Parler CEO says he was fired by board • Hacker News Board

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#201

Post by michaeleng » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:39 AM UTC

Parler was poor quality because it was a product of extreme political grift. People who work in politics unfortunately don't understand the mindset of actually high quality products or services. What they're interested in is quick and loud splashes to attract a huge amount of attention, pull in a bunch of capital/resources, and then underdeliver in the extreme in the hopes that the attention of the crowd will move on and ignore the failures.

This is of course a bipartisan trend, but as far as I can tell affects Republicans more.

It was absurdly poorly run--literally on Wordpress with very little security and obviously no bug bounty program. They probably have never even heard of the concept of a bug bounty.

All around disappointing. The next iteration, if it is to work at all, will require a complete mindset switch.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#202

Post by portpecos » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:40 AM UTC

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #86

burnte wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider disallowing death threats and plans to commit violent acts and crimes an untenable affront to the right to free speech? That's why they were taken down, it really, REALLY wasn't about the political speech.

Have you been on twitter lately?

Didn’t Kathy Griffin re-share her bloody beheaded Trump image a couple of months ago on Twitter?

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#203

Post by aahortwwy » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:41 AM UTC

babelfish wrote: post #29

aahortwwy wrote: post #6

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.

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)

Yes, this is what you're meant to do, but there are plenty of companies that don't (including some multi-billion dollar ones).

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#204

Post by KMag » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:41 AM UTC

rodone wrote: post #183

tehjoker wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know moderation is expensive, but how much of a cost is it to Twitter on the scale of their various expenses? Is Parler's idea a reasonable cost savings from a business perspective?

Is staffing your meat packing plant with sickly orphans a reasonable cost savings from a business perspective?

> Is staffing your meat packing plant with sickly orphans a reasonable cost savings from a business perspective?

I think you're taking an overly negative tone with someone who appears to agree with you.

GGP: It's a bad choice, but it saved a bunch of money.

GP: I don't think it even saved much money, percentage wise, did it?

And then your reply takes a very negative tone, as if the GP is suggesting that some amount of cost savings would have justified it. The GP is not suggesting that some amount of cost savings justifies what was done.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#205

Post by dd36 » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:41 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #163

jerrysievert wrote: post #80

> We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. requiring some users to provide government identification, building such weak security that anyone can read and archive private messages, and not stripping out damaging meta-data from media posts are three ways to not provide…

When Parler praises "free speech" they're really just using that as a cover for running a cheap Twitter clone with no investment in moderation. They exist to extract profit with minimum overhead.

It’s not hard to believe thy existed to foment conflict when you start looking into the private life of the founder.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#206

Post by Lammy » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:42 AM UTC

jerrysievert wrote: post #80

> We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. requiring some users to provide government identification, building such weak security that anyone can read and archive private messages, and not stripping out damaging meta-data from media posts are three ways to not provide…

Just make your own website, as long as you've done it before and are intimately familiar with all the dangerous defaults built in to our collective tech.

Perhaps they aimed too high too fast (dunno, never even went there), but I just can't bring myself to make beginner-shaming a core pillar of my criticism.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#207

Post by echelon » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:43 AM UTC

rodone wrote: post #177

dmix wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking the services entirely offline then giving them a few weeks to access archived data does not entirely cover the definition of (at least in my opinion): > not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements Going entirely offline like that can easily destroy a web business. Or at a minimum seriously harm them. Not to say I care much for Parler's technical nor administrative approach to provi…

Why aren't you hosting them?

Because they're not Amazon.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#208

Post by missedthecue » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:43 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #163

jerrysievert wrote: post #80

> We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. requiring some users to provide government identification, building such weak security that anyone can read and archive private messages, and not stripping out damaging meta-data from media posts are three ways to not provide…

When Parler praises "free speech" they're really just using that as a cover for running a cheap Twitter clone with no investment in moderation. They exist to extract profit with minimum overhead.

From whom are they extracting profit? I think the word you're looking for is "producing", not "extracting".

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#209

Post by bmurray7jhu » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:48 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #160

wmf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like 200-300 servers which would take months even to buy, let alone actually installing them.

Their actual hardware requirements: https://twitter.com/GreggHoush/status/1351923104403116032?s=... I have a hard time this is their actual needs in terms of servers - their video ingest pipeline sounded like it was just throwing videos on s3, and it didn't look like they were doing any transcoding at all (plus not removing photo or video metadata). 73tb of ram for distributed pgsql also sounds excessive.

Parler probably could have deployed a scaled down feature set with significantly less computational resources.

Instead, Parler has spent weeks with just a single static (and perhaps handwritten?) HTML page.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#210

Post by Jugurtha » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 4:49 AM UTC

skynet-9000 wrote: post #135

riffic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Parler should not have been de-platformed You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP. Otherwise, you can get yeeted.

> You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services. Always abide by your host's AUP. AWS AUP: "You may not use.. or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use" "Offensive"? That word is so vague as to be meaningless. This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know…

>"Offensive"? That word is so vague as to be meaningless.

>This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know will offend someone. Et viola: you just killed a company.

What's the probability at any given time that someone on HN is offended? YCombinator seems to use Amazon's Route 53 and would therefore be at risk.

  Domain Name: YCOMBINATOR.COM
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  Registry Expiry Date: 2021-03-20T22:51:07Z
  Registrar: Gandi SAS
  Registrar IANA ID: 81
  Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@support.gandi.net
  Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +33.170377661
  Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
  Name Server: NS-1411.AWSDNS-48.ORG
  Name Server: NS-1914.AWSDNS-47.CO.UK
  Name Server: NS-225.AWSDNS-28.COM
  Name Server: NS-556.AWSDNS-05.NET