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Okay so I completely agree but I want to add something to what’s going on
Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive. The foundation of the community is that a forum talking about stock investing strategies is, at its heart, really dumb. It’s harder than most people can manage to evaluate all the “DD” flying around and any advice other than playing it safe (r/investing) is stupid to take from a rando on a forum.
WSB’s culture is a reaction which embraces how stupid the exercise is, and then races to the bottom on rhetoric, which makes it all about meme irony. So they (excuse the language) call themselves “retards,” “degenerates,” and “autists” (again, their words). It sometimes gets more offensive from there, but they try to keep the insults self-targeted.
Generally speaking they’re pretty clever and witty in their behavior, but you know how this gets when it goes mainstream. Less clever people show up and attach to the “offensive” part without bringing along the “clever” part.
My general sense is that WSB works hard to moderate within its sensibility so it stays enjoyable, but with the big influx, I’d bet Facebook and Discord are either reacting to behavior which is slipping past the WSB mods due to the influxes, or they’re reacting to the aesthetic without understanding the underlying wit. Another side-effect of going mainstream: it becomes political, and politics is perception. Frankly though, I think most people would enjoy WSB culture right now, given the underdog narrative and the embrace of the irreverent.
If I were Facebook or Discord, I’d trust WSB mods to get things back under control and help them protect the community, not ban it. That said, I’d bet good money their reasons for banning are not evidence-free.
So the real question is, why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community.
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? That is the fishy part... and it's too fishy to leave it unaddressed and talk content.
Either way, this just shows why we can't have a handful of companies moderating most of the internet under a TOS regime.
It might be fishy but there is also a lot new interest in WSB and everything related. So much interest that /r/WSB voluntarily shut themselves down for a while because they couldn't handle the moderation situation.
So why it's happening now can more multifaceted than the more conspiratorial reasons. Even increased media attention is enough for someone to act -- The Hackernews community uses that all the time to get apps unbanned from the app store, for example.
Serious question: Since Facebook is a private company, does the "if you don't like it, you can build your own platform" argument apply here? Or does that only apply selectively when it benefits partisan politics?
The RobinHood $GME situation is the natural next step in societal evolution once extreme censorship is given a pass. If you support the "go build it yourself" argument, you no longer have the right to complain about anything that's theoretically reproducible.
Absolutely! I'm not sure why you replied to my comment with this but I totally believe that Facebook doesn't have any legal or moral requirement to host anything they don't want to. They could literally just punt me tomorrow because they don't like my name and that's their right. Especially because there is no commercial or contractual relationship between us. I am not a customer of Facebook.
If you pay for hosting then you have a contract and then you and the company you're buying from are beholden to those terms.
Paying for hosting and signing contracts won't behold any company either, because any hosting company will have terms in their service contract that give them the right to discontinue the service at their discretion. A lot of people on HN also argue that companies has a right to decide which customers they want to have an association with, and thus there is no legal or moral requirement to continue hosting customer, regardless if payment is involved.
As a paying customer, you can negotiate whatever terms you want. They will want the ability to discontinue your service and you will conversely want that ability as well. However you can negotiate the exact terms as well as any notice periods, etc.
You have no consideration relationship with Facebook. You haven't entered into a contract. You are just filling out forms on a website.
> As a paying customer, you can negotiate whatever terms you want. They will want the ability to discontinue your service and you will conversely want that ability as well. However you can negotiate the exact terms as well as any notice periods, etc.
Theoretically, yes.
In reality, I’m too small an account to warrant anything besides boilerplate. The big boys may be able to negotiate. I cannot.
I've negotiated contracts for a single server at a data center. You don't have to be huge to have some negotiating power.
Now it's possible you are so extremely deplorable that nobody is willing to take your money but I think that is society functioning as it should. People are still willing to put up with a lot when money is involved.
If I was so extremely deplorable, more people would give me their money enabling me to increase my bargaining position. Alas, I’m just a regular boring schmuck.
For many people, rightly or wrongly, Facebook has become a de facto way to communicate socially and for their business. It has become to big to make the sole decisions on who can and cannot be on the platform. It should be treated as a utility, just like phone and internet companies should be.
This is a poor argument. Facebook provides an HTML form and database for free and lots of people use it so it's a utility? That argument doesn't hold a lot of water.
Phone and Internet requires literal physical infrastructure that crosses public and private property, you pay for it, and they are natural monopolies because of that. Facebook is nothing by comparison.
No, Facebook provides a social network with billions of users and businesses relying on it for communication. Facebook requires literal physical infrastructure that is distributed around the US and the world, with interconnections in between. The two massive data centers they just built near me make that pretty damn clear.
Perhaps you may not like the suggestion that I offered, but you’re minimizing what Facebook has become and what it takes to run at that scale.
You are mischaracterized the situation to make your point. Facebook's infrastructure is all private and not at all unique. The interconnections are the Internet. Anyone can compete with Facebook. You can't create your own telephone poles or run your own railways but you can certainly do everything that Facebook is doing.
As for the businesses that rely on it -- they choose to use that platform, for free, knowing exactly what they're getting into. There are thousands of times more businesses that do not rely on Facebook than those that do. Facebook is not some key infrastructure; if it all went away tomorrow it's a minor inconvenience at worst.
Phone lines are privately owned, not publicly. Yes the locality may own the poles, but it may not either. They are leased or granted access to the right of way.
Facebook also owns at least some of its own interconnects.
It is fine with me if you disagree on principle, but to act like anybody can just create the network effect of Facebook and compete is frankly ridiculous.
You're splitting hairs about phone lines -- you know what I'm talking about.
You talk like Facebook was the first ever social network and didn't start out of dorm room. You talk like there aren't any other social networks right now. Or that there aren't other media companies.
What's the end game here? What exactly do you want? The inability to moderate? Nationalized? Broken up? I guarantee you can't come up with a single remedy that isn't ridiculous.
The end game for Facebook definitely should include breaking them up. Nationalized, probably not, but they need to be small enough that the federal government can regulate them like every other industry.
Facebook’s scale and power are bad for capitalism and democracy. You may find it ridiculous to break them up, but plenty of serious people in this world don’t.
I'd argue Fox News is worse for capitalism and democracy -- why single out Facebook? Also why do they have to be broken up to be regulated by the government? Laws shouldn't apply to extremely specific situations or single entities. If you are really worried about scale and power, you actually have a long list of companies to go through before you even get to Facebook.
So break it up, how? In what way? And if you've broken Facebook up, how have you ensured that you've actually solved the problem you intend to solve.
Curious, as your solution to the problem seems to be to do nothing. Does that mean you don't think it's a problem?
Here's the problem as i see it.
Facebook's and other companies with data exchange driven revenue models have monopolization on some of our generations most intelligent minds and are using cutting edge psychology and algorithms to get the general populace to click that, scroll for longer and be deeper entrenched in the depths of political extremism.
Do you believe Facebook has no legal or moral requirement to host content from people regardless of their race? I don't quite know the law in America, but I'm more interested in the moral question. Is racial discrimination by a company like Facebook morally acceptable to you regardless of whether it's legal or not?
Facebook is no different than any other business in this case. If you walk into a restaurant and you are rude to the waiters or you cause a commotion that restaurant can refuse your service and kick you out. Or heck, maybe they just want to close early. Legal and moral. If you are Black and walk into a restaurant and you are refused service that is both illegal (in the US) and immoral.
What if you walk in and are somebody named wvenable so they kick you out? As you've said, you believe they have that right.
What if you walk in and are ginger so they kick you out?
Have poor eyesight?
Are dressed in the costume of a religion they don't like?
Are dressed in the costume of a political ideology they don't like?
I'm trying to work out a set of fundamental principals are would distinguish good discrimination from bad. I often see people, such as yourself, adamantly insisting that some kinds are good or some are bad but the distinction seems arbitrary.
US law has defined a few protected classes (race, color, religion, sex, age, and disability). Is that a perfect list? Probably not. Is it a reasonable legal and moral framework, I think so. Based on that protected class list, you can probably work out my answers to your questions easily. So it's not that arbitrary.
I could reverse this and ask your the same type of questions. As a business owner, am I not allowed to have any control over who and what business that I do? If I allow posts on my website, I must allow Nazi hate posts? If I allow images, I must allow all images except those that are illegal? If you're being rude to my workers, I can't turn you away, I just have to take it? If you say yes, I'd like how that is fair to me. If you say no, then that is also arbitrary, right?
I guess your answers are:
1. Have the right
2. Have the right
3. Don't have the right
4. Don't have the right
5. Have the right
But what's so different between 2 and 3 or between 4 and 5? I could understand it if you see them as grey areas but it sounds like you're adamant they have no moral requirement to serve ginger people but that it's immoral to refuse short-sighted people. And why are religious and political ideologies distinct?
I don't have much of an answer myself, but I don't think religion should be protected. People are free to change their religion or lie about it to avoid discrimination if they want. Do you agree that excluding Muslims is wrong but excluding (nonviolent) Islamists is a right? How can you even tell the difference?
I wondered if you opinion was based on some philosophy. It seems it's just a copy of what you've absorbed from your culture and suffers from all the same problems.
> it sounds like you're adamant they have no moral requirement to serve ginger people
I'm not sure how you get adamant from my comment. I went out of my way to claim that this description was not perfect. One could argue that ginger falls under "race". I personally don't believe you should deny someone service because of there genetic appearance. I'd go all in on appearance but then you might might have to serve naked people! Everything is grey.
Religion is a grey area too; in some cases it's more equivalent to political believes and in other cases it's more like race. People also mistake appearance and religion all the time.
> Do you agree that excluding Muslims is wrong but excluding (nonviolent) Islamists is a right?
No I don't. People like to claim their persecuted because of who they are rather than what they do and how that impacts others.
Lets be clear, we are talking about Facebook blocking content (actively posted material) that they deem unacceptable. You made this about the who rather than the what and I don't think that applies in this case at all. So we've really gone down this rabbit hole for nothing.
This is the quote that makes it look like you have a strong opinion on at least an aspect of this topic, including discriminating against people for who they are not what they post. So I thought you might have some unique set of beliefs. Turns out you don't, and see it as a rabbit hole, which is OK and we can stop here.
> I totally believe that Facebook doesn't have any legal or moral requirement to host anything they don't want to. They could literally just punt me tomorrow because they don't like my name and that's their right.
You make a good point, I did say that! I do believe that you shouldn't be forced to do business with someone. And it doesn't matter if they're black, white, disabled, Nazi, Muslim, etc. But it does matter if the reason you don't want to do business with them is because of racism, sexism, agism, etc. If I all the sudden only want to do business with 100 people and I'm currently doing business with 200. I can randomly select 100 people and punt them. I don't need a reason. I can punt the least profitable. I can punt them because of alphabetical order. But it would be unfair and immoral of me to punt them because they are black or disabled.
In the case of Facebook, they're just offering people a free space to post stuff. They're not obligated to continue to that forever. They don't need a good reason to punt you. But their are situations where they could have a bad reason.
The question is, is this topic a bad reason to punt people? Given the low obligation that Facebook has to host anything -- I don't think so.
We might be getting a bit bogged down here, but I may as well carry on...
Your idea of Facebook's obligation seems to be pretty much just based on what the law prohibits. That's not really an interesting thing to talk about because everyone agrees on such a simple fact.
I weakly think Facebook is so powerful that when it bans people or breaks up groups, it's capable of doing more harm than most other internet services and therefore it could be more morally wrong. If your Facebook group is turned off, what other platform can you move every member to? How can you even contact them to organize the migration? If you're personally kicked off, how can you persuade all other members of your groups to migrate to another platform just so you can join them again? I attend a real-life class and it comes with a Facebook group for students to keep in touch and share materials. If I was banned from Facebook, I'd miss out on part of this unrelated class. Since everyone assumes you can use Facebook, if you can't, then you're disadvantaged. In contrast, nobody assumes you can post to HN, so being banned from here is qualitatively different, in my opinion.
This site is not good for discussions this far down the tree!
