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Parler 'free speech' app tops charts in wake of Trump defeat
- 0xy 6y agoApart from various "trust and safety" censorship and moderation activities, what new features or updates has Twitter done in the past 3 years? I can't think of many changes they've made beyond those things, except for adverse ones (like breaking Firefox compatibility for months). Is it a conscious choice for them to actively do nothing? MySpace died because it didn't innovate and refused to invest in the core platform. While Facebook was spiking in popularity, MySpace was still a slow ad-plastered mess. Twitter seems to be that sleepy giant who has stopped all progress.
- scrollaway 6y agoI've actually seen quite a few updates from twitter the last couple of years, most of them quality of life related. Not a lot of new features (although let's not forget they increased tweet size) but personally I don't mind that. It'd be like complaining HN is not getting enough new features.
- rusk 6y agoThey have given the option to disable the algorithmic timeline. This has been a game changer for me. I can use twitter without fear of being exposed to unction.
- zaphar 6y agoReally? That was the single most annoying thing they had done. I switched to using tweetdeck just to escape that change. Is it disabled permanently when you turn it off now? The "you can turn it off but we'll automatically turn it back on" bit was mind blowingly terrible.
- rusk 6y agoYes it was awful wasn't it. It pretty much turned me off twitter altogether. These days there is an icon on the top right of the app, or web page that looks like a constellation of stars. If you click that you get the option to go back to good twitter.
- zaphar 6y agoThe stars option will switch back automatically though after some period of time, which is why I switched to https://tweetdeck.twitter.com https://tweetdeck.twitter.com for my interface.
- steinuil 6y agoIf you switch back enough times it will stop trying. Same with other things like suggested tweets in your notifications or likes from others, if you see those just click on the top right arrow on the option that says I'm not interested and after a few days it will stop showing them.
- rusk 6y ago> just click on the top right arrow on the option that says I'm not interested Haha - I just use the block button like it’s going out of fashion. Cleans things up nicely.
- zaphar 6y agoYeah that's too much effort to turn off a feature. I spent over a year trying to keep it off. To the point I actually scheduled a recurring event in my calendar to check and turn it off. I'll stick with tweetdeck until they support a real offswitch.
- rusk 6y agoDoes tweetdeck handle threads properly? I tried a few different 3p clients but found them all lacking. Just gave up then and just used the web client every now and again.
- raxxorrax 6y agoNot sure how to feel about it. I think there will be a concentrated mass of user with certain viewpoints. On the other hand the censorship of Twitter is not attractive for many users and alternatives are always good, although I think Twitter is losing relevance for media exposure. Seems we are getting two distince bubbles.
- xabi 6y agoHope they enjoy their echo chamber.
- collyw 6y agoYou think that Trump being silenced is less of an echo chamber?
- acgh213 6y agoBwahahahahahahahahahahahhaahahahahahahahahahahhahaah Edit: No, Fuck Off
- scrollaway 6y agoYou're talking about the current president of the united states as if he's some unknown whistleblower. "silenced". He's getting fact checked.
- Robin_Message 6y agoIndeed. If he has silenced, we wouldn't be hearing about it, would we? And even "fact checked" is somewhere between Orwellian and jargon. He is being asked to provide evidence for the truth of his claims; and other alternative evidence is being presented alongside what he claims. I would call it "reporting". (And the claims are nuts. On the radio in the UK, one of his lawyers claimed to have 9000 affidavits from NV voters who said they had turned up to vote in person but a mail-in ballot had been done in their name. 9000! Yet not a single one has been provided to give an interview. I would be worried if 9 people had made such a statement, never mind 9000.)
- mcphage 6y agoWhat does “silenced” mean to you?
- collyw 6y agoTwitter is covering up many of his tweets, saying that they are debatable, you can't just scroll down his feed and see what has been said, you need to click on each one by one, click back again to see what he has said, hindering the user experience massively. Meanwhile the flat earth society doesn't have any of it's tweets disputed.
- maxehmookau 6y agoSpent 2 minutes on here. Looks like it's just attracting conspiracy nuts. Deleted my account.
- technoplato 6y agoObvious and dead horse beaten issue. I’m working on solving this and will report here when I’ve got a prototype. Surprising insights arise from pondering the philosophy of show and tell-specifically how listening is involved in order to “earn” your turn to speak.
- supjeff 6y ago> Obvious and dead horse beaten issue. I’m working on solving this and will report here when I’ve got a prototype. Surprising insights arise from pondering the philosophy of show and tell-specifically how listening is involved in order to “earn” your turn to speak. Do you ever look at what you've written and ask yourself: "Would somebody else understand this"? Could you say it again, but using enough words this time?
- jkinudsjknds 6y agoHe thinks this is a commonly noted problem. He's working on an idea to solve it. He thinks the answer is requiring others to listen before being able to post. Do you ever look at what you've written and ask yourself if you would say something so aggressive irl?
