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One of the good things I see coming out of Robinhood blocking trading, Twitter and Reddit booting problematic users, Parler getting vaporized, etc. is a sudden realization amongst people of just how easily major parts of their lives can be instantly turned off by intermediaries.
My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
"Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)"
Article subtitle:
> Altering the internet's economic and digital infrastructure to promote free speech
I am somewhat skeptical of crypto, but I do hope that the DeFi ecosystem, 20 years in the future, will act as a democratizing force for financial markets.
Throwing this out there, too: assorted government restrictions and lockdowns imposed by regional public health officials. The early ones were more justified because we knew less, but as the pandemic drug on, the burden of proof justifying closures needed to increase, and legislators needed to step up and legitimize the policies. It's like how the president can wage war for 90 days, but then has to get approval from congress.
At the risk of sounding like an "I told you so" type of person, it is frustrating to speak out and see others speak out about future consequences of these kinds of actions, only to be drowned out by people liberally applying the slippery slope fallacy argument.
I actually think you are sadly wrong with that hope, as much as I also wish it were true.
Unfortunately, many people (sadly including the far left, who 10 years ago I would have called myself part of) & the media are actively celebrating these blocks and shutdowns because it serves their ideology. For now.
Robinhood was just hit with class action lawsuit over this:
The financial trading app Robinhood is been hit with a federal class action lawsuit after it restricted trades to stocks popular on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets, sending Redditors and app users into a meltdown.
The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York on Thursday, alleges that the app “purposefully, willfully, and knowingly removing the stock ‘GME’ from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise, thereby deprived [sic] retail investors of the ability to invest in the open-market and manipulating the open-market.”
I definitely support the notion of moving from platforms to protocols, at least in theory. I do think you're going to run into the need to regulate wherever communication starts impinging on not-purely-informational constructs, like securities.
I really hope that gambling on GME is not a "major part" of a significant number of people's lives.
> My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
I hope so too and I hope that movement will develop and adopt technological solutions and not advocate for government force. This is an opportunity for people to control their means of communication and create a more robust internet that can better withstand censorship attempts in the future. I fear it will instead be taken advantage of by people who want to increase government control perhaps to prevent competition with the currently dominant actors on the market. Any further normalization of government control of communication or the internet must be resisted if we are to have any chance to keep the truly wonderful thing that the internet is today, despite all its imperfections.
> My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
I don’t have much hope for this, mainly because being the owner of a platform is much more profitable than being one of many protocol end points. Look at git. It is hard to think of a more open protocol, and yet GitHub absolutely dominates and it is a big deal if they decide to cut off your repo.
A better alternative is for government to fund and operate critical infrastructure or at least heavily regulate it.
I don’t have to worry that I will get deplatformed from mail, because the USPS is there and they have strict legal requirements prohibiting them from deplatforming people. I don’t have to worry that I won’t be deplatformed from roads, because most roads are operated by the government, which is under strict legal precedents that they can’t deplatform me. It is similar with utilities such as electricity, water, gas which are privately operated but heavily regulated.
Some of the internet infrastructure is both becoming more vital as has economies of scale such that there is an inherent drive for consolidation. As such, I think it is becoming time that such things be regulated like utilities.
I'm still wondering when we are going to get neighborhood-wide and then chained mesh wifi networks that bypass ISPs
I know that exists in pieces and small projects but it's not like more than a few dozen people in any town even can fathom what that is or why it's a good idea.
Google and Apple would never do this but imagine if every smartphone came not only with built in mesh-wifi ability but was on by default so it all acted as a repeater, you could probably communicate across entire states and countries given enough seconds like store-and-forward and ham radio-like solutions.
Never going to happen as long as people insist that stuff works on their walled-garden cellphone.
Cellphone lockdowns are the keystone here.
There are sensible arguments for cellphones being walled gardens (grandmas can't defend their phone against malware, etc), but this is the devil's bargain you have to accept.
As long as people (a) want everything on their cellphone and (b) want it to be locked-down enough that they can trust it to not listen in on them and stalk their location, everything downstream of the cellphone will be intermediated.
This isn't All One Thing. It isn't even all one thing inside the Robin Hood/Gamestop thing. Wall Street Bets got banned on Discord for calls to violent action, on the one hand, and their bets got throttled on Robin Hood because Robin Hood's data customers, who are legal-ishly front-running Robin Hood users, do not like what Robin Hood users are legal-ishly doing.