My idea of Facebook's obligation is not based on what the law prohibits but the law, hopefully, follows basic human moral tenets. If they overlap, it's not by accident.
If your Facebook group turns off, there are hundreds of other platforms you can move to. If you failed to backup your contacts, how is that the fault of Facebook? If you can't convince people to migrate, why is that their problem? If your school relies on Facebook, they shouldn't do that -- complain to them, not Facebook. And not everyone assumes you can (or want) to use Facebook.
It sounds like you want Facebook to take responsibility for things that are your own personal responsibility simply because, today, they're popular. It's not because they're the only choice but because, in some circles, they're the favored choice. Pretty significant difference.
What if your group meets at McDonald's and you got banned? You forgot to get their contact info. They don't want to meet at Starbucks instead. And your school hosts a study session at McDonalds. What is McDonald's responsibility for your misfortune?
Facebook is not the whole Internet. I have a Facebook account but generally I go months without even logging in. It's not essential. You're not forced to use it. If something you want to do requires it, it's your choice to do that or not. I've literally put my money where my mouth and decided not to upgrade to an Oculus Quest 2 because of the Facebook integration.
I understand what you're saying from an ideological point of view - personal responsibility, freedom for companies to ban who they want. That all makes sense for unusual things and small companies, but real life humans don't take personal responsibility and do need protection from the law. Look at some other examples which you surely agree with:
Personal safety requirements, such as compulsory seat belt wearing in cars.
Scammers are breaking the law by tricking people to give up their money even though the victims could just refuse to give money to whoever asks for it if they didn't want to get scammed.
Tenancy and employment law, at least in my country, doesn't allow people to contract out of certain rights. That's because some poor sucker would end up shooting himself in the foot by accepting a raw deal out of desperation.
Some companies like utilities are required to not arbitrarily ban customers, even though they're not the only choice - you can still install solar panels if you don't like the power company but it's nowhere near as convenient.
Consumer protection laws.
Restrictions on gambling.
Anti-spam laws. Email is not the only option but it has market dominance and network effects meaning normal life is harder without it.
McDonald's isn't like this because it has nowhere near the market dominance or network effects that Facebook does. It would still be a problem but a smaller one which I think doesn't outweigh the rights of the owner to ban whoever he wants or responsibility of customers to organize their groups better.
This thread has so far been busting my balls about what I think.
My question for you, is what do you believe should the be the rules here? I'm not against consumer protections -- if you want to compose a user bill of rights that applies to all companies online and off I might be for that depending on what you really want.
It's about what you think because you made claims about how you think things should be.
I'm not sure what regulation would be, but something that protects people against surprise and troublesome problems. Ideally, I feel it should be done by enabling greater competition, perhaps with a requirement for portable user identities, friends lists and reputations or interoperability between networks. Then they would have competitive pressure to treat their users well and the government wouldn't need to micro-regulate little details.
Not for all companies online. Just those that are in a powerful enough position to cause bigger problems, otherwise it would be disproportionately burdensome on small players or even hobbyists. That's similar to how existing regulations don't apply to everyone. Eg. Home owner-occupiers can do DIY work on their own house that normal requires a licensed tradesman, kids can sell lemonade without such strict hygiene rules as a cafe, individuals can sell 2nd hand goods without providing the same consumer protections as a 2nd hand dealer, etc.
The fact that you want equal treatment for all companies, as well as other things you've said, suggests you're more of an idealist than a pragmatist. I used to be like that but then realized the real world is too complicated for simple one-size-fits-all solutions to be the best. It turns out the free market doesn't actually lead to good outcomes for people unless its natural bad tendencies (eg. monopolies, predatory sales, negative externalities, etc.) are kept under control but at the same time, too much control stifles small business and innovation so it requires ongoing active management to function well.
> It's about what you think because you made claims about how you think things should be.
That's not necessary fair because everyone else is calling for change here.
> Ideally, I feel it should be done by enabling greater competition, perhaps with a requirement for portable user identities, friends lists and reputations or interoperability between networks.
Except that you're just spreading your private information even further. At least if I post my private information to Facebook, it's on Facebook. I'm not worried that, as a feature, my friends are porting my information to other platforms.
> Then they would have competitive pressure to treat their users well and the government wouldn't need to micro-regulate little details.
I agree that competition would be better. In fact, I'd say that Facebook should have been prevented from buying Instragam, Whatapp, etc. But competitive pressure alone does not necessary require companies to treat users better. Facebook would still be the same with competition from these other companies.
> Just those that are in a powerful enough position to cause bigger problems, otherwise it would be disproportionately burdensome on small players or even hobbyists.
That's hard to judge. Just look at Whatapps -- they grew to millions of users with a team of less than dozen people. Are they a small player or a big player? You might end up with a lot of social networks right on the line of being big to avoid additional regulation.
Facebook, for it's part, has been very pro-regulation as they're big enough and profitable enough. This will further make it harder for smaller players to compete even if you limit the restrictions to large players.
> The fact that you want equal treatment for all companies, as well as other things you've said, suggests you're more of an idealist than a pragmatist.
No. But I think you can't have rules for "Facebook" because in 10 years the problem is going to be some other company in some other situation. And you have to be very careful of regulatory capture.
I believe when you sign up to Facebook you need to accept some terms and condition clause - this is the contract which is signed between you and Facebook (Facebook is referring that document when users are banned, so apparently they consider this as contract).
Facebook earns money thanks to its users, providing them some service so definitely there should be a contract here.
Now, when you look on those T&C, they are very vague, especially possible reasons for account suspension are very, very vague. They refer user to some "community standards" and it is not clear, if those "standards" are part of the contract or not.
In my opinion, the first thing that should be changed is to force Facebook and other services to provide a clear, formal contract that would state what are duties of both contract parts, what rights they have, etc. Stuff that each normal contract has. No mumbling about "community", etc.
Contract should be something that is enforceable and has clear appeal path and so on. If I don't agree with Facebook I should be able to court and refer to something that is specific and well defined, not some Mark Zuckerberg views on what is good or bad.
They got "terms & conditions". This is the contract. Formalising another contract would require legal fees. Is every user willing to pay a lawyer $200 to use FB? (and another $200 for Pinterest, $200 for Twitter, etc.) Is every user willing to pay AGAIN another $200 on the next "T&C Update"? If you think $200 is too much, come up with anothe number, and then multiply it by every free service you/someone uses (Twitter, free-Dropbox, free-Gmail, free-GoogleDocs, free-HN, free-Reddit, free-Viber, free-....).
FB, Twitter, Pinterest usage comes "as-is". We/you are the products. Since when does a super market have a contract with a potato? (I don't mean to insult, but really..).
Unless they (FB, or any service provider - paid or free) clearly discriminates against someone (e.g. "you are man/woman/black/asian/etc. and we don't like people like you here") and then they kick out FB every man/woman/black/asian/etc. person, feel free to sue them (more legal fees.. I see a pattern here) :)
But if it's not a discrimination issue, then please tell me ONE person that hasn't dropped an f-bomb "f... you/this/him/her/them/.." or some other profanity on a FB post, a FB comment, on FB-messenger message. In that spirit everyone is eligible to receive a red card, and it's down to FB to kick someone out anytime they want or anytime they get provoked. E.g. HenryBemis is trashing us on HN.. HenryBemis wrote "f... this <name_of_politician>", thus HenryBemis violated the policy about swearing, threatening violence, sexual content, yada-yada-yada.
A couple of days ago we saw a post on someone sending a "accidentally, partial nude photo" over messenger to a friend of his, and this got him expelled from FB. I clearly understand the capabilities of FB vs mine. I think more people should see these facts coldly.
Why would you even bring in partisan politics? Sounds like lack of principles, and total ignorance how moderation, admin rights, privatization and rights of association works.
Where is the hypocricy though? The same principles apply to private property in this case too. No special laws required for special people. I grant it's formed as a bit of hyperbole.
It should give people pause what full privatization and deregulation may mean.
I disagree, its consistent to think that people who violate facebooks policies should go build it themselves once blocked, but that this does not violate them meaningfully (saying something sarcastically is not the same as actually saying it), and that facebook should consistently follow its own rules.
There's a definite middle ground between facebook should be able to do whatever it wants with impunity and facebook should never be able to moderate anything ever.
Do you have specific individuals in mind? Because HN is a collective of a lot of people. I, for one, as posted had the same reaction both times.
Not every opinion is informed only by partisan position. I just believe in private ownership and personal rights. I believe in free speech but not in compelled speech.
Of course it applies here. The problem with Facebook doing this is that it diminishes their brand, product and trust users have in the platform.
Re: Robinhood, it is a completely different story. What Robinhood did in this case is market manipulation. They only allowed people to sell the stock and not to buy it. That is (I think) illegal.
If so, it requires someone to take action against them. Since the CEO of the Nasdaq suggested a trading halt to let hedge funds "recalibrate"[0] it's going to take State AGs or similar to take action.
The CEO of Nasdaq is owned by those hedge funds. Just like Janet Yellen is owned by them[1]. Halting trading would cause the price to plummet, and the Hedge funds would save billions. THIS is why they're calling for a trading halt.
It still applies. It applied when we were talking about conservatives, it applied when people were wondering about the "slippery slope" which we are clearly at the bottom of for a while now, it applies now.
I don't care how people get there. New platform. Use the correct technologies to be more impervious to top down arbitrary decisions, build a real appeals process, build representatives.
Of course, they have the right to do whatever. What is interesting is the timing. Why is Facebook comfortable demonstrating to what extent they are somehow linked to wall street? That's just an odd choice, I wouldn't have made a connection between them if they hadn't actively moved to harm their own brand in order to protect markets. That should ring alarm bells regardless of legality.
Sure. I don't mean that it's unequivocally part of a conspiracy. But like I said, It can't go unaddressed. This isn't a Hacker news story about a banned app. It's international news, and the news isn't about WSB's (admittedly) bad language.
Social networks were forced to moderate with the capitol riots. Now they have to moderate left wing mob organization on their platforms to avoid the perception they will only censor the right wing.
"/r/WSB voluntrily shut themselves down" is the point. It was self-managment. When a tech oligarchy - FB, Twitter, etc. acts together to censor that is my concern. Like there wasn't lot of silly banter or still is on many forums, except this one pissed off hedge fund managers and traditional investors. Mark must have lost money ;)
> 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).
It’s not fishy at all. everything that’s happened has caused these communities to grow exponentially to unprecedented levels. tripling or quadrupling in size. It’s like asking why a house party of a dozen people doesn’t get raided by the cops and a party of hundreds does.
Of all actors, platforms like Discord and Facebook should understand that such an influx makes it quite hard to moderate well. And that there is also a risk of adversarial actors infiltrating the groups. If they had any interest in the well-being of said communities, they would show some understanding of this challenge. At the very least wait a few days until things have shaken out. But no, straight to the ban hammer, with no dialogue.
>It's why have they all decided to act right now, just as this gamestop maneuver is happening?
the demonstrated power and financial success of WSB, even if fleeting and temporary, provides a lot of implicit credibility and validation to the "retard/YOLO" non-PC culture of WSB. The modern society worships success, and the people pay oversized attention to what successful people do - like what they eat, how exercise, how they stay motivated, etc. And now instead of respectable, successful, well dressed, educated, smart, cool, etc. Wall Street-ers a bunch of "retards" crawled from under the rock, teared a new one to those Wall Street-ers and got right on top of that podium of success veneration and idolation (like the "nerds" did 20 years ago with their tech startups). No surprise all the establishment (which these days naturally includes successful "nerds" of the previous generation) fights back. The established interests are always scared of changes, and especially when changes look like paradigm shift (while we wouldn't know for quite some time whether it is a true paradigm shift or just an aberration, the scare is real)
Today, I just had a conversation with my dad about WSB... Everyone is talking about it, I'm not surprised that someone even talked about it on some facebook board-meeting or whatever...
