; you can always nutpick random examples; and if someone argues against it they just prove they're one of the racists/whatever.
I mean your comment is based on the assumption that hate speech doesn't happen online. in my experience, places like discord and a bunch of subreddits are sweltering with it. it is not surprising at all that something that blew up as fast as this had trouble moderating hate speech out and became a host for it.
I think he’s saying you don’t ban the entire room just because some of the people say naughty words. And also why is someone deciding for me how much risk I can take? Just let me be exposed to hateful speech, I think I can handle it, and if not I can leave. It’s not like they can argue that hearing bad language will overflow their hospital and thus I must be on lockdown just in case.
Nobody disputes that they have the right to make that choice. That doesn't mean it's the right choice.
If your entire justification for something boils down to "I'm technically allowed to do this" it should be pretty obvious that you're doing something shitty.
> I mean your comment is based on the assumption that hate speech doesn't happen online.
How so? "Institutions will publicly blame hate speech as an excuse to do things they wanted to do otherwise" in no way requires an assumption that "hate speech doesn't exist on the internet."
Selective enforcement of laws is an old strategy to legally discriminate. It has been used many times to discriminate against blacks. What makes you think it can't be used to discriminate against other groups, like for example r/WallStreetBets?
Of course we can't say for sure. But at the same time we can't say for sure that specific policemen were actually racist when they attacked black people, or if they would do the same thing against white people in similar situation. You can find statistical patterns there, but similarly you can also find statistical patterns that certain groups on message boards gets banned for less than certain other groups.
The discord for WSB was a bit more than just ablest slurs but the timing of this is just a bad business move unless there's more to it. It doesn't make any real sense from a liability aspect unless they were going to plan some kind of insurrection against the government... you can just as easily ban them for this same reason "multiple warnings" next week. There had to have been external pressure on someone higher up or someone with a stake in the game.
Yeah. I’m no fan of Wall Street but there is definitely a lot of rabid vitriol around, for example, Citron, and I really would not be surprised if people were stepping over the line and calling for violence.
You can take almost any discord down for this, and they often do if it gets reported enough times. In this case it got enough attention so they enforced the rules.
They can host their own matrix server... It's not that hard. Then they won't have to whine about deplatforming. When will they learn? Companies aren't your friends: the bottom line is.
If they wanted to have an anonymous server, they could host it on I2P and provide instructions on how to connect.
I have put together this new forum/communiy website where we could talk without being censored by reddit or other political interests. I know it is a small efort to create a new account, and start a conversation, but in a very short period of time, we will be free forever. Please share and bring all your friends. Enough is enough, we need to be in control of our lives and ideas.
I argue it was another issue. The community got too big for discord to handle as of now. My iPad app got completely unresponsive and I could not use discord anymore at all. I assume similar situations depending on the clients.
I hope that those bans will reveal to more people, that Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and, now, Discord are rotten platforms. Hopefully that will create enough demand to let truly free competitors rise up.
Truly "free" competitors financed by VC that will certainly not lean on them the moment one of their financial buddies starts loosing money to people talking on their "free" platforms? I don't see it. And in the current market I don't see where else the money should come from.
This is exactly why I think we’re in late stage capitalism. The economy has become so toxic that an army of retail investors has to yolo their money to try to realize an economic advantage in their lives. When retail investors finally do find a crack in the economic system and make some money, the regulatory body that never cared about the banks and their fraud in 2008, and the corporate enterprises that didn’t broadcast occupy Wall Street, all turn around and try to stop the momentum of WSB. The hypocrisy of it all is unbelievable.
> The economy has become so toxic that an army of retail investors has to yolo their money to try to realize an economic advantage in their lives.
"has to"? really? I mean, that is quite the extreme claim.
I hope you have some evidence for me that there was no way that these could get any economic advantage in their lives without basically pissing their money away pumping a stock up way above any value that makes sense in a game of hot potato where someone is going to lose out because the price just makes no sense. I will be waiting.
I mean some might say having the money to pull this in the first place is some manner of economic advantage. But I guess not the kind of people who think they are entitled to be wealthy in a reality where being destitute and improvised is the normal state in nature if you have more than 7 billion people, and anything else took thousands of years of human development.
I wonder if we've entered an new part of history with regard to moderation and enforcement of rules online.
I disliked Trump, parler and the kind of alt-right shit you could find on Twitter, but by using their right to ban anyone, I think Facebook and Twitter showed that there was no repercussion to censoring/deplatforming users that did not align with their internal values and now we will see those events become much more common as companies become risk averse with regard to the kind of content they host.
This thread might have the most downvoted comments I have ever seen here. It’s massively polarising. Discord, Reddit and freedom of speech - a potent brew.
I said this before [0] and will say it again: The tech community will some day regret wielding this kind of power.
It's about loss of trust, which is, perhaps, one of the most delicate things in the universe.
Now everyone in the world knows, in no uncertain terms, that your person, business, website, cause, discussion board, advertising capabilities, email, online documents and tools can evaporate and be taken away and shut down, with you and your business destroyed overnight.
That's the world we live in today.
This, BTW, has nothing whatsoever to do with politics. WSB was not about politics.
I thought this GME "event" might result in much-needed introspection and changes in the financial community. If you didn't catch Chamath Palihapitiya's interview on CNBC's "Halftime Report" today you should take the time to watch it. I couldn't find the full interview (easily 20 to 30 minutes long) or I would have posted a link (this is the closest I found [1]). He clearly goes over some of what he thinks might have motivated the GME event. I agree with quite a bit, if not all, of what he said.
Part of me hopes that folks now cutoff from WSB will revolt against this and continue on their mission.
Full disclosure: I hold non-directional positions on GME. In English, I make money whether it goes up or down...so I don't care which way it goes.
BTW #2: This isn't to say that such things as porn and other online conducts and content might not be in a range between objectionable to net-negative to criminal in different parts of the world. The issue is with platforms placing themselves in the position of being arbitrers of what's purity, values, truth and righteousness. If that's what they want to be they need to be financially and legally responsible for what they do not moderate. We have laws to deal with the criminal elements among us.
BTW #3: (sorry for the edits). This is also a case of famous Martin Niemöller poem [2]:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
Everyone was thrilled when they came for Trump and Parler. Now they are coming for someone else. The question is: Who's next and where does it end?
Is there a resource I can read or a video I can watch that can give an overview of what's going on here? I keep seeing articles about WSB, Gamestop and the market. But I don't quite understand what is going on and why.
TLDR the crumbs noticed some major shorts put in by big hedge fund so they started buying up the stock to drive up the value causing the hedge fund to risk losing multiple billions of dollars on the short, it went viral and here we are. Don’t quote me on this but I think the shorts “activate” on Friday.
I think the point is: If a pro-CCP (genocide, suppression of fundamental human rights) subreddit can exist, then perhaps a subreddit that discusses stocks can exist.
For the most part it’s just a sub Reddit of western hating people trying to push propaganda, but if you dig through it and it’s comments there’s some pretty negative stuff that would be removed from Facebook Twitter and YouTube. There was one thread talking about the Uyghurs being criminals and that they should be “killed off like the Jews”. Which is pretty sick IMO. That alone should be reason enough to have that sub Reddit removed.
I'm really curious in how much money was needed to pump the price the stock up this much. If it's relatively little, it really points to a flaw in the stock market system.
They never said completely or 100% in CNBC or other press, so WSB are alleging that they only closed some low percentage of their positions, which makes sense mathematically. Closing out ALL the shorts at $300-ish/stock (closing time) would be disastrous to any fund, with the shorts predicated on last months' Gamestop prices of around a single digit.
Disclaimer: I do not have a position on Gamestop or any other US stocks.
This is why I keep ringing the bell of open standards and protocols. This is why I still use IRC in 2021. This is why federation matters. Stop putting your eggs in someone else's corporate basket. Don't be duped by sparkly marketing and polish! You're being had!
So WSB's Discord guild gets banned for racism right as this entire fiasco is going on, yet the r/conservative Discord guild has had direct racism in it involving hundreds of users and moderator participation and that server is not touched. Makes sense.
The precedent was set with proTrump groups and people.
Any group or person who attracts negative attention must go.
Not worth the business risk.
Politicians are eager to make even apolitical issues partisan. The outrage driven media is happy to launder and legitimize retoric into fake news. Internet mobs are quick to follow.
Standing for principle will hurt your business and ruin your name.
