- WallStreetBets moderators carried out a coup attempt on Wednesday to expel dissident mods.
- Two waves of bans arrived on WallStreetBets mods, one of them and the other from Reddit.
- Some former moderators have been reinstated, but the sub’s future remains uncertain.
- Visit the Insider home page for more stories.
WallStreetsBets, a Reddit forum that recently made headlines for promoting unlikely stock choices like Gamestop, has exploded in popularity in the past two weeks. This week, he experienced a virtual scam between subreddit moderators that resulted in several waves of bans from WallStreetBets and Reddit himself.
On Thursday morning, a moderator who answers by zjz, said that the group of moderators who oversee WallStreetBets split because of a possible deal for a film after the subreddit’s viral fame, creating a power struggle between two groups. Moderators oversee control of individual subreddits, such as WallStreetBets, and ensure that the sub is following Reddit rules by removing spam and posts that violate community guidelines.
Writing in a post entitled “/ r / wallstreetbets will die soon, unless the administrators save us”, the longtime moderator “begged for help” after saying he was being “held hostage by the main moderators”. According to zjz, moderators who were not active on WallStreetBets recently came back and took control, creating email addresses for the press and “struggling to get paid for a movie contract”. The post was quickly removed from the sub, along with many comments criticizing the new moderators.
According to a New York Times report, moderators at WallStreetBets were discussing “getting a contract for a movie” and figuring out what their “slice” would be in a conversation on Discord, a chat app. These mods kicked out anyone in their inner circle who questioned the deal and wished the sub to stay true to its original message of buying shares with a “YOLO” mindset, like zjz. The deposed moderators were not only against the movie deal, they also believed that the sudden influx of new users could lead to a sudden change in the culture of the subreddit, changing what made the WSB initially unique.
“This was our club with all of our friends, where we broke free and were honest about being in it for the money, but not to sell anything to each other,” zjz told the NY Times in an email.
R / WallStreetBetsTest, a sub created nine months ago by zjz, has become the new center for these dismissed mods and the place to discuss the drama that happened.
Shortly after the removal of the zjz, his colleague mod jamsi announced that they had also been removed. Claiming to have more than 14 years of experience as a moderator on the platform, they offered their help to help deal with the volume of traffic and posts just a week ago. In that seven-day period, they claim to have moderated “an average of 1,500 posts and comments per day”.
—Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) February 4, 2021
“I was confused, angry and sad trying to understand what had happened,” wrote Jamsi.
The next day, other WallStreetBet moderators like notmikjaash and bawse1 left their positions or were expelled by the current administration. A petition was posted, asking Reddit administrators to intervene and reinstate the old team that got almost 9,000 positive votes.
On Thursday night, the WallStreetBets moderators who attempted the scam were removed by Reddit for breaking the platform’s guidelines. At Reddit, a direct approach is usually reserved for moderators, with the company rarely intervening and forcibly eliminating those responsible for its subreddits. Throughout all of this, WallStreetBetsTest went private, becoming public again on Friday morning.
Reddit’s “Moderator Guidelines for Healthy Communities” requires a “stable and active team of moderators” and “branding” and it is not clear whether the new wave of mods was able to adhere to these rules.
In total, six moderators had surrendered on Friday, including the turdled who personally banned jamsi. Seven of the older moderators at WallStreetBet were reinstated so that the sub could return to some level of normality.
“Things are now getting back to normal and the original mods are getting back in control,” wrote jamsi in a post on WallStreetBetsTest. “This is a good first step towards healing this community that we care about so much.”
The mod change on WallStreetBets has happened before. In April 2020, the sub’s founder, Jaime Rogozinski, was forcibly removed as the sub’s moderator after hosting a “Wall Street Bet Championship” event, where he may have participated in his sponsorship and success. Rogozinski recently sold the rights to his life story to entertainment company RatPac Entertainment, according to the Wall Street Journal.