Make no mistake, Reddit is absolutely loving this. WSB has 3 million new subscribers in the past 2 weeks. The only thing the executives at reddit care about is revenue and hence impressions, which is exactly what they're getting.
Also, do you see just HOW MANY awards are being applied to WSB posts? It's consistently off the charts lol. I'm willing to bet it's the most awarded subreddit by a wide margin.
If we are talking money incentives, a community that are discussing stock investments seems more interesting for advertisement than politics. If a person are investing in stock options, it almost guarantied that they have spare money.
The Donald subreddit was big, but the writing was on the wall that Trump was about to lose, and /r/politics + /r/SandersforPresident + /r/AOC have always been bigger and more popular. It was a very easy decision for reddit.
They acted now because it drew attention to their platform. Not the kind of attention they wanted. They seem to basically not care until something big happens and they could appear to have helped/allowed it to be organized on their platform. This seems clear as day. There is still a ton of foul, lewd, right leaning, left leaning, offensive, racist, x-phobic, etc content on these platforms, it’s just not drawing attention to the platform. Ironically or maybe it’s more indicative of the intelligence limitations of those taking part, them shuttering these groups becomes more ammunition for the falsehoods and antiestablishment ideas the groups promote. It’s probably a lot less fishy than you might think. You can’t have fight club anymore when everyone knows about it...
> It's why have they all decided to act right now, just as this gamestop maneuver is happening?
Because they all have fairly loose monitoring and mostly complaint-based policy enforcement, and people being pissed off at you for any reason makes it more likely that complaints get reported.
The fact that the group was previously suspended by Facebook for being a "dangerous organization" makes this removal even more suspect. It was suspended for two different reasons.
I suspect a large part of it would be to protect themselves in case the recent publicity brings forth some undesired attention from regulator with regards to market manipulation.
I think this is a mistake. They already issued one correction from "20-member" to "20,000-member". The author seems to have serious problems with numbers. Look at the first paragraph:
> Facebook Inc took down a popular Wall Street discussion group, Robinhood Stock Traders, in a move that its founder on Thursday described as backlash for conversations buoying shares of GameStop Corp and other companies this week.
First, a typo, "buoying". But it also says "this week". So what they meant is probably Jan. 27.
Largely because the "gamestop maneuver" has inflammed an already excitable community and things are likely bubbling over right now in a way that they wouldn't be if people hadn't just bet thousands of dollars on a tulip scam.
And let's not euphemize this, it's not a "maneuver", it's market manipulation. Coordinating a collective buy to effect a short squeeze is clear market manipulation. Enticing a horde of gullible forum users to buy the same ballooned stock based on ideas like "stick it to the man" and "turn their tricks back on them" is an even clearer pump and dump scheme.
This doesn't end well for anyone (except Gamestop's pre-existing shareholders I guess). The hedge fund got fleeced, the gullible WSB users are going to lose a ton, Robinhood flushed their brand down the toilet trying to avoid being an accomplice to all of this, and the only folks who made money on the deal are more likely than not in the SEC crosshairs now.
No it's not market manipulation. Its counter party risk gone awry and the entirety of the internet finding out about it at the same time.
In my view, hedge funds have implicitly colluded for years on short positions because it's in their best interests not to screw each other over the long haul. Imagine going against Citadel as a fund. Your career is over. The fact the short interest rose to 140% is proof of that.
This trade should have been shaken out sooner, but no one would dare given the powers that be who were backing it. Also, consider the bond holders as true original victims here. Is it right that they had people artificially putting downward pressure on the security of a company that is indebted to them? If you believe in reflexivity, this is depriving lenders of a fair security valuation, which is an asset of sorts, and further driving them towards a delisting or bankruptcy.
> no one would dare given the powers that be who were backing it
But now that it has been done once, more people will be interested in these opportunities in the future. Quoting from Iron Man 2: If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in him. There will be blood in the water, the sharks will come.
> In my view, hedge funds have implicitly colluded for years on short positions because it's in their best interests not to screw each other over the long haul. Imagine going against Citadel as a fund. Your career is over. The fact the short interest rose to 140% is proof of that.
Reality says otherwise. Hedge funds get into trouble at the expense of hedge funds taking the other side of the bet all the time. Their entire business model is based around claiming the ability to beat the market by winning zero-sum bets, and in the long run the more funds they screw over the better their reputation and the more fund management fees they collect. Not going against downward pressure on a security if you think the other fund is undervaluing it and the risk is tolerable is literally leaving money on the table.
As for Citadel, they'll be delighted that a fund got into so much trouble it begged them for a bailout on whatever terms Citadel was willing to offer (and used the funds to unwind its exposure to that market).
They've been very public and transparent for all to see about their strategy. It's a very common play when naked shorts are this exposed. The WSB side of this is a distraction. Michael Burry of Big Short fame has been talking this trade and pouring hundreds of millions into this gamma squeeze since the summer.
See, this is why someone is going to jail. This explanation is wrong. Someone lied to you, and they probably lied to you to make this look like a sure bet so that you'd buy (and thus pump) a stock that is otherwise going to crash, so that they can unload their position before it does. You got scammed, and the person who did it is guilty of a crime.
FWIW: Short leverage higher than 100% is not naked selling. It just means (as an example) that you borrowed a share, sold it, then later on that buyer loaned the same share back to you, and you sold it again. This is not a good idea, but it's not naked selling (which is itself securities fraud).
yes the GME crowd-source scenario is definitely market manipulation, it is the very definition of it. the question is, can any single person or group of people be identified as culpable? that is the beauty of it, in a way.
you cant tell if someone has a naked short position on. they are exceedingly rare, and most likely ephemeral, and most likely caused by a back-office error rather than deliberately. i dont think you know what you are saying
How does a pump and dump work if you realized your losses before you even bought the stock and never end up selling? In my opinion the value of GME is $0 and that doesn't stop me from wanting to buy more but never selling ever because of the entertainment value.
This kind of boils down to preference in humanity as well. Do you prefer a group that makes dick/retard/cuck jokes for laughes or prefer a group that laughed when they ruined the economy, put people out in the streets and coerced the gov to bail them out because they were too important to go out on the street?
Politically correct speech is bankrupt in all forms of ethics and morality if it favors the second group just because they have kinder words. Generally why lots of people are disgusted by PC rhetoric. It's bullshit to its core because it holds no real core value, it just keeps things superficially pretty for the predators of society.
I'm enjoying this ride and wish there was more I could do because it's become bigger than the money. This whole thing is pulling back the curtain and we're getting to see the frail ankles of the wizard.
Less clever people show up and attach to the “offensive” part without bringing along the “clever” part.
Going a bit off topic, but HNs constant fight against this is its best asset. Sometimes it's annoying to see a funny joke down-voted, but it's so much better than the entire comment section devolving into nonsense like slashdot did >15 years ago.
Absolutely understand that position and I know (and can prove through my HN history) that I'm pretty crass as well. However, this issue comes to facebook using the sensitive speech arguement to shut them down. How many other groups are just as bad if you do a simple word search on their database? If they effectively shut down everyone and every group for the offense of saying dick immediately, fine. I'm okay with that. But arbitrarily doing so, especially when the group is hurting their financial overlords, that's where I call bullshit and stand by using that word. They got zero flak pre this short squeeze and their attitude and speech is no different. But they're embarrassing the folks who cry for gov bail outs. Focusing on them making offensive jokes is a red herring from wall street trying to cover their ass.
It reminds me of the one and only time I've replied-all to an email with a joke. At the time it seemed perfect, the best possible setup, something everyone would get and enjoy. But the dozen or so joke replies immediately after mine ruined it and convinced me never to do it again.
This is not how WallStreetBets started. I joined the community in 2017 and I can tell you, there was high-level due diligence going on that made me wonder if some of the people posting might also be working at large investment banks, but couldn't get these certain trades they were advocating past their compliance guys (at some point, "too risky" starts to overlap in the Venn diagram with "too dumb").
Like every thing in the world that gains massive popularity, it attracts the normies who want in on the action, but aren't willing to do the, quite literally months or years (depending on how deeply you throw yourself into it) of learning required to even understand most of the DD posts there.
Yes, there was the occasional ridiculous trolling, like convincing posters on /r/investing that /r/wallstreetbets had a Lean Hogs Insider Trading Ring (which still makes me laugh out loud to this day), but it was far more rare.
Yes, the meme posts have risen dramatically, but there's still occasional good due diligence there, its just now you have to sift through a mountain of shit instead of small hill of it.
The same Chamath Palihapitiya said in his CNBC interview that he read posts in WSB and saw better analysis than the ones coming from real wall street analysts he has worked with.
You want to know what it looks like is happening now though? It looks like these peeps are weaponizing the sub to their own benefit in the name of "sticking it to the man". Everything about this smacks of a massive, crowd sourced "market manipulation" under the guise of righteousness.
All the people screaming "YOLO I can't care if I lose X" seem to be missing the fact that their money isn't "lost"; it is ending up in the pockets of a few at their expense.
From what I gather in WSB (I lurk there a lot) it seems more that a lot of people are very aware that money will change hands, might go into other rich people's pockets but they simply don't care, if they fuck up one or more rich folks while enriching others, they don't care. If some normal people make a lot of money out of this they are happy enough.
It's fascinating to see how many people really just want to fuck with the rich and how many care about normal people getting life-changing money. It's much more altruistic than I imagined.
Absolutely. I think generationally we're sick of old rich people owning everything and dictating how things should work, electing backwards idiots, doing things like brexit, and forcing us to rent every god damn part of our lives from them. Democracy is at present failing us hugely, and if something like this can start to hit the ownership class where it hurts, I'm all for it.
I chucked in £30 on Free Trade.
I don't care if I get that money back. I just want to see the rich people suffer a bit, know that they don't have all the power.
>it is ending up in the pockets of a few at their expense.
Everyone is aware of that. The group of people that will get rich are those who bought the stock 2 weeks ago or earlier.
Heck, when someone put their entire life savings in ornamental gourd futures WSB crapped about that person saying how stupid that was. They aren't stupid. They are fully aware of what they are doing.
WSB went through many different phases. I remember when gold was getting meme'd super hard ($JUNG, $DUST). Then "pharma bro" (Martin Shrekli) was popular and it was all about small cap bio stocks.
Then FD's (weekly OTM options, what it stands for is offensive) became super popular.
But I agree, it was always a good mix of memes and DD. I remember some activision DD which was along the lines of: "look at the name, act and vision! Two things a company needs to succeed".
Having expressed this understanding of WSB's benign intent in their use of the term "retard", surely you see why some random person at Discord taking offense to it and whimsically banning the entire community is messed up, right? Discord is host to a massive variety of nominally private (you need a link to join) communities that have real, deep value to those who participate in them. Over time they develop their own unique history and culture that has a complex context that can't be assessed with simple, surface level judgements by some Discord employee to whom said community is the n+1th problem of the day. Banning the community comes off to me as an arbitrary exercise of an unearned moral authority, and feels deeply arrogant and ethnocentric in all the negatives that term implies.
Obviously Discord is a private company etc etc. They're also the dominant platform upon which ~140 million people [1] from all over the world communicate, in all the messy ways humans do. I don't know about you, but I'd rather they focus on keeping the platform running, collect their revenue from their customers, and mind their own business. This is what everyone who uses the service expects them to do, after all.
The comment you are responding to is talking about more offensive stuff than the "benign intent" of the core WSB community. I've only been in a handful of discord communities, but none of them would tolerate even the "benign intent" WSB stuff.
Also, "benign intent" does not make offensive behavior less offensive. Intent can matter, but it certainly isn't everything.
We agree here that the term is probably offensive even in the context that WSB is using it. If someone used that term here in the same way that WSB people do, I'm sure we'd both wish that dang would remove that post and ban the poster for a bit to cool off.
This doesn't address the larger question of whether or not we have a right to enforce our completely subjective standards globally on other communities which we don't belong to. Personally, I wouldn't want some outsider deciding that me and my friends weren't allowed to talk to eachother anymore if we decided to start using the term towards each other privately in jest.
