(Bloomberg) – A fight seems to be brewing on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, and it’s not about what action will be the next GameStop Corp.
A few weeks after the site was used to galvanize an epic tightening in the stocks of the video game retailer, forcing the true Wall Street to rely on the power of a united front of traders, signs of dissent are emerging at around 8.5 million. member stock message board.
To say the least, it is an unconventional battleground, where online abstractions represent humans, identity is obscure and confirmation is often impossible. At the same time, it became difficult for Wall Street to ignore the drama. Maneuvers in the forum, by people whose only manifestation in the real world is an internet screen name, were able to move tens of billions of dollars in shares.
While online skirmishes are obviously not uncommon, any sign of cohesion is breaking through the loose cohort of coordinated presence from WallStreetBets may portend a weakening of its strength in the market. And, as the past few weeks have shown, this would be a novelty for day-traders and investors.
Read more: SEC seeks fraud in social media posts publicizing GameStop
First, some definitions. WallStreetBets is an almost independent message board hosted by Reddit, the GameStop crowdsourcing site that unfolded this week. While anyone who registers can ostensibly post there, some members are more equal than others: users known as moderators are the voluntary army of site keepers. They monitor and sometimes delete messages – for example, if the post is spam or violates the rules against harassment or promoting low-cost actions.
In the past 24 hours, active moderators, those who enforced the rules while GameStop mania swept the site, say they had their privileges revoked.
Who is on the WSB – that is, which living person is behind a post – is often unknown, which means that descriptions of what happens there are, for the most part, just chronicles of the interaction of screen names on a website. Although many moderators have been active long enough to establish a personality type through their messages, it is never completely clear who is who. The risk of misrepresentation and hacking is always present.
The source of the current tension, according to posts allegedly made by former moderators, is money – specifically, the potential to profit as the media’s interest revolves around the forum. WallStreetBets founder Jaime Rogozinski, who was kicked out of the forum last year, sold the rights to his life story for a “six-figure” payment to Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment earlier this week, according to Wall Street Journal.
Rogozinski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to a post by the WSB moderator ZJZ, a group of long-standing – and very inactive – moderators removed the forum’s policing privileges in an effort to profit from the site.
“We were hostage to the main mods,” wrote ZJZ. “They left for years and came back when they smelled money.”
ZJZ’s post was deleted from WallStreetBets, but posted again under the heading “Stop the theft #FREEWSB” on a different message board than Reddit, a subreddit known as wallstreetbetstest, where many longtime members gather.
Other recently removed WallStreetBets moderators have posted on wallstreetbetstest that they have been removed from the main forum or have chosen to resign.
Moderators who were active until they were kicked say that the old WSB porters, who maintained seniority privileges that allowed them to remove more junior members from the group, essentially came back from the dead. Initialized mods oversaw the community’s recent growth and say they want it to stay the same – they don’t want to monetize the WSB by selling or flooding it with spam.
Another former moderator known by the nickname Jamsi said he had his powers revoked without explanation on Wednesday.
A page showing WallStreetBets moderators no longer includes ZJZ or Jamsi. However, it shows four new moderators that were added on the last day. Three of these new moderators are accounts that have been created since February 3.
ZJZ, Jamsi and Reddit did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Of course, conspiracy theories are also circulating. In a post on WallStreetBets, Jamsi suggested that the hedge fund bogeyman may be behind the uprising:
Meanwhile, users have flocked to fragmented sites, such as wallstreetbetsOGs, as the original site has been inundated with new members since GameStop’s actions soared. On the new website, created on January 29, the board’s conversation weighs in on stock analysis, as long as it’s not about the now infamous video game retailer.
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