I've been refreshing the Robinhood app page in the App Store every couple hours since Thursday like it's a sport. It went from four-point-something stars to somewhere under two in about a day, buried under a wall of one-star reviews that all say some version of "you don't get to change the rules mid-game." I don't even use Robinhood. I'm just watching the number fall the way you watch a slow-motion car crash you have no stake in.
But that's not actually the story I want to write about tonight, because everybody and their cousin has already written the GameStop post this week and I don't have anything to add to "a bunch of Reddit traders squeezed the hedge funds and then the brokerage app pulled the ladder up." What I keep thinking about instead is Wednesday, the day before all that boiled over, when Discord banned the WallStreetBets server.
Not the subreddit. The subreddit's still up, still doing whatever it's doing, still full of screenshots of options gains that make my stomach hurt just looking at them. It was the Discord chat server tied to it that got the axe, something like 90-something thousand members gone in one move. Discord's official line was that it had been a long-running moderation problem, repeated reports of hateful and discriminatory content, and the timing relative to the stock stuff was coincidental.
Maybe it was. I actually kind of believe them, which apparently makes me an outlier this week. Here's the thing nobody wants to hear: when a community goes from a few thousand active chatters to essentially a stampede in the space of five or six days, moderation does not scale gracefully. I run (ran, past tense now, long story) a small Discord for a local dev meetup and I can tell you that at 200 members you can eyeball what's happening in the chat. At 2,000 you're relying entirely on automod and whoever happens to be awake. WSB's Discord went supernova practically overnight. Of course the mod queue turned into a dumpster fire.
None of that mattered to the timing, though, and timing is what people react to, not nuance. The ban landed less than 24 hours before Robinhood restricted buying on GME, AMC, Nokia, BlackBerry, and a handful of other tickers down to sell-only. Two completely different companies, two completely unrelated decisions as far as anyone can actually prove, and the internet stitched them into one narrative about platforms colluding to protect Wall Street from a bunch of guys posting rocket emojis. I'm not saying that narrative is fair. I'm saying I understand exactly why it formed, because it's a much better story than "a Discord server got too big to moderate and a brokerage ran into a genuine clearinghouse capital requirement," even if the boring version is probably closer to true.
What actually annoys me isn't the conspiracy theorizing, it's how little any of these platforms explain themselves in the moment. Discord posted a short statement. Robinhood posted a blog update about "market volatility" that read like it had been run through three layers of legal review before anyone hit publish. Neither one gave you enough to actually evaluate the decision, so people filled the gap with whatever explanation felt most satisfying, and the most satisfying explanation is always the conspiracy. This isn't new, it's just a particularly compressed and visible example of it happening in under 48 hours.
I don't think I'm going to have strong feelings about GameStop the stock a month from now. I do think I'm going to remember this week as the one where a decent chunk of the internet decided, correctly or not, that a chat app and a trading app were working together against them, and where the actual explanations offered were thin enough that you couldn't really blame anyone for not buying it. Robinhood's since scrambled to raise something like a billion dollars overnight to meet collateral requirements and let people buy again, in limited amounts, and by Friday the app store reviews had started splitting between people still furious and people posting screenshots of their portfolios like it's V-day. My review count guess: it'll be back above four stars within a month, because that's just how app store ratings work, everyone forgets by the next update cycle.
Still refreshing that page though. Can't help it.