From baking banana bread to tending to an indoor garden to taking up digital art classes, the past year indoors saw people venturing into new hobbies. For generation Z – those aged 24 and below as of 2021 – financial investment was one of them.
Research by UK bank Halifax found that spare time was the top reason that people from generation Z started investing, as reported by the Financial Times (FT) earlier this month. FT noted that online brokerages were experiencing “record levels of engagement from young, tech-savvy investors raised on YouTube tutorials and Reddit forums.” Raised as digital natives, the barriers to entry for this generation are relatively low given the variety of online resources and convenient platforms already available.
So here we are: about to have a hearing about GameStonk. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is going to have to explain himself tomorrow. What happens next for Robinhood?
Perhaps you recall last month, when GameStop stock shot up by as much as 500 percent, hitting a peak of $483 on January 28th, thanks largely to memes and a shitposting finance subreddit. (I’m sure there will be entire academic books written on r/WallStreetBets. There is a paper already.) Many of the retail traders involved in the GameStop buying frenzy were using Robinhood, and the company became part of the meme even though it had to limit trades on GameStop. The run-up had a populist theme: the little guys were gonna
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In today’s attention economy, platforms are megaphones and audiences are income. Shut off the megaphone and the income goes away. Bad guy go bye-bye. Throughout the last year, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and beyond have reckoned with their social responsibility not to amplify and monetize hate in what has become known as “the great deplatforming.” But what about when the megaphone is off and the cash keeps flowing in?
A WIRED investigation has uncovered dozens of far-right and white supremacist figures who monetize or have monetized through financial services essential to Twitch and YouTube’s full-time gamers: Streamlabs and StreamElements. Booted off traditional streaming sites, these figures have fled to more underground, less moderated streaming services like DLive, where integrations with Streamlabs and StreamElements let viewers send monetary donations alongside public messages to streamers. Unlike Pay