GameStop and the Flip Side of Fun
In a world where almost every digital product has become “fun,” everything becomes a potential target for trolls.
A few months ago I learned a new word: “tendie.”
I was video chatting with an internet troll of my acquaintance, a young woman I’ll call Avery, when she used the word. I jumped out of Discord for a moment to Google it. A “tendie” was 4chan slang for chicken tender, and I realized that Avery was asking me about a photograph hung on my wall, by an art photographer whose subject is fast food. I referred Avery to the photographer’s website, and had no reason to think I would have occasion to deploy this new bit of vocabulary again.
Until a few weeks ago, that is, when this obscure bit of 4chan slang spilled into the mainstream via the GameStop affair. Yes, a “tendie” is a “chicken tender.” But let’s go deeper. In 4chan and its adjacent spaces, a “tendie” has come to mean any kind of reward, a thing to be desired.
On the now-famous subreddit WallStreetBets (tagline: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”) “tendie” is what they call money: investment returns, the fundamental reward of the stock market. The Times and Bloomberg and NPR are now writing about the word; Popeye’s, purveyor of literal chicken tenders, has hopped on the buzz.
Most outlets are treating the word “tendie” as a throwaway gag in their stories, a bit of funny color. But I’d argue that the notion of the “tendie” is the key to a deeper understanding of the GameStop affair. Because looked at from the admittedly esoteric field of Trolling Studies, a field I have recently entered, the utterly weird GameStop event actually looks...surprisingly normal. The GameStop affair follows a playbook of other trolling events that have punctured the mainstream (among them, both trolling scholars and trolls themselves have argued, the Trump Administration). GameStop becomes normal once you understand the trolling mindset, and how the rewards––the tendies, if you will––that a troll chases both diverge from and converge with rewards the rest of us seek.
A study in why people troll
We at ReD Associates––in partnership with Jigsaw, a Google research unit––have spent much of the past year following some of the Internet’s bad actors –– the people messing it up for the rest of us –– to learn how to stop them. For a recent study on trolling, we asked: What makes the troll tick? What sends him into trollhood? (Yes, him. Avery’s gender is fairly exceptional in trolling.) What is the troll’s rewards system––and how can the Internet’s stewards leverage this understanding to mitigate the harms he creates?
In our current stage of digital capitalism, it is no longer “survival of the fittest” so much as “survival of the funnest.”
The 80/20 rule: just 20% are ideologically driven
When we began meeting trolls, we assumed that many––particularly the sort that had risen to prominence around the campaign of anti-PC internet harassment known as Gamergate––were driven by ideology. What we discovered, though, was something much more nuanced. At the core of any massive trolling operation, there were indeed a handful of leaders at the top who were driven by ideology, or some level of personal rage towards a target (a virtue-signalling celebrity, a Black woman invading a traditionally white male space). Our rough estimate, given our sample (and the widespread phenomenon known as the Pareto distribution), was that perhaps some 20% of self-identified trolls were driven by ideology in this way.
We seem to see something similar with the recent GameStop affair (which if not a textbook online trolling event, sure resembled it in many senses). Ideology was part of the smoldering core of the GameStop event fairly early on: in the fall, a Reddit post pointed out the vulnerable position that hedge funds were in, having massively shorted GME. A David-and-Goliath narrative soon emerged, and to be sure, never faded from WallStreetBets’s discourse: many of the most popular posts on the site focus on the urgency of bankrupting elite hedge funds by holding them over the barrel of their bad bets. The malaise and anti-elite anger that characterizes generations buffed by a Great Recession, then a pandemic, are clearly the primary driver of a recent WSB post: “I'M NOT MAD ABOUT THE MONEY LOST. MONEY COMES AND GOES. I'M MAD AT THE HEDGE FUND C**K SUCKERS…. They want my shares. I'm taking them with me to the f**king grave.”
This sense of an ideological, revenge-driven motivation is certainly common on WallStreetBets, but it is far from the only––and we would argue––the main thing that drove masses to participate in the GameStop rally.
The 80/20 rule: 80% are simply in it for the fun
So if revenge isn’t the primary motive, what is?
Obviously, in this context, money has something to do with it––as well as the instant gratification apps like Robinhood can offer. If you were lucky enough to buy GameStop at $15 and sell at $200, that’s plenty of instant gratification.