Discord and reddit are private companies, and they have no obligation to let you use their services. They can kick you out for any or no reason, with or without any recourse available to you. If you don't like it go make your own reddit and discord.
Remember: Parler tried “making their own X”. They were taken offline by a concerted effort at every level, despite the fact that a large portion of the capitol protests were organized on Facebook and YouTube.
Anyone who’s ever been an activist for long enough knows that the censorship that silenced your enemies will eventually silence you.
Social media is about to take the same trajectory that MP3s once did. Just as we saw the evolution of Napster and IRC trading, the RIAA takedowns, the rise of BitTorrent, and the eventual emergence of streaming services, I believe we will see a similar trajectory with social media and free speech:
1. Technology enables new social phenomena that subvert the status quo.
2. Corporations move to combat these phenomena <--- we are here now
3. New technology to subvert these controls
4. Industry faces reckoning and embraces the new technology, losing some profit but avoiding a complete loss of control.
We need the complete loss of control. Corporations control entirely too much of American, and really, worldwide, life as it is. We can't give this one to them. Its too important. The ability to freely communicate ideas, even in vulgar, poorly considered ways, is too important and too fundamental to humanity to be allowed to be controlled.
To quote Picard, "The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!"
I was once like you, but. Doesn't it seem to you like something is fundamentally worse about politics now than it was 20 years ago? Isn't it true that people are more disconnected now than they have been in the past 50 years and institutions like clubs and political organizations reduced to merely a place to send money. Obviously the causes of this are varied (for one thing social media is way newer than 20 years), but doesn't it seem likely to you that social media and maybe particularly recommender systems are part of the problem. Society seems like a much more fragile thing than I'd imagined 5 years ago. I'm not ready to throw out all the gatekeepers, they've been part of what kept this boat floating up to now
I think that is just the normal 'getting older' syndrome. We all just grew up and for some reason life isn't as nice as it was when we were kids and didn't read the news. We now imagine the world has turned dark and evil, but in reality we just all have jobs and the news now matters.
That seems possible, but literally half of all presidential impeachments have targeted trump Trump. Bowling Alone came out when I was a kid, but I don't have any reason to think that it's conclusion that there has been a statistically measurable decline in the social life of Americans is wrong or stopped. Interesting one of the more likely candidates for the cause it comes up with was TV. There are also statistics backing up the notion that politics has become more polarized relatively recently [1]. And like while new things are always happening the storming of the capital was definitely not something that's happened before. I think this is just a blip on generally upward journey and I could be convinced it has nothing to do with social media or the internet, but the blip is definitely a thing
Social media opened people's eyes to just how many different points of views there are on any given issue in the world. In the 90s or 00's, there was only 1-2 consensus views pushed by media.
Obviously its going to be a bumpy ride as the whole of society suddenly has to learn to cope with so many views, learn the critical thinking it takes to grapple with false information, learn who is trustworthy and who is not etc. but in the long run we will be much much better off for it. This is merely what society wide growth looks like - its not going to be a straight line up. Pulling the plug on that is deeply, deeply wrong no matter how scary it seems.
Some of the other issues like disconnection are amplified by existing institutions. In the 60s or 70s, a single working person could provide for an entire family. Now, most households have both parents working to provide barely the same standard of living or lower. When the vast majority of your time is directed into work by economic necessity, of course there is little time left for socializing or anything else. Don't believe the bullshit that it is somehow social media's fault. The trend of disconnection goes longer, and it has just as much to do (or much more IMO) with no free time, no money, stress and insular urban planning.
The institutions are dying because they are ineffective or do not serve the public and have been for far too long. How is it that we had almost a year to prepare for a plan to distribute vaccines but we found out there is none now? How is is that corporations lobby for and routinely pass laws that hurt people? How is it that the health insurance industry still exists and causes millions of deaths when most other countries have lower costs AND better outcomes with socialized healthcare? How is that the central banks are now printing so much money that it will devalue all peoples personal savings by 10-20% over the years without really explaining thats what they are doing, without any approval? How can you keep desperately clinging to some illusion that institutions safeguard society when every institution is failing so badly?
Social media is just the evil boogieman media loves to blame for every modern problem, when in fact it only surfaces the problems that have always existed but been completely ignored by traditional media. Heck even the problem of people being easily fooled by fake news is a reflection of how education completely fails to teach critical thinking. The institutions have failed us all for FAR too long - they cannot be reformed. Burn them down and build new ones.
> Obviously its going to be a bumpy ride as the whole of society suddenly has to learn to cope with so many views, learn the critical thinking it takes to grapple with false information, learn who is trustworthy and who is not etc. but in the long run we will be much much better off for it. This is merely what society wide growth looks like - its not going to be a straight line up. Pulling the plug on that is deeply, deeply wrong no matter how scary it seems.
Why, what makes you think that nurturing more viewpoints leads better outcomes? You've just agreed with me that recent experience tends to say it doesn't. Why do you think that part of the adaptation to this new world we find ourselves in might not be a bit more control. I think exposure to views is fine, but it seems likely to me that social media doesn't just expose it converts. It gives people the impression that their niche viewpoint is widely supported and our brains are hardwired to go with consensus so when presented with one they hop on, but because it fragments that consensus we're left with hundreds of fractions each lapping up a nice densely connected graph of agreement.
On institutional failure. I agree that institutions have failed us. It's hard to look around and argue, but not all institutions and not all the way. The vaccine is getting out. The US is in top handful of countries in terms of distribution and well ahead in terms of total doses administered. While the death of the single provider household is partially to blame Bowling Alone a book about the decline in social capital in the US credits a lot of the fault with TV with some interesting natural experiments to back it up (it came out in 2000 so social media wasn't really a thing yet). Burning institutions to the ground basically never happens and is incredibly destructive when it does. Like great leap forward levels of destructive. I for one am not ready for that to happen.
Well it does lead to better outcomes for me and lots of people I know who are super happy things like Twitter exist. If you use Twitter to follow cool people and learn stuff, its incredible how much you can learn and much your life can change. If you use it as a normie and get sucked into the endless political drama, it sucks.
Thanks to WSB, I learned how to make tons of money and a lot of interesting stuff about how markets, businesses and the world really work. Stuff you could never, ever learn anywhere else unless you really worked at wall street. Thanks to Twitter I learned to aim higher and that weird people like me often do great things and can be happy. Also lots of weird niche information that is never found anywhere else.
When I look at the way normal people use social media, there is one common thread that they just don't f**ing understand - STOP USING IT to read about politics. Endlessly debating or reading about politics online does not affect any change in the world whatsoever. Its a pointless addiction that makes you unhappy, much like smoking. People have forgotten how much more there is to media besides freaking politics. The younger generation already understands this - its only millennials who have forgotten there is media beyond politics, aging at the outgroup and all manner of bullshit to make you believe the world is ending. Its just a ploy for eyeballs, nothing more.
I think older people will eventually learn the same stuff I did and be better off for it. I don't believe in paternalism one bit. I was raised by overprotective parents and it simply does not work. You have to learn to fend for yourself, including how to think for yourself in this world, the sooner the better. The younger generation already grew up in this environment and understands all of that intuitively, they don't need any rules to protect them from being brainwashed by the internets!!11!!
Also it personally just sucks to have opportunities taken away because some people can't handle them. Anything with high reward is inherently high risk. It sucks that some people just don't get that, but that line of thinking is why opportunities on every axis systematically disappear from the middle class. Can't invest in early stage companies unless you're an accredited investor with $1M+, can't use social media because some people can't handle it, maybe we should ban driving too because some people crash their cars, ban podcasts because some people get radicalized by listening to the wrong ones. The end of that road is permanent social immobility and a very boring life.
Facebook was founded in 2004; Myspace in 2003; Friendster in 2003; Livejournal in 1999; Blogger in 1999. All of those are social media. It's only the recommendation algorithms with engagement-optimizing feedback loops that are newer. It should not surprise anybody that these have become runaway AIs.
> Doesn't it seem to you like something is fundamentally worse about politics now than it was 20 years ago?
Yeah, but this has nothing to do with social media in my estimation. It has everything to do with the elites of the world, but in particular, America, capturing most of the wealth that gets generated.
You can't have a middle class without an enormous amount of people making a healthy sum of money. In an ever-increasing desire to capture more of that wealth, there's were we ended up. Naturally the elites that are smart enough to realize this don't care, because they won't have to bear the consequences of these actions. They'll be dead and gone by the time it degenerates into a real problem, or they just expect to move to another nation, set up shop there, and repeat the cycle.
