Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server – The Verge

Discord says it did not ban the server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” The Verge gained access to the server and can confirm the claim that users of the channel were spamming hateful language, including racial slurs.

Source: Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server – The Verge

Other shoes are dropping on the GameStop Stock Reddit Bubble. Discord deplatformed /r/wsb because of “hate speech.” A mod of /r/wsb says it was one bad actor fuzzing the language filters on the channel with unicode, and one message was all it took to trigger the ban. That sounds about right.

Then the /r/wsb mods took the sub private for an hour. What was that all about?

Like I said in my previous post, the market is a zero-sum game (in that someone has to lose in order for someone else to win), and the hedge funds with strong short positions in GameStop are taking huge losses. I’d bet a steak dinner that the owners of Discord were getting pressure from (other) wealthy people to find an excuse to shut down /r/wsb’s “command and control” channel, which is organizing a massacre of their investments.

For all intents and purposes, Wall Street investment banks are a de facto branch of the government. I’m pretty certain that ruining some bank’s day with a crowdsourced market “hack” is going to attract the ire of the SEC, no matter how “technically legal” the people on /r/wsb say it is. All it’s going to take is one small flub, like with the Discord ban, for them to step in and start issuing subpoenas.

What I didn’t say in my previous post, I’ll say now. The market is rigged. There are lots of massive players, creating artificial moves, and basically printing money. Some of the most brilliant programmers and mathematicians work on Wall Street. They have some of the most impressive computers and networks on the planet. I read once that one bank, back in the day, installed fiber optics, at massive expense (at the time) from their office to the trading center to improve their latency by double-digit milliseconds. This was enough of an advantage in high-frequency trading that it sounded like they thought it was a no-brainer. These are the people the autists in /r/wsb are up against. People with unlimited resources of money and brains.

The only reason the market works, in general, is because there always has to be people joining the market. If the market looks obviously-gamed, people won’t play. The old adage about leaving your money in the system for 40 years, and collecting about 10% compounded interest has to continue to be true, or people will find something else to do with their money, and the whole thing will collapse like the pyramid scheme it actually is. It’s the biggest money-printing machine in the world, and it’s protected by the US government. You don’t have to look any further than the housing crisis to understand that the powers that be will not allow anything to hinder their ability to print money with the machine.

If /r/wsb expects to step out, and manufacture more chaos with other strongly-shorted companies, the people leading the charge are going to find themselves being investigated. Discord says they didn’t ban them for financial fraud. Of course not. They’re not in a position to pass judgement on whether that has occurred. No, they’ll leave that to the feds, and I expect this is already being organized as I write this.

UPDATE: Reading the HN thread about the article, I find this comment, and I’ll repost his repost:

So I was spot on. There’s duplicitousness at work here. Discord is simply doing a favor for the people being negatively affected by this farce.

I note, for the record, that if Section 230 were repealed, Discord would have shut them down for fear of being inculpated in possible financial fraud, as should have been the story.

 

Social justice groups warn Biden against throwing out Section 230 – The Verge

“Section 230 is a foundational law for free expression and human rights when it comes to digital speech,” the letter says. The law protects websites and apps from being sued over user-generated content — making it safer to operate social networks, comment sections, or hosting services. “Overly broad changes to Section 230 could disproportionately harm and silence marginalized people, whose voices have been historically ignored by mainstream press outlets.”

Source: Social justice groups warn Biden against throwing out Section 230 – The Verge

First of all, no it isn’t. It’s a “foundational” law protecting corporations and their precious profits. Don’t pretend that it’s about anything other than the almighty dollar, and Capitalism. Any benefit to people and free speech is accidental. In fact, I recently read that many people argued exactly the opposite of this when it was being debated.

You can only be sued (credibly) for saying something illegal. Why should removing section 230 “disproportionally harm and silence marginalized people?” Are marginalized people more prone to saying illegal things? If so, is that why they’re being marginalized?

Do the people writing this accept that the most-prominent example of people being marginalized, cancelled, and deplatformed are QAnon right-wing nut jobs? Are they advocating that they should NOT be banned on social media platforms? Are they standing up for their rights? No, of course not. We all know this kind of language, and what terms it’s being used as a proxy for.

