/r/wallstreetbets

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/r/wallstreetbets is a subreddit used for discussing day trading, stocks, and sharing individual trades, losses, or gains. The board describes itself as "Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal". Users will post images of their portfolio, text posts, and memes about stocks or trading. It's known most famously for incidents where its users have exploited options contracts in RobinHood to leverage millions of dollars, and for posts on the board of users losing up to millions of dollars. Mainstream media has described users on the board as "psychopaths" for discovering the glitch on RobinHood. [1]

Background

History

/r/wallstreetbets was initially created in 2012 by Reddit user /u/jartek after being run out of /r/investing, a sub with a similar focus on stocks, for advocating risky bets. [2] The subreddit grew in size from less than 10,000 at the end of 2014 to 930,000 by February 2020. [3] On February 21, 2020, /r/wallstreetbets removed itself from /r/all and default subreddits.[4] This limited the amount of non-members from viewing the subreddit without a direct link, and was done to reduce the number of users joining the community.

Community

The community of /r/wallstreetbets is unified in a bravado that they uphold through coarse language and frequent slurs. Members will call each other "autists", and other derogatory terms, but not in an attempt to provoke or attack. Rather, there is a sense of community among its members, and one where aspects of other young male communities like masculinity are twisted. [5] Instead of making fun of people who lose a lot of money, users feel a sense of solidarity, and have a one-of-us mentality.

Ethical Issues

/r/wallstreetbets is a platform used for discussing stocks, but it has been criticized for the atmosphere it fosters and the users attitudes towards. Members of the community will encourage each other to post their "loss porn", which means a screenshot or other documentation of users losing much of their portfolio.[6]

Groupthink

/r/wallstreetbets users tend to be very active, with the subreddit having the 5th most comments per day of any subreddit. [7] However, as there are only a few powerful voices, as the number of posts per subscriber ranks 758th, the same opinion can be spread to many members of the community, allowing an echo chamber to be formed. An example of this is the /r/wallstreetbets community's praise of Martin Shkreli. There have been numerous posts detailing /r/wallstreetbets users fondness for Martin Shkreli, and it has been encouraged by meme posts detailing Martin as a "pharma-bro" with a mentality not unlike that of the /r/wallstreetbets users themselves.

Manipulation

Approaching a million subscribers, /r/wallstreetbets has genuine weight over penny stocks, and so pump and dump posts can be seen that prop up a stock as a good buy, and when enough people buy it, the original poster will sell at the peak. They are profiting off the users that they convince. The community has guidelines so that posts that match this pattern will be reviewed before going through. Users of /r/wallstreetbets may also be private messaged about trading advice, where the messaging user preys on naive users. One user named /u/WSBgod gathered a lot of upvotes and attention from the media for posting screenshots of stock gains. It was later found out that he had photoshopped these images, and conspiracies that /u/jartek was behind the /u/WSBgod account were posted.

See also

References

  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imUsp_sruTc&feature=youtu.be
  2. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nedzqm/you-probably-shouldnt-bet-your-savings-on-reddits-wallstreetbets
  3. https://subredditstats.com/r/wallstreetbets
  4. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/f720hg/wsb_removed_from_rall_and_default_subreddits/
  5. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nedzqm/you-probably-shouldnt-bet-your-savings-on-reddits-wallstreetbets
  6. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-26/reddit-s-profane-greedy-traders-are-shaking-up-the-stock-market
  7. https://subredditstats.com/r/wallstreetbets