I’m less into the free speech component. I think companies should have the right to curate a community they see fit.
What I do care about is moving to protocols and data portability. I want the ability to switch to another provider if I’m not happy with their decisions. I absolutely don’t like my data being held hostage.
I also hope this realization extends to things like GMail which hasn’t yet seen a similar scrutiny
I just ran through a thought experiment--if Google (gmail) Apple (my phone) and Tmobile (the current owners of my number) all simultaneously nuked me, could I recover?
Luckily yes. Online access would be hindered, but nearly all my financial resources are handled through a local credit union.
Alternative take; the following are not major parts of your life:
> Robinhood, Parler, Twitter, Reddit (et cetera)
but represent trivial ephemera whose significance for the individual, following abandonment/deletion, vanishes into hindsight once the endowment effect and separation anxiety wears off.
At this rate, they will red pill everyone with a pulse. It's a good thing (/s alert) that we have legislative solution in the pipeline just in time to address the inevitable social consequences.
I think calling for violence then carrying out actual violence is a bit different than this. But yes, it's like these giants now have a taste for deplatforming and are liberally applying it now.
I doubt it. Robinhood is now citing misinformation as the reason to "protect its users". Misinformation and disinformation are really the weapons of mass destruction. Cite it, and you get your superpower. Twitter does it. FB does it. Media, oh media loves it. So, what's wrong with Robinhood again?
I agree, instead of the original idea of the internet being a utopia of free speech, decentralization and free trade, it has devolved into a place where a select few oligarchies reign supreme pushing their views and actions onto the billions of users forced into their monopolies. Laws do not apply to them and even when they break their own TOS there are no repercussions.
A strong digital rights for users is a good start, but I think the end goal is that they(the tech monopolies) are essential utilities for a majority of the world and should be regulated as such. A CEO should not be able to silence a democratically elected leader from a communications platform(congress or a govt. communications committee should decide), users should be able to buy the stock of their choosing(the SEC can decide to halt trading pending illegal behavior) and not have that right removed by a companies CEO.
I'm not optimistic an "open-source brokerage" will ever exist. Barrier to entry is probably too high/impossible to overcome. Big hedge funds would just flat out refuse your orders or prioritize them at garbage levels.
When retail in traders en masse decide that a trading platform is impinging upon their rights, the SEC should be obligated to open an investigation. Isn't this pretty much a major component of their intended purpose?
I have a bit of knowledge from friends who work in fintech, and the sentiment among fintech companies seems to be that SEC doesn't matter. The fine is small and comes way too late. You can simply account for an approximate future fine and move forward with your shady business.
The SEC has led the charge of government agencies away from anything that could reasonably be called regulation. Take note of how often the term 'oversight' is used vs 'regulation' when these guys are talking.
> Isn't this pretty much a major component of their intended purpose?
Reminds me of the scene in the The Big Short where the hot chick in the pool who currently works for the SEC (at the time) is in town in Vegas for a conference hoping to run into some Wall Street banker dudes so she can schmooze and float her resume to them. And it's not a conflict of interest.
I've been reading WSB since yesterday and while I understand the outrage about blocking trading. They started blocking trading with $GME trading in the $400's, and a slew of redditors on WSB, Discord & Telegram pushing penny stocks. It started out a crusade against the hedge fund shorting $GME and quickly turned into rallying dumb money to pump and dump penny stocks. Looking at the direction things were going it seems like Robinhood acted responsibly in cutting off the buys of AMC, BB, NOK, etc. They're all stocks that have been propped up artificially in the last 48 hours based on the hype and attention generated by the Gamestop story.
No one serious thinks Gamestop stock is worth $400+. Robinhood cut off buying at the point when unsophisticated investors were caught up in a stampede to "stick it to the man." Seems like they did the right thing.
I think it is ridiculous that Robinhood took the matters in their own hands to halt trading on GME. If anyone had to do this was the SEC. It is just outrageous.
Serious question: Since RobinHood is a private company, does the "if you don't like it, you can build your own platform" argument apply here? Or does that only apply selectively when it benefits partisan politics?
This is the natural evolution when censorship as we've recently seen is given a pass.