This is where a lot of people lose the plot. Its not a political problem - its made to look that way because that keeps scrutiny off the fact that its a financial problem. 47% of Americans living in poverty. Half the citizens of the richest nation in the world, live in poverty. That's laughable.
And if everyone's busy being gainfully employed, living a mostly fulfilling life, they don't have time to LARP as a MAGA Shaman. They're busy working, grilling some hamburgers and hotdogs and ribs in the backyard, drinking a cold beer while the kids play in the pool, and the reason I can tell you that's what they're doing, is because that's what me and mine do most weekends. I don't have time to go to D.C. and act like a jackass... when I'm not busy working, I'm busy with my hobby of building furniture, and when I'm not busy doing that, I'm in the gym, and when I'm not busy doing that, I'm off doing other shit.
But all that stuff is only possible if you've got a middle class salary. And the middle class has been asked to pay more than they can reasonably fork over, for entirely too long. Hard to take seriously the compliant of a multi-millionaire about the state of her tax bill of $4.8 million on her $11 million yearly salary, because scale matters. She can live in a $1m a year apartment in NYC, send her kids to private school that costs $40,000/yr, each, and still have, literally, millions left over for every thing else.
Meanwhile, the husband and wife making $60,000 a year as a nurse and $80,000 a year as an engineer end up with around $90,000 after taxes, if they're lucky. $7,500 a month. Two decent cars - $1000/mo. $2000/mo for a modest house in a decent part of town. Gotta throw a little something into savings, retirement, investment, etc., so knock out another $500. $1500 if they're really smart. Now we're down to $3000 and we haven't gotten to cell phones, Internet, car insurance, etc.
It adds up, and fast.
Maybe I'm just a little more jaded than you are... maybe I'm just old, and with age comes a lot of clarity about just how the world works. I'm angry, but I'm angry for the kids, not me. They're going to really bear the brunt of this, and it isn't just "unfair", its unconscionable.
Parler was explicitly unmoderated by choice and hate speech was its selling point. You’ll have a hard time finding a) a service provider willing to tolerate that and b) much public sympathy for the service promoting hate.
Yet it called into question freedom of speech.
Same thing today with WSB, but the focus is clearly not hate speech (even if Discord says so). I find today’s bans way more objectionable than Parler, yet I still cannot reason why people truly believe that any service providers owes it to us a 1st Amendment platform. Discord and Reddit are free to select whatever content they find palatable.
It sucks because I found WSB entertaining, but no one here should be mixing up Big Tech with the 1st Amendment.
And if you intentionally want to have content that is objectionable, putting it on AWS seems like an awful idea. That's how Sci-Hub and TPB have managed to stick around for decades, and they've shown censorship on the internet isn't really a thing. God knows how many powerful forces have tried to censor them, to no avail.
While I agree that in some ways this is worse than the Parler case, it also is a free service that costs Discord a ton of money, especially with the hundreds of people constantly hanging out in voice chat [0]. A ventrilo server of that size would probably cost upwards of $100 a month [1]. So I'm not surprised with Discord wanting to enforce their ToS more readily than AWS who was actually making good money out of Parler.
The Discord server in question claims "we got over 1,000 server boosts" [0]. That's Discord's monetization scheme, a sort of server-specific patreon subscription that users opt into, to collectively unlock features for that server specifically.
Judging by the going rate for "server boosts", Discord would have easily had $5,000 a month in revenue tied to that server [1].
There were over 1000 sever boosts mentioned. It depends on the timeframe and how they got the boosts, but a single boost seems to cost at least $4 and can be up to $6.
>Parler was explicitly unmoderated by choice and hate speech was its selling point.
It's worse than unmoderated. That would imply some sort of free speech zone where anything goes, but in reality any sort of left leaning stance will quickly get you banned.
The revolution always devours its children. One of my favorite aphorisms is:
>Don't put your faith in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.
What happened to Georges Danton, the thunderous voice of the early French Revolution? How about Toussaint L'ouverture, avenger of the New World? Even Simon Bolivar and Manuela Saenz left behind a fractious group of nation-states.
The US is kind of an aberration in that regard, but even Ben Franklin cautioned that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
The funny thing is, if you extend that metaphor to big tech companies like FAANGs, then they would be the early revolutionaries who are about to get devoured. And that metaphor would fall apart quickly, because those companies have never professed to be revolutionary harbingers of a new and improved world.
It's absolutely true that unpopular minorities (of whatever kind) should be able to talk. It's also absolutely true that virality can create dangerous situations which are difficult to control.
Instead of banning, which I agree has problems, I favor putting questionable communities in a 'slow mode' where people need to wait to join them (and maybe communications within the community are delayed). Then, in 5 or 10 or 15 days, you can see if the community is still 'a problem' (whatever that means in this situation) and if greater moderation is required. The idea is to preserve communities that build over time, give admins time to make decisions, and highlight the hard questions that need to be answered by platforms.
Maybe, but this isn't exactly a new fear. Right or wrong a lot of how for example the US constitution was setup was explicitly about limiting the power of a populist.
But also these discussions aren't really about the government. Full stop the government shouldn't be able to shut sites like parlor down, but part of how society works is by consensus forming and in my opinion social networks really have messed this up. FB and the other big players seem to be realizing this and trying to do better (not sure if they're succeeding), but if other players want to make it harder for this breakdown to happen I say all power to them.
Luckily someone else has already "made your own Discord" for us, and it's called Matrix.
It's E2EE and self-hosted, so unless you got snitches in your community that tattle to your hosting provider and then they go above-and-beyond and take action, you should be golden.
It's not impossible or difficult to self host. To build your own ISP is. Not a fair comparison.
Yes believe it or not there was a world where you could host your own hardware! But you sold out then, and now you're mad about it. Womp womp. We warned you.
Your single blade on a rack isn't going to stand up against non-stop ddos attacks. That requires ISP level infrastructure. That's why companies like Cloudflare are publicly listed.
From the wiki "Cloudflare was created in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn.[2] It received media attention in June 2011 for providing security services to the website of LulzSec, a black hat hacking group.[3]"
> Womp womp. We warned you.
Your multiple personalities are seeking vengeance on free speech because.. you wanted self hosted hardware??
If you endlessly come up with more and more excuses I'm sure you'll eventually land on needing another earth. What can you do if a meteor hits? What then! Clearly it is oppressive because there is no other earth for me to back up my beliefs and oppress others!
Ultimately you can only do what you can. But let's be honest, if you can't lift a finger to install server hardware and networking switches, how on earth can you possibly advocate for change in our society?
> Your multiple personalities are seeking vengeance on free speech because.. you wanted self hosted hardware??
Please remember HN etiquette.
You say you want free speech yet people can't even invest in your own hardware. Parlor complained but removed left wing content 24/7 - no one complained about "free speech" then. Make it make sense instead of being obvious political pandering.
> You say you want free speech yet people can't even invest in your own hardware.
We already have the hardware. A modern phone has as much computing power as an early server. Computing power isn't what's lacking, it's the permission to use it.
Will Apple and our ISP's allow p2p networking using our own hardware? Apple denied bitcoin wallets from the app store because "reasons". Many ISP's have policies against hosting servers.
The real solution to this is the decentralized web and it too can be clamped down by a handful of companies. If these companies want to act like publishers they should be treated as such.
Discord would claim its “hateful and discriminatory content” for anything in the fucked up reality we are currently living in. For instance, if you call someone retarded and a mod doesn't step in, that is considered hateful. Even though retard is in the dictionary and a widely accepted term by many people. Then saying that only retards buy the shit hedgefunds are peddling would also be considered discriminatory. I'm tired of this fucking bullshit and ready to go thru as many proxy accounts as needed to get my point across. Discord needs to go out of business or grow some balls. Everything in this world could be construed into being hateful or discriminatory if you stretch enough.
Discord isn't on your side. They're an unprofitable (so far) VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client. They're clearly trying to build a platform for PR- and ad-friendly discourse. Nobody should be surprised when weirdos get the ban.
They have expenses, but they also have a rapidly growing (YoY) revenue source. I didn't think I'd need to point out all the pieces of the puzzle.
I'm tired of getting downvoted with every post I make. I can understand when I defend freedom of speech or attack Apple or Google or China that I offend people, but it's happening all the time on totally benign posts.
It's making me cynical about the community. HN is great for information discovery and diversity of experience, but it feels like people are becoming increasingly vicious.
