> The "real question," imo is not about how FB, discord or reddit handle WSB's culture. It's why have they all decided to act right now, just as this gamestop maneuver is happening?
Because when you're short a few billion on a position, and your counterparty is a toxic stream of garbage, its a profitable strategy to paying someone to report all the toxic b.s. and disrupt their organization. In 2021, we figured out how to get hedge funds to pay content moderator salaries!
Of all the companies to level this accusation at... Facebook has more money than these funds. The biggest bank in the country, JPMorgan, is worth $400B (remember that total assets is not the same thing as net worth); Facebook is worth >$500B. Nobody outsmarted Facebook here. The scale that these funds are operating at is peanuts compared to Facebook's operations.
Outsmarted the group that happened to be hosted by Facebook. Facebook will always act in Facebook's interests, the hedge funds pointing at trolls and yelling (trolls they themselves seeded?). Makes Facebook's interests align with the hedge funds and run counter to this particular group. Group is shutdown. Hedge funds outsmarted the group who had outsmarted them. It's a blip on Facebook's horizon at best other than balancing PR concerns. Will people hold it against Facebook or can you spin it as justified by "hate"? The hedge funds, their investors and political connections will hold it against Facebook should Facebook take the other side. Facebook will currently be concerned about a new approach to regulation with the dems now in power. Facing down that monopoly regulation to make it toothless will be Facebook's number 1 concern right now unless they've already got it locked up, which is more than possible.
Are we ok with this? We talk about endemic corruption like it's the most normal thing in the world. But it isn't. Reform or perish.
Why don’t total assets matter here? JP Morgan has 3 trillion under management. Also the valuation of FB is based on it being a going concern whose business has very little to do with manipulation of financial markets.
The supply of volunteer trolls is near unlimited, especially on subreddits with edgy cultures, an influx of newbies who don't understand it and a lot more attention than usual. Why would they bother paying?
To make super-sure that the currently fashionable unspeakables are well and truly said. Stalinist trolling would have done the job in the past, fascist trolling now.
Of course if you can already point at it you might proceed straight to getting some momentum behind the outrage with some astroturfing and making sure there's more than one media story focusing on that very small amount of trolling as "the story". This is not much trouble to go to for the sums of money involved. Enron closed whole power stations, many of them, to rape California on electricity derivatives. The sums here are measured in billions, there's not much that would be too much trouble.
You could, or you could allow the internet to do that bit for you and focus your small team's efforts on much more important things like unwinding trades, securing emergency funding and making excuses to LPs. Forums full of people who've lost a lot of money, are pissed off at a particular company and had a politically incorrect subculture to start off with are not places likely to survive Big Tech's banhammer as everybody here already knows, especially if newbies are flocking to them looking for stock tips or lolz.
Genuinely baffled why so many HNers have spent the last couple of days forgetting everything they know about how the internet actually works to imagine that hedge funds whose couple of dozen employees are busy firefighting are somehow controlling the conversation.
The places where the buying is being coordinated? Get them shut! Now! There's billions at stake, make the damn calls get people on it.
How is this implausible to you?
Do you really think the timing of this is purely coincidental? I mean you will have trolls on both the Democrat and Republican official groups. They aren't going to be shut.
I guess it could be coincidental and incompetent but it's not the highest on my list of the likely.
It's interesting that this phenomenon is obvious in a commercial situation, but rarely considered in political situations. Are we sure that the activists most salient to social media are anything like the groups they claim to represent?
What? Fake/troll accounts in political discourse are widely discussed and studied, probably more than commercial ones (if you don't count obvious spam, which obviously is a focus of lots of attention at least internally to vendors, less so in open research).
Because when you're short a few billion on a position, and your counterparty is a toxic stream of garbage, its a profitable strategy to paying someone to report all the toxic b.s. and disrupt their organization. In 2021, we figured out how to get hedge funds to pay content moderator salaries!