> I've only been in a handful of discord communities, but none of them would tolerate even the "benign intent" WSB stuff.
On the other hand quite a few of them would probably support stabbing each other in the back. I may have had a run in with a few too many people that like to abuse simple stuff for power plays.
> So the real question is, why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community.
This. At the end of the day, Facebook/Discord has the power to ban individual users. There is no good reason to nuke an entire community if the the mods running said community are being cooperative. This isn't about "hate speech" or "adult sexual exploitation" or whatever the excuse dice end up rolling next time. This is a knee-jerk reaction from a platform with a ton of power and no incentive to wield it responsibly.
I don't know the Discord popularity but the reddit sub has like 4 million new users this week. Its not really at a scale where doing anything to individual users is going to work.
Discord is probing how much censorship they can get away with. This is a standard tactic for social media companies today. They ban first then backpedal later if there is too much backlash. This helps them normalize censorship while minimizing reputation loss.
Do i read that article right and this "Helping the mods" is an euphemism?
They banned all bad words and image memes (due to lack of ability to check the content with a bot) and told the mods to rigorously enforce compliance with Discords standards or the group gets removed again. Maybe they helped configuring the mod-bot ...
Perhaps, but not as encouraging as a migration to self-hosted Matrix servers on traditional paid dedicated/virtual server hosting that's much less interested in policing its customers' content than platforms are.
The thing with me is, WSB is a group of what? A few million at least? I saw that they were up to 1.2 million maybe yesterday. And they're having a hard time on most if not all platforms. If not technically, then in terms of some form of censorship (as is the case here). There was the Discord issue, this Facebook issue. I've heard Reddit devs has been helpful with scaling r/wallstreetbets, but even still, the number of users and the (crazy yet benign) content is proving too much for a single subreddit to handle. This is a real-life use case for a possibly open-source, scalable message board. I feel like people are suddenly seeing the downsides of these backdoor-dealing, self-interested walled gardens.
/r/wallstreetbets has 5.3mil members right now, up from ~2mil a week or so ago.
Reddit has not been helpful at all. The mods made a post after they shut down the sub saying that the Reddit API can't handle the amount of traffic they need to moderate, and they've asked for special permissions.
It's a great irony people will stick it to the man using a private closed walled garden. Pump and dump is market manipulation. We all know the system will mitigate, both for survival but also stability and preventing bubbles.
> My general sense is that WSB works hard to moderate within its sensibility so it stays enjoyable, but with the big influx, I’d bet Facebook and Discord are either reacting to behavior which is slipping past the WSB mods due to the influxes,
This is possible, they are a victim of their own success in a way... or
The banks are looking for a way—any way—to shut them down. This is costing millions of dollars. Paying a few shills to jump into the group ramp up the BS and a few others to jump into the group and take offense at every little thing might just be what it takes to overwhelm the mods.
Not Facebook collusion, just a little discourse sabotage.
Given the number of new people being the size of a substantial city, the worst of them is statistically guaranteed to be worse than the most horrible professional troll, I would argue.
what? banks just lend money and are scared of defaults. what do banks have to do with this? the power company is complicit by providing electricity too?
if you against banking, you have bigger fish to fry
Brokerage firms are backed by banks, and if a brokerage firm was somehow small enough that they couldn't provide the liquidity to cover the trades, then the banks backing them are on the hook.
Ever since Clinton repealed Glass Steagal, banks have been able to offer both commercial banking and investment banking. And they aren't really scared of defaults when they are too big to fail.
I agree with your skepticism but it is possible, even likely, that maple and melvin were levered as part of their short strategy.
I think its far more likely that the poison would be released by funds themselves, but do not think for a second that banks will not intervene to safeguard their revolvers...
You captured how I would describe WSB pretty succinctly. It's relatively clever people just not caring to bother with grammar, being correct, making fun of often funny events in the world of MONEY.
The 6 chimp brain has no clue what its doing when it comes to group dynamics at population scale.
The only moves are blunder, react, counter react, avoid, fight, flee.
The chimps at FB have dug themselves into deep holes. The only way they save themselves is to pull everyone else inside and cry for Grandma to show up.
If there is any adult content (in the form of swear words) it is moderated and marked NSFW on wsb.
If that was the issue, all Facebook had to do was issue a warning and make the group adults only or something like that. This outright ban is just insane.
Which seems to be a good indicator that the motivation wasn't any form of adult content or NSFW which they have tools to deal with. It was more reactionary
Out of morbid curiosity I was looking for all these places from to Facebook to Discord servers popping up and one obvious strong topic was about 'sticking it to wall street jews' so you can imagine where it's going.
I'm thinking that their stock is also tied to the hedge funds holding short positions on GME and etc. They also took a dive because of WSB - maybe their covering their own interests?
No the community is genuinely toxic and that is the fun of it. It’s boorish offensiveness, not some ironic satire. This is what gives it its power however.
> Half the fun of WSB is that it is enormously offensive.
That's the way 4chan presented too, and it turned out that the community wasn't entirely as ironic as its members claimed.
Cultures turn toxic really, really fast. And this kind of "ironic offensiveness" turns into a shield for genuine hate in a way that even long term participants don't notice until it's too late.
When everyone is a criminal, anyone can be arrested. The reddit mods have basically made this charge, in their own special WSB way.
It's impossible for moderators to fully control large groups, subs and such. Some bannable comments will always be present, and they are limited by whatever moderation tools they get from reddit.
Meanwhile, the idea that discord, reddit (throttled not banned) and FB all simultaneously and coincidentally took these actions during the gamestop maneuver is not even 1% believable. WTF.
You just need a few saboteurs coming in and posting "hate speech" on your forum and then reporting the same. Before you know it, you are banned, you have (several) news articles objectifying you as nazis and you are doxxed to high-heaven.
The only way you can get back is if you are "friends" with the big-boys or the mainstream media.
The oldest trick in the book for governments and large organizations. Large peaceful protest happening? Send some goons to blend in and cause trouble, and arrest everyone.
> if you are "friends" with the big-boys or the mainstream media
For example: Bohemian Club was originally founded by San Francisco newspapermen in 1872, and you can see how many friends they have in very very high places. Manufacturing Consent is not a new phenomenon.
Short summary: you dear reader are a federal felon, the only reason why you're not in prison is that no one has bothered to lock you up yet. The laws on the books and the way we live our lives have diverged so much that you commit at least three felonies by the time you have had lunch.
Actually, they can try to appeal to the new Facebook Oversight Board.[1] They released their first set of decisions today, overturning some Facebook removals.[2]
Sometimes people ask, why do rich people keep striving for more money? What is the point of having $1B instead of $100M, or $10B instead of $1B, or $100B instead of $10B?
Sometimes the answer is given, that it's the same impulse as playing a computer game and money is the score.
But the last few days, something else occurred to me, watching the kind of disarray of various billionaire hedge fund types. A big attraction of wealth on that level must be the sense that you're smarter than nearly anyone else.
This situation punctures that and it seems like a lot of quotes in the news are about scrambling to save face and protect peoples' self images. I don't think they are actually outraged over monetary losses as such.
It's interesting that people are comparing it to Occupy Wall Street.
Characterizing this as a "rich folk" vs "common folk" issue is hilarious. Aside from the early "common folks" that cashed out, there's also plenty of "rich folks" that cashed out as well[1]. As for the losers, well the hedge funds who were shorted initially definitely lost money, although it remains to be seen whether the "rich folk" hedge funds who shorted this week lost money. It also remains to be seen whether the "common folks" that piled on this week are going make a profit or are just going to be bagholders.
This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Lots of rich investors are using this as an opportunity to further enrich themselves. The narrative that this is "David vs Goliath" is only partially true; in reality it's Goliath vs Goliath, except one of the Goliaths has David strapped to his chest to absorb any blows.
> although it remains to be seen whether the "rich folk" hedge funds who shorted this week lost money. It also remains to be seen whether the "common folks" that piled on this week are going make a profit or are just going to be bagholders
My comment above makes no statement about who is going to eventually profit from this.
My comment is about how as soon as the "common folk" start to take their destiny into their own hands, the "rich folk" cry foul, to the point where Congressmen are issuing press releases, and there is talk of completely re-designing the entire system.
There is an awful lot of whining coming from one end of the wealth spectrum right now.
FYI by your own logic, you have no right to be upset about the RobinHood GME situation. Per your own logic, RobinHood is a private company, and they can do whatever they want...If you don't like it, you can build your own RobinHood!
RH is subject to a ton of federal regulations that social media isn’t. They legally cannot cut off one set off investors in order to enrich another. It’s a felony. We are not discussing free speech here.
It is kinda funny how the Constitutionally protected right doesn't have laws ensuring fair treatment, but stock trading does. Why should they have to allow for equal access to investors? Sure, the law currently requires it, but if we made a law saying First Amendment now applies to all private businesses people would be fine with it because it is now the law? I think not. So, given they are a private company, shouldn't they be free to do business with who they want and how they want?
As for the penalty of breaking the law, if it is enforced it will likely still have been the cheaper option for those who made the call.
Yeah, it’s a real shame that’s there is only one ISP in the whole world. If there was at least one more, maybe Pirate Bay wouldn’t have been killed in 2006.
Isn't it illegal to make your own financial system? I'm under the impression that it's one of the big levers of power the US government has (those "sanctions" you hear about), can't imagine them letting it be weakened.
Facebook is kind of fucked both ways tbh. If they don't remove anything they get blasted for hosting violence and abuse and if they remove too much they get blasted for censorship. Its impossible for them to remove just the right amount of stuff since thats subjective and they could never train a million moderators on how to apply it.
I think the real solution here is we need to break up the social media companies. Have each community be its own self hosted website again where the moderators of the community take responsibility for it and apply their own rules. The government can then step in and take action if the communities are illegal.
Agree on the first part, but the second part doesn't seem as though it would practically work. Subreddits are the closest approximation and they still fall under a monolithic umbrella (and struggle to cope). Also, in terms of balance of power, breaking up all the different communities into separate smaller units gives too much power to the government IMO. It's essentially the ideal situation for a government who would like to pressure anyu one smaller community. Much harder to shush/gag/silence/stealth takedown a Facebook or a Reddit than it is a small entity. Divide & Conquer.
Facebook is definitely stuck between a rock and a hard place here though. This is why I think Mark Zuckerberg is actually being authentic when he says that "Facebook needs more regulation". He's already seen this problem and knows that having that subjective burden offloaded onto the government is the only true solution, i.e. "just tell me what the rules are and I shall play by them". Conveniently, these additional rules would also make it much harder for a new entrant to come unseat Facebook. So more regulation from the government is, in reality, win-win for Facebook.
You literally can't because of government regulations, although spinning up your own self-hosted community hasn't been regulated yet and is fairly easy.
> found your own country no one will try to stop your
E.g. Asgardia can be considered a surprisingly successful proto-nation. AFAIK UN actually contacted them and asked to launch a satellite into space (which they can) but that ended up a diplomatic failure.
> or won't let you into the UN
Getting into the UN hardly really means much. There are many nations in the UN nobody cares about. There also are nations not in the UN yet very relevant (e.g. Taiwan which was among the UN founders).
No, see, what you don't get is that they're a big company and people really want to use their product, so the rules are different... for some reason, I guess?
People were using the argument five years ago, 4,3,2, yesterday. Whenever one of these monopolies does something to A that B approves of and A objects, B comes out with IAPCTCDWTW.
People generally seem love to make excuses for Power when it's stepping on people they don't like, and are then somehow surprised when Power turns around and crushes them.
I never mentioned no sides so I'm not following you here; but to answer to your argument even if the government gets control of FB and decides to silence some group I support (e.g. homosexuals) and therefore I disagree with such decision I still would prefer that control of a main communication platform to be in hands of the government and not random executives, in such case my focus (and people's) would be to have a less homophobic government where at least my vote counts and not some random execs that I have no minor influence upon.
