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Reddit Phenomena: The GameStop Gambler's Base Camp

2021-01-29T20:34:32.656Z


With »WallStreetBets«, Reddit is in the headlines worldwide - again. Actions by Reddit users have often fueled society. It was about nude photos - and Donald Trump.


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Reddit mascot: Time and again, trends from the platform end up in the mainstream

Photo: Igor Golovniov / imago images / ZUMA Press

Why is GameStop's share suddenly and absurdly worth a lot?

The stock of a chain that - during a pandemic - offers video games and merchandising through branches while more and more games are bought as downloads?

Many people are currently asking themselves this question.

Behind this is a crazy competition between hedge funds and hobby investors, in which numerous parties are involved, from Tesla boss Elon Musk to politicians like Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the US stock exchange regulator.

The »Gambling War« (»Handelsblatt«) has its origins in the »WallStreetBets« financial forum, which is part of the Reddit discussion platform.

Here the idea that small investors buy GameStop shares in swarms and thus put shortsellers in trouble has been promoted in the past weeks and months.

On Friday afternoon, GameStop shares, which were worth just around 5 euros in summer 2020, stood at almost 300 euros.

»WallStreetBets« has existed since 2012. Together, users dream of big or fast money here.

United over the net against the sharks, against the system - that is the self-image.

One of the most popular stylistic devices is irony.

Someone greeted newcomers on Friday by saying that the forum was only founded to lose money: "Nothing here is financial advice."

Some want porn, others question politicians

"WallStreetBets" is one of countless subreddits, individual topic forums that exist side by side on Reddit - sometimes with none, sometimes with great interaction with one another.

While there used to be numerous individual, independent forums on the Internet on topics such as music, nutrition or pets, Reddit now bundles tens of thousands of thematically completely different discussion areas on a single platform.

Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz, who died in 2013.

52 million people are on the platform at least once a day, several hundred million at least once a month.

In terms of click numbers, Reddit has long been a mainstream portal.

Because it is divided into countless subreddits, there are different groups, from fans of little-known video games to self-confessed foot fetishists.

In the vast Reddit universe, almost every niche interest has its own hangout.

Some users come to recommend pornographic content, others share their shower thoughts in the »Showerthoughts« forum, others look for life hacks.

Still others are interested in Q&A sessions with policymakers under the motto “Ask me Anything”.

And then, in addition to cryptocurrency enthusiasts, there are also Wall Street gamblers.

Five examples show how different the platform is - and how niche phenomena have become large phenomena that extend far beyond the platform:

The meme machine for Donald Trump

Even when Donald Trump announced that he would run for the US presidency in 2016, he was controversial.

There are several explanations for the fact that the TV star and entrepreneur actually made it into the White House.

At least one of many is: Trump was able to rely on the support of some Internet users early on, who flooded the net with pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton content - partly out of conviction, partly out of fun provoking or getting involved in the election campaign.

Some well-known Trump memes come from underground forums like 4chan.

Perhaps the largest meme machine that worked for Trump in the 2016 election was the subreddit "The_Donald".

A lot of inside jokes emerged here, which later ended up in the news streams of the general public via platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

Individual memes even became political issues.

In 2017, Trump himself - already in office at the time - distributed an anti-CNN whipping video that came from "The_Donald".

Although racist, anti-Semitic or misogynistic content was repeatedly distributed on "The_Donald", Reddit did not pull the plug on Trump's meme machine until the summer of 2020.

The "March for Science"

Various offline protests came about through Reddit.

In April 2017, for example, the “March for Science” took place, at which people in 600 cities demonstrated against “alternative facts” and for science.

Those demonstrations were advertised on many platforms, but they go back to a Reddit post.

In January 2017, someone shared an article on the Politics forum about the disappearance of climate change content from the White House website.

The user "beavertheeth92" then wrote: "Scientists need to march on Washington." This idea became the global protest.

"The Fappening" and the deepfakes

In the late summer of 2014, Reddit was the main point of contact for a leak in which the nude photos of more than a hundred celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence ended up online.

A forum called »TheFappening« had been opened on Reddit, the name of which alludes to the terms »fap« - an onomatopoeic English word for »masturbate« - and »happening«.

"TheFappening" revolved around photos of stars, apparently for private purposes, that had been captured by hacks, and that were now linked and commented on here.

Within 24 hours, the Voyeurs forum had 100,000 members, the posts were viewed tens of millions of times.

It took Reddit a week to lock the forum, in which numerous users proved how little moral scruples they had about talking about intimate recordings of known people.

Just as the GameStop campaign is now surprising the world of the stock market, "TheFappening" in 2014 shocked the world of celebrities.

Sexual content related to celebrities is still a topic that keeps making the headlines on Reddit.

In 2018 the sub-forum »Deepfakes« was massively criticized because it distributed videos in which the faces of stars like Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson were mounted on the heads of pornographic actors.

It took some media headwinds before Reddit finally shut down the sexist and derogatory forum.

The hunt for the perpetrators in the Boston attack

After the January 6th storm of the US Capitol, tens of thousands of internet users tried to identify rioters and report them to the police.

Names, personal data and private photos of strangers were posted, speculations shared - and many people wondered whether the work of the hobby scouts was going too far.

One thing is clear: a lot can go wrong when amateurs start playing investigators together online.

That was evident in 2013 when an attack on the Boston marathon killed three people and injured 264.

It was initially unclear who was behind the crime, but there was a lot of image and video material about the competition.

At the time, Reddit users felt called to clear up the crime.

The action ended with an apology from the Reddit operators to the family of a student who was found dead a week after the attack and had been missing for a long time.

The student had nothing to do with the assassination attempt, but Reddit said he was a prime suspect like another bystander.

The family of the missing student was then exposed to verbal attacks.

In the end, the Reddit community hadn't cleared up the act, instead they had pilloried innocents that were visible to the world.

Questionable suspicions, in which users sometimes put people at the other end of the world in a bad light, were more common on Reddit in the following years, for example in subreddits to true crime documentaries such as "Making a Murderer".

Mister Splashy Pants

Reddit's history is rife with obnoxious subreddits like "WatchPeopleDie," a forum that shared videos of people killing.

However, nicely-intentioned community projects repeatedly drew attention to Reddit, such as pizza deliveries to a cancer patient in the children's hospital, who had wanted just that.

One of the first actions that had an impact on the offline world revolved around a Greenpeace initiative in 2007 to find a name for a whale.

Users of Reddit, which was still a comparatively small platform at the time, came together to give the marine mammal a name that can only be found on the Internet: "Mister Splashy Pants", Mr. Splashy Pants.

In the end, this proposal actually won through, receiving almost 120,000 of 150,000 votes cast.

At that time, at the end of 2007, before the great age of game downloads, GameStop shares stood at around 40 euros.

Icon: The mirror

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-01-29

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