Shitposters
Imagine for a moment that you are a top tier Reddit shitposter.
You have a premium Reddit account and a username like u/PMMEYOUR4SKIN with 800,000 karma. You post ‘WE LIKE THE STOCK’ on r/wallstreetbets. You you get gilded for your work daily.
You have a sick gaming rig with 32 GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card, and a hot Asian girlfriend.
You take kratom daily.
You know what deep fucking value is.
You think Elon Musk is cool because he makes weekly 420 jokes on Twitter. You think Chamath Palihapitiya is a rebel despite his SPACs, whatever, he sometimes says bad words on TV so he’s ‘one of us.’
Or maybe you’re just a normal Reddit guy.
You have Lord Elon on your side, along with Mark Cuban, a bunch of tech billionaires, Chamath Palihapitiya, most of Twitter, most of my friends and relatives, and of course, thousands of other kindred Redditors.
You made Wall Street sweat a bit, which doesn’t happen usually, if ever.
The cards are stacked against you, they always have been. You are up against powerful forces of nature.
The mods.
Moderator: u/hedgefundmanager
Mods (short for moderators) come in all shapes and sizes, but most importantly – they’re the ones controlling shit. Three mod archetypes in this scenario are the hedge fund managers, the talking heads on CNBC, and of course, the Robinhood dorks.
First, the hedge fund manager.
He lives in Westchester, drives a 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo S and listens to Duran Duran on full volume. He calls his barista ‘sweetie’ and has never once spilled coffee on his Salvatore Ferragamo loafers.
Many people would call him ‘old fashioned’, and he likes that. He uses techniques he learned from PragerU to get his wife to sleep with him when she doesn’t want to. He makes fun of his nephew for being in therapy. He thinks society is crumbling.
He hears about a pack of wild teenagers on Reddit manipulating the stock market and gets angry that someone else is doing his job, while also getting a lot of attention and praise for it.
He feels the need to be heard so he goes to the place that will listen to him – CNBC.
Moderator: u/CNBChost
He spends 20 minutes gaslighting their audience into believing that these Redditors are responsible for messing up the whole stock market, while also saying they are only dumbass kids who can’t read a stock chart. He knows that neither the host nor the audience will be able to point out this contradiction, so he goes all-in.
He is joined on the segment by three other experts with perfectly organized bookshelves behind them, they are talking about how managers are having to sell off their blue chips to cover their losses on some of these stocks, causing massive volatility and distrust in the market.
They will are also pretending to be worried about U/hellyabrother420 and u/lukamagicgangbang69 losing some of their hard-earned bucks by buying into this hype cycle.
The CNBC host really has one job, – defend the status quo.
Hedge Funds can manipulate the market, but’ you shouldn’t be able to because you’re dumb’ was the vibe all week on CNBC.
Despite talking about ‘disruption’ among companies and new innovations, the last thing any of these media people really want is actual change. Market penetration is one thing, but a slight tinkering of the unbalanced and unfair system, that is strictly off-limits. The little guy cannot win, at least not entirely, more on that later.
The CNBC host knows this and hates how the landscape has changed. Imagine being a 30-something who was cool in high school and then becoming an anchor on CNBC knowing full well that no one under the age of 63 takes you seriously.
So of course you get excited when the slightly cooler mod, the hedge fund manager wants to come on to do a segment about how the internet is ruining the stock market. This is a place of common ground and understanding, as they have a shared enemy – the Reddit investor community who thinks you’re a joke.
Here’s a video of Chamath at least try to explain to the guy what is going on, but it largely falls on deaf ears.
Moderator: u/appdork42069
As everyone knows by now, Robinhood froze Gamestop (GME) trading in the midst of a frenzy of trading volume last week. Showing their hand that they are controlled by the Duran Duran overlords – the hedge fund managers, and really don’t care about the little guy who made their app popular in the first place. The Redditors themselves.
Robinhood is planning its IPO as we speak, and the company is venture-backed by a few big-dicked Wall Street hedge funds. However, as Robinhood pissed off 90% of its client base who will likely never return to the platform, their valuation as a company has dropped significantly.
Robinhood really had a good thing going, pretending to be for the little guy. The app achieved mass adoption in a relatively short period of time, crossing the chasm rather quickly, Robinhood looked much different than say TD Ameritrade.
Robinhood was the most popular platform with the Reddit investor archetype, as they typically don’t like big banks, hedge funds, and now Robinhood. Robinhood was rebellious, just like they were.
The true value of Robinhood’s platform is not so much in the tech, but more in the user data it has accumulated, that’s what could have really driven shareholder value and garnered the interest of big-name hedge funds.
Shitposters & mods – the circle of life
Robinhood is a platform that has user data and millions of active traders, not only is this important for spotting trends, but the potential to influence these traders is also huge for old ass mods who know they have isolated anyone born after 1960.
Robinhood was the opportunity to tap into the younger demographic, but now that it has pissed off its users in such an obvious and objective way they are kind of fucked.
But hey, do you know who else is doing an IPO soon? Another massive app with user data on millions of people, including investors.
Yup, Reddit.
Much like Robinhood, Reddit offers investors exposure to the up and coming generation of investors. Although boomers typically don’t understand doomer culture, they do recognize that these deeply nihilistic individuals carry a lot of value, especially a sub like r/wallstreetbets which was the main catalyst for the Gamestop debacle.
I would argue that these recent events have made Reddit even more valuable, especially to the Wall Street types. The true power of the previously flaccid retail investor was on full display on every news network.
Their user data will be used in future IPO’s, and Wall Street will find a way to make as much money as it possibly can off of it. Look at how Robinhood took their back, ruining the company’s unsustainable, yet impressive run.
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Stay tuned for part 2 where I will take a deeper dive into the upcoming Robinhood and Reddit IPO’s and what they could mean for the future.