The slippery slope is in full effect. Platforms engaged in mass, coordinated de-platformings and people lapped it up because orange man bad. Now the orange man is gone, but the mass coordinated de-platformings still remain and are now being wielded for YOLO reasons.
I have been on wsb subreddit and discord server for a long time. There has been zero change in the culture or the type of content or the tone of the conversations in all that while, right uptill the discord server was banned. Either these platforms knew there was bad content but did nothing, or they know there is no bad content but are using it as a flimsy excuse to help out their fellow Harvard MBA's.
Ironically the orange man would be the one laughing at all of this today.
As if it started with orange man or if it was his political program at any point before 2019. He never advocated regulating megacorps and started his whining only when he himself got hit. Cutting and regulating megacorps was always initiative from the left side. Orange man just appropriated that idea recently to ride the outrage train.
It's too bad the same doesn't apply to them. Like the Gov or someone coming along and saying that there is adult sexual exploitation going on on their platform, we're shutting you down and banning you.
Fuck I only wish....can you imagine how much healthier society would be without farcebook.
The issue is that in any group of sufficient size, someone at some point will use a slur or phrase that someone who is really reaching can turn into a claim like this. The excuse in WSB’s case with Discord was “hate speech”. This then overflowed into the Financial Times falsely labeling WSB as an “alt-right” group [1].
Unfortunately in today’s hyper-PC environment, this is such an easy way to instantly deplatform your enemies that it will continue to be abused. Any large group can be shutdown at any time should the powers that be decide they don’t like it - they just have to find a single post that the PC police would find objectionable. It’s one of the dangers of allowing such thin claims to have such instant, fatal effects with with no ability to fight or appeal.
As the saying goes, "if it's free, you're the product". And all of these de-platforming moves are in response to 'defective product'. The community they sell to advertisers is acting defective and becomes unsellable, thus that community is tossed out/shut down. Enough other communities remain manageable & sellable, so business continues on.
Please stop posting ideological flamebait. You've done a ton of it in the last 24 hours, it's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it—regardless of which flavor you favor or how strongly you feel about it.
Fortunately your recent account history doesn't show much of this before the current episode, and many of your comments seem downright excellent. That's great. Please go back to that and don't do any more of this. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, we'd appreciate it. The idea here is substantive, thoughtful conversation on topics of intellectual curiosity.
I'm an admin and unfortunately I have to ban people who contribute to destroying this place. You did a lot of that in the last 24 hours. I don't think that's hard to see. I don't want to ban you, so please go back to using HN as intended so I don't have to.
> The important thing is they now realize
If you want people to realize something, you need to explain it to them patiently and respectfully, and include a certain amount of overlap with what they already know and feel. That's a totally different mode of communication than flaming rhetoric. People don't learn when beaten with flaming sticks (verbally any more than physically). They just go rigid, double down, and lash back. If you actually want them to learn, that is the worst way to make it happen.
Flaming is something we do to other people, not for them. We do it for ourselves, to vent our anger and frustration (not that it really helps us either, but it at least provides a little temporary relief). That's partly why it contributes to destroying communication and community. We want communication and community here, so please do the opposite from now on.
Why do they even pretend to give a reason anymore. Just close it. Nobody is buying the "hate speech" "adult sexual exploitation" whatever arguments, and honestly it just makes facebook look like liars.
Just delete the group and say: "It violated our terms of service". That's probably also a lie, but at least it's a little less obnoxious.
Or just delete it and be honest: "Our VP's rowing crew buddy from Harvard who now works at Citadel asked us to shut this down and he's more important than you."
Reminds me of when I and a whole flight's worth of people were waiting hours in line at the airline's service desk to rebook flights after a missed connection. One guy waltzes up and steps right into the front of the line. People object to him pushing in, but the guy stays where he is and says "sorry, I'm business class!".
The airline employees let him do it, and just repeat to us: "Sorry, he's business class!" He gets served first, saving literally hours compared to joining the back of the line.
Yea, so? How is this the same thing? He paid for that service. It's equivalent to paid support tiers where your query gets answered faster than others. Or is it just fashion now to shit on rich people even when they are playing by the rules?
That's not even close. As long as the first/business/economy classes are transparent in their policies and privileges, then it's okay. There is no cheating here.
The thing that gets me is that they don't ban specific people, it's always the entire community that gets taken down. But totally nothing to see here, guys.
If you manage a community that is even remotely controversial, you’d better start asking your community for their email address, as an emergency backup.
Possibly even ask for their phone number.
Though it's tempting, don't message them at all. Just hang onto it.
Only use it to if your community is banned and you need to start over somewhere else. Then email/text them the location of the new community.
You probably should start an alternative community right away so that you can promote it in the current community and maybe cross-post until you get banned with a warning on each post in the twitter/facebook community.
Exactly. Many controversial instagrammers create a backup instagram account that they only barely use, and occasionally refer to. If their "primary" account gets banned, the backup already exists and has a history.
I suspect people do this with Twitter and other social media accounts as well.
I suspect you can do the same thing with groups. For example when WSB went down there were already backups within minutes.
I apologize for this; I had high hopes based on mention here, but really thought that documentary was terrible. The word itself is great, but there was about 10 seconds of anything that resembled the levels of reality distortion that are now quite commonplace. I was mostly interested in the Soviet system of full-spectrum propaganda such as staging protests against themselves, which was only mentioned in passing. There was basically no common theme running through it, just a bunch of weird stuff that happened, mostly relating to US foreign policy, mostly blaming it on personalities of republican presidents. It felt like it was itself the sort of propaganda meant to distract from real fundamental problems and place blame on boogeymen, rather than an exposure of the same. I chose it for movie night with people I live with, which was embarrassing for me.
No matter how they treat users, people won't leave due to network effect.
I don't believe the problem is solvable with more tech or free market. I think the only way forward is political, with laws and regulations.
Long ago railroad networks, water pipes networks, and landline phone networks were private companies free to do whatever they please with the property they own.
What? Facebook obviously isn’t a natural monopoly. WSB is mainly on reddit, was active on discord, and congregates elsewhere.
I don’t think Facebook should have shut down WSB but that doesn’t make them a monopoly.
As for monopoly in general, there’s Tiktok, Snapchat. Clubhouse just raised a big round.
The blue facebook app is actually anything but a monopoly, as Instagram (a facebook property) gets much more enthusiasm. There’s no “natural” monopoly for Facebook blue there.
It’s easy to pick a concept and try to apply it everywhere, but Facebook can act objectionally without being “a natural monopoly”.
It fits the definition from the article. “An industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry give the largest supplier in an industry an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors”
In case of FB the infrastructural cost is less of an issue, at least not anymore. I think Amazon and Microsoft are capable of hosting at least a dozen Facebooks each on their clouds should they want to. The main barrier to entry which causes that overwhelming advantage is network effect.
Not sure killing competitors is the main reason for FB’s behavior. Their stock price is somewhat linked to their userbase. This alone creates an incentive to buy competitors.
It's much better to argue that FB is a monopoly than a natural monopoly. It's not at all obvious why FB cannot instantly die like all social media companies before. I'm not sure what inspiration is hoped by linking to Wikipedia on a fiercely discussed issue.
> It's much better to argue that FB is a monopoly than a natural monopoly.
Many laws and public discussions related to monopolies in general, as opposed to natural monopolies, are focused on pricing. FB can argue by saying "that's not applicable because our product is free for users".
> It's not at all obvious why FB cannot instantly die like all social media companies before.
About 35% of global population use facebook at least once a month. Global population counts newborn babies, and 10-15% of adults who can't read or write.
None of the prior social media companies achieved that size of their network.
The question is, what is Facebook a monopoly of? If you say "social media" it's almost self-referential. Facebook's customers are advertisers. Facebook is ultimately a media company competing with other media companies for eyeballs.
Agreeed. And there are several obvious laws without touching 230. Off the top of my head
- Ban businesses engaged in online advertising from compiling real world data / mixing physical world data with the online profiles of users
- Ban businesses engaged in online advertising from building profiles of people who have not opted into their platform; require permanent removal of all data within 30 days of any user leaving their platform
- Require businesses provide human based appeal process to any user or business that spends or earns $1,000 in a year before suspending or terminating an account
These could even be done at the state proposition level, absent state authority
> Long ago railroad networks, water pipes networks, and landline phone networks were private companies free to do whatever they please with the property they own.
I agree about social networks, but I'm not sure how good of an argument this is. In the US all those things (railroads, water networks, landline) have gone to crap.
Yeah, well, Facebook did indeed buy some other social networking companies. I don't pay any attention to them, but how many people who don't use Facebook are also not using any of their brands?
Such things don't make logical sense to me. So assuming Facebook is a "natural monopoly", it is only so because of millions of people (the voters) choose to use it. Instead of voting for legislation, those people could simply vote with their feet and choose a different social network. There is no need for regulation. (If the people already WANT it, they could simply do it, without government intervention).
I mean, what's the utility that I get from the network effect as a user? Lots of people that I barely know and don't care about are on it, great who cares.
* Far more people are on Facebook than were ever on MySpace. There are not that many of my personal friends/family were ever on MySpace. Now however, almost every one of my personal friends and family members is on Facebook.
* MySpace did not spend billions acquiring potential social network competitors. The two biggest c(non Chinese) social networks that might have challenged Facebook were acquired for billions (Instagram and WhatsApp) and the other network (SnapChat) had an offer, and when it was turned down, a competing service was created by Facebook.
* As a market matures, it becomes harder to unseat incumbents. The social media market is far more mature than it was before.
* as an example, Google dethroned AltaVista and Lycos rather easily. However, I would bet money that 10 years from now, absent regulation, Google will still have the dominant search engine. In the same way, 10 years from now, I would bet that Facebook will still have the dominant social network.
Until your family suffers the consequences or the side effects of FB, you will ignore the critics but I am convinces that most families will eventually experience the side effects.
Your experience (and mine fwiw) does not generalise. It is significantly harder for many people to do so while keeping up with familial and social obligations. Not to mention some business obligations for many. Facebrick is trying ever harder to make being a citizen impossible without a Facebook account. Government departments have Facebook accounts and use it for communication. WhatsApp is used for payments on much of the world. Don't kid yourself it's as easy for everyone as it is for you and I.
That said. Delete your Facebook account. Plan it. Do it. It feels so, so very good pushing the button and your quality of life improves significantly. Facebrick is as vile as any serious addiction tends to be once it has hold of you.
Facebook exists because the boomers are there and the boomers don’t like change, once they die off (and ig degenerates into what FB is) the monopoly is gonna start to topple
> Facebook suspended his group on Jan. 7 after labeling it a “dangerous organization,” according to correspondence seen by Reuters, though the company reinstated its privileges after he appealed to contacts there.
What a joke. They're not even pretending to do it under the guise of hate speech anymore.
When the music stops, it's also going to lighten the wallets of many of the amateur investors.
These groups quickly degrade into memes about how buying and holding these stocks forever will make people rich. They chastise anyone who even considers mentioning an exit strategy.
When the stock begins to decline, early investors in these groups will quietly exit while using the group to convince others to "buy the dip" and have "diamond hands".
Don't believe the narrative that this is a simple transfer of wealth from wealthy banks to Redditors. It's also a massive transfer of wealth from Redditors arriving late to the game who aren't in on the joke to those who are.
That's not really what this is about though. It's not about pardon the pun..Robin hooding the wealth from the rich to the poor, it's about casting light on practices that are disproportionately in favor of the wealthy. Hence bans on groups trying to do this in clever ways.
That’s the narrative they’re using to convince new players to hold the bag. It’s not true, though.
Do you really think Redditors are YOLOing thousands of dollars into a stock with the understanding that they’re going to lose most of it? Are they really spending thousands of dollars on some laughs?
No, they’ve been convinced that this trade is free money. They’ve also been convinced this money is coming from evil bad guys, ignoring the influx of cash from fellow Redditors.
Nope, a lot of the wallstreetbets community are in this because they recognize that squeezing an over-leveraged short position will make a stock go vertical until bankruptcy or govt intervention.