The reason why this happened is that their clearing house stopped fulfilling their orders (totally out of their control,) but Robinhood bungled this so badly, I honestly wonder if they'll ever recover. WeBull had to do the same thing but they have a clear reason rather than "protecting investors" etc.
Robinhood phrased their message as if it was for user's own good. Moralizing everything beyond protocol and rules and law has serious consequences. It does nothing but driving people cynical. Didn't the elites learn the stories of USSR political jokes, the stories of how East Germans (and ancient Chinese people) talked to each other via eye contacts only? It's not hard to guess what will happen when enough number of people stop trusting the system. For that matter, I'm so glad that AOC and Td Cruz can agree with each other to probe Robinhood's practice.
That sound you hear is the evaporation of billions in pre-IPO Robinhood equity vanishing based on both a poor decision (to disallow buying of a stock that others could still buy) and worse, poor execution on their site that didn't make it clear how narrow the blocking was.
Those customers who have left Robinhood will never come back and it will take years to recover, if ever.
Most of the other brokerages (Schwab, Etrade, and TD Ameritrade, but NOT Fidelity and Vanguard according to the reports I am getting) are participating. According to the rumor on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassActionRobinHood/comments/l723k... the call came from the White House.
Can someone who knows more about such things than I explain to me why their weird response to the situation (halting buying, but still permitting selling) was deemed by them to be the best of their options (the other two obvious ones being to temporarily stop dealing in those securities entirely (halting buying and selling), or to continue letting people trade them as they had the previous day)?
It's confusing to me. I'd think if they were being risk-averse or something they'd have stopped dealing in them entirely until the craziness passed. The "you can only sell, not buy" part seems... odd to me.
It's not even that it rounds to 1 star, it's actually 1.0 stars (according to the aria-label on the HTML). The difference between a 1.4 and 1.0 is huge in terms of what percent of reviews are actually favorable.
I honestly feel bad for all the employees, especially the early ones with equity that were looking forward to cashing out after the IPO - now they have to deal with immensely negative PR and federal investigations.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
The current thread is paginated like all the other big threads (to spare our poor server—yes, we're working on it). If you want to see all the comments you'll need to click through the More links at the bottom, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947697&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947697&p=3
(and so on)
[+] [-] alangibson|5 years ago|reply
My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.
[+] [-] sebmellen|5 years ago|reply
"Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)"
Article subtitle:
> Altering the internet's economic and digital infrastructure to promote free speech
I am somewhat skeptical of crypto, but I do hope that the DeFi ecosystem, 20 years in the future, will act as a democratizing force for financial markets.
[+] [-] worker767424|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daenz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breakfastduck|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, many people (sadly including the far left, who 10 years ago I would have called myself part of) & the media are actively celebrating these blocks and shutdowns because it serves their ideology. For now.
[+] [-] at-fates-hands|5 years ago|reply
The financial trading app Robinhood is been hit with a federal class action lawsuit after it restricted trades to stocks popular on the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets, sending Redditors and app users into a meltdown.
The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York on Thursday, alleges that the app “purposefully, willfully, and knowingly removing the stock ‘GME’ from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise, thereby deprived [sic] retail investors of the ability to invest in the open-market and manipulating the open-market.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/robinhood-hit-with-class-actio...
[+] [-] asdfasgasdgasdg|5 years ago|reply
I really hope that gambling on GME is not a "major part" of a significant number of people's lives.
[+] [-] 974373493200|5 years ago|reply
I hope so too and I hope that movement will develop and adopt technological solutions and not advocate for government force. This is an opportunity for people to control their means of communication and create a more robust internet that can better withstand censorship attempts in the future. I fear it will instead be taken advantage of by people who want to increase government control perhaps to prevent competition with the currently dominant actors on the market. Any further normalization of government control of communication or the internet must be resisted if we are to have any chance to keep the truly wonderful thing that the internet is today, despite all its imperfections.
[+] [-] treeman79|5 years ago|reply
Maybe we could amend the law. Seriously.
Lots of people love to dump on the constitution as old and not relevant. But it’s meant to restrict government and protect people’s freedom.
[+] [-] ashtonkem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|5 years ago|reply
I don’t have much hope for this, mainly because being the owner of a platform is much more profitable than being one of many protocol end points. Look at git. It is hard to think of a more open protocol, and yet GitHub absolutely dominates and it is a big deal if they decide to cut off your repo.