As I’ve been saying, I want Section 230 revoked. You can play what-ifs about this all day long, but we, as a society, need social media platforms to be accountable — under threat of a lawsuit — for the things they allow on their services. They’d get serious about throwing the child porn and direct threats of violence off their sites in a New York minute.

Will they have to hire more people to do it? No, not even that. They’d have to buy a bunch more servers, and run them to block that junk. I have people tell me all the time that this is beyond current computer science. Bologna. If YouTube and Facebook can scan all uploads in real time for any copyrighted music, social networks can scan for nudes and threatening language in realtime, and at least winnow down the posts that need further review. They’d have to spend a bunch of money on servers instead of throwing a pittance at a bunch of contractors in impoverished nations. Cry me a river. Spend some of those billions you’re making a year already.

Worry that it will affect you? Don’t say or post anything illegal. It’s that simple. What’s illegal? That’s up to the government, not Zuckerberg or Dorsey, or the boards of Facebook or Twitter.

I have literally no sympathy on this point. We’ve tried the internet for 25 years with Section 230, and Facebook and Twitter are literal existential threats to society which have been allowed to develop. Let’s get rid of it, make corporations finally take responsibility for these monsters they’ve created, be accountable for their algorithms and funding sources, spend some of their hoarded blood money, and just see what happens. I find it impossible to believe that this could make the situation any worse for society.

Dopamine Thirst Trap – Pirate Wires

As with almost everything on the internet, misleading headlines are not a new phenomenon. What’s new, and notable, is the scale of our exposure to the phenomenon. Today, on Twitter, many of us now spend a significant portion of our lives inside a virtual world of headlines.

Source: Dopamine Thirst Trap – Pirate Wires

Well, not me. I deactivated my Twitter account again. I can’t, in good conscience, continue to be manipulated by the platform. That being said, I’ve been fighting the urge to reactivate it, because I enjoy the thrill of seeing all the drama unfold in real time. That’s the problem, and why “the only winning move is not to play.”

This guy points out that Twitter’s censorship has not been fair, so they’re going to crowdsource it, and then, rightly, makes fun of the idea:

Anyway, Twitter said “fuck it” this week and decided they could crowd source the truth.

I publicly critiqued Birdwatch for what I believed the obvious danger inherent of determining “truth” by popular vote. Like, from science to civil rights literally when has this ever worked out? A handful of commenters expressed frustration with the point, and asked what I would do about the problem of misinformation were I in charge. But misinformation is as old as human civilization. What’s new is the phenomenon of instantaneous information virality, and this is where we should focus.

Where does someone go to defend themselves from cancellation if hosting providers follow suit, and won’t let them back on the internet? You can say that Parler had other alternatives besides AWS to host their site, but I venture to say, given prevailing public sentiment, that Microsoft and Oracle wouldn’t have let them use their clouds either, for fear of being labeled “Nazi sympathizers.”

You can say — as I have — that they could buy some servers and rent space in a co-lo facility, but who’s to say that public pressure wouldn’t cause the hosting company to give them boot, or their ISP’s to cut off network access, or their WAN providers to remove their BGP routes, or their DNS registrar to delete their entries? We are all dependent on access to the internet at this point, and there are many gatekeepers involved. The mob can apply pressure at any one of these points.

My approach to the news has been to read alternating reports about controversial stories until they “converge” on a consistent set of most-likely facts. Not coincidentally, I cribbed this approach from how I go about implementing a new programming technique. I read a lot of documentation, Q&A’s, and blog posts about it, until I see a consistent, reliable, and understandable implementation emerge. How will I be able to read original sources and make my own informed opinion about some of the most important, yet controversial, issues of the day, when platforms acting as de facto common carriers eject people from their services when the mob gangs up on them?

Either we’re a county that believes in freedom of speech, or we’re not. You can say that we shouldn’t allow speech calling for violence. We don’t. There are all sorts of legal remedies for this already. You can say that the speed by which this particular form of speech makes it impossible to react quickly enough to avail ourselves of our existing legal tools. That’s why “Pirate Wires” here is advocating slowing everything on Twitter down, and admitting up front that this idea runs in stark contrast to all the profit motives driving the company.

