Marilyn's Photos - Oct 2 2026 - Most Upvoted on Reddit
On June 29, 2026 Reddit noted/celebrated that it was the 4 year anniversary of the most upvoted Reddit post ever. The title was "Times Square right now", and it got 490,000 upvotes. Now in October 2026 it has 495,000 upvotes. While it was celebrating upvotes, the events around the actual post happened in January 2021. But the real story is not how many upvotes it got - the real story is the mess in the stock market and that Reddit users made a big disruption happen. Here's the post - a billboard in NY.
Do you know what this billboard is saying? I had to ask AI what this means because all the items I retrieved didn't make sense to me.
The story goes that retail investors coordinated on Reddit to drive up the stock price of GameStop, known as GME. The "Go brrr" refers to the internet meme mocking the Federal Reserve printing money, and "means" the stock is climbing rapidly. So it seems to me it was telling everyone/retail investors that they should buy.
The upvoting is part of a "retail investor movement" - to make an impact on the stock market by disrupting the "big guys" - Wall Street hedge funds. The upvoting seems to me to be a poke in the eye, which seems to be continuing as time goes on. The Wikipedia entry below counters that by noting that a large part of the market activity was conducted by hedge funds who made substantial profits on the short squeeze. The "short squeeze" allowed GameStop to issue new equity and raised cash to keep the company going. The retail trading app Robinhood closed down trading and became the centre of controversy with retail investors losing the ability to sell the stock.
The details are covered in Wikipedia HERE. It is a long and fascinating story.
And what has happened since then? The supposed summary is that retail traders/individual investors have more clout as they now make up about 20% of average daily equity trading volume. In the past, they used to be considered "dumb money" by institutional firms. And institutional hedge funds crawl social media platforms, especially Reddit, to monitor retail sentiment and adjust their short exposures to prevent getting squeezed.
The mayhem in the U.S. market was serious. Investigations followed - the Treasury Secretary, Congress, various Attorney Generals, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and many more got involved. There were lawsuits against Robinhood, some regulations, and everyone weighed in. Of course, the next phase ensued: entertainment. A movie was made - Dumb Money. Then a mini-series, and then an investigative docuseries. And various others.
And so the story of "Most Upvoted on Reddit" is told.
Here's a picture from January 2021 - it seems appropriate. Fast actions leading to motion blur in the winter landscape.
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