A better alternative is for government to fund and operate critical infrastructure or at least heavily regulate it.
I don’t have to worry that I will get deplatformed from mail, because the USPS is there and they have strict legal requirements prohibiting them from deplatforming people. I don’t have to worry that I won’t be deplatformed from roads, because most roads are operated by the government, which is under strict legal precedents that they can’t deplatform me. It is similar with utilities such as electricity, water, gas which are privately operated but heavily regulated.
Some of the internet infrastructure is both becoming more vital as has economies of scale such that there is an inherent drive for consolidation. As such, I think it is becoming time that such things be regulated like utilities.
[+] [-] bluetwo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tima101|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|5 years ago|reply
I know that exists in pieces and small projects but it's not like more than a few dozen people in any town even can fathom what that is or why it's a good idea.
Google and Apple would never do this but imagine if every smartphone came not only with built in mesh-wifi ability but was on by default so it all acted as a repeater, you could probably communicate across entire states and countries given enough seconds like store-and-forward and ham radio-like solutions.
[+] [-] KirillPanov|5 years ago|reply
Cellphone lockdowns are the keystone here.
There are sensible arguments for cellphones being walled gardens (grandmas can't defend their phone against malware, etc), but this is the devil's bargain you have to accept.
As long as people (a) want everything on their cellphone and (b) want it to be locked-down enough that they can trust it to not listen in on them and stalk their location, everything downstream of the cellphone will be intermediated.
[+] [-] Zigurd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8ytecoder|5 years ago|reply
What I do care about is moving to protocols and data portability. I want the ability to switch to another provider if I’m not happy with their decisions. I absolutely don’t like my data being held hostage.
I also hope this realization extends to things like GMail which hasn’t yet seen a similar scrutiny
[+] [-] balls187|5 years ago|reply
Luckily yes. Online access would be hindered, but nearly all my financial resources are handled through a local credit union.
[+] [-] inopinatus|5 years ago|reply
> Robinhood, Parler, Twitter, Reddit (et cetera)
but represent trivial ephemera whose significance for the individual, following abandonment/deletion, vanishes into hindsight once the endowment effect and separation anxiety wears off.
[+] [-] eternalban|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] g9yuayon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subsubzero|5 years ago|reply
A strong digital rights for users is a good start, but I think the end goal is that they(the tech monopolies) are essential utilities for a majority of the world and should be regulated as such. A CEO should not be able to silence a democratically elected leader from a communications platform(congress or a govt. communications committee should decide), users should be able to buy the stock of their choosing(the SEC can decide to halt trading pending illegal behavior) and not have that right removed by a companies CEO.
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anm89|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shrimpx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alangibson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmurray|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] racl101|5 years ago|reply
Reminds me of the scene in the The Big Short where the hot chick in the pool who currently works for the SEC (at the time) is in town in Vegas for a conference hoping to run into some Wall Street banker dudes so she can schmooze and float her resume to them. And it's not a conflict of interest.
[+] [-] ritchiea|5 years ago|reply
No one serious thinks Gamestop stock is worth $400+. Robinhood cut off buying at the point when unsophisticated investors were caught up in a stampede to "stick it to the man." Seems like they did the right thing.
[+] [-] ArtTimeInvestor|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947674
From the number of Playstore votes it seems quite a few?
Will be interesting to see if it stays that way. Or if they can somehow cheat their way out of it and get all recent ratings deleted or something.
Any guesses?
[+] [-] coliveira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jb775|5 years ago|reply
This is the natural evolution when censorship as we've recently seen is given a pass.
[+] [-] partiallypro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] g9yuayon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdamN|5 years ago|reply
Those customers who have left Robinhood will never come back and it will take years to recover, if ever.
[+] [-] xxpor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackfoxy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
It's confusing to me. I'd think if they were being risk-averse or something they'd have stopped dealing in them entirely until the craziness passed. The "you can only sell, not buy" part seems... odd to me.
[+] [-] robntheh00d|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1354853920762253315?s=2...
[+] [-] rammy1234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donohoe|5 years ago|reply
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robinhood-investing-for-all/id...
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucasmullens|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robot1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misiti3780|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|5 years ago|reply
1. No outstanding trades 2. a $0.00 balance 3. Contact support and (optionally?) give a reason
(1) and (2) make sense, but is (3) new?
I wonder if there is a mass exodus - there should be.