One website panicked to stop a flood of misinformed newbies from instantly bankrupting it. Y'all picked that site because it let people spend the website's money. New users could immediately buy stock - without waiting to transfer money from their bank, to a broker. The trades were made with the website's money. And thousands of proudly ignorant randos bought the exact same junk.

Half the website's capital was suddenly tied to one struggling brick-and-mortar game store - the only stock that is in this community's name.

You're casting their effort to avoid losing everything in your get-rich-quick scheme as some childishly simple morality play. As if the fact they lost everything anyway proves them wrong. As if vague but menacing powers-that-be will be brought to heel if you just keep sticking together and clinging to your sliver of a dying retailer.

This is narrative addiction. It's the same as every hype cycle that ever flopped, but with modern technology connecting people to share denialist rhetoric, so nobody ever admits they've been had. When it was a bunch of peasants clutching tulip-bulbs, they couldn't help but look around and feel that something went wrong. But with communities like this - that recognition might never land. You can keep scoffing at critics that Wall Street is bad, actually, and therefore your negligible participation in it is going to show them what-for. You can build interpersonal connections on assertions that your shared actions cannot possibly have been a mistake. That so long as you keep the same rituals, you will be vindicated, no matter how thoroughly your predictions fail to align with observable reality.

We have a word for that. And it's not "scientist."