Live data from Hacker News

Parler CEO says he was fired by board

reuters.com

21–30 of 520 posts

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#21
post #15

Was he the CTO as well? That’s who should really be fired (unless Matze hired the CTO in which case sack them both).

It doesn't matter whether you hired someone or not. If they report to you it's your job to make them successful. Maybe you deserve some slack for the first 100 days, but after that it's irrelevant whether you hired them or inherited them from your predecessor.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#22
post #15

Was he the CTO as well? That’s who should really be fired (unless Matze hired the CTO in which case sack them both).

The incompetence is really astounding, politics aside.

If they were behind Cloudflare or another DDoS protection website, you wouldn't even be able to tell they were an AWS customer at all.

That coupled with their multi-million dollar monthly infrastructure bill and I'm scratching my head. The site seems like it was built by outsourced lowest bidder contractors and they scaled by throwing blank checks at the problem.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#23

Not surprising, when your first and foremost duty as the headhoncho should be doing what you can to keep your site online. It's been almost a month that the site has been down for now. Yes, an outage should be expected when you get deplatformed at a network level... however they could not put up anything more than a status page in this time.

I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event. That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.

They had a backup plan for getting kicked off AWS, supposedly, but the backup plan terminated their relationship with Parler before AWS did.

I can imagine Parler also might have some problems attracting the kind of talent needed to run a site like that.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#24
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event. That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.

Given that he initially represented that they had no real hard dependencies on AWS, I assume that the Mercers quickly lost patience when it became clear that they were locked into AWS, with no contingency.

It sounds like they had prepared to move from AWS to another mega-provider like GCP or Azure. The site is too large (and probably poorly optimized) to just spin up a few DO droplets.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event. That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.

Given that he initially represented that they had no real hard dependencies on AWS, I assume that the Mercers quickly lost patience when it became clear that they were locked into AWS, with no contingency.

I wonder if employees left. Working for Parler past January 6th is going to be radioactive on a resume.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#26
post #22
post #15

Was he the CTO as well? That’s who should really be fired (unless Matze hired the CTO in which case sack them both).

The incompetence is really astounding, politics aside. If they were behind Cloudflare or another DDoS protection website, you wouldn't even be able to tell they were an AWS customer at all. That coupled with their multi-million dollar monthly infrastructure bill and I'm scratching my head. The site seems like it was built by outsourced lowest bidder contractors and they scaled by throwing blank checks at the problem.

> If they were behind Cloudflare or another DDoS protection website, you wouldn't even be able to tell they were an AWS customer at all.

This is non-sensical. AWS certainly knew they were a customer, and they were the ones that kicked them off. Plus, Cloudflare has deplatformed other customers before, don't think they would have wanted to touch Parler either.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#27

Not surprising, when your first and foremost duty as the headhoncho should be doing what you can to keep your site online. It's been almost a month that the site has been down for now. Yes, an outage should be expected when you get deplatformed at a network level... however they could not put up anything more than a status page in this time.

Not just the technical issues, he took no steps to prevent deplatforming. I'm reading between the lines but I'm assuming Mercer et al didn't actually care about free speech as much as they wanted a place to spread Trumpism.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#28
post #18
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that he initially represented that they had no real hard dependencies on AWS, I assume that the Mercers quickly lost patience when it became clear that they were locked into AWS, with no contingency.

Maybe the problem is that no other capable provider was willing to take them in?

In which case you'd need to moderate your content to match your providers' T&Cs, or you'd need to moderate your ambitions to match your choice of providers.

But telling your owner that you can meet their desire to allow people to breach T&Cs, and that you can scale to the size of their ambitions, means you're either lying or don't understand the problem that you're solving.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#29

Not surprising, when your first and foremost duty as the headhoncho should be doing what you can to keep your site online. It's been almost a month that the site has been down for now. Yes, an outage should be expected when you get deplatformed at a network level... however they could not put up anything more than a status page in this time.

I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event. That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.

Most Silicon Valley darlings run disaster recovery exercises simulating setting up a datacenter from scratch in less than 24 hours (not that Parler should be compared to any of these companies, clearly)

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#30

Not surprising, when your first and foremost duty as the headhoncho should be doing what you can to keep your site online. It's been almost a month that the site has been down for now. Yes, an outage should be expected when you get deplatformed at a network level... however they could not put up anything more than a status page in this time.

I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event. That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.

Not entirely sure if its a comparable case, but first thing that comes to my mind is 2011 PSN outage[1]. I guess any change of that magnitude should take an unprecedent effort to resolve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outag...

Post reply on HN