I think they absolutely know they can lose it all. But the risk/reward ratio was so amazing it made sense to throw money at it and see what happens.
Many of them constantly suffer the consequences already but the street is not in it for protecting them. The street wants their cash into their own pocket.
> When the stock begins to decline, early investors in these groups will quietly exit while using the group to convince others to "buy the dip" and have "diamond hands".
Haven't they been pretty candid about saying "when the short interest decreases it's every man for himself?"
The big Internet challenge for the next 3-4 years is to completely decentralize the big social networks. It is not a matter of technology though. You need people rioting, the governments having the balls to do it or a combination of both.
It is a matter of technology. Groups that get banned on regular social media will move to these new next gen social networks, and (almost) everyone else will stay on the old ones.
Giant echo chambers will form. But only the new ones will be uncensorable and free.
> It is a matter of technology. Groups that get banned on regular social media will move to these new next gen social networks, and (almost) everyone else will stay on the old ones.
I find it scary that those big tech companies are trying their best to put everything under their control. I understand that they are private companies. But does that mean they can do whatever they want and get away with it?
Depends on which argument you agree with. "It's a private company it can do whatever it wants" makes it seem like yes, they can. However Facebook is answerable to two distinct groups: The people who use the service, and the stock market. If people stopped using Facebook then it's possible that would push ad revenue down, which would then push the stock price down, which might then incite the investors to demand Facebook make changes to bring people back...so the ad revenue will go back up, which will push the stock price back up, and on and on. On the other hand, Facebook is a lot like Microsoft back in the 90s. It wasn't the only computer company. It wasn't the only operating system. But the sheer size and market influence allowed it to act unchecked.
Biggest question seems to be how does the community deal with spam (and spam taking a large amount of space). But other than that I could see a lot of people willing to host nodes for free.
Hotline! What a great piece of software. I learned to code as a teenager in a hotline group dedicated to RealBASIC. Such fond memories of that decentralized platform.
I spent all of high school on hotline servers but it was never very decentralized. Not compared to a real federated protocol. It's client-server where servers register themselves with trackers which keep lists of server and return the list to clients when they ask.
KDX is the "modern" open source implementation of the Hotline/Caracho concept.
I still think usenet is the way to go. It's a robust federated system. Sure most people will use a few servers but there's always the easy open to switch to a new one. I even posted on misc.invest.stocks today using eternal-september.org text only access.
Doesn't need to be decentralized, just a phpBB forum behind Cloudflare would still work. Cloudflare is one of the few companies that hasn't become censor-happy (except that one time..)
The one time I believe you are referring to is when Cloudflare banned the Daily Stormer, which is a far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynist, and Holocaust denial message board website that promoted the genocide of Jews. It went far beyond the domain of free speech into advocating violence against people, not to speak of its horrific hatred and racism. Reason enough for anyone to ban it.
I think saying "We do not have the option of 'ban views that are actually bad'" is like saying "We do not have the option of saving lives" because everybody dies.
I also think it's inconsistent to declare morals are all relative while arguing for your free speech ideals. In a forum with moderation, voting, and frequent banning of people.
> "But they're really really actually super-duper truly totally bad!" isn't a valid argument, since many, many people can use it and they will.
It is absurdity to make the claim that, since anyone can say anything, no meaningful concept of objectivity can exist. Interesting how often it recurs in "free speech at any cost" argumentation.
That’s the price to pay when you don’t take political stances. The free speech approach is to just leave the dictator’s page up and let opposition pages stay up as well.
It’s not a political stance. Cloudflare is breaking the law by providing services to companies/individuals that fall under US sanctions. It’s not politics here, it’s people’s lives.
It’s time to hack/weaponize censorship. Any group you don’t like you infiltrate and add hate speech. Like China when you denounced the neighbor you had a grudge with as bourgeoisie.
If you don’t think this isn’t already happening, you are completely wrong.
Frankly, this is a good thing. Maybe when those who were so sanguine about the recent censoring by Big Tech see it without the blinders of their political bias on, and also witness to the coordinates attacks by the media to justify it, the other Big Lie will be obvious to more people.
Are you referring to the recent censoring of platforms that refused to moderate the inciting of violence? I believe there is a huge difference. You can not have a society that is tolerant to intolerance, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. Iirc, there were a few major platforms that are well known to harbor and promote incitements of violence when it aligns with the political and cultural hegemon. You actually can and must have a society that is tolerant of intolerance. The alternative is totalitarianism. Hence the paradox.
Quick question: is anything stopping GameStop itself from authorizing a whole bunch new shares and selling them at this all-time-high price? I understand the Redditors trust each other, but what makes them think they can trust GameStop?
They can but they have not yet. They’re not going to be able to do it by 29th (doubtful) and it’s a day of max pain.
On the other hand, pissing off a whole bunch of your customers and investors does not seem like a wise idea. Hell, they’ve more money to buy things now.
I should also mention that the GME balance sheet wasn’t even bad back in July, and they’re doing everything to improve it, even without the short squeeze (think closing stores etc).
I believe they are limited to issuing 100k at a time and spaced out much larger than is currently needed to take advantage of the situation. This is all part of the calculated short squeeze.
I don't know much about this but apparently they can. I read [1] that AMC did just that and raised money to survive the rest of the year based on the inflated valuation.
I don't know much about all this gambling stuff and to be honest I don't care. But what happened and what is happening is, in my opinion, more important than this affair.
It shows where power is, in case we didn't notice yet.
And it shows that we should collectively act to regain some of this power, we gave them for free...
If people are wondering what other options there out there to protect WSB and other groups from obnoxious band like this, might I suggest Mastodon? You can self host and be a part of the network. The tricky part to replicate the user capacity for WSB would probably require a lot of build out and probably someplace the servers can’t be killed by the ISP or data center (Russia?).
I along with a few other friends have messaged the moderators and a few other notable figures on Reddit about this. Nobody has responded for obvious reasons.
Would like to see them continue doing what they’re doing outside the grasp of the money strings controlling politics and the economy.
I find it striking that a solution proposed at times like this is to depend on infrastructure in a foreign land, specifically Russia.
This is not a dig at you at all - in fact you're probably right, but it is certainly striking that after all these years, people are seriously suggesting Russia as a "freer" alternative to American/Anglo systems.
> people are seriously suggesting Russia as a "freer" alternative to American/Anglo systems
This is more of an alignment issue. If your particular community is US-centric, going to Russia (or China) for hosting will serve you well, as they have little interest in what you're doing and will not easily give in to pressure (if you're scared of the US cracking down on you, you should probably avoid the EU as well).
Still, I agree: Having to take these steps as anything other than a far fetched precaution is horrible.
Isn't it some sort of equilibrium? If you want to criticize A, host your website in B land (A's ennemy). If you want to criticize B, host it in A land. It works while they both remain ennemies. Nemo judex in causa sua (no one is judge in his own cause).
It’s not ‘freer’, it’s just far less likely to be opposed to this particular group. I doubt that a freewheeling discussion on the evils of soviet imperialism would be toleration a Russian hosted mastodon server...
As I said in a comment below: Isn't that the irony though? You can continue to use American infrastructure, be it for communication, finance, etc, unless you irritate the wrong people. There are no lack of "Putins" in Anglo countries as well.
Isn't that the irony though? You can continue to use American infrastructure, be it for communication, finance, etc, unless you irritate the wrong people. There are no lack of "Putins" in Anglo countries as well.
Well luckily the groups fleeing to host servers there have no reason to do that. When they want to criticize Putin they can do it from American servers.
That would be the state. It's a loose alliance between the corporations, media, government, and religion. They are generally content to try and gain control of the power structure under the guise of weakening one branch or the other, but they never actually attempt to weaken the whole system.
Having been on the internet a long time I can confidently say that WSB's "culture" is just old internet culture based on the descriptions in these threads. Metahumor and offensive words are nothing new. This confusing humor is alongside others like 4chan. When normal people see that kind of humor and culture they are immediately offended because it doesn't really match anything in reality. Normal people don't go around using those words that way unless they're 13. While it's possible an influx of new users drives up the number of people joining, thus creating a squeeze on the number of people learning to adapt to that culture and thusly carrying that humor too far, this is nothing out of the ordinary in the world other than that Facebook now deems those words hate speech (assuming what people are commenting on is what they got banned for.)
There are likely people on this forum who would reject that culture because of their ideals. Those words fit right into a category called "ableism" whether you use them for humor or not. You're not fighting some hedge companies paid troll machines or whatever else you can dream up. What's happening to WSBs is more tantamount to what happened to the internet and many small forums back in the late 2000s when Facebook and Twitter signed on millions of people who had never used the internet before. What you're fighting is people who want the internet to reflect reality.
Hopefully this serves as a wake up call to all those people who previously supported censorship. Up until now it has mostly been groups that are extremely difficult to defend because discussions around them always got mired in politics. Finally a relatively popular, apolitical community has been targeted.
Facebook has done it. Reddit is probably very close. In the future, we might rely on other channels of communication. At which point if a situation like this happens again, the ISPs will intervene instead. Disgusting on so many levels (Robinhood, Platforms (Facebook, Google, Discord)).
Social platform X is good when it bans the group i'm against. It's power and influence of free speech is in check.
Social platform X is bad when it bans the group i support. It's power and influence of free speech is not in check.
"adult sexual exploitation" usually refers to revenge porn, but it can also refer to threats of rape. Here's my guess as to what happened.
Somebody posted a joke that was, taken literally, a threat or incitement of rape. "I hope you get fucked and don't enjoy it". An admin of the group "liked" or commented on the post.
Later, a human labeler determined that the post was "adult sexual exploitation". It was removed. Because the admin had "liked" or commented on it, the group was automatically banned. That's FB's public policy on "adult sexual exploitation".
Just a guess, but that is the most likely explanation to me.
I'm hoping this will create an impetus for social change. Occupy Wall Street failed but now that people's nihilism is increasingly justified and living standards drop, I doubt things will go on as before.
"Let's protest because we can't sink our money into GameStop stock after seeing a stock promoter online hype up the stock!"
Do we forget that GameStop is a mall retailer that sells physical copies of video games? This is not the next Amazon or Saudi Aramco. Anyone who is convinced to put their money in GameStop was likely tricked by someone with a financial interest (and that was probably a rich person). This entire narrative about retail investors taking billions from evil hedge funds is just that, a narrative. It's not even true; Melvin got rid of their short position.
This is not related to Gamestop as a company. This is about a instrument (GME) which was over leveraged short position, and is way out of balance. Doesn't matter what Melvin says, the short % is there for everybody to see and some one is still very short. Retail investors want to use the said instrument to legally make lot of money.
Why is it "over leveraged"? What makes you think the stock is "out of balance"? The hype men will have you believe that there is some magic percentage or tipping point that makes it a good buy but it's pure bunk. If GME has any relationship to the company GameStop (which it does) the stock should be in the toilet and is very likely to go out of business soon, which makes a massive short position very reasonable.
Go read the current financial position yourself. The hedge funds still have to buy over 100% of the total amount of GME shares to cover their short positions. To do that they need to buy existing shares at current market value or they go bankrupt. Its a vicious cycle. Go look at previous short squeezes that have happened.
You misunderstand the context here. Yes, there's the narrative and the certainty that wealthy people participated in the snowballing/astroturfing and profited from it. But it's still the case that small investors made some money playing by the same rules as the hedge funds, and the institutions have nakedly tried to stop that through any means possible, from curtailing the actual discussion to media campaigns to directly plugging at the source with Robinhood. It has nothing to do with the actual nature of GameStop, but that's part of the message of the stock market itself and the broader economy being more and more nonsensical and divorced from production.
The nihilism is increasing more and more. This is just one instance of it, where institutions are so brazen that they don't even bother to come up with an excuse and just pull the plug after some cost benefit calculations. Eventually there will be the straw that will break the camel's back, which is what I mean by an impetus for change. If more and more people come to understand that working hard and saving is a sucker's game and that any escape from that game is rigged at the institutional level, they will stop wanting to participate in the current social contract.
