After briefly going private, subreddit r/wallstreetbets is back up. Moderator user zjz posted a response to why the subreddit was briefly taken private alongside the account’s Discord server being banned.
“We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn’t allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven’t given us special access despite asking for it,” zjz writes. “We’re suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad.”
They continue: “We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don’t get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.”
According to The Verge, Discord banned the WallStreetBets server for “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.”
The Reddit-based trading community has managed to make mainstream news via its ongoing feud with short-seller Citron Research over GameStop stock, to the point that US politicians have had to step in–the White House is currently “monitoring” the situation. The whole thing has caused GameStop’s stock prices to fluctuate in a major way over the past several days.