One of the many, many weird stories to come out of 2021 was the one about Gamestonk, a memelord-led stock market charge that ballooned the stock valuation of GameStop despite the company losing money, which in turn ended up squeezing hedge funds, arousing the ire of the House financial services committee and investors, and ultimately making losers out of everyone involved from regular folks to day trading shitposters.
At the top of the trash pile was Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of the WallStreetBets subreddit, who was banned from Reddit a month before the Gamestonk tinderbox blew up, and now he’s trying to fight back by suing Reddit over his removal.
The complaint by Rogozinski, which was filed in the Northern District Court of California last week, accuses Reddit of banning him from the platform only after he filed trademark protections for the WallStreetBets brand, while arguing that he is the latest victim of Reddit’s attempts to “capture, take credit for, and monetize other people’s creations.”
A statement from Reddit says that Rogozinski was banned from the platform for trying to use it to enrich himself and called the lawsuit “another transparent attempt” at doing so, while Rogozinski claimed in a WSJ interview that the only monetization of the subreddit he attempted was plugging a book and promoting a live trading competition. In that same WSJ piece, a moderator of the still-running subreddit claims it “has become incredibly vibrant and more intelligent since [Rogozinski] left.”
