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Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

vice.com

61–70 of 640 posts

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#61

Parler decided not to buy their own hardware and rent their own rack space. Plenty of other unpopular websites have figured it out.

You don't even need to do that. The actual key to running an extremist / subversive / hate / unpopular website is NOT connecting the site to any in-person activities. As long as your website is just some text floating out there in the network there is a lot of wiggle room. Sure, companies like Google or WordPress will ban you if they don't like you, but you can still get service from Cloudflare, major web hosts, or d…

I appreciate businesses like Cloudflare that stay neutral and just provide their service.

I don't want to have to think about the political beliefs of a CEO before deciding to use a service.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#62
post #29

Parler was, at the end of the day, a somewhat amateurish Twitter clone whose essential growth hack was that they decided to serve as a kind of ban evasion mechanism for Twitter. They had virtually no organic growth of their own, they worked by accepting the banned castoffs from another service and promising not to do any moderation. And then we had a historical incident of political violence perpetrated by the same d…

Not sure why the downvotes. This essentially is the same as my take. This is the inevitable result of pushing your brand as "no content moderation" but not actually having any skills or plans on what to do when it eventually caught up with them. Anyone familiar with 4chan knows that some of the earliest content that was banned on the platform include childporn and organizing raids/doxxing. If you read the terms of se…

Since when is "not enough moderation" grounds for terminating hosting? Amazon does a terrible job of moderating their own catalog and reviews. Should their ASNs be blackholed?

You can read the comments on any given CNN article, and see racist statements. Should CNN reporters be barred from attending press conferences?

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#63
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems reasonable to me! If your reason for existing is that "information wants to be free" but then you start making exceptions when it conflicts with your politics, people might think your real political philosophy is "pop music wants to be free."

Or, more charitably: your stance on information and freedom simply isn’t absolutist.

Or more accurately is they agree on the idea of censorship. That censorship has value to them.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#64

Ironic the article is in Vice considering one of its founders (Gavin McInnes) also founded the Proud Boys.

I spent some time trying to figure out Gavin McInnes the other day. I had a very hard time separating conviction and sarcasm.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#65

Parler was, at the end of the day, a somewhat amateurish Twitter clone whose essential growth hack was that they decided to serve as a kind of ban evasion mechanism for Twitter. They had virtually no organic growth of their own, they worked by accepting the banned castoffs from another service and promising not to do any moderation. And then we had a historical incident of political violence perpetrated by the same d…

> Parler was, at the end of the day, a somewhat amateurish Twitter clone whose essential growth hack was that they decided to serve as a kind of ban evasion mechanism for Twitter.

The growth hack was to be funded by the Mercer family (Cambridge Analytica, Brexit) to the tune of a few million a year to help promote their agenda.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#67

"We don't condone gun violence. We believe that the world needs less guns, not more of them. We believe however that these prints will stay on the internets regardless of blocks and censorship, since that's how the internets works. If there's a lunatic out there who wants to print guns to kill people, he or she will do it. With or without TPB. Better to have these prints out in the open internets (TPB) and up for pee…

good for them. civil rights must be defended

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I set up an account this evening and it’s unusable due to loading times. They’ve added 1.7m in 4 days which may explain it. Be interesting to see how long it takes them to scale

I've been impressed by Gab

What puts me off Gab and Parler is that the vast majority are those alienated or banned from other platforms for the same reason, for the most part they all think the same way and the topic of conversation is almost exclusively political. Gab has some interesting groups which slightly mitigates this.

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#69
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need to do that. The actual key to running an extremist / subversive / hate / unpopular website is NOT connecting the site to any in-person activities. As long as your website is just some text floating out there in the network there is a lot of wiggle room. Sure, companies like Google or WordPress will ban you if they don't like you, but you can still get service from Cloudflare, major web hosts, or d…

Tbf, I don't think Parler ever saw itself as extremist. Obviously it was used by extremists, but as I've seen mentioned in other threads lately: When you create an alternative platform from the mainstream, the people who join it are either idealists, or are the people who were banned from the mainstream platforms. And if you don't have the resources to moderate those extremists (or foolishly choose not to), the extre…

The CEO literally was personally banning anyone who posted anything left-wing, and yet claims that he's for "free speech". It's laughable.

If he wasn't cynically cashing in, then he's not a very deep thinker either.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/06/27/parlers-f...

They literally welcomed pro-saudi comment farms to their service as well:

“The nationalist movement of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has made it known that big tech is censoring them at rates we have never experienced in the United States,” Parler wrote in a post on its own account on the site. “Let us welcome them as we all fight for our rights together.”

Reminder: Saudi crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, ordered the assassination of a US journalist not that long ago. So, in a sense, Parler is really the social network of choice for dictators and extremists.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-saudi-politics/un...

Re: Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'

#70
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why the downvotes. This essentially is the same as my take. This is the inevitable result of pushing your brand as "no content moderation" but not actually having any skills or plans on what to do when it eventually caught up with them. Anyone familiar with 4chan knows that some of the earliest content that was banned on the platform include childporn and organizing raids/doxxing. If you read the terms of se…

Since when is "not enough moderation" grounds for terminating hosting? Amazon does a terrible job of moderating their own catalog and reviews. Should their ASNs be blackholed? You can read the comments on any given CNN article, and see racist statements. Should CNN reporters be barred from attending press conferences?

It is grounds for terminating hosting when AWS has repeatedly asked you to remove said content AND they've offered to help you migrate you off of AWS.

See court filings - https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...

Or for specific sections, see https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/134916216569825280...

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