EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: WallStreetBets Forum Goes Members Only
Posted on 01/28/2021
NOTE: 4:51 PM PST, the WallStreetBets forum went back online.
Here is a recent mods post when the subreddit went back on. Please pardon the profanity.
Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?
We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad nights sleep. We’ve got so many comments and submissions that we can’t possibly even read them all, let alone act on them as moderators. We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn’t allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven’t given us special access despite asking for it.
We’re suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don’t get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.
To add to this, people are co-opting our name on twitter. I won’t mention their accounts, but lots of handles with “wsb” and “wallstreetbets” in them are pretending to speak for us. They’re saying things that we don’t agree with, driving traffic to derivative communities and shitty pixelated merch stores, and generally making it harder for us to define who we are. There’s also too much political bullshit in a community that was never ever political. The only way I want to occupy Wall St is in a suit myself or rent-free in the mind of a blown up short.
That is why I’m throwing my support behind the Twitter handle in general. We need a way to PUBLICLY reach out to the staff of the infrastructure that is failing us so the world can see that we aren’t doing anything wrong here if they don’t respond. We need to be able to respond directly to a reporter that is lying to the world about our clubhouse. We can’t be expected to meet any expectations when we aren’t given the tools we need.
That’s not to say I approve of every message or will even be in the loop for all of them, but it’s clear to me we can’t do nothing and we need a megaphone.
http://twitter.com/wsbmod aka @wsbmod is the only Twitter handle whose statements are directly from some part of the team.
We’ll do our best not to pretend to speak for you, but to try to speak with the volume our name now seems to command to get shit done for us.
LINK: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/where_do_we_go_from_here_and_who_is_going_to_step/
The WallStreetBets subreddits has been closed to the public and is only available to members. Reddit’s WallStreetBets subreddit is the driver of an unprecedented rally of GameStop stock (ticker: GME).
In addition, the chat web service Discord Inc. bans the r/WallStreetBets server. Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud, but over “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
Like many tech companies such as Twitter and Apple, Discord is arbitrarily policing speech on its platform. For example the service banned Wallstreetbets but is permitting communist left-wing Antifa groups on its servers. Discord almost doubled its valuation to US$ 7 billion in a financing when it raised US$ 100 million in its latest funding round. That round was led by Greenoaks Capital. Other investors in Discord include IVP, Firstmark, Tencent Holdings Limited, Benchmark, Greylock Partners, and Spark Capital Partners LLC.
Some major Democrat politicians have come to the side of the reddit forum including Senator Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
