Reddit's uncommon qualities as a community platform, inspiring nihilism and humor, may explain why r/WallStreetBets' growth feels reminiscent of r/The_Donald
At the height of the GameStop frenzy, John Herrman argues in the New York Times that r/WallStreetBets' explosive growth feels structurally familiar because Reddit's mix of nihilism and humor has produced this pattern before — most recently with r/The_Donald. The comparison lands awkwardly for a platform whose reputation was built on cleaning up after its worst moments, from the catastrophic Boston Marathon bomber manhunt onward.
What makes the piece worth revisiting is how the arc resolved: the volunteer moderator corps documented in Wired's deep dive into Reddit's 60K+ unpaid mods became the enforcement layer that turned Reddit into what the Times later called a content moderation success story, clearing the path to a $9.5B NYSE debut.
First-order effects
Reddit's moderators are handed a live stress test: contain a subreddit whose growth engine is the same nihilistic, meme-driven energy that made r/The_Donald uncontrollable, without defusing the engagement.
Second-order effects
Advertisers and eventual public-market investors price Reddit on whether its moderation apparatus can hold — the brand-safety question raised here precedes the revenue pressure Slate later flagged around ad and licensing growth.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, every Reddit growth spike forces the same trade-off between community authenticity and containment, and the platform's long-term value rests on keeping its unpaid moderator layer effective as commercial pressure mounts.
The trend: Community platforms whose engagement runs on transgressive subcultures face a recurring cycle in which each growth spike tests whether moderation can scale fast enough to make the chaos commercially viable.
There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how. 1/ https://…
Excellent @jwherrman on how the dynamics of Reddit fuel nihilism, first in TheDonald and later on WallStreetBets https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“to always seem like you might be joking, well beyond the point at which you should be taken seriously, is to guard yourself against accurate interpretation and evaluation.” This sentence is possibly the last 20 years in summary https://www.nytimes.com/...
“Among its unspoken rules was an expectation that users upvote pro-Trump content regardless of its quality, because doing so would make it visible to users elsewhere on the platform, or force Reddit to intervene, inviting” cynical cries of censorship. https://www.nytimes.com/...
regardless of whether reddit/wsb is behind the gme, another lesson should be about the mob rule. robinhood was all about democratization till the mob turned on them and no one else (you think only rh blocked trades? so did schwab and td) https://twitter.com/...
My favorite part of this story is the Roaring Kitty GameStop guy is a CFA See - the CFA is worth it! https://www.reuters.com/... https://twitter.com/...
here, @jwherrman gets at a defining dynamic of the last decade which is how things that are very real are also increasingly absurd and nihilistic (and it still scrambles a lot of brains) https://www.nytimes.com/...