I feel like a lot of the commenters here either never actually went on /r/wsb or are trying to glorify it with a narrative that is absolutely disconnected from the real thing.
They are not somekind of community trying to "stick it to wall street", they are mostly just random people shitposting all the time, posting their gains and losses. Right now it's GME, before it was SPY/TSLA/NIO. No need to overthink it.
Sure the GME thing has an actual borderline smart twist to it which gives the entire community a different spin, but it's still just an outlier in the wsb timeline.
What I like about wsb is it is fueled by endless optimism and celebrates wins and losses equally, with a sense of humor that the rest of Reddit or the internet cannot tolerate anymore. In the comments of a good due diligence (DD) post, you usually find people saying "I don't understand anything, but I'm in". And frankly speaking, that's fun. There's no politics or moral posturing on there. HN, on the other hand, is a gold mine for skepticism, almost like a "code review" but for ideas, which can get a bit negative at times. I will continue to visit both communities.
You and me both. I go to /r/wsb because I can see some 1047% ROI and some screenshots of people losing their life savings with comments like "That's what you get for betting agains't Papa Musk you f*king retard". It's just so surreal.
But isn't that kind of the point of the discussion? A bunch of shitposters band together and manage to align themselves with someone with resources and interests to create a "movement" that is self-sustaining. The article makes parallelisms with the Capitol attack and other forms of self-fulfilling prophecies. Enough believers is the fuel, someone with resources makes a spark, things ignite.
WSB didn't create it. A billionaire founder created it and retail came along for the ride. The differences in holdings, excluding the anomolous millionaires, are enormous. Attributing this to WSB is calling them more powerful than they are.
Precisely, /u/DeepFuckingValue which started this thing on WSB literally has only $15M in GME on a $5B cap. In the grand scheme of thing that's not significant.
They are not somekind of community trying to "stick it to wall street", they are mostly just random people shitposting all the time, posting their gains and losses. Right now it's GME, before it was SPY/TSLA/NIO. No need to overthink it.
Sure the GME thing has an actual borderline smart twist to it which gives the entire community a different spin, but it's still just an outlier in the wsb timeline.