![]() ![]() In a post hailing Shkreli, who is currently serving seven years jail time for defrauding investors, u/goosefacekillaz wrote, “When I buy options or stocks it’s solely to make money.” This is a sentiment shared by older veterans of the sub: there is no attachment to the Robin Hood label in fact, some regard the title with disdain. On the other hand, many users on the sub applaud Martin Shkreli, an honorary member of the sub famous for driving up the prices of insulin. You only think you’re in control,” which outlined that, because they grew up working-class, they wanted to avoid selling their stocks in order to keep the price of GameStop stock high and retain their gains. User u/Hungry_Freaks_Daddy shared the post, “A message to everyone on Wall Street from somebody with nothing to lose. Though a lot of the jokes are self-deprecating - users often refer to themselves as “smooth-brained” and other slurs - there is also a lot of support between their bets and their stories. On the one hand, the subreddit has some camaraderie around class politics with users often mocking Wall Street or major news outlets for their inability to take the subreddit seriously. Users on the sub also don’t seem to have political consensus on what they wanted out of the GameStop stock bets in the first place. If someone had told Melvin Capital CEO Gabriel Plotkin six months ago that he would be losing hundreds of millions of dollars to people who called themselves “dumbledoreRothIRA” and “ bigpapa901” he would have laughed them out of his sleek Manhattan office. Wall Street certainly did not see it coming. Just to get a feel of the place, there is a “No-Meme Mode” button on the sub that brings you to a compilation of posts flagged as “ Sh*t Posts.” The whole thing comes off as if your high school class clown suddenly became extremely invested in something they called “stonks” (read: stocks), which is why it’s all the more remarkable the group managed to thwart the stock market and stop what would have been a fairly straightforward short sale by hedge funds, including Melvin Capital. Slurs, jabs and off-color jokes are the norm. According to a user poll, almost half of the subscribers are 18–22, and more than 90 percent are male. WSB bros are not professional stockbrokers or activists, and many are just that: regular bros. However, instead of teenage girls interested in fashion and music, WSB is populated mostly by young men who like gambling. Much like people on WSB, we all shared a sense of camaraderie through the screen that we couldn’t, for whatever reason, replicate in real life. When reading through the subreddit, I was reminded of myself during my time on Tumblr in the mid-2010s, eagerly waiting for school to end so I could rush home and talk with my friends online. Though it’s hosted on a site as large and popular as Reddit, WSB has the feel of a corner of the playground that has escaped the teacher’s view. Despite its jokes and political infighting, r/WallStreetBets represents a larger trend in the growth and power of online organizing. The coordinated buy-out of GME stock caused Wall Street hedge funds, who were betting on the fact that GME would go out of business, to lose almost 900 million dollars. That is what happened with GameStop this past month when users on the subreddit r/WallStreetBets (WSB) purchased large amounts of GameStop stock (GME) and subsequently drove the stock up by roughly 1,900 percent. Communities like these are powerful: they can transform an amalgamation of lonely people with seemingly little in common into a tight-knit group with real consequences in the outside world. It’s the content they absorb on their lunch break, the people they talk to after work, what they look at while brushing their teeth and the last thing they see before bed. Having grown up on the internet, from Club Penguin chats to teenage Omegle hangouts to Tumblr, Twitter and Reddit, I’ve learned that internet subgroups you’ve never heard about can be some people’s entire world. ![]()
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