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Parler CEO says he was fired by board

reuters.com

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Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah except you did talk about cost. Cost is not the issue here. > surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge. Somehow the internet is full of websites (some of which probably had much higher traffic) that did just fine though

I do agree with parent that this is an interesting political hypotheical though. There was so much media focus on Parler for a while and ultimately AWS was exonerated as the good guy in the mainstream narrative. If Parler had self-hosted, would the potential wrath of the media just have turned to their upstream telco or whoever instead of AWS?

Colo facility or your transit provider doesn’t have a brand name it has to protect. You can look at gab, 4chan, tpb etc for counter examples. I’m actually fairly certain they would be fine on oracle, tencent or alibaba too

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#192
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does deeply believe in and care about free speech (from all parties), I could not be in deeper agreement with you. (for non-native English speakers: I fully agree). Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stun…

Parler was never a "free speech" platform. This was always a lie, they heavily moderated their content. I've always felt like Parler was just a lazy attempt to make some cash by pulling some users away from Twitter claiming they could do what they want, it was never more or less than that. I'm interested in knowing how you think a real "free speech" platform can actually work, however. We have message boards that do…

Well a real free speech platform should apply strict automatic moderating rules to political threads and basically tease out the best arguments from all sides,

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#193
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler was never a "free speech" platform. This was always a lie, they heavily moderated their content. I've always felt like Parler was just a lazy attempt to make some cash by pulling some users away from Twitter claiming they could do what they want, it was never more or less than that. I'm interested in knowing how you think a real "free speech" platform can actually work, however. We have message boards that do…

>Parler was never a "free speech" platform. This was always a lie, they heavily moderated their content. I assume you’re just spreading what you’ve read in liberal news about Parler, without having used the app yourself. Because the reality is, if the users didn’t like the post or comment, they simply downvoted it until it was buried. Even r/politics and HN does the same thing with their downvote option. If multiple…

> Because the reality is, if the users didn’t like the post or comment, they simply downvoted it until it was buried.

Exactly. And the problem was the users did like it. Lin Wood called for the VP's execution just days before a real mob took the capitol chanting "Hang Mike Pence!". And it was hugely popular and shared everywhere. And that's a problem that needs to be fixed, not celebrated. Major thought leaders across the platform were fanning the flames, not engaging in moderation.

Maybe it's true that Parler had a scheme for moderation. But it was objectively a complete failure.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#194
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It's the 1980s, a Russian and an American are talking. The American says: "In my country, we can have freedom of speech. I can stand outside the White House and shout that the president is an idiot, and nobody can stop me". "So what," replies the Russian, "In Russia I can also shout that the president of America is an idiot and nobody will stop me".

but what matters is free speech... if we can no longer have it hosted in the US for the Internet, it doesn't really matter where the free speech is hosted (also, maybe we can host free speech for Russia in the US?).

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#195

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> our societies need tools that can survive popular histrionics. Getting owned by some sanctimonious prick at Amazon is not pro level play. Seems like banning communities that led directly to an insurrection in congress should be one of those tools, no? I mean, that part was a bit more than just "histrionics" by "sanctimonious pricks". I know you won't buy this because of the environment that we find ourselves in, bu…

I'd argue the insurrection narrative is as much of a farce as Kim Jong Il hitting 11 hole-in-one strokes on a golf course, because if you voice doubt about the absurdity of the claim, it marks you as a dangerous subversive. Everybody knows it, and they're just too afraid to say so because they're worried they will get put on a list. Some conspicuously unarmed people trespassed and even managed to bring camera crews.…

Sympathizing with people trying to literally block the constitutional duty of congress engaging in carrying out the most fundamental aspect of a democracy?

Smh

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#196
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does deeply believe in and care about free speech (from all parties), I could not be in deeper agreement with you. (for non-native English speakers: I fully agree). Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stun…

Parler was never a "free speech" platform. This was always a lie, they heavily moderated their content. I've always felt like Parler was just a lazy attempt to make some cash by pulling some users away from Twitter claiming they could do what they want, it was never more or less than that. I'm interested in knowing how you think a real "free speech" platform can actually work, however. We have message boards that do…

> I'm interested in knowing how you think a real "free speech" platform can actually work, however. We have message boards that do this and they are just toxic cesspools. The idea of an online "public square" that isn't that sounds impossible. How many public squares are reaching millions of people instantly?

I'd like to know the answer to this, too. I wonder if the reason why they turn into toxic cesspools is precisely because the only people who use free speech platforms are the people who were kicked off the others.

If you accept that this is plausible, then is it feasible that the more reasonable folks that just want to talk about politics in a less divisive manner (or maybe not even politics at all!) might help bring down the temperatures if everyone was swimming in the same pool instead of just a few extreme viewpoints forced to move into the same swamp? (NIMBY!)

This would also be in keeping with that classically liberal axiom, "The remedy is more speech, not enforced silence." (Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the Democratic justice who is credited with creating the "Right to Privacy" in 1890: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Brandeis)

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#197
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.

> It would have been reasonable to expect to have access to the same platforms as those companies.

Wait, which of those companies is using the publicly offered terms of any public cloud vendor?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whose side the FSF would take. Amazon shouldn't be making these decisions, and certainly not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements. This should have been litigated in court prior to taking deplatforming actions. Imagine if Amazon was a Chinese company and Parler hosted information about the plight of the Uyghur people. Community websites have the right to enforce rules. I'm not…

AWS is not a common carrier

At their size, they sure seem like it.

What happens when AWS and Azure design their own silicon, outstrip other hosting providers, and then become the only hosts on the internet?

Are they common carriers then?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the path to success for Parler would have been: Step 1: Hire huge moderation team. Step 2: Write draconian terms of service that incorporated every possible offensive thing that any vendor might object to. Step 3: Build an app that explodes with all the users that are delighted with the moderation. Step 4: Profit! That's not how Facebook and Twitter ("the free speech wing of the free speech party") were launched,…

> Step 2: Write draconian terms of service that incorporated every possible offensive thing that any vendor might object to. No, just violent rhetoric associated with a real world violent movement. I don't understand why that keeps not registering in these discussions. I mean, even accepting your frame that we leftists have infested Big Tech and want nothing but to censor our political enemies: they've had years and…

> And it was just one site, and its users just moved on to Gab and such.

Is this intentionally ironic? Or did you not actually know that Gab was completely deplatformed in exactly the same way, and it almost killed them by knocking them offline for months, just when they hit a big growth curve. Interesting, actually, that the timing was so similar, as well as some of the same players.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#200
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Parler was never a "free speech" platform. This was always a lie, they heavily moderated their content. I assume you’re just spreading what you’ve read in liberal news about Parler, without having used the app yourself. Because the reality is, if the users didn’t like the post or comment, they simply downvoted it until it was buried. Even r/politics and HN does the same thing with their downvote option. If multiple…

> You’re just spreading what you’ve read in liberal news about Parler, without having used the app yourself. You have no way of knowing if this is a true statement. He never said whether he used the app. Maybe he's speaking from personal experience with the app. You should focus on debating the argument and not introduce assumption as fact.

You’re talking to a far gone political extremist who literally wants to murder those who don’t agree with his insane agenda.

It’s stupid to expect him to be honest, or to speak with integrity.

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