>Why would they bother paying?

To make super-sure that the currently fashionable unspeakables are well and truly said. Stalinist trolling would have done the job in the past, fascist trolling now.

Of course if you can already point at it you might proceed straight to getting some momentum behind the outrage with some astroturfing and making sure there's more than one media story focusing on that very small amount of trolling as "the story". This is not much trouble to go to for the sums of money involved. Enron closed whole power stations, many of them, to rape California on electricity derivatives. The sums here are measured in billions, there's not much that would be too much trouble.

You could, or you could allow the internet to do that bit for you and focus your small team's efforts on much more important things like unwinding trades, securing emergency funding and making excuses to LPs. Forums full of people who've lost a lot of money, are pissed off at a particular company and had a politically incorrect subculture to start off with are not places likely to survive Big Tech's banhammer as everybody here already knows, especially if newbies are flocking to them looking for stock tips or lolz.

Genuinely baffled why so many HNers have spent the last couple of days forgetting everything they know about how the internet actually works to imagine that hedge funds whose couple of dozen employees are busy firefighting are somehow controlling the conversation.

The places where the buying is being coordinated? Get them shut! Now! There's billions at stake, make the damn calls get people on it.

How is this implausible to you?

Do you really think the timing of this is purely coincidental? I mean you will have trolls on both the Democrat and Republican official groups. They aren't going to be shut.

I guess it could be coincidental and incompetent but it's not the highest on my list of the likely.