Showing the trademark of a technology they are using in the product, for the purposes of identification of said technology does not count as advertising. According to your reasoning, they would have to say "we use some other company's noise reduction". And no, the chat view (or the voice chat view) does not show the Krisp logo continuously.
They showed the trademark very prominently and that must be because they had a deal. We give you noise reduction, you give us visibility. That is an advertising contract.
Their place, their rules. I see the continuing belief you can do anything on somebody’s else turf. Wallstreet bets could pretty much move to 4chan if they value their 4chan behavior this greatly.
But you are both right. Ever had a good free debate about anything when the other side of the debate held their ears and screamed their opinion full blast?
The best and most free debates I ever had happened in environments where I knew that I was allowed to be wrong without them holding it against me.
As a European I always thought free speech was very much an American thing. In the past years I realised that debates are lead much more freely here than in the US, because your debates constantly go onto a red vs blue track. That means speakers have to reflect that constantly and signal to everybody else where they stand and which team they like.
The truth is, both environment factors into free speech and every society has to strike a balance.
> The truth is, both environment factors into free speech and every society has to strike a balance.
This, I agree with. But the point I'm trying to make is that this cuts both ways. Alice has every right to make her point however she wants. Bob also has every right to not lend her his resources to amplify that. Charlie has a right to criticize Bob for denying resources, etc etc.
I note that the shoe never seems to be on the other foot — e.g., the crowd that gets angry about Discord banning hate speech is curiously quiet about the chilling effect white nationalist rallies have on people of color.
I agree with what you say. If you look atthe parent comments, they both go to extremes to make a point. A big problem when it comes to discussion, is coming in with an attitude that your view is “right” and soapboxing it to the world. In any discussion their should be room for shades of grey and the respect to listen to different and (in your eyes) descending views.
How you communicate is just as important as what you wish to communicate.
Exactly. Especially when we talk about freedoms and rights it is important to recognize the collision space between the different freedoms/rights of individuals.
If one exercises their freedom of speech in certain ways one might impede the freedom of speech of others (e.g. who are objectively less free). This is one of the big differences between Europe and the US: in the US the freedom of speech of the individual (regardless of the collisions with others) is traditionally valued more, than a collective, utlitarian definition of freedom of speech which is more present in Europe.
Utilitarian freedom of speech would mean that we try to optimized for a society where everybody can speak freely even if this means cutting of some individuals that go to extremes.
Individual freedom of speech means you let everybody say what they wanna say, even if it means that the discourse of the society as a whole gets harder, muffled or destroyed.
I don't say any one of those things is better, but both have their pros and cons and we certainly need to be aware of the downsides and complexities involved when we ask ourselves what society we want to live in.
I don't think it's this simple. That interpretation of freedom of speech seems a bit literal. The point is that people should have the ability to voice their opinions, and have their voice heard if anyone wants to hear it. Since today that's done primarily through social media sites, blogs, and videos, preventing people from using those mediums is limiting their freedom of speech.
And of course I'm not saying there aren't limits to freedom of speech. There are legitimate limits. But a social media company deciding they don't want you on their platform anymore without any due process seems wrong.
I just don't buy the overly literal "this is private property and I get to decide what you're allowed to say here", when that private property is our primary medium for communication.
I agree with that in the same way that I agree with strong anti-monopolistic laws, and with the expanded understanding of de-facto monopoly where (for example) Apple/iOS is one despite billions of Android devices.
But I do not think Discord is at that level yet, while Facebook, Twitter and YouTube most definitely are.
All you can reasonably ask a normal company is that they do not act to harm society in their pursuit of profit. And they may argue that they believe the dynamic of WSB is harmful to society. I think that position in this case and for WSB is defensible, and I am yet undecided personally if I actually agree with it or not. (I do believe that WSB may grow to become clearly harmful, but I'm not sure they're there yet)
Not sure. Back in the day it was very common to buy space in a local newspaper and print messages there. The newspaper could (and would!) deny publication of auch messages arbitraily.
Living in Germany with laws that ban you from displaying Nazi insignia or spouting certain phrases in public, I don't really believe in the whole "if we ban a certain thing there is a slippery slope and suddenly everyhing is banned". German society more or less collectively decided that tolerance for the intolerant is stupid and did something about it.
This might seem a little extrem from an US perspective, but just like that the prudeness of US society seems extreme to us Europeans. You talk about freedom of speech and censor every female nipple there is? Really?
What we will and won't tolerate in public forums is a mirror of our respective societies and values. And there is always something we will have to ban or at least frown uppon. E.g. even in the US child molesters won't be very able to talk about how their believes are okay etc.
And because all out free speech is destructive we have to strike a balance somewhere inbetween disincentivising people who use free speech to get rid of it and not turning into thought police.
Seen from a German perspective the US is so polarized that the polarization alone disencourages most people from leading a free and meaningful discourse.
I don’t really get it. Why do we keep telling people that it is support worthy to engage in name calling? Is it alright to let kids call teachers names at school? “This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit!” Maybe that’s ok now since Trump made it acceptable but it certainly wasn’t considered to be appropriate for a long time. It’s not free speech, it’s derogatory speech (for either side of those comparisons). So what changed?
“Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” -- Lenny Bruce
I've never really understood the drive to banish profanity or insults. The purpose of language is to communicate ideas and I see no reason why it should be unacceptable for someone to express their disapproval at a situation or individual in the succinct way that profanity provides.
If anything profanity is far more mundane than the kinds of words a particularly clever person can string together to convey a heinous idea.
> “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” -- Lenny Bruce
That's a comedian being funny and cool. The right to say "fuck the government" isn't important. I'd rather keep the de facto right criticize the government substantively, which may de jure exist, but is drowned in the de facto drivel.
Profanity matters. It motivates people. Not everyone has the time to attend your 1 hour TED talk. You tell them “FUCK WALL STREET” and you got a crowd ready to take down the traders. Publishing a position paper on the potential negative impacts of naked short selling while taking into account the views and interests of all stake holders ... cool. But you’re not motivating people with that.
Yeah, that's the problem. Too many people swayed by cheap laughs and the thrill of anger. Thus the failed insurrection earlier this year. It's hard to predict what'll be fun this week.
> Not everyone has the time to attend your 1 hour TED talk.
I guess we should package up the science into more concise bits. How about 5 minutes instead of 1 hour?
lol you're saying that people stormed the capitol because of profanity?
This reminds me of a time shortly after 9/11 when an agitated old man chased my friend for a block while screaming "People like you caused 9/11" just because he stole a jack in the box mascot head car antenna topper.
> lol ... an agitated old man chased my friend for a block while screaming
On the second thought, this makes me sad. I hope someday I'll be an old man living among friends, instead of watching my neighborhood devolve. It's all perspective, of course. I've been the hipster, now I'm the gentrifier. Still, one can feel the pain of that old man.
Obviously, your choice of words becomes limited if you refrain from using offensive language. And given our predisposition towards rage and anger to give attention this seems like an important “tool” to have at your disposal.
But as the incentives stand right now, accepting this kind of behavior is likely to trigger a race to the bottom as more and more speech get’s radicalized (in either direction) as people realize it is more powerful and can grab people more easily. We see this in the republican party. We need to find stop lines for this madness and find a somewhat stable equilibrium. Some places might be overreaching in moderation but this is to be expected as it’s difficult to find the right line as we don’t really have an understanding of the “proper” balance yet.
And my point is really that I am not sure what triggered this need for redress in the first place. Why is it so important to use spiteful language now? Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Why should we support this shift?
> Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place?
Who is "we"? It was just some Discord server. No one forces you to be a part of it. And they're not even political. It's stock market, so obviously people will get emotional.
I was referring to the general attitude of one of the parent comments which was making a statement about supporting speech with derogatory terms on principle.
In this instance, I generally agree that I don’t think it is a prime example of things that need to be “shut down”. It’s probably a borderline case. But if discords terms of service disallow this type of language, I think it’s a good sign that they try to stand by it and apply it also to cases that are not clearly (also) politically motivated. If it’s about how to talk rather than what you say this is what you would expect to see.
All my comments point to this renegotiation of norms and obviously tough and contentious calls will have to be made.
I support that kind of speech. Not the teacher example, but if it happens in some voluntary gathering, I really can't see why not. Like I said, people sometimes get emotional and you can't expect from everyone to stay calm no matter what. It's better to vent frustrations with words than doing something stupid and irresponsible.
> Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place?
I feel like there's a disconnect. Movies may not depict it so, but curses and profanity have always been a part of language. So the "shift" is happening in the opposite direction the way I see it.
I think your example highlights exactly what people are reacting to.
School is an environment where teachers have broad authority and try to use it to create a safe space to protect children from hurtful speech. Many people react strongly to the application of this power dynamic to adult interactions.
Derogatory speech has always been free speech, but the places where people speak are becoming more visible, and organizations are becoming more active in expanding safe spaces. Derogatory speech is probably the lowest it has ever been, but more heard than it has ever been, and more scrutinized than it has ever been.
So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders? Are you sure about that? To be honest, I don’t see it. If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms. The problem might be that they CAN’T but then it’s a problem of basic education and training rather than opposition.
And I would argue the reverse to your point regarding free speech. More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. People are trying to justify more things and other people are pushing back trying to uphold formerly established civil norms about how to say or not to say things under free speech. It’s really a plot of irony.
The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. It’s really difficult to make objective judgements on this matter (also for me).
> So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders?
It was just in general, but even in this case, yes, there are two sides opposed to each other. One happens to be more influential, powerful and with more money behind it, and the underdog is the wallstreetbets people.
> If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms.
I guess so, but if you have thousands of people in a single server, it's virtually impossible to keep everyone calm, especially in situations such as this one, where large sums of money are involved. Also you'll have bad actors who are trying to make it look bad on purpose so they get shut down. This is Discord and people actually use this kind of tactics there.
> More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech.
Speaking strictly about the USA, this is just factually incorrect. Racism, homofobia etc. used to be fine not that long ago. And legally it's still protected under the 1A. But then it became socially unacceptable and from that point more and more speech started to become "not free". This year questioning the integrity of the elections became a fireable offense and as I found out today - anything offensive.
> The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes.
Regarding the profits, for sure, I imagine. But politically this is an apolitical "movement", you will find socialists, libertarians, nationalists and anything in between that support their efforts. I guess it really united people, in a way.
> This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit
This was always acceptable (and even common) as long as no teacher heard it. Not sure what Trump has to do with it. Maybe it is different in america, I hear that they are very puritan over there.
If you let people use their freedom of speech to be anti-free-speech we will end up with a society that does not have this freedom. This is the logic on why licenses like the GPL were created, restrict some freedoms in order to keep the rest.
discord is filled with 'snowflakes' (apologies if that seems insulting)
I'm only a sample of 1 but on IRC I never felt surrounded by trigger happy mods. on discord I got regularly kicked without notice for some not even heated argument.
if I extrapolate, this side of the web is becoming a way for people to craft tiny bubbles to fit their own little views on life.
Yeah it might be a matter of culture/maturity/experience. But so far the majority of servers I ended up on [1] were filled with people that had this mentality trait. It was unsettling.
[1] topics could be from science, to collapse, to dev ..
Any on-line venue is a place where mods and admins make the rules. You know them before going in. Their place, their rules. It’s the same when going into any bar. Some bars may allow rowdy behavior, others have strict measures.
In such places speech is a privilege and not a right.
The only remarkable thing here in this article is the size of the discord. The problem with huge size is that the amplification effect is a lot bigger and that tends to get noticed. In the real world you don’t have bars with tens of thousands of guests.
The last line you mention is true-ish if said rather derogatory, but if you value freedom of speech, you can also extrapolate that everyone has a right on their view of life, nothing little about it.
The problem that is not being mentioned is cause and effect. If your view on life is basically violent and emotional, that helps nothing when it comes to public discourse. In all my years when I was a mod on IRC, never did name calling or derogatory names further an argument or improve communication, except when we were maybe discussing the topic itself.
To reuse your bar analogy. I came in and said 'dont you think the tea is not warm enough' owner said 'uhh nooo' I said 'really, I never drank tea that cold, i think it's a lot better warmer' when suddenly the chair was removed from behind and I was thrown out.
Maybe I didn't see the sign 'no complaints about tea temperature allowed in here or you will be removed asap' but I found the whole ordeal ridiculously immature.
If that truly is the case, then I should stand corrected. Thing is, I just looked at the responses on WSB, and “immature” would probably describe the comments really well. I didn’t see any arguments or actual coherent speech, to what is probably a lot of in-crowd signals / meme-ing.
What I am looking forward though is a good in-depth review of what happened, preferably from a neutral party. Because there seem to be politics involved as well (as in wall street influencing)
Yup, I was permabanned from rockpapershotgun for arguing against rootkit multiplayer anti-cheat software and asking that punkbuster, VAC and their equivalents should be regularly reviewed and scrutinized. I didn't use a single swear word. No one reviews anticheat.
Have you ever read the Discord ToS and the partnered server community guidelines? I did read the latter the first time I used the word "retarded" in a self-deprecating manner on a partnered server and was called out for it. The rules are
written in a way that pretty much lets users say anything within the boundaries of the law, but the individual server owners and moderators can be held responsible for not moderating that content.
In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.
I've seen server moderators removing completely legit messages afterwards and they've openly admitted that they can't risk someone perusing the chat history for ToS breaches, screenshotting individual lines of text and sending them to Discord abuse team, because Discord does not care about context, only actual words (see their anti-reclamation policy - even black hip-hop artists have been deplatformed for using the well known mother of all bad words in a positive context).
I didn't have discord level issues. I didn't know about the long term history legal issues. But in my case there was none of that, only users enforcing their own rules, or having trouble dealing with disagreeing viewpoints. Setting rules is fine on paper but oddly people used to have less rules and less desire to enforce anything back in the days.
On a hundred of IRC channels (which had mods) over many years I had like 3 such interactions (and I have to flex to remember). On discord it was 50% in a month.
discord make people very very attached to their virtual space. They craft it, install emojis, makes per room rules, lots of decisions .. it changes how you connect with others, very defensive by nature.
> In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.
This only applies to partnered and/or verified guilds. All other guilds are only checked on user complaints and otherwise unmoderated (bar the explicit content filter, that applies at the gateway level, before the event gets propagated) by Discord staff.
The problem for you is that you can make the exactly same argument without the words that people object to and it will upset no one and lie unmoderated.
You're being moderated for rudeness and not your opinion.
I'm not convinced. I think that gives discord and others an easy excuse to censor people or communities they don't want on their platform, but I just don't buy that their real objection was rudeness.
This is an effective excuse because not many will come to the defense of socially unacceptable behavior. Look no further than this thread for examples of that.
Considering that Discord has a lot of gaming communities with underaged people, I can see the need for heavy moderation wrt language that tend to be used for cyberbullying. Whether or not just deleting the server is a good idea I disagree.
Settings up new "servers" is trivially easy and can be done without payment. You can join any number of servers with same account and retain separation (i.e. other users can not see a list of servers you are on). You can change your nickname on server-by-server basis. "Everyone" is already on Discord and by everyone here I mean every gaming community and many tech communities.
For TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble (which were the big 3 in my youth at least) you have to have different clients, you have to pay for servers, and the chat support is very rudimentary and bad. Channels aren't as easy to create and admin. Lastly they don't support inlined links/images or emojis. Which makes them just as user friendly as IRC.
Discord took what was good about Slack's UI and added on top good VoIP. It might not be perfect but it quite literally covers most what anyone could want and it scales really well. To beat it you must have 100% feature coverage + another killed feature. First part probably isn't that hard, but the second is. There needs to be a reason to install yet another communication program on your PC/tablet/phone because all of the communities wont just uproot and leave to a new platform over night.
How does Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc finance themselves? Selling data and also having subscriptions. If you pay $5/mo you get higher quality video streaming and you can use custom emojis cross the servers you visit.
The value of a network is exponential in the number of users/connections, not in the technical features available. See Voat vs Parler or old Digg vs old Reddit.
There were potential competitors back when it really didn't matter - the early 00s. Even AIM at its feature peak could do pretty much everything Discord can do now (save for some of the server organization and custom content), but only a fraction in the US had Broadband to take advantage of it.
And it wasn't written in resource-hungry Electron.
Demand wasn't there. Gaming was seen way more as "that thing nerds do" and online communities where mostly about very async forums.
Now gaming has hit main stream and is accepted by everyone. Forum concept has been dead in the water for years and everyone has moved go mobile first social medias, but none of the other social medias fill the niche of IM & VoIP.