I think banning people you don’t like because they said something which might be legally actionable is the wrong approach. For every single example you can show me where some “conservative” said something legally objectionable, you can find some “liberal” who said exactly the same thing. The “liberals” I’ve traded comments with about this say “it’s not the same thing” because you have to consider the size of the audience of followers. Fine. Put that into the algorithm then, and then do it. It’s just popular, right now, to go after the conservatives. What happens when the same rules get applied to the next big Antifa or BLM protest, and “leaders” of those movements suddenly find themselves without the platform on which they’ve relied? I suspect we’re going to find out, and pretty quickly.

Techdirt on the Reddit GameStop Stock Bubble

Okay, so what’s going on here? Did GameStop come up with an entirely new strategy to propel its relevance in the long-term video game industry? Did it totally restructure, coming up with cost-saving measures or store and staffing closures that make it suddenly more profitable? Was there some consequential change of leadership or outside investment in the company?

Nope, none of that. Instead, there appears to be a sort of insane tug of war going on right now on Reddit between short sellers and day traders that is artificially sending this stock on an insane rollercoaster.

In other words, this is like some strange offshoot of a meme stock, where nobody really cares about valuation and mostly only cares about potential. Except, for all the reasons we discussed in the opening, nobody really seems to think that there is any potential here. Instead — and I recognize that this is crazy — a group of traders on the WallStreetBets Reddit appear to be trying to use the power of that chat room to create its own market reality.

Source: Techdirt.

There’s another good, factual writeup at the WSJ (subscription required).

Disclaimer: I hate Reddit. Like, HAAATE it. It used to be a good site for discussing niche interests, like mechanical keyboards or headphones. But, since the site has become established, these subs have been taken over by the alpha nerds with a lot of money and time, who drive the conversations, which focus primarily on gear that “normal” nerds have neither the money to buy nor the time to fabricate. It’s not that it’s not interesting; there’s just a limit to how many $1,000+ keyboards or $4,000+ cans you can see until your eyes glaze over.

For the sake of argument, I just looked at /r/mechanicalkeyboards again, and saw this post. It’s a perfect example. Note that the submitter meekly acknowledges that he is out of his depth in the group, both in terms of knowledge and money, to avoid the predictable backlash. The post has all of four comments (after taking this snap), which took about 20 seconds to appear when I clicked the link. After that, for some reason, I can still only see three. There is one (inane) suggestion, one reply from the submitter, and one is unintelligible nonsense from a guy with astronomical post and comment karma.

And all of this pseudo-grassroots activity is just a thin veneer over what has become the world’s largest porn hub. $10 says that the porn on the site is 95% of the overall traffic now.

Then, they top it off with what may be the worst web application in the history of the internet. It is so actively user-hostile, that if I do a search for, say, a programming question, and the result has links to the site, I go back and add “-site:reddit.com” to the search. It takes 3 or 4 clicks to expand the comments on a post there, and it never has an actual, usable answer. Never. Google execs should be lined up and shot for allowing the inclusion of results from Reddit for technical questions. It’s actually a perfect example of profit motive ruining society at large. It doesn’t matter that the results suck; it only matters that Reddit paid Google for putting their links at the top of the results.

I’m convinced that Reddit makes most of their money by tweaking their algorithms to manipulate page views and slipping content into places that it normally wouldn’t appear in favor of paying customers. I’m also convinced that the entire site it being run as an experiment in just how far you can push people around online before it starts becoming obvious, or working against you.

So, yeah. I really despise Reddit.

With all my criticisms of Reddit on record, here’s a story about how a group of day traders on Reddit is trying to “create its own market reality” by running up the stock price of a company everyone knows is ultimately doomed. (Hey, doomed companies can linger a long time, and make their execs and investors a LOT of money, but it is doomed.)

Note how they throw in that “one guy” allegedly made $11M on options so far. Remember that “alpha nerd” comment I just made?

The problem here is that Reddit has an outsized influence in the tech world, because of all the money that they’re throwing at the trade industry press and advertisers. There are massively over-inflated egos at work here, who believe the hype that Reddit is paying for. Stocks are a zero-sum game. Once the actual numbers in these GameStop stock market machinations make sense, the real players in the market are going to eat Reddit’s /r/wallstreetbets for lunch. The investment banks are going to push their billions around on the table, and the Reddit brigade is hopelessly out-gunned.

