I think the battle is mostly a red herring, it’s more so about the community and the myth of the potential upside. People are bored and want to be a part of something, whether it’s a battle against the shorts or… literally anything, people will join in. The recipe is basically: some people get rich of something + a narrative about how other people can get rich in the same way.
GME was about The Short Squeeze, but it could have been about why bananas are superior to apples. If someone said they became rich off of bananas being superior to apples you can be sure that there’ll be people like us in a thread like this arguing the relative superiority of apples and bananas. The Short Squeeze narrative is more compelling than most because it hits on the wealth disparity, but that isn’t fundamental to the behaviour we’ve seen.
I would bet that the majority of people still holding GME sincerely believe they will make a profit off of it, and they are enjoying being part of the community rallying around something.
A similar situation happened with MoviePass a few years ago, many people continued to shovel money in to MoviePass even when it was circling the drain simply because “…if I buy 100,000 shares and it hits $10/share again I’ll be rich…” even though there was no battle, no grand mission, and zero prospect of MoviePass surviving (let alone becoming worth anything)… but because some people had got rich, and it gave people a sense of community, people kept buying.
I’m not sure how true it is to say they were pretending. There is absolutely some very smart people in wsb but the make-up of the subreddit is misleading because of how reddit works. Reddit isn’t a forum like this with equality of posts, posts in wallstreetbets are as much about the person posting it and the cult of personality that comes from that – there’s always some flavour of the month person who everyone follows blindly. Yes, people play a stupid character there but it doesn’t mean beneath that character is intelligence.
I think this argues the opposite of your point: most people in wallstreetbets lose money, and DFV – a person with market smarts – spent more than a year sharing well reasoned analysis of why GME was worth betting on and he barely got a sniff from the community… it wasn’t until very recently that anybody cared about GME, and not until GME’s behaviour started to validate DFV’s analysis did people trust DFV. I’d think anybody in the finance world would look at the analysis from DFV and take an obvious position, but very few did.
Crypto is probably one of the best templates for this sort of activity, “partnerships” are my favourite goal post in crypto.