As side note: we can gripe about Discord being electron based all we want, but that is actually a huge selling point. Discord just works on all platforms with all features. Even Linux is not some shitty after thought that has 3rd party gobbled together client that requires 10 hours of tweaking each week just to keep running. Then obviously the same code base runs on browsers.
I'm working from memory, but AIM at the peak had webcam support and a very rudimentary screen share component. I keep thinking the name of it was "AIM Share", but Googling that does not bring up mentions of it.
The discord was terribly moderated long ago. Apparently nothing changed but maybe a few more rules and auto mutes.
I don’t get offended by the ways people move their mouth or words they substitute for what they say.
If you have been around a racist, you will learn all the secret terms they use or not so secret. Go ahead and look up slang terms for light or dark skinned people in other languages.
Discord just so happened to enforce their rules at a very opportunistic time.
The WSB community calls each other a bunch of names as a form of... I don’t know, acceptance? It’s not meant to hurt. It’s a David versus Goliath mentality, the little guy, the underdog. That’s why they call each other these names.
I think it’s complicated, and that banning them is just another sad example of how sensitive the world has become to these things.
We ban accounts that take swipes at other users like that, so please omit those from your comments here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting to HN, we'd be grateful.
Your comment would have been fine without the last bit.
I agree. Small nitpick: retard in WSB context is not entirely an insult. You can swap letters and come up with trader. It’s WSBs special way of saying you belong to it’s retail trader group that does stupid bets.
This is really important context. WSB traders use words that some would consider offensive in an affectionate way. “Degenerate gambling addict” sounds terrible but it’s a compliment there.
Criticising people’s language without their context reminds me of Americans getting upset when they hear Spanish speakers say the word “black”.
WSB users are so into the argument about context that they forgot that when borrowing from another language, that language's context doesn't just vanish.
I don't think it's quite the same though, the Spanish word for black exists in an entirely different culture that isn't shaped by the words use in modern America. Whereas the WSB usage of language is a direct reaction to the context of the word. They aren't saying retard because it came up through some parallel etymology, they're saying it specifically because it's offensive.
Yeah this is just bastardized internet dialect. The word's increasing offensiveness (for good reason of course) in most of the rest of the English speaking world isn't reflected in WSB using it as a term of endearment. I call my dogs and cat the cutest shithead fuckers all the time while feeding them off my plate, sounds bad in public but in my house with my little group it's, well, pet names.
"not entirely an insult" sorry this is a lame excuse, it's offensive. it's a word used to demean no matter what context. To them its funny, it's not. typical bunch of men who need to show their hyper masculinity with insults and chants of "hold the line". are these the same people that call themselves patriouts.
go to zenomountainfarms.org if you don't understand why the use of that word is offensive
I see what you mean. I saw the subreddit with fresh eyes again. Its unnecessary, rude and demeaning to the people with learning disabilities. But I must concede they seem to be using the term to refer to trading. But what confuses me they call everyone the r-word. Who ever makes a trade on the stock market. Even themselves. Don't you see how unnecessary that is?
I didn't say it was OK, just that it was intentional. You're reading a lot more into my comments than is there. There are a lot of things in life that I don't think are OK. I also don't try to stop them.
Plenty of standup comedians use humor that I find distasteful or even offensive. I just read a book instead of watching them. Plenty of bars are frequented by people I don't like. I just go to a different bar.
No one has to visit WSB, but I'd prefer to live in a society that errs on the side of allowing people to congregate and communicate as they see fit.
As an aside, I've had to deal with two kinds of assholes in my life: people who use offensive language, and people who get offended at everything. I'd rather deal with neither, but if I had to chose, I much prefer the former.
As a moderator of a large (400k+ members) Discord, I can confirm that Discord has specifically told members of the partner program to remove words such as retard. I've never heard of a server being banned for it, but not allowing retard and the like has been a policy for more than a year now.
Because it's a public server, which means Discord feel it reflects on them as a business to be hosting hostile communities.
You can say whatever you want in a closed, private discord group. Discord isn't going to care if it's a server with a dozen users who are all close friends. It's when you go posting invite links everywhere and get a community in the thousands that Discord start taking an interest and enforcing their brand protection.
We're slipping into some alternate universe where freedom of speech is being adjusted for our safety.
It's starting with noble causes, like stemming racism and hate speech. But this is one step into a land of control where divergent opinions will be cause for deplatforming.
Sorry, you don't understand how comment threads work. They are structured like a tree so people can fork off a part of the conversation (if self contained) and discuss that. I chose to discuss the premise that being in the dictionary makes something ok. If I am discerning the premise wrong, or if its not self contained you can point out the connection with the rest of the context.
Ti generalize the expression to both genders, in Italy the pair can refer to testicles, breasts or ovaries. The point being “having significant reproductive potential”... I hope it will never be poco’d to avoid offending people that have reproductive disorders.
My point was more that what most people want to express is “guts”. But they’ll go for “balls” because it needs to be about sex and hormones, what else could it be, right ?
Huh? As someone under 40 I never remotwly had that feeling when talking to e.g. Unix greybeards or other programmers above 50.
Some of their experiences and tricks are great to learn from, some of the stuff they complain abput has been solved for a decade but they don't know it yet. I think if everybody has the feeling that we can learn from each other, we profit more from our interactions.
...they have "a pair" because they use words that as a society we've decided shouldn't be used because they're derogatory to a certain group of people?
I understood GP as talking about what is in the 'overton window' or not. You and I may have qualms about saying retard but I've worked in industries where that is not the case. I've met people who would call an unprofitable VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client telling them what is or is not acceptable to say something I wouldn't say here.
Society is not as monolithic as you think it is. "as a society we" for sure have not decided that these words should not be used or that they are derogatory. Maybe this is true for your circle of friends or for the communities that you enage in but it is not true for the wider world.
Dimwits? You mean 4chan that used media to make neutral sign look racist? Or the white supremacists that took the free advertisement and appropriated a common sign?
The only dimwits are the media companies that contributed to it.
You broke the HN guidelines egregiously with this comment. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of how bad some other comment was or you feel it was. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site to heart. We're trying hard to avoid this sort of mutual bashing on HN.
I'm going to make an argument for linguistic descriptivism. I've never once thought, in the WSB subreddit, someone calling another an "autist" or a "retard" was ever intended to harm or disrespect people with those literal issues. It's a niche audience with very specific meaning. As a linguist, I find it fascinating and aptly descriptive frankly. As a person who knows people with actual mental problems, I understand why it may be distasteful. However I strongly feel that when you enter that subreddit, the jargon is both incredibly obvious and specific.
„Retard“ has evolved and is universally regarded as an insult these days. Denying this entirely obvious fact is rather hard to square with your claim of being a linguist. The science tends to take a more descriptive approach, and to acknowledge the changing nature of language.
No it doesn't, and you have to blatantly ignore the power dynamics between groups to compare the two.
Your analogy would hold only if people with mental disabilities started trying to reclaim the discriminatory connotations of the word by using it to describe themselves.
I think there's a very obvious difference between a group reclaiming a word that has been used to marginalize them and discriminate against them (N word, Queer etc.) and people who are not part of that group using the word to mock each other - and by proxy - the group of people the term is used to mock, and perpetuating its use as a derrogatory term.
Radio edits are a thing and every rapper who uses that word finds it gets censored a lot.
And context here is people picked the terms for 4chan-humour value, and it's quite hard to argue non-autists lolling about how an instance of their behaviour is a bit like an autistic stereotype, or hehe trader is an anagram of how uninformed we think these trades are is an obvious candidate for the meaning being completely unrelated to the use of autist and retard as terms of abuse. Same as if I decide to categorise my friends using derivations of a four letter word: I'm doing so because it's a four letter word, and I don't get to play the 'but I meant it affectionately, specifically and non-literally' card if someone asks me not to swear in this establishment
I certainly don't think it's necessary for Discord to ban them, but if your jargon is chosen for edginess, you don't get to act surprised if someone decides it's too edgy.
The very reason of how words like "retard" evolve in the first
place is by people using those words outside of the standard
dictionary definition's meaning.
What I want to say is that just like there's a huge difference
in meaning between "this is shit" and "this is the shit", even
usually insulting words can be used in inoffensive ways(like
it's done on WSB) - and of course the other way around you can
call someone a "genius" and make it obvious you meant the exact
opposite.
Language is an incredibly flexible tool and every dictionary
definition or scientific description is an obsolete snapshot at
best.