Sure, the one guy made his money. Good job. But by the time “normies” hear about these sorts of things, the opportunity to make money is gone. I looked, and the entire /r/wallstreetbets sub is filled with stories calling BS on the mainstream reporting about this story, and saying that there’s still money to be made. I’d be willing to bet that the guy who supposedly already made a lot of money is trying to influence the group into doing things to make him more money on the backside now, in a classic con man scheme.

I’m a pretty smart guy, but I don’t understand much about the stock market. The casuals on Reddit are going up against people who invent techniques of fleecing other people out of their investment money, and the wolves masquerading as sheep hiding amongst them. I strongly suspect the stock price will flatten out, and we’ll never hear how a whole bunch of Reddit users lost everything they put into it. And even if someone tries to post a writeup about how this all suddenly tilted in favor of the banks, Reddit will try to cover it up, either by manipulating the algorithm, or outright censorship.

Google eyes privacy-friendly substitute to cookies – Axios

Tests show advertisers can expect at least 95% of conversions per dollar spent on ads, compared to cookie-based advertising, Google said.

Source: Google eyes privacy-friendly substitute to cookies – Axios

I don’t even need to read the article to know this is utter BS. If Google is advocating for it, it will not do anything like it is purported to do. It will aid Google’s efforts to serve you ads, and hinder other advertiser’s efforts. And Google won’t knowingly give up any tracking, in any way, shape, or form, so don’t pretend that this is helping privacy. All this will do is more-solidly cement the fact that if you want to advertise on the internet, you’ll have to go through Google to do it. Any effort they expend in this area will have that goal, no matter what color of lipstick they apply to the pig.

… given that the entire digital ad ecosystem, worth $330 billion USD globally…

Yeah, and according to some reports, it’s about 80% fraudulent. I’m just glad I don’t need to be involved in that world whatsoever.

Take the Profit Out of Political Violence – BIG by Matt Stoller

Repealing Section 230 or reforming it so platforms who profit via advertising are not covered, would reduce the incentive for social media to enable illegal behavior. If we did so, a whole range of legal claims, from incitement to intentional infliction of emotional distress to harassment to defamation to fraud to negligence, would hit the court system, and platforms would have to alter their products to make them less harmful. There are other paths to taking on targeted advertising, like barring it through privacy legislation, a law for a real Do Not Track List, or using unfair methods of competition authority of the Federal Trade Commission. But the point is, we need to stop immunizing platforms who enable illegal behavior from offloading the costs of what they inflict.

Source: Take the Profit Out of Political Violence – BIG by Matt Stoller

These “platforms” driving all discussion and conversation today are, by definition, common carriers. The phone company was a common carrier. They couldn’t discriminate against anyone. They had to provide service to everyone, because they were 1) essential to modern society, and 2) had a monopoly on the service. In the same way, Twitter and Facebook are essential, and monopolies in their respective spaces. Like the phone company, they should be required to just carry everything that’s not clearly and always illegal, and let the court system sort out behavior that requires any sort of legal interpretation.

I could see making exception for blocking groups or people identified by the government as terrorists or criminals, but that’s the point. The government — i.e., our system of laws — would be making that determination, not a bunch of un-elected modern day kings and princes of our neo-feudalistic capitalism.

I don’t trust them. Their influence over our country, news cycle, and opinions is too great to leave to profit motive. It’s already been credibly demonstrated that Russia (at least) interfered in the 2016 election through these two platforms, because it aligned with this profit-seeking motivation. What guarantee do we have that this is not ongoing? There’s no accountability, and no visibility into their systems, hidden behind trade secrets for the banal purpose of making obscene profits.

Facebook is making $20 billion dollars a year, and paying about 8% tax. The older I get, the more liberal I get, and the more I resent the squandered opportunity cost of another round of tens-of-millions-of-dollars bonuses for a bunch of execs, while human beings pile up on the sidewalks in the city which hosts the company’s headquarters. It’s immoral. I don’t know when the line was crossed, but the whole thing is simply immoral, at this point.

