I would argue that such things do happen, the cult "Heaven's Gate" probably being one of the most notorious examples. Thankfully, however, this is not a widespread phenomenon.

Yes, even some influential people at my employer have started to peddle the idea that only “old-fashioned” people are still using Google, while all the forward-thinking people are prompting an AI. For this reason alone, I think that negative examples like this one deserve a lot more attention.

From the original article:

Crivello told TechCrunch that out of millions of responses, Lindy only Rickrolled customers twice.

Yes, but how many of them received other similarly "useful" answers to their questions?

After reading the review linked above, I have a strong suspicion that this comment really nails it: https://mastodon.cloud/@[email protected]/111892343079408715

It's not intended to convince an outsider to believe as it is to shore up the belief of a believer who is starting to doubt.

IIRC, some people pointed out at the time that this particular trade was quite sophisticated - probably orchestrated by people who knew what they were doing and who understood that the hedge fund they wrecked had acted in a particularly dumb/risky way. I guess with this kind of information, another hedge fund could have pulled that off just as easily as the people from WSB on Reddit.

Hedge fund managers (and their staff) can read reddit, of course, and they can even participate and - for example - manipulate people into betting on a stock they themselves have a "leveraged long" bet on (or desperately need to dump for whatever reason). It's important to remember that those with the deepest pockets are very likely to win here, and also that hedge funds (and other institutional investors) might have deep pockets in part because they use investment money from everybody's pension funds. In rare cases (such as Gamestop) they may be taken by surprise, but only when there is a very specific attack from an angle they didn't expect, which is hard to replicate systematically IMHO.

Traditional collective action is successful mainly because actual people show up (or refuse to show up at their workplaces) in large numbers. IMHO it's impossible to replicate that via accounts on a trading app and anonymous sock puppets. This is simply not how financial markets work.

Also, if this gets more people addicted to gambling on the stock market (which obviously happened), Wall Street is going to win either way through fees etc.

IMHO, the only way to "win" here is not to play.

I vividly remember how, in the days of Gamestop, even normally reasonable people on the left bought into that "Sticking it to Wall Street" narrative. Sadly, I'm not surprised at how things turned out.