There's also the thing where buying equity in a company can seem very simple because you see something like Apple where they made a cool thing and obviously their stock went up. People just have no idea about how complex the markets are.
They also don't remember the very smart people who claimed the Iphone would be quickly overtaken by Android and other cheaper alternatives (Clay Christensen predicted this a guy generally very smart on tech/business)
Hindsight always makes it seem like it was easy to pick the great companies that were OBVIOUSLY going to do well.
They don't understand how incredibly sophisticated professional investors are who dedicate their lives to it, and on average even THOSE people don't 'beat the market'.
Ben Graham said many decades ago that over the short term the market is like a voting machine but over the long term it's a weighing machine.
There have always been periods of irrationality in the markets but there's no reason to believe that equities are fundamentally untethered from their inherent value in perpetuity.
Eventually most of the overnight WSB stock picking geniuses are all going to lose their shirts and we'll see less of this GME nonsense. They make up a tiny fraction of trading volume anyway.
It happened in '07-08, late 90s dot-com bubble and about every decade or so before that for different reasons
If you read some of the posts on WSB a huge number of people just really have no clue about capital markets, investing, or basic business sense.
I don't know how many times I saw people claiming GME would go to $1000 because the new CEO has a brilliant new scheme to turn the company around by going digital! Why "going digital" in 2021 means your company is worth 100X what it was a few months ago I'll never quite understand. I guess no one had yet discovered the opportunity of these computer machines and the World Wide Web!
Or "it's the short squeeze" By people who didn't even know what a short was 72 hours before, long after the shorts had covered their positions.
Sure some people acknowledge they are essentially gambling in equities, but tons of people truly think they have some stunning insight into a business because of some anonymous WSB shitpost they read this morning.
Most of the WSB equity analyst is the equivalent of the blackjack player sure he's going to win it big because Mercury is in retrograde!