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

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#441

Post by stickfigure » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #305

stickfigure wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no real threat to democracy here. It's not like the police and military are going to take commands from some nutjob cosplayer just because they're wielding Nancy Pelosi's lectern.

I want to remind you that the military are supposed to take orders from their commander in chief - who, on January 6th, was Donald Trump. Neither January 6th, nor in Athens would a mob rush the chambers of government to install God-King Billy Rando, who nobody has heard of. Coups only work when the person benefiting from them already has a large amount of civilian and political, and sometimes, but not always, militar…

> I want to remind you that the military are supposed to take orders from their commander in chief

The military (at least here in the US) swears allegiance to the Constitution, not the president. And they were very clear about broadcasting that the military was not going to interfere in domestic politics.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#442

Post by Applejinx » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

syshum wrote: post #391

motohagiography wrote: post #62

Odd dynamic there as unfortunately, standing on principle means getting martyred, and the quote from the former CEO of, “Over the past few months, I’ve met constant resistance to my product vision, my strong belief in free speech and my view of how the Parler site should be managed” is not CEO level strategic. His investors and board hired him to win, not to pick a principled hill to die on. Martyrs are cheap and nob…

>> Parler positioned itself as less radical than Gab .. How can 4chan, Gab, and the even darker parts of the internet manage to persist online Some of it has do with the fact that when it comes to political speech you can not be moderate. if you do you fall lock step in with one of the extreme's you painted by both extremes as the other... For example many times, in the same conversation or talking about the same top…

You might consider the idea that Parler 'positioned' itself and was not in the least what it claimed itself to be.

Some folks lie. Some platforms lie. If 'I promise I don't want to kill you' becomes the logical Kryptonite to get you out of any sort of jam, then it becomes nothing more than an exploit useful to people who want to kill you. All they have to do is say, 'no, you see, I'm telling you I don't and so you have to believe me' and then kill you, because they were lying.

Law is based on the idea that people can intend all these negative things and then lie about them and then go through a process to be held accountable: it's never about just taking people at their word.

Parler's just what AWS thought it was. Anyone trying really hard to obfuscate that is probably Parler-like themselves.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#443

Post by molbioguy » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:36 PM UTC

Slightly off-topic, but I think it's important to recognize that Parler was placed in the unfair position of having to perfect it's moderation systems in a very short time as their user base ramped up exponentially. Twitter et al had a lot of time to work out their issues and their moderation strategy has 'evolved' substantially over time (and it is still not optimal). I've not seen any messages from Parler defiantly saying they would not try to moderate violent content. If they were not 100% successful, I'd chalk that up to growing pains. Twitter was never subjected to the same level of compliance. Parler was punished for political reasons.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#444

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

molbioguy wrote: post #423

wiremine wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 privacy. Exactly. They weren't really interested in true privacy or free speech, they were just using those keywords to attract customers.

This is misleading. The ID requirements were there to provide a 'verified' account status similar to Twitter's blue check mark. It wasn't some arbitrary requirement. I bet Twitter requires this as well for the verified status.

[deleted]

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#445

Post by edbob » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

rodgerd wrote: post #340

edbob wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean building out their own datacentres?

Obviously not. They contract with cloud providers as well.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#446

Post by throwaway19937 » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

bmurray7jhu wrote: post #209

judge2020 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoting from https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/23/parler-llc-...

"As a final matter, multiple members of Parler’s team have come to me expressing both fear for their career and fear for their lives and potentially bodily harm due to the press surrounding AWS’s claims. Many employees want to resign due to the strain and pressure they feel, fearing hostility towards our company and fearing for their own safety. Some have had articles written about them. Many are being harassed by reporters and journalists already. Some have had to cancel their phone numbers, and their family members’ phone numbers, due to harassment."

My guess is that most of Parler's technical staff are either in hiding or have quit. They have 15 million user accounts; I'm sure some of them are irate about their posts and metadata being publicly available. They're also facing harassment from the left but that's harder to quantify.

Just to be clear, I'm not endorsing harassment of Parler employees, AWS employees, or anyone else.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#447

Post by Applejinx » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

edbob wrote: post #119

lasagnaphil wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I'm baffled by their choice of WordPress. No wonder they need so many servers. I don't understand why they should have expected everyone to deplatform them. Facebook hosts the same content in far greater quantity and has clearly demonstrated that they can't moderate effectively, but there's no bulls-eye on them over that. What's different about Parler besides the ownership?

Depends on who you ask. I would be delighted to see a bulls-eye on Facebook for their complicity in what's been going on. I don't see them as significantly better in moral terms than Parler, and Facebook's body count for willingly collaborating with seditionists and genocide instigators is WAY WAY higher than Parler's.

Facebook is bigger, and has power.

That means that (a) they're harder to attack, and (b) they have purposes beyond ONLY fomenting insurrection and genocide. That means they'll operate in more of a gray area by intention, and will in fact try to self-moderate when the cost of fomenting insurrection and genocide risks becoming more expensive than the profit (ideological OR financial) for fomenting insurrection and genocide.

The difference between Parler and Facebook is, Facebook will take your money but then throw you under the bus if you're malicious and endangering their platform. Parler went down with the ship because it was more important to them than just taking the money.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#448

Post by Applejinx » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

8note wrote: post #283

skinnymuch wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of sites stay up that are not liked by powers to be. White supremacist forums. Or Pirate Bay

White supremacists are well liked by the powers that be though?

Some of 'em. Depends on who you ask. It's bad for business in a global economy.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#449

Post by ashtonkem » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

molbioguy wrote: post #423

wiremine wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 privacy. Exactly. They weren't really interested in true privacy or free speech, they were just using those keywords to attract customers.

This is misleading. The ID requirements were there to provide a 'verified' account status similar to Twitter's blue check mark. It wasn't some arbitrary requirement. I bet Twitter requires this as well for the verified status.

Their supposed free speech absolutism was just PR puffery. They absolutely banned political accounts.

Re: Parler CEO says he was fired by board

#450

Post by jfengel » Thu, Feb 04, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #434

kangaroozach wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation is highly subjective and Parler seemed to have limited moderation mostly to illegal speech. We have built an entire country on the premise of legal vs illegal speech and have very clear laws and systems in place for reporting and handling violations. If a company chooses to adhere to the law but not also impose their own biases when it comes to moderation, that is their right. As long as they are undoubted…

The issue with Parler is that they weren't purely banning on illegal vs legal speech, they were banning left-wing "trolling" which isn't illegal (even if it was actually trolling). https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr... And didn't exactly perform adequate moderation based on the rules they did have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26022229

That's a thing I never figured out: why would they ban left-wing trolls? The right-wing trolls enjoy fighting with left-wing trolls, and in my experience, they usually win. Especially when they have numbers on their side.

I had thought that what would kill them would be that those echo chambers rely on an enemy to be opposed to. Without it, they would just get bored and wander off. That's what they like about public forums such as Facebook and Twitter. They're not perfect echo chambers. They're opportunities to have their echoes amplified, then go off to fight the good fight against their dastardly foes.

Beating up on the left-wing trolls should be fun. Sure, some of the left-wing troll masquerade as right-wing trolls to throw people off, but really, it's hard to tell the difference. Poe's Law is more and more prescient.