But few timed the market that well. And so we suspect that one of the major drivers of the GameStop pile-on––one of the things that made it become a viral meme––was something surprisingly simple: fun.
This, certainly, was what we found on our trolling study. While 20% had that ideological motivation for their trolls, the majority of folks––the remaining 80%, we estimate––are really primarily in it for fun: or lulz, in the troll’s parlance. Again and again, across dozens of interviews, this motivation was far and away the most common. These trolls were bored. They wanted something to happen. They wanted a laugh. About 80% of our sample seemed motivated in this way.
Fun, after all, has more universal appeal. “Want to join the fun…” posted one user on January 31st. “How can I join in on the fun?” asked another. A happening was happening, attracting not only those who hate “hedgies,” but also the larger pools of the internet’s bored and mischief-inclined––the wider set of 4channers I’ve come to call “mercenaries for lulz.”
What happened next with GameStop made it a rare troll, if not an unprecedented one. The mainstream––people who don’t identify as trolls, and have never been on 4chan––joined in. So great and low-hanging was the fun-to-be-had (you can get set up on RobinHood and have $1,000 of purchasing power to play with in mere minutes) that the appeal became universal.
“Gen X mom here,” soon posted someone on WallStreetBets. “Did Robinhood just tell me (a normie) to 💎👊 $GME?” wrote another. (“Normie” is 4chan slang for, well, someone who does not frequent 4chan.) Anger had been leveraged into a game, and then into a game everyone wanted to play. As it made headlines globally, WallStreetBets’s membership swelled enormously, from something like 2 million prior to the GME rally to over 9 million now. The last several million to join, I’d wager, have never been on 4chan, and if asked about “trolls,” think of the pink-haired dolls.
The risks of fun in designing digital experiences
If your company produces a digital product of any kind –– a website, an app –– or can in some way be influenced by swarms of digital behavior, then you should be paying attention, and trying to draw lessons, from the GameStop affair. And that description covers just about everybody.
Increasingly, our businesses and industries live online, or have some consumer-facing component that does. And in the last decade, one of the most common design trends for these digital products is the trend of gamification––in other words, turning everything into fun.
Learning a language? Turn to Duolingo, whose digital world of badges and achievements seems straight from a videogame. Looking to date? Move from the text-heavy OKCupid to the quicker, easier Tinder, where a match is feted with a full-screen digital celebration. PayPal yields to Venmo, with its playful social feed and emoji-centricity. Vanguard loses mindshare to user-friendlier Robinhood, whose website copy teases the language of gaming (“level up with options trading”), and whose user interface shows up-to-the-minute broadcasts of your portfolio’s performance.
Learning a language? Turn to Duolingo, whose digital world of badges and achievements seems straight from a videogame. Looking to date? Move from the text-heavy OKCupid to the quicker, easier Tinder, where a match is feted with a full-screen digital celebration. PayPal yields to Venmo, with its playful social feed and emoji-centricity.
In our current stage of digital capitalism, it is no longer “survival of the fittest” so much as “survival of the funnest.”
And there’s the rub––because while fun is the lure of the general user, it is also the lure of the troll.
This may be the ultimate lesson of GameStonk, or whatever history will call it. It showed definitively that the gamification of everything, as alluring and understandable a trend as it is, also creates weaknesses. Fun brings the users, but it also brings the trolls––and if the game is easy enough to play, it even brings out the troll in us. Now that everything is a game, everything can––and probably will––be trolled. Video games, of course. Social media, for sure. But also places where the stakes may be higher: the mainstream media, the democratic process, and now Wall Street.
Online video games, and the spaces that serve online gamers––like Discord and Twitch––have been the first to grapple with large-scale trolling, and have mostly managed to turn the tide with aggressive moderation policies, controls, or ways to stem the ‘fun’ (e.g., initiating a slow-mode to curb aggressive comments). This may be a playbook most other major digital products may need to follow: if you’re building a site or app that in some way connects to the nerve center of your business, you might do well to pair every gamification-minded designer hire with another one for trust-and-safety issues.
What has GameStop has shown us? The wisest business leaders would begin to look at their products, however seemingly banal, from the point of view of the troll looking for his next hit of lulz––his favorite tendie.