Everything's a Joke Until It's Not

[Nevilledog]

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Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__
"For people who study social platforms like Reddit, WallStreetBets called to mind a specific recent precedent: The_Donald, the subreddit that was, for a few years, the staging ground and the central organizing platform for supporters of Donald J. Trump."

Everything’s a Joke Until It’s Not
Reddit communities grow powerful in plain sight. Why do they keep taking the world by surprise?
nytimes.com
1:41 PM · Jan 30, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/style/gamestop-wallstreetbets-reddit.html

Read this in the little voice in your head, and tell me it doesn’t sound familiar: Is this for real? It’s got to run out of steam. It can’t just keep going like this. How is this even happening?

What comes to mind? Maybe a recent event in politics, or perhaps a particular politician. A conspiracy theory that was treated as a punchline, then a nuisance, then a crisis. Maybe it’s something sillier — a whole new digital currency named after a meme. Perhaps then the voice in your head really wants to say: Why not? Let’s see where this goes.

You may have guessed that, right now, we’re talking about stocks.

Individual investors, many of them moved by calls to action on Reddit and other social platforms, have spent recent weeks aggressively buying up stock in GameStop, the struggling video game retailer, driving the price to extraordinary highs. On Jan. 28, 2020, it was treading at under $4; this year, on the same date, that number briefly exceeded $480. Thousands of traders, amateurish and sophisticated alike, made money, fast. Hedge funds that had bet against GameStop lost billions.

Discussion and planning around GameStop investment unfolded most visibly on a subreddit called WallStreetBets, where traders share tips, “due diligence,” investment theories and memes. It had grown substantially in size over the past year, especially as some of its users’ enthusiastic bets on Tesla paid off. (Its membership more than doubled in size this week, to over 6 million subscribers.) Members have spent recent days encouraging each other to hold on to GameStop — or buy more — through enormous swings in price.

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