- technoplato 6y agoIt was very early in the morning. Apologies for being obscure. When platforms ban assholes and other platforms arise in the guise of decreasing censorship, said assholes flock to new platforms and infest them a la Ruqqus (though I believe the developer/founders have positive intent) We need more clever ways of finding the assholes. I mentioned show and tell in my comment above. When you think about how show and tell works, you must earn your right to show and that works fairly well, even when you scale the idea. Does that make more sense?
- _red 6y agoCan you speak about Benfords law or post data plots on Parler? Unfortunately you can no longer do that on HN even...
- ceejayoz 6y agoConsider perusing the answers at https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/do-vote-counts-for-joe-biden-in-the-2020-election-violate-benfords-law https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/do-vote-c... before you do.
- _red 6y agoIn other words, no we can't discuss that here and should have those conversations on other sites....ok...
- rusk 6y agoHN does not suffer fools gladly. Speaking as a fool, I find this challenging at times, but overall I think it is a distinctive feature. I'm free to go to reddit and find a sub with fellow wingnuts if I fancy something more whimsical.
- jonquark 6y agoThat isn't what the comment you are replying to said. It said that before you claim that thing X and thing Y are related, take a look at this page that goes through the claims and debunks them. If the answers on that page are mistaken and it is relevant to a topic on HN then it seems logical (to me) that you could discuss it here (but unfounded political allegations should be off-topic in most HN chats in my opinion).
- _red 6y agoUnfortunately links to other pages / data-scientist who disagree with above are "flagged".
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- chippy 6y agoTwitter alternatives will all fail because they try to be an application for millions. They see Twitter and see the volume of users so build something for the numbers and hope that they are less bad. But Twitter and every other thing that has grown big has 1) started small 2) was not initially created to be big and 3) was attractive to use.
- rusk 6y agoTwitter succeeded because (and I'm not au fait with the details of how exactly) they managed to onboard a lot of high profile users from a variety of different walks of life. Everybody else came to hear what they had to say. This must have been a huge amount of work, and not something that's talked about much and I can only presume you'd have to do something similar to mount any kind of credible opposition. That's a lot of work for people who's prime motivation is chasing dopamine hits. EDIT can't reply to below cause I've used up all my commenting credits for now: My word selection (au fait) relates probably to cultural context. This is a phrase that people around me use frequently. Sorry not trying to be obscurantist or anything. I just have a life outside the Internet where people talk in non-Internet ways.
- technoplato 6y ago> au fait As someone very curious about language usage, why wouldn’t you just write the word “familiar” there. I’m genuine curious as to your motivations. Is it brevity? Am I missing additional context this provides?
- jan_Inkepa 6y agoIt’s just a phrase that’s in standard usage in some dialects (like mine) but I guess not in others. I don’t think it’s deliberately obscurantist, just people writing as they talk. I’m happy with people letting having some flavour or colour to their speech rather than aiming for germanic recidivism as an ideal of purity. (Though yeah clear simple plain writing can be good to aim for, what that means depends on who yer talkin to).
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- Havoc 6y agoOminous that the social networks are splitting along these lines
- rusk 6y agoI wouldn't worry. It's basically like a gigantic "always sunny in philadelphia" in there. People regular twitter could do without. I'm sure it would be funny to watch though.
- pjc50 6y agoWhy is it ominous?
- krapp 6y agoI don't think it's ominous. Different platforms serve different interests and demographics - some people want the barely moderated edgelord chaos of 4chan, most people don't.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoWhat's ominous is the growing media separation between the two political sides leading to ever-increasing difference in worldviews. How can we negotiate and compromise when viewpoints are so diametrically opposed that no middle-ground can be made?
- demosthenes14 6y agoThis. It’s already bad enough with segmented Twitter follower graphs and Fox News. Just imagine when they’re entirely walled off from one another
- Havoc 6y ago>I don't think it's ominous. Different platforms serve different interests and demographics Split into two separate social networks dramatically increases the echo chamber effect. e.g. on reddit someone from /r/conservatives might still interact with /r/liberals because they both have an interest in /r/succulents They may not be speaking about politics but they're still interacting. If you're on two different platforms even that minor overlap falls away & that allows for the two to drift further apart and harden in their views
- danpalmer 6y agoI think that all these platforms: Parler, Gab, etc, will end up with one of two fates. They'll either fail to make it big and remain a niche thing for those trolls who enjoy the edginess, like 4chan and its newer alternatives, or... They'll grow big and end up having to deal with "trust and safety" issues when the majority of users on the mainstream end of the spectrum demand protection from those users who would otherwise be on 4chan/etc. This is pretty much what Twitter and Facebook are going through now, but shifted more towards the right, in the case of Parler/Gab. We can already see hints of this in the fact that their terms of service prohibit inciting terrorism or acts of violence – issues that 4chan/etc deal with by allowing it, reducing their reach, and Twitter (attempt) to deal with by banning it, increasing their reach as they provide a "safe space". Parler has the same issues as Twitter, it's just shifted to the right of the political spectrum. They can either deal with those issues and move closer to Twitter, or not and be irrelevant in the long term.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago> fail to make it big and remain a niche thing for those trolls who enjoy the edginess, It would fail on those terms as well due to irrelevance: When your political agenda consists of annoying and offending "the other", they need to be present to take offence. If they're not listening, where's the fun? The "echo chamber" aspect takes all the fun out of the performative cruelty.
