The Reddit WallStreetBets movement has been under construction for 15 years

The Redditor revolt that has driven the stock markets mad in recent weeks owes its origins, in part, to a humpback whale called Mister Splashy Pants. In 2007, Greenpeace asked the public to decide the name of a whale in the South Pacific Ocean for an awareness campaign on hunting by Japanese fishermen. A group of pranksters organized in the still nascent Reddit message board to hijack Greenpeace’s online survey and publicize the chosen name. The organization and netizens fought for weeks until Greenpeace finally relented and Mister Splashy Pants was crowned.

Two years later, Reddit Inc. co-founder Alexis Ohanian told the joke in a talk at TED. “In the past four years, we’ve seen all kinds of memes, all kinds of trends popping up right on our homepage,” he said. “This is how the internet works. This is the big secret. The Internet offers a level playing field. “

The Greenpeace maneuver was such a significant event for the company that Reddit temporarily changed its logo to a whale flexing its bicep fins. Mister Splashy Pants would offer a model for Reddit, shaped over more than a decade, that has given rise to cultural milestones and charitable causes, as well as organized harassment and dangerous conspiracy theories. It also provided an initial roadmap for WallStreetBets, a forum for amateur traders who used Reddit to incite the stock market frenzy.

“The message is no longer just coming from the top,” said Ohanian in the 2009 speech. “You have to be okay to lose control.”

Reddit has long cultivated the reputation of a place where anything goes. The best and the worst of the Internet were on display. Reddit took small steps last year to curb uglier behavior by introducing its first hate speech policy. But it remains a place where controversy is allowed, games are encouraged and a joke can quickly get out of hand.

The commercial crusade of the past few weeks, which raised the price of nostalgic stocks like GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. was partly a joke and partly a way to punish hedge funds for selling those shares. It worked. Ohanian, who left the Reddit board last year, and his co-founder Steve Huffman clung to the populist argument. The founders, both 37, said WallStreetBets demonstrates that people can come together to influence established institutions.

“This is something, I think, for many people, that was a statement as much as an investment,” said Ohanian in an interview on Bloomberg TV. Huffman, the CEO, described this as a “Wall Street cultural war against everyone else”.

But the victims go beyond hedge funds and stock trading apps like Robinhood Markets Inc., which rushed to emergency capital to cover volatility risks. US regulators are examining social media posts for clues to possible fraudulent activity behind the negotiations. Now, as fashion stocks plummet, those who bought high are not laughing as much as before. “I’ve been looking at my phone non-stop for the past week, and it has worn me out,” said Scott Smith, a Reddit user who lost about $ 1,300 in trading GameStop shares. “I’m going to take a long break and focus on my student loans before I think about stocks again.”

Ohanian and Huffman met as students at the University of Virginia, where they started Reddit with another colleague in 2005 as a place to share and discover web pages and news articles. They were summoned to the inaugural class of a new business incubator in Silicon Valley, called Y Combinator. With $ 100,000 in venture capital, they cultivated a small population of users who filled the site with their own posts and voted for their favorite content.

Condé Nast, editor of New Yorker and Wired, acquired Reddit in 2006. In the following years, the founders left; Condé Nast broke up the business; and a couple of outside CEOs tried unsuccessfully to tame the Reddit crowd. One was Ellen Pao, a former venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. Pao criticizes the way Huffman, his successor, deals with hate speech, harassment and other disturbing activities on the site. And with WallStreetBets, she said that Reddit failed to provide adequate safeguards for people caught up in the craze.

“Reddit should add a disclaimer because I don’t believe that all 6 million people on r / wallstreetbets and the people who followed them know exactly what they are getting into,” wrote Pao by email. (The forum now lists more than 8.6 million readers.) “Being transparent about risk is the ethical thing to do.”

Huffman’s response to the controversy on the website has been inconsistent and often late. He dealt with critics using tactics similar to Reddit’s trolls. On at least one occasion, he secretly edited a lot of comments that criticized him, something for which he later apologized. Pizzagate, a native internet conspiracy theory falsely linking Hillary Clinton to a pedophile network, thrived on Reddit before Huffman intervened to ban the community in 2016.

He allowed another group, The_Donald, to spread racist messages for years. In an interview with New Yorker in 2018, Huffman said that some people on the forum were simply expressing political convictions, “and this is something we want to encourage”. Reddit banned the group last summer and then expelled a similar group last month after members fed and celebrated violence on the United States Capitol. Reddit declined to make Huffman available for an interview.

The building blocks of Reddit have been around since the early days of the web. People shared stock trading tips on Yahoo! forums and surveys conducted at GeoCities. But there is a certain aspect to the Reddit system, where anyone can vote for just about anything on the site up or down, which attracts users’ internal shock. Some treat this as a game, Huffman told the New Yorker: “’If I post this ridiculous or offensive thing, can I get people to vote positively?’ And then some people, to quote The dark Knight, I just want to see the world burn. “