Thread by @shengokai

If you're going to report on Stonks, you have a journalistic obligation not to conflate the phenomena of Stonks with Q or the Jan 6 terrorists. While all three are largely decentralized online phenomena, they're DIFFERENT decentralized online phenomena

wsj.com/articles/games…

While all three may have made use of reddit, the degree to which they made use of reddit and the ways they made use of reddit are vastly different. For example, r/WSB was less of an organizing platform for Stonks than the other forums used by Q and the Jan 6. insurrectionists.

To my knowledge, the Q folks choose to use other platforms, specifically in the wake of the demise of r/thedonald, and when they do use platforms it is in a less "pedagogical" mode than r/WSB where there was some direction to take particular kinds of action by members of the sub.

And the Jan 6. folks. Well... There's a world of difference between how they use their chosen platforms to coordinate an act of domestic terror or insurrection than how r/WSB used their subreddit to provide limited organization to their decentralized efforts.

Moreover, takes like the linked one seem (to me) attempts to fit the affective politics of reddit and other decentralized communities into established boxes when they simply do not work this way. I might say these takes parallel attempts to engage with "twitter" as a whole.

That said, this isn't "the wisdom of crowds" versus "the wisdom of the mob," as neither of those terms fully apply to something like r/WSB or Q, though they might better apply to the Jan 6. terrorists; this is something for which we barely have the language.

And I say "barely" because there are some very talented scholars who are trying to develop the frameworks with which to study and understand things like Stonks, Q, and the Jan 6 terrorists, scholars whose research is considered marginal or not valuable by the academy.

I mention this not because we've attempted to warn y'all, but because this is a good case study in the ways that our understanding of a phenomena lags behind the experience and the social effects of the phenomena BECAUSE the phenomena wasn't taken seriously by our culture.

Put simply, we spent decades treating reddit and online community spaces as if they were beneath our notice and as if there was a hard online/offline divide that prevented what happens online from spilling into the "real" world, and now we're reaping the consequences of it.

See also, the shit show that has been attempts to "regulate big tech" for the past fourish years.

Put simply, we lack the conceptual language to begin talking about these phenomena, and few places with resources are directing them towards that end.

Which means, as I've said before, when the next internet thing happens, and it will, we are most definitely screwed.