> „Retard“ has evolved and is universally regarded as an insult these days. Denying this entirely obvious fact is rather hard to square with your claim of being a linguist.
This "fact" is not, in fact, a fact. GP is engaging in the act of forcing intersubjective reality - basically willing this "fact" into becoming an actual fact.
This is becoming increasingly common in discourse these days, and noticing it is the key to understanding the various non sequiturs and other abuses of logic made in arguments that try to classify random stuff as offensive. Unlike in the physical world, in the social world, if enough people are forcefully claiming something is a fact, it becomes a fact.
That's why it's even more important socially to combat such abuse of reasoning than it is in hard sciences. You can't make gravity disappear because you really believe humans are capable of levitating. But you absolutely can make acceptance, due process and individual freedoms disappear if enough people strongly insist some other people are saying the wrong things.
That's obviously incorrect. When someone on wallstreetbets says "What's up retards", they are obviously not intending to insult everyone reading it. Context matters.
It's a very convenient excuse for banning a controversial community, though. With the sea change we just had in corporate censorship, no one should be surprised.
I hope we get plausible alternatives with a more principled stand towards censorship.
I think that they are saying it's similar to how the n-word has evolved - out of the right context it's very insulting (and more) but in certain situations it's appropriate, accepted and encouraged.
The OP's explanation is correct. The word "retard" being "universally regarded as an insult these days" is just straight up not accurate - on that sub or otherwise. I don't count myself as a linguist but have learned "get around in an emergency" in a few languages and have studied the history of language a bit, and it's very common for words to absorb new meanings in different contexts.
As others have pointed out, "retard" is an anagram of "trader".
I'm curious to know what is the meaning trying to be conveyed here which would not be received negatively by people with actual autism or caring for one?
You probably recognise this scene from The Wolf of Wall Street. The text uses “degenerate”, “autist” and so on but the whole text and di Caprio’s manner strongly implies that these are positive, desirable qualities. He uses them as terms of endearment and compliments. The rest of /r/wsb is the same. Context matters.
> I've never once thought, in the WSB subreddit, someone calling another an "autist" or a "retard" was ever intended to harm or disrespect people with those literal issues.
What you said is purely annecdotal and it's a big assumption to think you know other people's thoughts and intents are.
Fact is they are popularizing hate speech to a growing audience and its not ok. Period.
Idiot, stupid, moron, immature -- these terms are all much the same as retard in their origin as a neutral clinical label. These were terms referring to impairments that patients often had through no fault of their own. Why are some of those words still acceptably used negatively in a serious fashion, while others are taboo to be used even affectionately or in a neutral context?
Why is your deliberately negative label of "shit-for-brains" any better?
Words change meaning, my dear egregious etymologist.
By that reasoning every nice woman is an ignorant queen. (Nice comes from latin "ne scius", and queen was the general word for woman)
EDIT: egregious also flipped it's meaning; I clearly meant the old meaning of "remarkably good"
You cannot just pick and choose. We live today and we understand each other based on a shared under ding of what words mean and what they are are "meant to mean". A veiled insult is still an insult, and there are places where it's inappropriate
By virtue of the fact that numerous people disagree with your assessment. Should it not be obvious that you could be living in your own private Idaho sharing a belief that all humans experience your gestalt. People have been finding ways to call both themselves and others mentally handicap since communication began. The irony of the current cultural dialogue is that the real negative experience of an expressive and living word is assumed to negate substantial positive aspects which are well documented by those of good humor and cheer. Your line of reasoning attempts to censure peers much as a child would demand of a playmate when in disagreement.
a) whether it's ok or not to insult person A with terminology that currently insults group B as a side effect. (The topic here would be "to PC or not to PC, have we gone to far with it etc; which is a conversation that can and should be had)
b) whether it's ok, while discussing point "a" above, to insist that some words mean something else than what it's generally understand in good faith, in order to apply ineffective whataboutism ("what about idiot, it used to be a medical term!") to the conversation. To what goal? Claim that you can use "retard" because you can use "idiot"? Let's not play etymological games, if you want to discuss about PC overreach, discuss PC overreach; there are plenty of good arguments to be had against extreme political correctness and censure that don't involve having your readers rolling their eyes at blatant attempts to clutching at straws.
Words change meaning over time. They do not flip over in an instant.
What I believe we're seeing is a society-wide disagreement on the connotations of the word. It will shake itself out, one way or another - but this process used to take decades and was barely noticeable. Now it takes months to years, which is catching people by surprise.
Also: the flip side of "words change meaning" is that, during a period of change, you'll encounter people using a different meaning than you. The arguments favoring the updated weight of the word we're discussing here seem frequently of the form, "$word truly means $my-meaning; surely you do not really believe it means $your-meaning, you're just pretending, and in reality you're just a hateful person who hates $me and $mine" - which is essentially twisting logic and sanity into a pretzel.
(For better or worse, I expect the "revisionists" to win over "conservatives" here, now that the updated connotations have institutional backing of big social media companies, in form of the ban policies.)
I think you're right, society is not homogeneous and language does evolve differently in different niches. Usually this can be observed in smaller groups, which have a strong pressure to "code switch" the dominant language of the society where they live. Minority group members do this all the time, all over the world; often there is a continuum of language/dialect/register that speakers navigate throughout their daily lives.
What's peculiar here is that american society has become polarized, on a rough 50/50% split, along certain cultural norms that affect a small part of language.
Members of group A will not easily concede "code switching" to the vocabulary that is ok for group B because group be is not clearly the majority dominant group.
In this case it's easy, since the word has alternatives, so a member of group A doesn't have to code switch to group-B-speak and say "retard" instead of "idiot".
Furthermore some vocal members of group A will demand that members of group B refrain from using that word on the same ground (there is an easy alternative).
You may be rightfully annoyed that group A is dictating something to you, dear group B member. A meager consolation is that there many minorities in the world that know how you feel (although some may not identify you as a minority since you're not; but that's beside the point, that's how it feels to be one).
Culture is complicated.
Where I live there is a big chunk of local culture that uses blasphemy as casual filler words. Other areas of the country, and a sizeable chunk of the same region, find that utterly repugnant and it cannot be used in polite speech (e.g. people are fired for saying "porco Dio" on television). Locals here just know it when it's ok to use it and when it's not a good idea. Some insist they should be free to stay whatever they want, and "porco Dio" they may well be right! A famous local nobel prize winner (Margherita Hack), when asked "do you use blasphemy in casual speech?" answered "sure, I'm from Tuscany!". I myself fit well in the that local culture.
That said, do I still talk like that when my 4yo child is around? No! I don't want him to talk like that until he can control himself and read the room! Is fixing this bug in the society (the rule against insulting the christian God) a hill I want to die on? Why should I? It's just a word, a fun habit, would it be rational for me to yell at people that I'm free to insult their gods because if freedom of speech or whatever? I'd be looked at as a crazy man because that's what I'd be.
To me people who cling their freedom to utter words that a significant portion of their fellow compatriots find offensive, look exactly like that. Picking a silly battle, and entrenching themselves.
Thanks for elaborating. I mostly agree with what you're saying here (and thanks for including a local example!). That said, I think the following isn't the correct portrayal of the situation:
> To me people who cling their freedom to utter words that a significant portion of their fellow compatriots find offensive, look exactly like that. Picking a silly battle, and entrenching themselves.
We're not talking about people who "cling to their freedom" to say what they want to everyone. We're dealing with a group that used language allowed by its local culture, that suddenly got in the spotlight, and now the rest of the world is trying to pressure them into conforming to the norms used elsewhere. To riff of your example, it's like the wide world suddenly noticed Tuscany is a place, and decided to condemn people living there for insulting the Christian god on a regular basis.
I mention this point because, in my observation, this was a common pattern in on-line communities, particularly around forceful introduction of Codes of Conduct. Outsiders would enter a niche community, take public offense at the local language norms, mobilize a wider Internet crowd, and force the community to change their norms under threat of heaps of negative publicity. To me, this kind of behavior reeks of... colonialism.
That would make sense if communities are indeed isolated and want to stay as such. To continue with our little analogy: while Tuscany (and a few other places) have this peculiar cultural trait, it's as still home for a lot of people who don't recognize themselves in that and they also belong there and need to be respected. Very often that's even the numeric majority of people.
"my grandfather and my father and I all cursed God for breakfast for three generations and now I suddenly have to talk like what this pope-kissing bigots want me to?" ignores that there are pope-kissing bigots in your society, your neighbor may be one, your friendly policemen may be well one, the old man across the street.
