Photographer: Tiffany Hagler-Geard / Bloomberg
Photographer: Tiffany Hagler-Geard / Bloomberg
Looks like he’s fighting on the RedSit WallStreetBets forum and it’s not over what stock is next GameStop Corp.
Just a few weeks after the site was used to galvanize an epic short gathers actions of the video game retailer, forcing the real Wall Street to consider the strength of a united front of traders, signs of dissent appear around the stock message board of 8.5 million members.
To say the least, it is an unconventional battlefield, one in which online abstractions represent man, identity is blurred, and confirmation is often impossible. At the same time, the drama has become hard to ignore on Wall Street. The maneuver in the forum, carried out by people whose only real-world manifestation is an internet screen name, was able to move stocks of tens of billions of dollars.
While online battles are obviously not unusual, any cohesion of signs decomposes between the free cohort of coordinating presence of WallStreetBets could predict a weakening of its market power. And as the last few weeks have shown, this would be news for day traders and investors.
Read more: SEC Hunts for Fraud in Social-Media Posts Hyping GameStop
First, some definitions. WallStreetBets is a quasi-independent messaging forum hosted by Reddit, GameStop’s short-squeeze site that ran this week. While anyone who registers can apparently post there, some members are more equal than others: the users known as moderators are the volunteer army of site porters. Monitors and sometimes deletes messages – for example, if the post is spam or violates the rules against harassment or stockpile promotion.
For the past 24 hours, active moderators, who applied the rules as the GameStop craze has swept the site, say their privileges have been revoked.
Who is someone on the WSB – that is, what living person is behind a post – is often unknown, which means that descriptions of what is happening there are largely just chronicles of the interaction of screen names on a website. While many moderators have been active long enough to establish a kind of personality through their messages, it is never completely clear who is who. The risk of distortion and hacking is always present.
The source of the current tension, according to posts that claim to be now former moderators, is money – specifically, the potential to collect while media interest revolves around the forum. WallStreetBets founder Jaime Rogozinski, who was kicked out of the forum last year, sold the rights to its life story for a “six-figure” payment to Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment earlier this week, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Rogozinski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A post from January 28, 2021 informing new WallStreetBets members about Rogozinski’s removal
According to a posted by moderator WSB ZJZ, a group of long-term moderators – and long inactive – took over the police privileges on the forum in an effort to take advantage of the site.
“We were taken hostage by the top modes,” ZJZ wrote. “They left for years and came back when they smelled money.”
ZJZ’s post was deleted from WallStreetBets, but reposted under the title “Stop the Fur #FREEWSB ”on a different Reddit message board, a subreddit known as wallstreetbetstest, where many long-time members have gathered.
Other recently fired WallStreetBets moderators posted on the wallstreetbetestest that they were either removed from the main forum or chose to drop out.
Moderators who had been active until they were fired claim that the former WSB guards, who retained senior privileges that allowed them to remove several junior members of the group, have essentially returned from the dead. The startups have watched the recent growth of the community and say they want to stay the same – they don’t want to monetize WSB by selling or overcoming it with spam.
Another former moderator known as Jamsi said his powers were revoked without explanation on Wednesday.
A the page featuring WallStreetBets moderators no longer includes ZJZ or Jamsi. However, it shows that four new moderators have been added in the last day. Three of these new ones moderators are accounts that have been created on February 3rd.
ZJZ, Jamsi and Reddit did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Of course, conspiracy theories are also making a round. In a post on WallStreetBets, Jamsi suggested that the hedge fund budget could be behind the uprising:
“They may have been bought by hedge funds!”
Meanwhile, users have gathered on splinter-like sites wallstreetbetsOGs, since the original site was flooded with new members, as GameStop shares have increased. On the new site, created on January 29, the discussions on board are strong in stock analysis, as long as it is not about the now infamous video game retailer.