Gizmodo: Reddit Declares War on Christmas, Ends Secret Santa. “Yesterday, admins made the baffling and infuriating announcement that Reddit is shutting down the beloved Secret Santa platform Reddit Gifts after the 2021 holiday season. Christmas Reddit, under assault. All Stonks Day, every day, forever. Wrapping paper, smoldering atop on a single lump of Reddit coal.”
EurekAlert: Posts to Reddit forum “SuicideWatch” spike in the early hours of Monday morning. “New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London has found that people on a social media suicide support forum are most likely to post to the site during the early hours of Monday morning.”
The Verge: Reddit Talk is a Clubhouse competitor for subreddits. “Based on Reddit’s description and images shared by the company, Reddit Talk appears to look a lot like Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and other social audio products. Talks will ‘live’ within subreddits, according to Reddit.”
Mashable: Reddit is secretly exploring a Clubhouse-like voice chat feature . “Reddit is quietly exploring a new feature that would enable moderator-run voice chats, possibly similar to Clubhouse, according to a source familiar with the company’s plan. Development is still in the early stages, and was described as confidential.”
Boing Boing: Take a strange trip through r/QuarterLand, if you dare. “Exploring r/QuarterLand feels like drifting off into a fever dream, one that veers into a full-on nightmare at times. The subreddit’s demented community of 4,000 people (which I admit, I am a part of) seems to have an unspoken understanding of the specific flavor of the content’s strangeness. Beware: the further one ventures through the QuarterLand page, the more they will stray from their sense of reality.”
The Next Web: Furious AI researcher creates a list of non-reproducible machine learning papers. “On February 14, a researcher who was frustrated with reproducing the results of a machine learning research paper opened up a Reddit account under the username ContributionSecure14 and posted the r/MachineLearning subreddit: ‘I just spent a week implementing a paper as a baseline and failed to reproduce the results. I realized today after googling for a bit that a few others were also unable to reproduce the results. Is there a list of such papers? It will save people a lot of time and effort.’ The post struck a nerve with other users on r/MachineLearning, which is the largest Reddit community for machine learning.”
Reuters: Bots hyped up GameStop on major social media platforms, analysis finds. “Bots on major social media platforms have been hyping up GameStop Corp and other ‘meme’ stocks, according to an analysis by Massachusetts-based cyber security company PiiQ Media, suggesting organized economic or foreign actors may have played a role in the Reddit-driven trading frenzy.”
Phys .org: Different social media platforms foster different levels of segregation in online communities. “A team of researchers from Ca’Foscari Univerity of Venice, the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, the University of Brescia and the Sapienza University of Rome has found that different kinds of social media platforms foster different levels of segregation in online communities. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of millions of online posts on several leading social media sites and what they found.”
CNET: GameStop stock hearing: How to watch Robinhood and Reddit CEOs testify before Congress. “On Thursday, Feb. 18, the House Committee on Financial Services is holding a virtual hearing, titled ‘Game Stopped? Who Wins and Loses When Short Sellers, Social Media, and Retail Investors Collide.’ The chief executives of Reddit, Robinhood, Citadel and Melvin Capital will be in attendance, along with the Reddit poster who spearheaded the GameStop buying frenzy. Here’s how to watch the hearing and some background on what led to Congress getting involved.”
New York Times: Reddit Is America’s Unofficial Unemployment Hotline. “As unemployment claims shot up early in the pandemic, so did posts on r/Unemployment, one of the many topic-based forums on the site known as subreddits. The subreddit once typically had fewer than 10 posts a day, but it quickly ballooned to nearly 1,000 posts a day in April and May. As the crisis wore on, posts and comments spiked in the weeks following changes to benefit programs. In January, nearly 10 months after the first lockdowns, the forum had one of its busiest weeks ever, driven by delays in payments and uncertainty around legislation signed late last year.”
Bloomberg: A Battle for Control of WallStreetBets May Have Broken Out. “A fight appears to be brewing on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum, and it’s not over which stock is the next GameStop Corp. Just weeks after the site was used to galvanize an epic short squeeze in shares of the video-game retailer, forcing the real Wall Street to reckon with the power of a united front of traders, signs of dissent are cropping up around the 8.5 million-member stock message board.”
The Verge: Senate to hold hearing on the stock market after Reddit GameStop squeeze. “Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the incoming chair of the Senate Banking Committee, announced Thursday that he plans to hold a hearing on the ‘current state of the stock market’ in the wake of unprecedented volatility around GameStop, AMC, and other stocks.”
CNET: AMC, GameStop stock are on a Reddit-fueled roller coaster. Why, and what happens next. “Over the past few months, a bunch of Reddit users have worked to push up the value of shares for video game retailer GameStop, despite Wall Street investors betting the company will fail. In the process, they sent the stock up more than 14,300% (you read that right), with some wild fluctuations. Then they started spreading their strategy to struggling movie chain AMC, too. In their wake, these online market players have upended Wall Street, creating a drama filled with memes, app trading disasters and weird internet lingo as big-time investors have lost billions of dollars.”
CNET: Facebook, Reddit receive low marks for Holocaust denial content. “Facebook, Reddit, Discord and Steam received low grades from the Anti-Defamation League on Wednesday for the handling of Holocaust denial content on their platforms. The ADL issued the report to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.”