Pointing out that people are making money as the stock is currently going up completely ignores what is likely to happen next: the stock will go down. In the end this won't be a story of Robinhood traders making money but rather about how Robinhood traders lost a bunch of money because of internet hype.
The narrative about a cabal of rich people "nakedly trying to stop" Robinhood traders from trading is also manipulative garbage. Every reasonable and level-headed explanation of why Robinhood halted trading was about credit limitations, that is in agreement with what Robinhood stated publicly, and now that the credit has been remedied Robinhood trading has resumed. No conspiracy theory necessary. The hype is wrong and, worse, intentionally misleading.
>likely tricked by someone with a financial interest (and that was probably a rich person)
Do we know Melvin got rid of their short position? They might be in a position to get an article published saying they did, while being able to say later it was fake news, and covering it as the stock plummeted today.
The article I saw I think had weaselly language about not being able to confirm the losses.
This article is so confusing. Facebook suspended the group on Jan 7 and already reinstated it. Why are we hearing about it now?
The article says Facebook did several things, including banning the group, giving a notification "that the group violated policies on 'adult sexual exploitation'", reinstating the group, saying the ban has nothing to do with the "ongoing stock frenzy", and calling the group a "dangerous organization". When did each of these things happen and in what order?
The way it mentions the Discord group is also confusing.
First Google with reviews, now Facebook. Why on Earth are they mixing themselves up in this? Both companies already gave people enough reasons to be angry at them earlier this month. A little more of this and I'll start believing that they want to get the wide public against them, for some reason.
Relying on FB for your communications? I guess that's what you risk happening every day. You are at the mercy of FB. They can eradicate your communication channel at a whim. Let this be a lesson and do not organize any community you value via FB.
I seriously wonder what people will do when enough of them stop trusting the system. The elites really think that driving people cynical will serve them any good?
Meh, in my opinion (and probably legally too) they can do whatever they want, it's their platform.
Not that this was your intent but wanted to comment on what I've seen a few places around the internet -
I've seen various comments online comparing this to Robinhood shutting down people's ability to buy certain stocks, or their clearinghouse forcing it, etc. I don't think they are comparable.
I have a question to all the HN commenters who were celebrating openly when Twitter et al. banned Trump: are you happy now? Is this really who you want in charge of what speech is allowed on public forums? It only took 2 weeks and now Facebook has extended their censorship to stock trading groups. Who's next?
The issue with Facebook you see is that they (along with most huge tech corps) have become this weird amalgamation between fascist and communist. They're a private company that controls WAY too many assets, with way too much unregulated/unchecked power. They want equality for all, but yet they're willing to suppress every man's voice in order for their own mission, whatever that is. Their agenda ranges from personal freedom and free speech suppression to political campaigning; and far beyond the reach of both of those. When a company gets too big and consolidates too much power for themselves their own absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Facebook here has the power to regulate their own version(s) of the markets due to personal fear that their stock will be affected by the every man's voice and opinion. They fear being oppressed by the people, so they oppress the people's ability to have any control over them. For a publicly traded company this is insane, and it shows how fake everything really is behind the scenes. Only a few out there are truly allowed to trade on good information and swing markets their way.
If you think that big tech is bad, wait till you learn about Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the two political parties, the medical industry, etc, etc, etc...
I see real opportunity for big platform here who doesn't do such PC kind of thing. I hope someone build truly neutral platform that supports both right wing and left wing politics , retail traders and wallstreet big players ... plus and minus.
It’s more like: First they came for the fascist but I didn’t speak up because fuck those guys. Then they came for the meme stock traders, and what the fuck even is this timeline.
Bottom line is corporations are self serving, and the poem doesn’t really hold up to what is happening.
The timing was not fun at all. 4 years ago it would have been interesting to treat Trump equally, or wait until the end of his term +1 more bad comment. It was a political coordinated attack against him (and I am saying as a person who's not a Trump fan).
It was a politically coordinated response to a politically coordinated attack on the capitol. What else could be done? At the very least, dog whistling, hyperbole, and calling the electoral system fraudulent without evidence proved he was an extraordinarily dangerous leader. I would go further to say he was completely open to an uprising to regain the throne
I implore everyone to go re-read all the HN articles about Trump and far-right deplatforming where numerous --highly downvoted-- comments quite correctly predicted what was coming.
Yeah, remember when people were saying "there is no slippery slope, they'll definitely stop at fascists!" Sounds like someone who's never read a history book.
It really does surprise me how few people seem to remember history, and how these things always go. It starts off with "those objections people" and then eventually turns on everyone else. But maybe this time it'll be different I'm sure ;)
Oh yeah. Just look at Alex Jones. Do I support anything he says? Not really, but he should not be deplatformed. These objectionable voices are going to get much stronger as a result.
Alex Jones was the test. Trump was their show of force. If you can "cancel" the president of the USA, you can cancel anyone. The big tech cartel sent a message that they're the new dictators of the flow of information.
The two situations are apples and oranges. Trump violated many rules in his years on Twitter. Twitter let him go on for things that would have resulted in a banhammer for anyone else. Same goes for the alt-right. They were allowed to go on for a very long time. Despite the hate and harassment they generated. Are you arguing Trump should have received special treatment forever? That sites can't moderate as they see fit?
On the other hand, these WSB bans seem to be related to external pressure from some very wealthy people. Not really the same situation. And not something that's new to the Internet. Digg's blocking of the HD-DVD key comes to mind. Or sites that removed content under threat of a lawsuit.
Orange man still bad. Most haven’t realized that the establishment used every trick in the book to install their preferred patsy. They will understand in time.
Like the flawless presidents before him. Didn't get his c*ck sucked in the wh. Didn't lie about a tragedy to start a new war. Did other shitty things. It's a joke that Americans act like this guy was the first bad president.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
@dang, I appreciate all your work moderating here, I'm sure it's pretty thankless at the best of times, but you do keep this place one of the best places on the internet for technical discussion. So thank you for that.
That being said, I disagree with the assessment of my comment. Those of us (and there were many) who warned about this escalating when Trump was censored and deplatformed were downvoted and flagged at the time, amidst lots of crowing and victory clapping from people who fully believed the censorship only applied to one individual and was acceptable.
We've seen in the past 2 weeks a huge escalation - the British Socialist pages on FB, other left-leaning sites, and now of course watering holes related to WallStreetBets. We're fortunate to see this history happen in real time, so hopefully we can course-correct, as our forebears did, but without the longer timeline and through much more horrible circumstances.
Facebook used its power unilaterally to shut down yet another group of people. Whether we agree with the opinions of that group or not is not the point - the fact that this can happen, is happening, and is being supported by large swathes of people who should be more aware of where this path leads us, is very worrying.
Reminding people that just a few weeks ago, when concern about the Trump censorship was resoundingly dismissed, that that was the same as the censorship of other groups today, is important.
I'll continue to do that, because we need to deviate from this path we as a collective seem to be walking down.
If you had posted this explanation in the first place then it wouldn't have been flamebait. The problem with what you did post is that it was snarky and unsubstantive, as well as a partisan provocation. Certainly that breaks the site guidelines—more than one of them, in fact.
It's fascinating to me how common it is that people's second comment (e.g. after a moderation reply) will give a detailed substantive expression of what they actually meant. I think we all assume that what's in our mind will come across in our comments, but actually it doesn't come across by itself—it needs to be formulated explicitly, as you did in your later reply.
If you don't share it explicitly, but only give a quick pointer to it, people will fill that in with what's in their mind, which is a huge range of possible interpretations, many of which are inflammatory or even attacks, whether you meant it that way or not. Commenters will respond to what they perceive you as saying (and feeling, and thinking, and doing), and it's your responsibility to minimize the gap between that and what you actually mean. (I don't mean just you, of course. We all need to do this.)
Yeah, real funny that guy, if only someone would put him in a position of ultimate power I'm sure he'd un-rig the system real quick, and definitely not spend four years with his thumb up his ass laughing with his rich buddies at the gullible rubes who appointed him.
I've heard this criticism a lot, including the opposite accusation that he was a dictator/fascist/autocrat. We'll never know whether the situation was as you described, a big con to absorb the real middle-class frustrations of large segments of the population, or whether he was too naive to properly appreciate how corrupt the system is, and how the odds were stacked against him implementing any change.
*Edit, in any case, the US Presidency is not a "position of ultimate power".
> whether he was too naive to properly appreciate how corrupt the system is
Oh, there's no question that he was naive, but you're betraying your own naivete here. Who do you think rigged the system in the first place, if not Donald Trump and his ilk? Was he merely naive when he signed off an a trillion-dollar tax break for the wealthy and an ongoing tax increase for everyone but the wealthy? What else could anyone have expected from hiring the fox to guard the henhouse?
I'm not sure what you're referring to - the tax break that was passed objectively saved regular folks money.
• The double-digit percentage decreases in average tax liability started with a 12.5% drop for people making $15,000 to $20,000 a year. Double-digit percentage reductions in liability continued for people making $25,000 to $30,000 (down 11.2%) through $100,000 to $200,000 (down 10.96%).
• Taxpayers making between $40,000 and $50,000 a year had the largest fall in average tax liability, a 14.5% drop, while high-end households making between $250,000 and $500,000 had the second largest decrease, with a 14.4% liability reduction.
• Taxpayers making at least $1 million had a 4.3% decrease in average tax liability.
"The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019."
"The current poverty line for a family of four is $26,200: People with incomes between $10,000 and $30,000 — nearly one-quarter of Americans — are among those scheduled to pay a higher average tax rate in 2021 than in years before the tax “cut” was passed."
"By 2027, when the law’s provisions are set to be fully enacted, with the stealth tax increases complete, the country will be neatly divided into two groups: Those making over $100,000 will on average get a tax cut. Those earning under $100,000 — an income bracket encompassing three-quarters of taxpayers — will not."
"At the same time, Trump has given his peers, people with annual incomes in excess of $1 million dollars, or the top 0.3 percent in the country, a huge gift: The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the average tax rate in 2019 for this group to be 2.3 percentage points lower than before the tax cut, saving the average taxpayer in this group over $64,000 — more than the average American family makes in a year."
This is free speech in action. Sites should be able to moderate as they see fit. In return, their users are free to protest the removal of some speech, or protest the tolerance of some speech. And then companies respond to those protests. The government doesn't get involved.
It's messy, but there's no way around the mess without forcing companies to host content they don't want to host. Freedom of association is as important as freedom of speech.
Should privately owned sites be allowed to control what content they display or should they be forced to accept whatever their users post? And we're talking about endpoints, not the carriers represented by ISPs and phone companies.
It's funny to me when conservatives talk about the sanctity of private property, and then want to force the owners and publishers of certain sites to have zero control over their own property. You can't have it both ways.
Also funny to me that conservatives censor like mad in their own properties. Parler, /r/conservative, RedState, and too many others to count, would delete posts from people like me on sight. Do you consider that censorship too, or is that acceptable?
It's the scale that matters. Once a company starts serving many millions of people, and becomes a nationwide backbone for some type of communications like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon services, email providers, telephone companies, etc. then it needs to be illegal for them to engage in discrimination and censorship based on political ideology.
Nobody's saying you can't run a small Federated server on Mastodon, for example, and "play god" with your users, but if you do that on a national level you need to be made to stop.
Lumping in the phone companies with social media companies is fallacious. The phone companies and ISPs control a finite resource in the physical environment to the exclusion of other companies. Websites are not like this, they are decentralized nodes on a virtual network, the popularity of one node does not impact the capabilities or accessibility of other nodes. Arbitrary standards of popularity aren't a good metric for applying regulations, individual users make their own choices to visit various sites based on their own capricious preferences, nothing is forcing an individual to use a particular site except for their own perceptions on what they site might have to offer them.
Right, that's the obvious argument against gov't regulations, that applies to all monopolies and is exactly what you'd expect their lawyers will say. My counter to your argument is that Twitter is "effectively" a monopoly, even though smaller competitors exist.
