Reddit's WallStreetBets celebrated as GameStop stock soared

• On Wednesday, GameStop stock surged once again and more than doubled in value over night.
• The WallStreetBets community has been celebrating, posting memes and videos imploring not to sell.
• As the stock rises and falls, Redditors are theorizing as to why the fluctuation seems to be occurring.

WallStreetBets (WSB), the Reddit community that encourages anyone with an internet connection to trade like a stock broker, is still impacting the market.

Weeks of controversy and turbulence have plagued the subreddit, stemming from a bounce in GameStop stock to over $400 at the end of January. On Wednesday, a similar bump happened again to the stock, bringing it as high as $200 after hours. WSB hopefuls that had invested late or never got a chance the first time around were elated at this opportunity to jump on the bandwagon.

As GameStop stocks rise, so do the sentiments of WallStreetBets

Interest in the GME stock was so high Wednesday, that Reddit itself seemed to struggle to deal with the traffic load. At around 4 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, the whole site went down for about an hour, potentially sparked by people flocking to the subreddit.

The most popular and highly upvoted sentiment currently on WallStreetBets is the exact same one that's permeated the sub since GameStop first took off: hold your stocks and don't sell until it hits record highs or "goes to the moon." Through highly edited videos, sea shanties, and wrestling promos, users are implored to have "diamond hands," or to not sell their stock.

"You held on, you stuck with it. And now, we're going back up baby," user AquaSea_Squirrel wrote in a post that was upvoted over 33,000 times. "Obviously no road trip runs without bumps, sometimes you even get a flat tire. But you generally get where you're going."

Many on the subreddit were skeptical that the stock would ever rise again and made bets that they'd never thought they'd have to keep like getting tattoos, piercing their ears, or moving to Bulgaria. Reddit user nogoodnameswork cataloged nearly every single promise made on the board based on the GameStop stock, holding them accountable to their ridiculous comments or permanently banning them from WSB.

As of Thursday morning, Gamestop stock has started to fall once again, losing about 25% of its value. User matt1028 posted a quickly rising thread claiming that stocks are getting shorted, or borrowed for a cheaper price in an attempt to get people to "panic sell."

That hasn't stopped users from investing in the stock, with it still rising and falling sporadically.

"Sold most of my shitty portfolio and put it all into GME wish me luck," wrote HideYoGurl, one of the thousands of other users posting in the daily discussion thread of the stock. "Once this suckin thing hits $10,000 I'm gonna move my family somewhere tropical and bring my Nana with me," wrote GrimandNordic1.

How did WallStreetBets become so prominent?

After the initial wave of GameStop interest, the subreddit became the target of mainstream media attention. Outlets in traditional and online media scrambled to explain to the masses why a bunch of self-described "degenerates" were causing a stock to soar while asking for "tendies."

The subreddit itself boomed in popularity, gaining over seven million subscribers in under one month. This popularity and media attention put a lot of pressure on the moderators of the subreddit, whose job is to regulate the posts and delete spam. On February 3, a group of moderators that had been inactive on the sub came back, prompted by the prospect of a movie deal and fame, removing the site's current moderators. After a day of turmoil, the original moderators were reinstated and after a few more days most of the original team returned.

On February 18, a Congressional hearing with the House Financial Services Committee was held to discuss what went on with GameStop and the trading app Robinhood. Keith Gill, known as DeepF---Value on WallStreetBets, was one of the people brought in to testify. The user had invested heavily in Gamestop and became one of the figureheads of the WallStreetBets movement.