Twitter doesn’t make nearly the money that Facebook does, but they are arguably more directly important. It seems that half the news articles I read these days are about a tweet, or reference tweets as part of the story. Their influence is overarching all news organizations now. That’s a dangerous situation for a democracy. These companies are ruining the world by — dare I say it: “inciting violence” — through driving everyone crazy with anger and division about every issue, no matter how big or small, evading meaningful oversight, and not giving back commensurately. I tire of it.

UPDATE: Right after posting this, I read Continuations by Albert Wenger : Welcome to the Government-IT Infrastructure…

I believe there is a high likelihood that we are witnessing the visible emergence of the government-IT infrastructure complex. Government will be even less inclined to try and generate competition in this space. It is so much more convenient to have just a few large entities that an executive agency can influence behind the scenes rather than having to bother with the rule of law. We have already had this in the payments space for a while where instead of targeted interventions against actual abuses payment providers withdraw wholesale support for companies in certain categories (most prominently anything related to sexwork).

Matt Stoller thinks that there’s a shot at doing some serious anti-monopoly regulation under a Biden administration, but Albert Wenger makes me realize that Facebook and Twitter don’t just have government “cover” because of campaign contributions. They also are manipulating their systems in subtle ways for the government’s benefit (besides giving them access to all the personal data they want, of course). I realize now that the relationship goes deeper than I have previously, cynically concluded. There’s not going to be some sort of noble, united urge from Congress to reign these companies in and hold them accountable for their influence on our democracy. A few of the “radicals” may make some noise, but only because they haven’t been briefed on the whole dynamic. And they won’t be. Their political theater is useful to those actually in power. Or, cynically, maybe they do know the real situation, and they just volunteer to be the token voices against these companies, to string along the public’s desire that they do “something” about them.

Microsoft Released a Bizarre New Surface Pro Ad and It’s Hoping You Won’t Notice It’s Pure Gaslighting | Inc.com

Microsoft made a point of mentioning that price point–since the Surface Pro is cheaper–but it’s worth mentioning that it means the MacBook Pro in question is sporting Apple’s new M1 processor. It raises an interesting question: How do you compare two things that are not at all like each other? And, maybe more importantly, why would you?

Source: Microsoft Released a Bizarre New Surface Pro Ad and It’s Hoping You Won’t Notice It’s Pure Gaslighting | Inc.com

Whatever sales figures Microsoft might release about the Surface, they are continuing to struggle to sell these units. How do I know this? Because of jumbled and confusing ads like the one referenced in the article.

The kid in the video complains about not having a stylus or a touchscreen, but you can get both of those things in an iPad. The only reason alluded to in the ad about why you wouldn’t just want buy a tablet in this scenario is “gaming.” LOL WUT? You can’t pay me to believe that people are buying a Surface to play games that you couldn’t play on a MacBook.

Microsoft continues to try to sell people on the idea that the Surface somehow bridges a theoretical gap between a laptop and a tablet, but if that market segment exists, it’s very small. And, when your competition has so completely dominated the tablet end of that spectrum, any effort to wedge a hybrid device into that market gap is going to be difficult at best.

The issues with using a touchscreen while it’s not-horizontal have been beaten to death, and I won’t rehash them here. I know 3 people who have Surfaces, and they seem to like them. But I watch them fumble around with their keyboards as they switch between tasks, and wonder why they put up with it. Microsoft is betting they can make money selling to people who don’t mind living in the usability gap. Maybe they can, but they’ve obviously not created a segment-defining product the way the iPhone and iPad have.

My advice to Microsoft’s advertising department would be to simply sell the devices on their merits. The people who are interested want to live in that “convertibility” space. Market that. Play to that strength. I don’t see it, but there are people who do. Sell to both of them.

The best PS4 games to play right now – Polygon

A mix of originals, remakes, and remasters makes the PS4 a system with a vast library of wonderful games

Source: The best PS4 games to play right now – Polygon

I just note, for the record, and with no small amount of satisfaction, that Red Dead Redemption 2 didn’t even make the list. It’s only an honorable mention. It’s not that it was completely terrible in all aspects, of course, but I contend it will eventually be seen as one of the most overrated and over-hyped AAA titles to ever hit the market.