On Wednesday night, a moderator of the popular Reddit message board, WallStreetBets, posted several images on the Discord chat app. They showed that other moderators started talking quietly to each other about getting a film contract.
“What’s our cut?” one of the moderators asked in a Discord chat, according to the images.
On Thursday morning, that search for Hollywood riches exploded in an ugly battle, giving a glimpse of the undisciplined nature of a suddenly famous Reddit community.
That was when the moderators of WallStreetBets who were considering the deal for the film started kicking out other moderators who had questioned them for trying to secretly profit from the forum’s success. Finally, Reddit employees decided to try to contain the unrest.
“Can you guys discuss with me what’s going on?” asked a Reddit employee with the screen name sodypop, according to images of the conversation shared with The New York Times.
The WallStreetBets fight is the latest twist in the saga of an online army of investors that has rocked Wall Street in the past 10 days. Fueled by posts on the message board, where participants urged each other to buy shares in the video game retailer GameStop, the company’s shares had an extraordinary run. The market frenzy trapped the hedge funds that had bet against the shares of GameStop, a populist movement that soon captured the imagination of the general public.
Since then, GameStop’s stock has spun wildly. On Thursday, stocks plunged 42%.
Chaos put the spotlight on WallStreetBets, which has been on Reddit since 2012 and which millions use to exchange stock tips and talk about specific investments. As soon as the GameStop craze started last month, millions more joined the message board. At one point, the forum settings were set to private – meaning that the posts could not be viewed publicly – because he was overwhelmed by the flood of attention.
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As of Thursday afternoon, WallStreetBets had more than 8.5 million members, the vast majority of whom joined after GameStop.
“It’s definitely huge,” said Nick Cormier, 35, a Los Angeles resident who has been a regular stalker at WallStreetBets for most of the past four years, about the flow of new users and attention. “The amount even last week was astronomical.”
Moderators, who handle the daily management of the online community, are central to all Reddit forums. As volunteers, they analyze thousands of comments, stop users who violate the rules and develop guidelines. Some moderators also create custom technology, such as automated bots, to help the group run more smoothly. The number of WallStreetBets moderators has fluctuated over time, but in the past few weeks there have been a few dozen.
Reddit did not immediately comment.
WallStreetBets was founded in 2012 by Jaime Rogozinski, 39, an information technology consultant in Mexico City.
“I was looking for a community, a place for people to talk about high-risk business in an unapologetic way for people to earn some short-term money from disposable income,” he said TMZ last month.
But early last year, Rogozinski was struggling to stay in control. He became involved in a controversy over ties with a negotiating group that sponsored a message board event, leading to accusations of insider trading and biased actions. Last April, Rogozinski and his allies in the community were fired.
Now WallStreetBets is struggling to deal with the sudden publicity about the GameStop saga.
Last week, several key moderators, who have administrative control over the message board, met in a private chat room on Discord to discuss business opportunities stemming from their sudden fame.
A moderator said he was in contact with Ben Mezrich, author of the book that became the film “The Social Network”, which last week struck deals to write a book and help with a film about the GameStop saga, according to screenshots from forum shared with The Times.
“Phew, we have to go fast, I think,” wrote another moderator. “While the studios are competing.”
None of the six moderators interviewed by The Times wanted to provide their real names, but The Times found that people were in control of the council moderator’s accounts.
The conversation heated up after Rogozinski announced that he sold the rights to his own story to a movie studio this week. Mr. Rogozinski did not respond to requests for comment.
A former group moderator, known as zjz, saw the conversation and questioned it. He posted images of the conversation in a larger chat room for all moderators.
“We suddenly found that these previously inactive moderators are trying * literally * to sell the story of how they built the subreddit and harmed us,” wrote zjz in an email to The Times.
In a post to WallStreetBets on Wednesday night, which was quickly removed, zjz also wrote: “We were held hostage by major mods. They left for years and came back when they smelled money. “
This led to growing recriminations and insults that soon surpassed a film contract. Some began to criticize the main moderators for their actions to increase their profile, such as creating a Twitter account and hiring a public relations representative. Some have also made death threats.
At the end of Wednesday and early Thursday, the main moderators began to remove the low ranking moderators who asked questions.
When reached in his new Twitter account, the main moderators said they wanted to sign a contract for a film, but planned to donate the proceeds to charities.
“They try to make it look like we’re grabbing money is so dishonest,” wrote the moderators.
The main moderators said the battle was also rooted in the desire to modernize the council, considering all the new people who started using it. Opposite moderators like zjz, they said, wanted to keep it feeling more homely than WallStreetBets used to be.
“It has been his life’s work and he is afraid it will change essentially,” said the moderators.
In this, at least, the two sides were aligned.
“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,” wrote zjz by email.
On Thursday afternoon, Reddit stepped in to remove the top moderators from WallStreetBets. They put the moderators who had allied themselves with zjz back in control, although the zjz itself has not been restored.
Cormier, who has been unemployed since March, when he lost his job at a store specializing in the Magic the Gathering game, said he was dismayed by the fight on WallStreetBets.
He feared the forum would fragment, making it almost impossible to launch the kind of coordinated effort that generated such a spectacular reaction from the market last week.
“If they kill WallStreetBets, it will be very difficult to restart that effort,” he said.