Reddit’s popular WallStreetBets forum briefly went dark late Wednesday, stunning users who had been flooding the community with posts all week amid a frenzied stock rally.
A message on the forum’s landing page initially said WallStreetBets had been taken private by its moderators because of technical difficulties on an “unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB.”
About an hour later, the forum was made available to the public again.
It wasn’t immediately clear why the forum was opened again. A post from one of WallStreetBets’ moderators noted the team had struggled to keep up with the influx of comments and posts submitted to the forum in recent days.
WallStreetBets has been the subject of growing fascination and scrutiny as once-unpopular stocks ranging from GameStop Corp. to AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. have drawn significant interest from individual investors, helping catapult their share prices to eye-popping highs. Much of the discussion surrounding these shares has originated on WallStreetBets and then was amplified across the internet.
Shares of GameStop fell in after-hours trading as news of the forum’s brief closure spread online.
The stock fell as much as 28% at one point before recovering, cutting its after-hours loss to 16%.
Some users on social media, seeing GameStop’s drop, urged investors to hold on to the stock.
“Hold the line! Do not sell,” tweeted one user, followed by a series of rocket ship emojis.
The number of WallStreetBets users has exploded in popularity in recent days, as more users have joined the forum to browse and weigh in on the discussions about stocks like GameStop. Users often use the forum to tout their trading profits and debate investing ideas. In some cases, the discussions have the potential to go viral, helping send stock prices up. GameStop and AMC are among the latest examples of that.
More on the Trading Frenzy
WallStreetBets is run by moderators, who work to enforce a list of rules about what can and can’t be posted. The forum’s rules include bans on pump and dumps, or the practice of encouraging other traders to inflate a security’s price in order to then close out one’s own position at a gain. The forum’s rules also ban market manipulation, “political bulls—” and SPACs.
Users across Reddit, including on WallStreetBets, typically post with usernames that keep their identities anonymous, which can make it difficult at times to track who is discussing trading ideas and why.
The growing interest on the platform has made moderating the discussions more challenging recently. After the forum came back online, a post from one of the moderators said that WallStreetBets had gotten “so many comments and submissions that we can’t possibly even read them all, let alone act on them as moderators.”
While in its early years, the community counted a few thousand subscribers, its ranks swelled in 2019 as brokerages slashed their online trading commissions, spurring massive growth in retail trading activity.
The community then hit more than three million subscribers this month as GameStop, which WallStreetBets users had been cheering on, rallied.
Separately, chat service Discord banned WallStreetBets’ server late Wednesday. Discord servers have become a main forum among individual investors seeking to swap trading ideas. Users had turned to WallStreetBets’ Discord community to exchange voice and text messages in real time.
As the rise in GameStop shares continued, WallStreetBets’ Discord server had become increasingly chaotic, users said online.
A Discord spokeswoman said the WallStreetBets server had been on the platform’s radar for some time “due to the occasional content” that violates community guidelines, including “hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation.”
She noted that server administrators had been issued multiple warnings in recent months.
“Today, we decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings,” she said.
She added that the server wasn’t banned because of the recent frenzy surrounding GameStop and other stocks.
The post from a WallStreetBets moderator Wednesday said after the server was banned that the community is “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,” the post continued, adding that “we blocked all bad words with a bot.”
“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,” the post said.
—Michael Wursthorn contributed to this article.
Write to Caitlin McCabe at [email protected] and Akane Otani at [email protected]
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