Yubo Kou
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States
Financial trading has become commonplace, involving the purchase and sale of securities such as stocks and bonds. While HCI research has investigated people’s financial literacy and decision-making and how to design for it, little is known as to how people form financial conversations on social media. To answer this question, we used a grounded theory approach to analyzing financial conversations in the YOLO (‘you only live once’) posts on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit (WSB), one of today’s largest financial online communities. We describe how WSB's discursive culture portrays its gambling-like, high-risk trading by likening trading to gambling, celebrating it, and normalizing financial risk-taking. We discuss the rise of social investing, including how individual investors’ affective relationships encourage their outsized risk-taking, as well as reflect on its looming financial risks, especially to already marginalized groups. Lastly, we propose implications for design and policymaking.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642768
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2024.acm.org/)