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Parler CEO says he was fired by board

reuters.com

101–110 of 520 posts

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#101
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).

Could you imagine being the CTO of this company, kind of cruising along in the modern integration focused environment? You need an email provider (looks like they used SendGrid) a 2FA provider (Twilio), hosting (AWS), apps (Apple, Google), internal chat (Slack), etc. Now imagine all of those services say "nah, you're done". All of the sudden you need to roll your own everything. You have millions of users and no acce…

Eh every similar platform, such as Gab, was "deplatformed" so it feels like they should have seen it coming.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#102
post #60
post #53

Looks like free speech won't be returning to Parler. No use putting the site back up if basic principles are abandoned.

Just so ya know, inciting violence is not protected speech.

Things like Trump saying "Be Peaceful" and also telling rioters to "Go Home" cause him to be banned and impeached. Just imagine what stretches they take to say a normal Parler user is inciting violence.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#104
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Going with another major scale cloud provider was definitely poor planning there

Proper planning would have been what, coloing hundreds of servers worth millions of dollars as a DR plan? And having no guarantee that the colo provider wouldn't also deplatform them?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#105
post #81
post #66

Give me Parler's software and I will host it in Russia... that's where USA's free speech usually come from anyways (free as in somewhat controversial, popular and still allowed). I think I say a lot of somewhat controversial things, but they let it fly because I am not popular.

> Give me Parler's software and I will host it in Russia... that's where USA's free speech usually come from anyways (free as in somewhat controversial, popular and still allowed). Doubt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny

Russia only really has a problem with speech when it’s against them. People slagging the US is fine by them.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#106
post #92
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you want anyone to actually use it or if you want to be able to monetize it.

Honestly they seem to have a captive audiance, who feel they are being censored. If anyone remotely mainstream could succesful transition to being hosted on tor, it could probably be them (not that tor is decentralized.)

Social media like Parler and Twitter are largely fueled by notoriety and attention though, so I don't think decentralized anonymity is a good fit for the audience.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#107
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).

Could you imagine being the CTO of this company, kind of cruising along in the modern integration focused environment? You need an email provider (looks like they used SendGrid) a 2FA provider (Twilio), hosting (AWS), apps (Apple, Google), internal chat (Slack), etc. Now imagine all of those services say "nah, you're done". All of the sudden you need to roll your own everything. You have millions of users and no acce…

Sure these things are annoying and it usually doesnt make business sense to roll your own, but its not exactly impossible either.

Need slack? Install an irc server (i assume this is for internal use). Need email, install sendmail and thunderbid, need a 2fa provider? TOTP is literally five lines of code.

Yes its all annoying, yes it will be rough around the edges, yes it will slow velocity, but no, missing them will not make your business intractable.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#108
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going with another major scale cloud provider was definitely poor planning there

I get that everyone just wants to shit on Parler, but AFAIK they didn't host any content that wasn't present in far greater quantity on Facebook and Twitter. It would have been reasonable to expect to have access to the same platforms as those companies.

However, given the predictable circumstances they might be in , they should at least expect every cloud provider to pull the plug at them, and should have gone the route of self-hosting. Instead, they have created a social media website out of Wordpress (out of all things), that performs ridiculously slow and eats up all of their maintenance budget, on AWS. It’s baffling how the right populists cannot find or hire any competent engineers; heck, on the leftist side people do far better with much less money (for example, look at Extinction Rebellion, where they manage to self-host their entire communications system: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11008-server_infrastructure_for_...)

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gab.com is doing a great job at this.

Gab is holding on by a thread called cloudflare. I’m SURE there’s strong internal pressure from within cloudflare to drop them as well.

Their actual servers are self-hosted, IIRC, so if Cloudflare pulls the plug it'd just be a loss of their CDN and DDOS protections. It'd suck for them, but aside from maybe some downtime while they switch over DNS records they should be more or less alright.
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