But also, there are people who are not pope-kissing bigots and YET behave themselves in a way to not saw division. Your children's school teacher may be one, perhaps cursing in the privacy of her home but giving you a look you if your children talk like little fallen angels.
We're all used to norms. I don't think that's the root cause of us having this conversation in the first place.
There is a group of people who is feeling their position in society has changed under their feet and they are frustrated about that. For them these topics become an identity-glue, something to hold on and to tell their ingroup from outgroups.
But there are also people who just don't like norms and just by coincidence happen to be aligned with whoever is the norm-breaker du jour.
It isn’t that backwards? Retard isn’t a slur against against people with intellectual disabilities, it is a neutral description of people with intellectual disabilities, used to slur your buddy who said something dumb.
the word retard is common parlance in many parts of the world.
But lets not be retarded about this, the point is more that they are using a puritan argument about the word retard in a retarded manner in order to shut down discourse, to try and retard the share price of a stock, which has had absolutely retarded performance lately.
I think it's more like if the name "amvalo" caught on as an insult, which meant someone had shit for brains. Both "amvalo" and "shit for brains" would then hold the same meaning, but only one of those terms would be a needless attack on amvalo.
Yeah it’s all about the 3rd party who gets insulted. I have one friend whose brother is disabled and he’s told me off for using it, which I get. Transgression is part of the appeal of curse words
I agree it’s rude but banning a discord of 50k people just for that is highly sus
Is this not the classic problem with all censorship? Of course the majority (and I) would agree that the language used is not productive, but the question of whether something should be allowed, despite its "goodness" (or lack there of), is much more nuanced. I think an argument can be made that the definition of a public forum has changed.
OP can host his own server and invite his friends and they can say whatever they want there.... but no one has any obligation to give him a venue.
If I have a shitty band and I want to book your venue for a gig, you have every right to say to me "no, your band is too shitty for my venue, I don't want to degrade myself or the public in that way."
There's very little nuance here at all, no one is saying he is not allowed to be a terrible person, they're saying they don't want to be associated with him because he's a terrible person.
You seem to think “retarded” is magnitudes worse than all of the other negative words you used and worth shutting down a community for.
I think most people do not think this is true.
I think moderation is hard and I’m generally in favor of private companies being able to moderate how they want (with something like Urbit being a good alternative for a user owned network).
That said, the word policing around this and wsb in particular (a pretty good natured community really) is pretty off.
I know people who grew up with disabled relatives and I can assure you that insult is among the worse things you could use. Maybe those who use it don't think of themselves as bad persons, and "thats just the way language evolved", but if you use this word it shows that you never reflected on the other persons position. It tells me, you are either not the brightest bulb in the shed, unempathic or just mean.
So yes, depending on the context using retard as an insult is worse than many other things. It might not be to you, but so might have been the n-word a few generations before. Just because a lot of people don't get it, doesn't mean it is okay.
Edit: and now that you know that this insult might cut two ways (because you never know who has a disabled relative), you might also deem it less useful.
This is a topic that won’t make much progress on an Internet forum (too heated, too personal for people).
I think there’s a difference between using the word to target someone who is disabled and using it the way it’s used on wsb.
I also think there’s an irony in calling me “not the brightest bulb” for thinking this, which is a euphemistic way to say dumb (or even the word in question) in a way that’s more targeted than most of the forbidden word’s use on wsb.
I also don’t use “retarded” in writing either, I just don’t see as much issue with it in the wsb context.
Huh? I didn't call you "not the brightest bulb”, that was projection on your part and I am sorry for miscommunicating. What I meant was that these are the thought processes that spring to my mind when I hear someone using these phrases. I also explained a little bit of the underlying thinking on my side. This was my attempt of showing you my side of how I think about this.
Also: just because these thoughts spring to my mind doesn't mean I deterministically from now on think that person is stupid etc. I had my best friends use these words in an unreflected way.
My mistake - after rereading your comment I understand what you were saying.
I agree with you actually - I generally find overuse of profanity in real life leaves a bad impression on me too.
I just think the wsb context is a bit of a different thing and the word use in some contexts is fine.
It's also likely some of this is colored by other related word policing I find to be more stupid, (like saying 'on the other hand' is ableist). I have a general bias towards not policing words.
> I think there’s a difference between using the word to target someone who is disabled and using it the way it’s used on wsb.
Try being a white person and using the n-word in any context at all. Apart from an incredibly narrow set of contexts, it's deeply offensive and will be called out as such. Joking with your other white friends isn't one of the acceptable contexts.
If it's not exactly the same, it's very similar. It's a slur, used by members outside a group, defined by birth, to insult them and discriminate against them.
I'm genuinely hoping the huge number of sophists trying to defend it are doing so because they genuinely feel kind of bad for having done so and don't want to comprehend the moral implications of having used it casually for years.
Op doesn’t own the server, but neither do you as far as I know. You are free to express your opinion, but don’t pretend to speak for everyone. In my book, people who use offensive language are preferable to those who make snap value judgement about human worth based on it. The latter is far more destructive
Exactly, at least they didn’t use “childish” as a slur to condemn this behavior they consider inappropriate. Children have a significant inner world that deserves respect... /s
I'm curious, do people who get upset at this word never learn classical piano? Because, well, you're going to encounter that word quite frequently if you do.
A category of person? Being immature means you behave immature. Scolding someone for behaviour is very different than scolding them for something they can't change about them selves (e.g. like where they have been born).
Usually we also factor in age when calling someone immature. So if someone calls you immature, they mean "immature given your age", so it is certainly different from e.g. hating on all kids, teenagers or old people.
Immature: Not fully formed or developed; not grown [1]
It depends on what sense you use it in, just like the r-word.
> Scolding someone for behaviour is very different than scolding them for something they can't change about them selves (e.g. like where they have been born).
Literally what the r-word controversy is about. Glad you finally get it. Except of course if you think that someone was being scolded for having mental deficiency or specifically an IQ below 70 or something, which I doubt and which I would agree would be just as uncouth as scolding an immature person (in the sense of not being fully developed or grown) for being immature as they can't change that about themselves.
> Literally what the r-word controversy is about. Glad you finally get it.
Huh, are you confusing me with someone here? I argued precisely that in this very thread. As someone who grew up knowing people whose relatives were disabled I think of the r-word (and the German equivalent, English is not my first language) as horrible.
Most people who use it are ignorant to what it means to people who have to live with it every day. Which means it is even worse if one thinks about it and goes like "yeah I understand why they hate it, but I am still gonna use it", because then they are not ignorant but malicious.
How is it okay to you to use "immature" and not the r-word?
Both could refer to a category of person based on something they can't change about them selves, and both are in most cases not used to refer to said category.
> As someone who grew up knowing people whose relatives were disabled I think of the r-word (and the German equivalent, English is not my first language) as horrible.
You think children like being called immature?
> Most people who use it are ignorant to what it means to people who have to live with it every day.
Most people who call other people immature also has long since forgotten the anxiety and troubles that come with being an immature human being.
> "yeah I understand why they hate it, but I am still gonna use it", because then they are not ignorant but malicious.
As long as you feel the same about calling people immature, idiots, or anything else that could also be misinterpreted to refer to category of person based on something they can't change about them selves.
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Your account has already done this more than once, as well as posting unsubstantively and baitingly in other ways. That's a poor track record for only 11 comments. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this. On HN we want thoughtful, curious conversation. Bashing each other like this is obviously at the far extreme from that. No more of this, please.
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We need an alternative to this server, there was a lot of momentum on AMC and its dwindling because people dont know where to go or whwere to turn, someone needs to make a discord or we need an alternative ASAP
If you've *seen* the moderation (or the lack thereof) you'd understand why it was banned. Place was crazy with all kinds of nasty language. I'll admit I joined early on but I also left early on after seeing how lax the moderation and how much of a toxic mess it was - even more than the sub.
Why exactly is it so difficult for some to stop using derogatory, ableist, racist, sexist, antisemitic and otherwise bigot language other than that they want to be exactly that?
We know the power of habits and we know that if you’re a user of the word “retard” in a derogatory sense, your very first thoughts when seeing an actual mentally challenged person won’t be positive.
If you’re not a bigot then stop using bigot language. It’s so easy there is no excuse.
As for this thread, it's got 500+ comments. If you want to see them all you'll need to click through the More links at the bottom, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935511&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935511&p=3