Tag: Reddit

Online Community Encourages ‘Transmaxxing:’ Gender Transitions for Sexually Frustrated Men

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by Laurel Duggan   A community of men who consider themselves involuntarily celibate, or “incels,” are transitioning to the opposite sex to escape sexual rejection and improve their lives, according to numerous posts on Discord servers and other social media platforms reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. While many transgender advocates argue that one’s sense of gender is innate, unchangeable and largely unrelated to one’s biological sex, members of the online “transmaxxer” community encourage one another to transition for personal gain, often regardless of whether they have gender identity issues. By undergoing cross-sex hormones and identifying as female, transmaxxers argue men can improve their sex lives, access a new dating pool and escape the perceived hardships of being a man. For instance, one Reddit user who said he was 17 asked the transmaxxing community for advice about whether he should medically transition to female, citing perceived failure as a man. “I was seven years old when I started ‘praying’ to God to let me become a girl … I tried looksmaxxing when I realized that there is not much you could change just by working out and ‘getting a haircut bro.’ Got hit with this dilemma of wanting to be female,…

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Commentary: Redditors Flock, Amplify ‘Antiwork’ Movement

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When it comes to blaming the masses, no one seems to take the fall more than young people: Weird food trends, the “baby bust,” and now, a labor shortage all seem to be attributed to Millennials and Gen Z. Now, following “The Great Resignation” comes a new phrase, “antiwork.” It’s a movement pointing out the flaws in work and employment. The subreddit grew from 76,000 to 1,019,000 subscribers from January 2020 to November 2021, according to Vice. And they planned a “Blackout Black Friday” strike. So, what’s this movement, and how far will it go?

What is antiwork?

This isn’t simply a lazy act of defiance. The antiwork movement has to do with burnout, mental health, wages, benefits, employer treatment, and many other factors. The pandemic saw many people working themselves to the bone but for low pay under toxic management. Then came The Great Resignation, where millions voluntarily left their jobs. Nearly 40% of those were service jobs— restaurant, hotel, bar, and health care workers, and others—also known as those who are famously underpaid. Now, employees from nearly every workforce sector in the U.S. are coming forward to expose poor treatment and overworking, among other issues.

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Commentary: Pitchfork Populists v. Wall Street?

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As a long-time financial services executive, every so often I am called upon by friends and family from other walks of life to comment on a story related to the stock market. Such is the case with the GameStop saga.

Given that few of them are well-versed in the ways of Wall Street, that I hail from an investment banking pedigree and not a securities trading — particularly stock trading — background seems to them a distinction without a difference, and I offer my insights as best as I am able. As such, I’ve given more thought to GameStop than I may have otherwise.

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GameStop Revolt Redditors File Class Action Lawsuit Against Robinhood for Cutting off Access to the Market as Hedge Fund Losses Mount

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by Andrew Kerr   A class-action lawsuit filed against the investing app Robinhood on Thursday just hours after it prohibited its users from purchasing GameStop stock is unlikely to be successful in court, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. And federal regulators with the Securities and Exchange Commission are going to have a hard time proving that the millions of retail investors from the Reddit forum WallStreetBets who forced a monumental short squeeze on GameStop, causing the company’s price to skyrocket nearly 1,500% in January, violated any securities laws, the experts said. “They may be ganging up, but it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of material misrepresentations being made. And the SEC’s standard modus operandi is to go after people who are making material misrepresentations,” University of Michigan Law professor Adam Pritchard told the DCNF. “These people may just be stupid. But there are a bunch of them and they’re encouraging each other. It’s not a crime to be stupid.” GameStop’s price explosion in January was made possible because hedge funds and other institutional investors had shorted 140% of the company’s existing shares. When an investor shorts a stock, they’re betting that the security will decrease…

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Commentary: Robinhood, Reddit, and the Cram Down of Economic Populism

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Short sellers claim there is a moral and economic worth to their trade. They supposedly keep the market honest by exposing overvalued stocks, thereby preventing “irrational exuberance” from creating stock bubbles.

If that was all there was to it, they’d be right. Stock bubbles tend to pop eventually, and when they do, the worst case scenario is that the collateral they represent implodes, the loans that the collateral enabled go into default, and trillions in debt-fueled liquidity is erased in a cascading downward spiral. And just like that, the economy collapses into a deflationary depression that makes the 1930s look like a cake walk. There are good reasons we don’t want to demonize short sellers indiscriminately, or drive them out of the market.

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Commentary: The Social Media Purge Exposes Net Neutrality’s True Goal

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For nearly two decades, Silicon Valley made net neutrality its highest policy priority. Under the banner of a “free and open” internet, Google, Facebook, and Twitter sought regulations to ensure the uninterrupted flow of information by treating every bit equally. Or so they said.

Beginning last Friday night, these firms and others executed an unprecedented digital purge of the social media and video accounts of their political rivals. After several years of accelerating suspensions and suppressions, this time YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter permanently banned a number of high-profile conservatives and deplatformed thousands of others, at least temporarily. Many of these accounts had nothing to do with last Wednesday’s heinous events at the Capitol. Yet their histories are erased.

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Commentary: Reddit Bans Largest Trump Subreddit as Trump Announces Social media Summit to Address Censorship

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by Robert Romano   In the latest round of social media censorship, Reddit has quarantined the largest subreddit in favor of President Donald Trump, r/The_Donald, with over 750,000 followers, restricting access. The move comes amid a crackdown of conservative content on social media platforms, with users on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube being censored, suspended, banned and demonetized and Trump calling for a social media summit to address the censorship. Since 2016, the r/The_Donald subreddit has grown significantly and is a highly trafficked go-to locale for Trump supporters online. It describes itself as “a never-ending rally dedicated to the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.” In a message to the group by one of its moderators on June 26 announcing the quarantine and measures being taken to be reinstated, it stated, “we were quarantined without warning for some users that were upset about the Oregon Governor sending cops to round up Republican lawmakers to come back to vote on bills before their state chambers. None of these comments that violated Reddit’s rules and our Rule 1 [against advocating violence] were ever reported to us moderators to take action on. Those comments were reported on by an arm of…

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Commentary: A Subreddit Is Teaching People How to Actually Challenge Ideas Civilly

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by Brittany Hunter   Civil discourse is dead – or so one might think given the current state of affairs in this country. It doesn’t matter what political views you hold, one thing every single American can agree on is that as a society, we have become incapable of having meaningful conversations about controversial – or seemingly controversial – topics. We live in a country where First Amendment rights to free speech and free expression have given us the wonderful privilege of being exposed to a wide range of different viewpoints on a regular basis. The only caveat to this, aside from the government occasionally suppressing speech, is that in order to take advantage of this privilege, you have to be willing to listen to others with whom you may disagree. And this is where Americans come up short. It would appear that many are no longer capable of listening to the other side. If anyone doubts this is true, simply log in to Twitter and read one controversial or political thread. You just might lose your faith in humanity in the process. Instead of deliberating and breaking down a topic to its finer points, most people have resorted to…

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