The Redditor revolt that has driven stock markets crazy in recent weeks is due in part to a humpback whale called Mister Splashy Pants. In 2007, Greenpeace asked the public to decide the name of a whale in the South Pacific Ocean for a campaign to raise awareness of hunting by Japanese fishermen. A group of farces organized on the nascent Reddit message board to hijack the Greenpeace online poll and push their chosen name. The organization and netizens fought for weeks until Greenpeace finally gave in and Mister Splashy Pants was crowned.
Two years later, Reddit Inc. co-founder Alexis Ohanian recounted the gag in a TED Talk. “In the last four years, I’ve seen all kinds of memes, all kinds of trends are born on the front page,” he said. “This is how the internet works. This is the great big secret. The Internet offers a level playing field. ”
The Greenpeace caper was such a significant event for the company that Reddit temporarily changed its logo into a whale flexing its bicep wings. Mister Splashy Pants would provide a model for Reddit, modeled for more than a decade, which gave birth to cultural contact stones and charitable causes, as well as organized harassment and dangerous conspiracy theories. It also provided an early roadmap for WallStreetBets, a forum for day-to-day amateur traders who used Reddit to incite the stock market frenzy.
Alexis Ohanian
Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
“The message doesn’t just come from the top down,” Ohanian said in a 2009 speech. “You have to be OK to lose control.”
Reddit has long cultivated its reputation as a place where everything goes. The best and worst internet was full screen. Reddit took small steps last year to reduce the worst behavior by introducing its first hate speech policy. But it remains a place where controversy is allowed, hijinks are encouraged and a joke can quickly get out of hand.
The trading crusade of the last two weeks, which led to an increase in the price of nostalgia shares, such as GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., was partly a joke and partly a way to punish hedge funds in the absence of such actions. Went. Ohanian, who resigned from Reddit’s board last year, and his co-founder, Steve Huffman, linked to the populist argument. The founders, both 37, said WallStreetBets demonstrates that people can come together to influence entrenched institutions.
“I think it’s something for a lot of people, it was as much a statement as an investment,” Ohanian said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. Huffman, the executive director, described it as a “cultural war on Wall Street against everyone else.”
But the victims extend beyond hedge funds and stock trading applications such as Robinhood Markets Inc., which sought emergency capital to cover volatility risks. US regulators are examining social media posts for clues possible fraudulent activities behind the trades. Now, as fashionable stocks plummet, those who bought big don’t laugh as much as before. “I’ve been looking at my phone non-stop for the past week and I’m exhausted,” said Scott Smith, a Reddit user who lost about $ 1,300 trading GameStop shares. “I’ll take a long break and focus on my student loans before I think about actions again.”
Steve Huffman
Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
Ohanian and Huffman met as students at the University of Virginia, where they started Reddit with another classmate in 2005 as a place to share and discover web pages and news articles. They were recruited in the inaugural class of a new Silicon Valley business incubator called the Y Combinator. With $ 100,000 in venture capital, they cultivated a small population of users who filled the site with their own posts and placed votes on their favorite content.
Condé Nast, editor at New Yorker and Wired, acquired Reddit in 2006. In the following years, the founders left; Condé Nast gave up the business; and a couple of outside executives tried unsuccessfully to tame the Reddit crowd. One of them was Ellen Pao, a former venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. Pao criticizes the way Huffman, her successor, handles hate speech, harassment and other disturbing activities on the site. And with WallStreetBets, she said Reddit failed to provide adequate guarantees for people caught in a madness.
“Reddit should add a disclaimer, because I don’t think all 6 million people on r / wallstreetbets and the people who followed them know exactly what they’re up to,” Pao wrote in an e-mail. mail. (The forum now lists more than 8.6 million readers.) “Being transparent about risk is an ethical thing to do.”
Huffman’s response to the controversy on the site was inconsistent and often delayed. He dealt with criticism using tactics similar to Reddit’s trolls. At least on one occasion, he secretly edited a bunch of comments criticizing them, for which he later apologized. Pizzagate, an Internet conspiracy theory that falsely links Hillary Clinton to a ring of pedophilia, thrived on Reddit before Huffman stepped in to ban the community in 2016.
It has allowed another group, The Donald, to spread racist messages for years. In an interview with New Yorker In 2018, Huffman said that some people on the forum are simply expressing political beliefs, “and this is something we want to encourage.” Reddit banned the group last summer and then expelled a similar group last month after members ate and celebrated violence in the US Chapter. Reddit declined to make Huffman available for an interview.
The basic blocks of Reddit have appeared since the beginning of the web. People shared trading tips on Yahoo! messages and surveys conducted on GeoCities. But there is a certain aspect in the Reddit system, in which anyone can vote virtually anything on the site up or down, which attracts the inner shock shock in users. Some treat it like a game, Huffman said New Yorker: “If I post this ridiculous or offensive thing, can I get people to vote for it? “And then some people, to quote The dark knight, I just want to watch the world burn. ”
Reddit monitors the “bad stuff” on the site, Huffman said in a conversation last month on the Clubhouse social app, using an internal value called “daily active slides.” WallStreetBets did not reach the penalty threshold on Reddit, despite being slapped with a banning hate speech from Discord, another application that usually takes a light approach to moderation. WallStreetBets is “by no means perfect, but they were well within the limits of our content policy,” Huffman said.
Huffman described it as one of his favorite communities on the site. “Isn’t it hilarious that WallStreetBets is now the glue that binds most of America now?” Huffman said at the clubhouse.
Mark Luckie, the former head of Reddit, criticized the company for its lack of intervention on racist and hateful content, but did not consider WallStreetBets problematic. “These are people who talk to each other to improve their financial future. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, “Luckie said.
In recent days, the tone of WallStreetBets, once delighted with sticking to the types of funding and making a fortune in the process, has become somewhat harsh. The council is full of comments about how much money members have seen missing from their Robinhood accounts.
Smith, a Reddit user and former GameStop shareholder, had never traded a day before being sucked into WallStreetBets about a year ago. He lives near Austin, Texas, where he develops business intelligence software. Smith bought some shares in GameStop on January 27 and then more the following week. He argued that he could afford to join the movement: “We saved a lot of money in 2020, not being eaten out because of quarantine.”
Feeling stressed by the fluctuations of the stock, Smith sold all his holdings when the share price reached 79 dollars. Then he bought back $ 67. “That fear of losing hits me hard,” he said. On Friday, when the stock closed at $ 63, Smith said, “We’re officially done.”
Huffman expressed concern about the financial well-being of its users, but also an underlying hesitation to do something about it. “I am just worried about them. But I would not allow this to extend to paternal action, such as protecting them, “he said in a statement. New York Times podcast interview published last week. “Hey, look, I’d be worried if people jumped off a cliff and into a river. It is a fundamentally dangerous activity. But I think people are free to make decisions. ”