Reddit WallStreetBets movement was 15 years in the making

The Redditor uprising that has made the stock markets disappear over the past few weeks is due to a humpback whale named Mister Splashy Pants. In 2007, Greenpeace asked the public to decide on the name of a whale in the South Pacific for a campaign to make Japanese fisheries aware of hunting. A group of jokers have lined up on the reddit message board, Reddit, to hijack Greenpeace’s online poll and print their chosen name. The organization and the netizens struggled for weeks until Greenpeace finally conceded, and Mister Splashy Pants was crowned.

Two years later, Reddit Inc., co-founder Alexis Ohanian, told the gag in a TED Talk. “In the last four years, we’ve seen all kinds of memes, and all kinds of trends are born right on our front page,” he said. ‘This is how the internet works. That’s the big big secret. The internet offers equal playing field. ”

The Greenpeace caper was such a significant event for the company that Reddit temporarily changed its logo into a whale bending its bicep fins. Mister Splashy Pants presents a model for Reddit, formed over a decade, which gives birth to cultural touchstones and charitable causes, as well as organized harassment and dangerous conspiracy theories. It also provides an early roadmap for WallStreetBets, a forum of amateur day traders who used Reddit to fuel the stock market frenzy.

“The message no longer just comes from the top down,” Ohanian said in the 2009 speech. “You must be ready to lose control.”

Reddit has long built a reputation as a place where everything goes. The best and worst of the internet was fully displayed. Reddit took small steps last year to reduce the ugliest behavior by implementing its very first policy on hate speech. But it remains a place where controversy is allowed, hyinks are encouraged and a joke can quickly get out of hand.

The trading spree of the past few weeks, which has raised the price of nostalgia stocks GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., was partly a joke and partly a way to discipline hedge funds that lack those shares. It worked. Ohanian, who stepped down from Reddit’s board last year, and his co-founder Steve Huffman seized on the populist argument. The founders, both 37, said WallStreetBets shows that people can work together to influence fixed institutions.

“This is, I think, for many people a statement just as much as an investment,” Ohanian said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. CEO Huffman described it as a “Wall Street culture war against everyone else.”

But the victims extend beyond hedge funds and stock trading programs such as Robinhood Markets Inc., what scrambled for emergency capital to cover volatility risks. U.S. regulators investigate social media posts for clues from possible fraudulent activities behind the trades. While trendy stocks are collapsing, those who bought high are not laughing as loudly as before. “I kept looking at my phone for the past week, and it’s worn me out,” said Scott Smith, a Reddit user who lost GameStop shares worth about $ 1,300. “I will take a long break and focus on my student loans before I think about stocks again.”

Ohanian and Huffman met as students at the University of Virginia, where they started in 2005 with another classmate for Reddit as a place to share and discover web pages and news articles. They were included in the entry class of a new business incubator in Silicon Valley called Y Combinator. With $ 100,000 in venture capital, they nurtured a small population of users who filled the site with their own posts and placed votes on their favorite content.

Condé Nast, publisher of the New York resident and Wired, acquired Reddit in 2006. In the following years the founders left; Condé Nast exposed the business; and some outside executives are trying to tame the Reddit mob successfully. One of them was Ellen Pao, a former venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. Pao is critical of the way Huffman, her successor, hate speech, harassment and other worrying activities on the site are handled. And with WallStreetBets, she said that Reddit could not provide adequate precautions for people caught up in the craze.

“Reddit needs to add an indemnity, because I do not believe all 6 million people in the r / wallstreetbets, and the people who followed them know exactly what they end up for,” Pao wrote in an email. (The forum now has more than 8.6 million readers.) “Being transparent about risk is the ethical thing.”

Huffman’s response to controversy on the site was contradictory and often late. He dealt with critics with similar tactics as Reddit’s trolls. On at least one occasion, he secretly edited a bunch of comments that were critical of him, something he later apologized for. Pizzagate, an Internet indigenous conspiracy theory that falsely linked Hillary Clinton to a pedophilia ring, prospered on Reddit before Huffman intervened to ban the community in 2016.

He allowed another group, The_Donald, to spread racist messages for years. In an interview with the New York resident In 2018, Huffman said that some people on the forum were simply expressing political beliefs, “and that’s something we want to encourage.” Reddit banned the group last summer and expelled a similar group last month after members celebrated and celebrated violence at the U.S. capital. Reddit did not want to make Huffman available for an interview.

The building blocks of Reddit have been around since the early days of the internet. People have tips on stock trading on Yahoo! message boards and polls on GeoCities. But there is a certain aspect to the system of Reddit, where anyone can vote virtually anything on or on the site, that attracts the inner shock to users. Some treat it like a game, Huffman said New York resident: ” If I post this ridiculous or offensive thing, can I get people to vote for it? ‘And then some people, to quote The Dark Knight, just want to see how the world burns. ”