Chives

Thanks John for what you're doing here - and by that, I mean steadfastly encouraging a relentless forward momentum and leading in that by example.

It's absolutely in our interest to incorporate the broader community in a collective crusade for a revolution in finance and the spread of ownership and custody education. We'll soon be seeking to revamp our community resources and online gathering spaces in order to align with the broader vision, and encouraging all individuals to rally behind the concept of understanding in full the delineations of share ownership. Informational transparency and a democratic voice are, in my view, applying those same value systems to governance and leadership.

As we've discussed, I wholeheartedly believe in the self-interest of investors and issuers to transition to a system which prioritizes them both - as opposed to the incumbent system which encourages private capital to complicate and obfuscate the matters of ownership and settlement. We live in an era of technological potential and of shared passion. There are so many fractured online communities each seeking justice and retribution in a system which views them as juice to squeeze, and there are unifying factors to take advantage of.

On the 'two discords' dichotomy which sandwiched this post. There is both the public DRS discord (which we opened as our subreddit DRSyourGME was growing) and a much smaller DRS discord which was the original planning place for the volunteer-built, volunteer-developed, and volunteer-maintained DRS resources online. Much conversation has already transitioned to the public space, and that procession will only continue as we formalize and seek to change the market structure around us.

I agree with you completely regarding the massive improvements to liquidity and settlement with a centralized depository model. The Depository Trust was founded to that end and accomplished it well. However, I do not believe the 'control' of the shares is adequately dispersed to beneficial owners under the current system. See the concerns (long standing over decades) regarding shareholder democracy from my previous comment.

They 'own' them in the literal sense of ownership. Cede and Co is the name recorded on the issuer's stock ledger. In case you aren't familiar, the stock ledger is something issuers are required to maintain and use to track ownership. Very commonly this responsibility is outsourced to companies called Transfer Agents, which themselves need to be SEC approved.

https://www.sec.gov/about/reports-publications/investor-publications/holding-your-securities-get-the-facts

I would definitely encourage checking out the SEC's recently updated page on the options investors have when holding securities. It's very readable and will likely answer your questions.

TLDR - If you own shares in a broker, you are a "beneficial" owner. This means that while the economic and voting impact of ownership are supposed to be passed on to you, you are not the named owner. If you own shares directly on the register of the issuer there is no middleman to pass these things to you.

DRS is not about price impact on any security. There should never be any price impact on a security from investors choosing DRS over an alternative holding method. DRS, rather, allows for other assurances - most critical for me personally are 1. being able to submit shareholder proposals directly to the company without needing to go through other channels and 2. knowing that my votes will not only be cast, but counted. For more on 2, know that over voting is a massive issue in shareholder democracy, and companies holding elections or seeking shareholder input on proposals never get to see that. Proxy vote counting companies truncate or control voting results before reporting.

This is (imo) a fascinating and tragic problem. Here are a couple sources to get you started if you feel the same way.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=904004

https://web.archive.org/web/20060421085925/http://www.rgm.com/articles/FalseProxies.pdf

https://katten.com/files/21384_proxy-vote-processing-issues.pdf

"Back to $20 fast" is still something I quote often, it is just hilarious to me.

Perhaps my favorite poem of all time. I have a framed copy on the wall. A lesson in humility which can find ground with anyone.

What's most important is that there is a space for retail investors passionate about these discussions to congregate, and to continue to congregate, without fear of future deplatforming.

Over at the DRS Lemmy instance, we don't have monetary donations available at the moment - we are covering hosting out of pocket as a courtesy to the community.

That said, we do welcome all "stonks" discussion. There are already some (fairly inactive) BBBY communities set up over there, and I did encourage PP to set up a community on the DRS instance a few weeks ago. Real_Eyes and edwinbarnes were users who did come by and set up communities.

Like with all Lemmy transitions though - I definitely expect it to take time!

Great post Jersan. I am of a very similar mind, I'll share some other context and my perspective.

I'm Chives, one of the DRSGME.org / WhyDRS.org site admins. I was a DRSyourGME reddit mod and I am a DRSyourGME Instance Admin here on Lemmy.

Our Subreddit was banned about 6 months ago now, but we had seen the writing on the wall and had begun testing alternative platforms when Reddit first imposed additional regulation on our sub (not allowing user and subreddit tags). We were ready to launch our Lemmy instance before the platform ban arrived.

DRSyourGME had about 15,000 users when it was taken down, and our Lemmy instance currently has about 800 native users with about 1,100 subscribers to the largest community on the instance. We chose to run our own instance rather than opening a community on a larger instance (the way this community lives on the lemmy.world instance) because we wanted complete assurance that nobody could ever deplatform our community again. I believe it is worth noting that the lemmy.world instance admins can shut down this community if they ever chose to. I'm not saying that is likely, only that it is possible, due to how this community was started.

All this to say that I do feel having an additional network, such as an app, is a really neat idea. That said - it's going to take time, and it's going to take transparency and honesty for people to be receptive. What will the data collection policies be?

Growing additional resources is valuable, I certainly believe that, but we also should take advantage of what is here now. Lemmy is an open source project which is similar to Reddit in function and, crucially, is actively growing.

This seems completely wild. What was this, the maximum possible amount they could enter on this line?

It's comical. like a typo.

Anyone know what the actual source is for this screenshot? The article you have shared does not include it.

Oh sure - no disagreements it's a tall order to organize such a thing. Interested in the theory at first. Thanks for swift reply.

Decentralized or user owned and run platforms will prevent what happened on Reddit from happening again. So important to embrace these options!

This is really neat information! Thanks so much for this. Reading it, my assumption is that it would also be possible to gather user data from other banned subs using this technique? I am thinking of course of r/DRSyourGME which had plenty of positive content and DRS based research as well. Much of it was archived using archive.org, but much was thought to be lost as well.

Great find!