Any monopoly can claim that since were all in a free market system, it's merely customers making free choices that's causing an incorrect "appearance" of a monopoly to exist. But you can ask any journalist, legislator, or other public figure if there's another 'competitor' that can provide what Twitter provides, and the answer is simply "no".
If we were talking about gaming consoles or some other type company the monopoly perhaps wouldn't matter, but we're talking about communications infrastructure for the entire nation, and frankly world. We simply cannot let a handful of unelected overlords censor the world.
Someone is always going to be the biggest, you can't just label something popular as a monopoly and then say "the smaller competitors don't count", of course they count, the entire problem with a monopoly is that competitors can't survive because the monopoly has exclusive control of the market, but this isn't the case with websties, if my site has 10 million users it isn't in any way impacted by the fact that another site has 100m users.
Funny how all of the people spurting out "It's a private company they can do what they want" after banning Donald Trump have now changed their mind about big tech censorship.
The precedent of accepted censorship was set and accepted. Deal with it.
I mean, you can totally "meme about stocks" in a way that's blatantly a violation of the law. There are laws about what you can and can't say when you've got a financial stake in it/something to gain. (As an example, Elon Musk's SEC troubles from his Twitter use)
I'm not suggesting the average poster/average discussion has necessarily broken the law, but there's likely more than a few who have.
And if Facebook went "What's happening in here may be illegal and is too much of a business/legal risk to us to continue to condone, so we've shut it down. We've also updated the rules for all groups in the future to reflect this." - That'd seem to be kind of reasonable.
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Banning it with an arbitrary, inaccurate reason and seemingly no clear guidance as to what the lines of acceptable/not are going forward? That's what I take more issue with.
I think platforms have to be able to moderate content to function, but that the rules surrounding it should be as transparent and consistent as possible.
Fence-sitters like you are who gave them this power in the first place. Free speech is not "ban who you don't like but allow what I like." It's all or nothing.
And if you're talking about the ill-defined philosopical concept of "free speech", that's also mistaken. Free speech is a subservient value in pursuit of free society; if an instance of speech would do damage to the freedoms of others (e.g. slander) then it is morally just for that speech to be forbidden.
Black-and-white thinking isn't the recourse here. Free speech is a nuanced topic, and not as cut-and-dry as you have been led to believe.
> Free speech is a nuanced topic, and not as cut-and-dry as you have been led to believe.
It is, actually. Your edge cases are disingenuous (or maybe you've just misunderstood them). It's like saying killing someone is a nuanced topic. Sure, there's moral complexities with things like abortion, war, or euthanasia, but, generally speaking, killing someone is pretty black-and-white wrong.
Free speech is the same way. Let's not mince words.
> but, generally speaking, killing someone is pretty black-and-white wrong.
Ironically, this has left me speechless. Surely you realize the inherent contradiction of arguing that something is emphatically all-or-nothing, and then turning around and moderating your position with a strategically-placed "generally speaking"? Which is it? Is it nuanced or isn't it?
By "generally speaking" I meant in like 99% of regular every-day cases. Heck, I even gave some counter-examples. It just seems you're being uncharitable because the spirit of what I was trying to say I feel was pretty straightforward.
Look, I don't want to bust your balls in particular. We both believe that freedom of speech is generally a good thing and I'm sure you're coming from a good place. But surely you must acknowledge that I should not be free to, for example, dox you right here and now (my freedom of speech is overruled by your expectation of privacy and right to pseudonymity); likewise I should not be free to go around telling all your friends and colleagues that in your free time you prostitute yourself to lonely grandmas in nursing homes. And even if, for whatever reason, you wanted to waive these rights, that does not give you the right to decide that I should waive my own claim to those rights.
The bottom line is that there are exceptions to freedom of speech, including morally-justifiable ones. We don't need to treat adherence to freedom of speech as some sort of religion that admits no heresy. It is a generally good idea to distrust anyone who tells you how (not) to exercise your speech, but that doesn't mean you can't independently derive from first principles a reasonable set of self-consistent morals around when it is proper to value other rights above it.
> We both believe that freedom of speech is generally a good thing
I doubt it. Cases in point:
> I should not be free to
> I should not be free to go around telling all your friends
Free speech is absolute by definition, otherwise it is not free. If you don't believe in free speech, you don't believe in free speech. Own up, don't try to weasel around with words. Say it: I do not support free speech.
This is the main issue, people not speaking their mind. Just speak what you feel. Don't worry, we still have some free speech left. You can voice your disregard for the principles of freedom and liberty.
> You can voice your disregard for the principles of freedom and liberty.
And when the principles of freedom and liberty come into conflict with each other, how will you resolve it? If you must excommunicate me from the church of freedom of speech for the heresy of believing in the existence of more important personal liberties, then I accept my ostracision.
In the meantime, /u/DeepFuckingValue was doxxed today. Do you believe that Reuters' right to free speech outweighs his right to privacy?
> In the meantime, /u/DeepFuckingValue was doxxed today
He wasn't "doxxed." Why do people use that word so willy-nilly these days? Reuters did some investigative journalism and found out his identity through public sources. He's not a confidential informant, he wasn't trying to keep his identity a secret, and he was voluntarily interviewed by WSJ anyway.
And even if he was doxxed, it's up to the courts to decide of free speech outweighs the right to privacy. This is one of those edge cases that will sometimes be answered in the negative, and sometimes in the positive.
You know, you can be against Facebook providing a platform to extremist/neo-nazis groups, and also think Facebook has overall too much power and presence.
It's not "you reap what you sow" and you're not handing GP some funny "gotcha". It's just plain obvious decency.
Some people don't get that, and then they're surprised that most normal humans think it's suspicious, as if they don't get it on purpose. Then they get upset because they start to look like nazi sympathizers.
If you put too much comparative value on keeping the boot on Bad People's necks, you'll help close off methods to shift influence away from e.g. Facebook.
If a lot of people move to e.g. the fediverse facebook equivalent, that shifts power away from facebook and makes it harder to deplatform people. So your two listed goals are in competition. That's why I'm saying you reap what you sow: you wanted a world where people can be deplatformed, and you got it.
> So your two listed goals are in competition. That's why I'm saying you reap what you sow: you wanted a world where people can be deplatformed, and you got it.
I don't "want a world where people can be deplatformed". I am 100% in favour of better censorship resistance, open messaging, etc and I 100% think whatever "bad" comes out of a system like that would be far outweighed by the good it brings.
But that doesn't mean I'm against Facebook deplatforming assholes. Hell I'm against Facebook as a whole, but as far as their current role in society plays? They have a stupid amount of influence over large swathes of the population and that's a problem.
The problem is no matter how I phrase this, you'll think I'm in favour of Facebook "censoring people"; whereas my position is that Facebook has actively given new tools for assholes to spread hateful messages, including not just the groups systems but active recommendations, advertising, sorting algorithms which prioritize engagement (read: flamewars), etc.
In short: I'm in favour of Signal and against Facebook. How's that contradictory?
You don't want a world where people can be deplatformed, but you want facebook to deplatform people?
If I built an uncensorable distributed/federated FLOSS Facebook equivalent (fedbook?) with distributed moderation (personalized so it censors out the things that would offend you/spam from your feed, or whatever you set it to) and it became popular, would you be for that?
Do you think it that Hateful Ideas wouldn't be compelling on such a market?
Would you deny facebook to everyone if you could, because the shape of facebook-like sites is corrosive to the mind in and of itself, in a way that private chatrooms aren't?
I could respect wanting to deplatform absolutely everyone, in a unabomber way. But somehow I doubt that's your position.
I just don't see how whatever advantages you claim facebook has given to 'assholes', it hasn't given to e.g. BLM twice over- with feeds tuned to engagement and rage etc. and also the Official Blessing.
You're asking me to take a position on your completely hypothetical and theoretical social network. This is no more useful than asking me whether I'm in favour of the universe being a simulation.
I'm in favour of you building it. Then let's see what happens. Does that answer your question?
> I just don't see how whatever advantages you claim facebook has given to 'assholes', it hasn't given to e.g. BLM twice over- with feeds tuned to engagement and rage etc. and also the Official Blessing.
What of it? I've already said Facebook has too much influence. You can be against having a king, and in favour of the king doing something about, idk, taxes.
> Would you deny facebook to everyone if you could, because the shape of facebook-like sites is corrosive to the mind in and of itself, in a way that private chatrooms aren't?
This is such a weird question. Are you asking if I'm in favour of Facebook existing? I already said I'm not. Or is your question "if you were King of the World & Master of the Universe, would you make Facebook disappear?", which, again, this isn't the Matrix.
These aren't useful questions, you're just trying to figure out what my stances are. My positions don't matter. I'm just trying to try to help you understand a concept which is incredibly easy to grok to a lot of people.
I get wanting to crush untouchables; I just think it's a hysterical stance to take vis-a-vis something like FB.
You're not having the King "do something about taxes"; you're having him go on witch hunts.
I'm suspicious about how much witch-hunters actually want the king gone, or whether they wouldn't want to replace him with a cheka later. They have a vested interest in power staying centralized. This all makes it a lot funnier when it's their sister being burnt at the stake. Someone might even break out a saying.
With how evasive you're being, I can only assume your stances would cast you in an unfavourable light, similar to the guy who's "Just asking questions about race".
For at least two centuries there has been a prevailing thought in American culture that supporting free speech is only an honest claim if it means supporting people you disagree with. Free speech is by definition not free if one monopoly controls the square. The ALCU has fought for freedom of speech for many years for the exact kind of people the left despised then and despises now. I would really ask you to re-analyze your stance because it's pretty obvious to some of us that you are a house divided against yourself and you're going to find yourself waking up one day (much like today) where your favorite pair of steel galoshes are bearing down on top of you. This is what the GP meant.
> You know, you can be against Facebook providing a platform to extremist/neo-nazis groups, and also think Facebook has overall too much power and presence.
People aren’t really upset about deplatforming extremists/neo-nazis. They’re upset about the deplatforming of mainstream groups and falsely labeling them “neonazi extremists”
I think this is taking too far into what I was intending.
I am all for removing violence and terrorism groups from social media. At the same time, I am against censorship from these companies in other matters.
The responses here are disgusting, contemptful and vile for what I thought was a reasonable stance.
Whoever gets to decide what's "violence and terrorism groups" can just remove whoever they want. So your stance, combined with centralization, immediately leads to tyranny.
Do you think Judges who interpret laws should also be abolished? Because there is a lot of ambiguity in the law and we need the justice system to interpret and carry out laws.
Are you for Anarchy? otherwise, people in position will decide a lot of things for you including truth.
Facebook is a non governmental company and is absolutely free to decide who is allowed on their platform. If wsb don't like it they can just go and make their own Facebook.
This is such a tone deaf comment that I'm surprised people are still making it. This problem is far deeper than just "go make your own Facebook". It has gotten to the point that these giant corporations are able to influence elections in whatever direction they think is "right", they are able to shut down speech, on what is now a de facto town square, and they are able to deplatform their own competition based on accusations of harbouring "hate speech activists".
Note that the term hate speech is relative, poorly defined and can mean anything, based on the perspective of the individual. What is hate speech to you is not hate speech to another, and vice versa.
Sorry it wasn't clear, my post was supposed to be a clever commentary on the situation a few weeks ago when twitter/fb/amazon were blatantly banning people and organisations based on political ideology. And people over here were giving this argument in support, but now seem to be outraged.
> It has gotten to the point that these giant corporations are able to influence elections in whatever direction they think is "right", they are able to shut down speech, on what is now a de facto town square, and they are able to deplatform their own competition based on accusations of harbouring "hate speech activists".
I agree 100%. Twitter/FB/Google are too big, they are monopolies. They must be held to a higher standard or be broken up. Either become "public squares" where my freedom is protected or get broken up into 100 different networks.
(Sorry for the annoying repetition:) Large threads are paginated. To see all the comments, you'll need to click More at the bottom of each page, or do this sort of thing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25952659&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25952659&p=3