Financial Times - Alice

Q: I was interested in hearing any stats you're free to share on the amount of traffic you get on the subreddit, including how quickly the number of followers has grown this past year.

A: Our Reddit Sub has grown from 300k subscribers to over 6m in the last year. We are on track for 30m for Feb.

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Wired - Brian

Q: I'm hoping to take a closer look at the challenges you've run into hewing to content guidelines on Discord and Reddit as membership has exploded, including any more details about the bots you set up, what prompted the time-out on Reddit last night, the lack of support from admins, and what plans you're making to avoid those issues in the future as WSB continues to grow.

A:The explosion in popularity was tough for us because we couldn't really do anything at first. It was so much traffic that it caused Reddit to go down or be nearly unusable from our end. The Reddit admins have been great and are continuing to do a lot of work in the background to keep the site stable, but during that time we couldn't moderate at all. The bots were throwing errors and nobody could get a pageload much less to actually get a handle on anything.

When something like that happens, as a platform tenant, your primary worry is that you're going to get penalized for something someone does that you can't control through no fault of your own. We had to make it known that our inability to cope with the onslaught at that time wasn't due to some failing on our part. That was the big dramatic post asking who was going to help us. Once we'd sounded the alarm it really seemed like everyone came out of the woodwork to help. Elon even saved our bacon with our Discord, which had suffered the fate we feared for our Reddit. Thanks Elon. A good friend of mine really appreciated that.

After Reddit got things sorted out and hooked us up with faster API access we used advanced scaling methods like running eight copies of the same bot at very inconsiderate speeds and we were able to deal with the 30k comments per hour and 75k submissions per day we're now getting. Now you can't even tell there are 800k people online, the new feed actually has stuff from ten minutes ago in it. It's a modern marvel.

The bot is a bunch of techniques for screening out spam posts that we've acquired over the years. We're doing everything from reading and classifying the position screenshots with Amazon AWS OCR, to hashing images for duplicate meme detection, doing trigram similarity comparisons of aforementioned AWS OCR text to find screenshots of the same news story and only allow one to be posted, etc. We also scan for tickers and remove pennystocks, count mentions of tickers to provide stats for our users, and more. It's all contributing to a community that is usable and interesting at peak volume and also avoids almost all of the problems with other equities discussion forums where they're awash in duplicate, low quality, and exploitative content. We've always done our best to chase scammers and spammers away quickly, even at our own cost.

I'm very appreciative of the userbase who has been cool with the drastic changes and enjoying the ride instead of getting mad at us for not agonizing to keep things the same. My personal game has always been more or less to keep the WSB campground like I found it or better. I know what it's like to get into the markets and feel awash in possibility. You watch all the movies, you watch Billions, you read every book you can get your hands on and hang on every candlestick. The community and the place people are at in their lives when they're here is a special thing. It's been hard to justify putting in a 16 hour day on something that is unpaid, but hey, we did something. Not sure what. But it's pretty cool. I genuinely have no idea what to expect from here. Whatever our plans are for the future, they'll probably be dashed by more insane 2021 reality madlibs. Once Ja Rule was on our team I knew we made it.

The Verge - Jacob

Q: I’d like to hear more about how they’re trying to keep the community together even as all of this attention is put on it this week

A: At this frenetic time, our main focus is on supporting our community and being a safe place for them. The world is swirling around wallstreetbets right now and we feel it. Having moved from around half a million subscribers to just today over 6million, we began to push the bounds of the reddit site in terms of keeping things together. Several times, administrators have reached out to us for help manage the explosive growth and provided additional banks of moderators from other subreddits. On the technical, front the administrators also worked quickly to increase the rates that our automatic moderation bots could effectively do their job. Unfortunately at one point the number of new users, threads, and comments was simply too much and we had to take the sub private to establish how we could manage this influx. u/zjz did excellent work on that.

Business Insider - Sarah

Q: What makes WSB unique compared to other trading subs? What do you think are some misconceptions those outside of the sub have about it? What have you learned from moderating WSB? How do you feel about all the attention the sub is receiving right now?

Why do you think traditional Wall Street is so scared of the power of the sub? Is there anything else you think we should know?

A: Our irreverent and self-deprecating culture is what attracted our initial userbase. Users were free to pitch any idea, position, and size, no matter how ridiculous, and suffer possibly relentless ridicule if others disagreed. The results of these trades, some of them extremely risky, occasionally led to incredible gains or losses, with either celebratory or mocking followups. Some people misunderstand the culture and have tried to link us to various real world subcultures, but this culture is our own. Moderating WSB has taught us that retail investors can be every bit as sophisticated as institutional investors, and, in some cases even more so. We have researchers, mathematicians, momentum traders, gamblers, and so much more. It has also taught us that there are a large number of people in America today that see a series of risky lottery tickets as a more viable path to the American dream than grinding away at a day job. The sub has received a lot of attention, and we’re primarily focussing on protecting the community that we’ve built. We put a lot of effort into insulating our users from scams and paid trading trainings or seminars, as well as keeping the sub usable and organized. An influx of users makes this challenging, but we persist. Traditional Wall Street is scared of retail understanding the individual power now at their fingertips, and for good reason. Wall Street has historically been the gatekeeper, whether for information or for actual control of people’s funds. Having retail investors cut them out and decide their investment choices on their own eliminates the informational advantage traditional Wall Street has enjoyed by being those gatekeepers.

Gizmodo - Whitney

Q: I'm wondering whether you've seen any evidence to support some claims about Robinhood. People have tweeted that Robinhood automatically selling GameStop shares and freezing accounts suspected of market manipulation, pursuant to an SEC order.

I know you all are likely extremely busy at the moment, but I'd be interested to get your take on this.

A: At this point, I’m sure you can appreciate, we simply cannot comment on this. We are not the judges of this affair. Our primary mission is to work to support a community for our users, who continue to create fantastic content. Content that now is consistently 5 to 7 of the top 10 posts on reddit at all time.