My concise (as I can make it) take on the gamestop short run: Impossible for regulators to prevent this or punish retail for it. All they can do is have more frequent "circuit breakers" and the like, hamstringing exchange functionality.

2/ Shortselling equities was already a really tough business. Very few true long-short hedge funds left in business (most just short indices like the S&P 500 against their longs). Shorting "physical" equities is tough because of the need to locate and pay for a borrow.

3/ Reddit just made "Wall Street Bets" private, and discord shut it down entirely. This is the next iteration of the "censorship" fight we just witnessed with Trump's deplatforming. Building momentum for decentralized alternatives.

4/ The investing geek in me can't help but briefly ignore the social implications and just focus on the market efficiency effects: adding this extra risk to shorting is overall bad for healthy markets - we want "smart money" to price negative information and analysis into stocks.