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

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

#81

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

cstejerean wrote: post #60
throwbacktictac wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like double speak. Can you elaborate?

I think basically don’t use your platform to plan an insurrection and you should be fine. As soon as you start being used as the platform where violence is being organized all bets are off.

So... are you talking about Twitter and Facebook?

Your comment is short sighted and shows a possibly too eager willingness to accept the media and big tech narrative at completely face value. What if you are wrong?

At one point saying “We shouldn’t own slaves”, or “the Indian has rights to the land they live on”, or “women should be allowed to vote”, or “no taxation without representation” were all insurrectionist comments.

How do you propose we only stop “the wrong” insurrections? We should probably ask you first.

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

#82

Post by koyote »

idrios wrote: post #56
CryptoGhost wrote: post #32

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…

I do not know if it was the original intention of the founders, but you can't ignore that the people who are/were funding it are influential far-right figures.

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

#83

Post by latch »

formalsystems wrote: post #37

I got the sense while crawling data from their API that the engineering quality is poor at Parler. Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps, certain fields were duplicated for no reason (e.g. every object would have an identical "id" and "_id" key), counts of impressions/comments/etc would be the display strings rather than raw numbers (so…

I think most JSON libraries encode dates in something that's closer to what Parler is doing than when you think is correct (e.g, using ISO 8601 or something)

I could see the argument for representing impressions as a string (especially if it's updated asynchronously and denormalized like that). The major downside is localization.

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

#84

Post by userbinator »

singron wrote: post #77
Meekro wrote: 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."

TPB never supported absolute free speech. I can't find it now, but they used to have a section of their site where they posted responses to media company lawyers, and they basically said they wouldn't take down anything except child porn. I'm not sure if the rules have changed in the years since.

CP is one of the very few things where mere possession is illegal. It makes sense that TPB, which is mainly against copyright and IP, would not allow it.

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

#85

Post by throwaway894345 »

Obviously Parler didn't consider censorship as part of their threat model, while TPB necessarily had to. Moreover, I'm pretty sure TPB has gone down here and there, probably for weeks at a time. I don't think Parler's problems threat model is that bad; just maybe don't depend on companies that are liable to peer pressure. In the worst case you just get hosting from someone who isn't going to dump you because of social pressure (even going out of country if you must).

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

#87

Post by jakelazaroff »

mc32 wrote: post #63
jakelazaroff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you don’t mind when platforms get rid of spam, child porn, normal porn, doxxing, death threats, ISIS recruitment videos or assassination contracts, then guess what: censorship has value to you, too.

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

#88

Post by KLexpat »

outoftheabyss wrote: post #68
um_ya wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gab is #537 highest traffic website in the US, up from #647 yesterday.

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/gab.com#section_traffic

I agree with you about the political agitation but I would say its becoming less of an issue on Gab. Parler was quite toxic. However, I prefer MSN messenger style chatrooms, so I use Telegram mostly which has now reached 500 million daily active users.

These platforms aren't just filled with people banned from facebook anymore, and will become less political as time goes on

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

#89

Post by uxp100 »

formalsystems wrote: post #37

I got the sense while crawling data from their API that the engineering quality is poor at Parler. Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps, certain fields were duplicated for no reason (e.g. every object would have an identical "id" and "_id" key), counts of impressions/comments/etc would be the display strings rather than raw numbers (so…

I think the display strings thing is because exact number of impressions etc is slightly sensitive information. The whole site was "gamed" from the start, but providing exact vote counts makes it easier for other people to game. I guess. Don't really know, but I do believe that the numbers given by reddit, for example, are exact, but fake. Fuzzed a bit. HN also hides some of this, or behaves misleadingly, your downvotes don't always count, I think.

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

#90

Post by Meekro »

um_ya wrote: post #61
CryptoGhost wrote: post #32

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…

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.

Cloudflare has been quite neutral for now, but there are communities of people who daily devote themselves to harassing everyone from Cloudflare's support team to the mayor of Sammamish, WA (where Epik, one of Gab's webhosts, is headquartered) to try to get Gab deplatformed[1].

I can only imagine how many of these emails per day Cloudflare's support team is deleting.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GabWatch/

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