- intended 6y agodo note that this isnt that hard a barrier. The earliest reports of bad behavior were from the BBS days, with nazi forums targeting Jewish or holocaust focused boards/sites.
- charliebrownau 6y agoNow all the Jewish Zionists run the entire mainstream
- zaphar 6y agoYou are making an assumption that it's primarily about performative cruelty. But I would guess a non-trivial amount of them are just looking for a place where they feel safe talking about what they believe. Every slice of the political/cultural spectrum has it's trolls but they trolls are not representative of the general population. I may think much of what the other side says is reprehensible but I can generally tell when the speaker is trolling vs just speaking their mind.
- seanalltogether 6y agoIt reminds me of how reddit went through a period of turmoil with claims of censorship and mods acting too aggressively and all the freedom of speech zealots decided to jump ship over to voat.co. I like to check in from time to time to see how that site is doing, and well...it's not pretty. I know parler is pulling in some pretty big names to give it some legitimacy, but it's probably going to succumb to the same problem where only the most aggressive and angry users survive, while the more moderate users gravitate back to places like facebook and twitter
- pjc50 6y ago> parler is pulling in some pretty big names to give it some legitimacy This works both ways; if someone does that it's likely to harm their "mainstream" legitimacy eventually. Anyone remember menshn?
- smitty1e 6y agoIt takes a continuous effort to avoid becoming that which we despise. Scaling is hard, and brings out authoritarianism.
- shadowgovt 6y agoThe seductive thing about authoritarianism is efficiency. The best government is a benevolent dictatorship. But since continuity of benevolence cannot be guaranteed, we seek more stable alternatives for anything long-term.
- raxxorrax 6y agoreddit could still retain "freedom of speech zealots", which I think still have the better arguments for that matter. They are just in other subs now, but they are still there. The admins know about it and leave them their place. Ironically they often are more civilized and often have a higher quality discourse. That isn't always the case though.
- SN76477 6y agovoat.co is just mob rule. it is such a mess.
- manuel4sk 6y agoI think we should give it a try before reaching our own conclusion.
- hntossaccount12 6y agoI received a text message from them yesterday with an activation code to create an account, despite not signing up for them. I reported it as spam. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a deliberate bot effort to register fluff accounts yesterday, to make this PR piece possible.
- tyingq 6y agoDo they really want just an echo chamber though? As I understand it they are catering to the far right. Some of the fun they have on FB or Twitter is probably arguing, feeling controversial, etc.
- seebetter 6y agoAlso because the corporate media in general and the left leaning companies, don’t really respect facts anymore. Entire networks ignore valid stories. And they subtly and aggressive distort and deflect, “There is no explicit evidence of overt corruption and to suggest otherwise is dangerous to our institutions.” I’m a big defender of intelligence agencies but people like John Brennan are widely hated within the Intelligence Community. The political operatives masquerading as intelligence officials are leading CNN — which is disturbing. Reality has been conflated. We’re all living in a conspiracy theory.
- thechao 6y agoI have a genuine question: why is it that left-leaning companies dominate media and/or nearly all other walks-of-life? I hear this all the time, but I’d like to know how it came about. I would guess, knowing nothing else, that companies would tend to lean right.
- tyingq 6y agoGeography has something to do with it. New York and Washington are liberal leaning, and that's where the origins of many of the big media companies lie. The other piece is likely the motivation to be a journalist, as well as the college experience. Journalism programs tend to have lots of students and staff that want to be seen as "fighting for the little guy", which tends to line up more directly in a liberal context. You can see this pretty clearly by looking at the news stories that have won Pulitzers in the past.
- pjc50 6y agoObviously this isn't true; any analysis would require first trying to establish where "left" and "right" might be, then looking at media ownership, and also referencing the extreme Overton Window effects of the US. Biden/Harris are center-right candidates, which probably contributed to them winning the election, and definitely contributed to them winning the primaries. (also you'd need to disentangle "left" and "liberal"!)
- fsflover 6y agoI wish they went to Mastodon instead.
- thinkingemote 6y agoI tried mastodon, saw that it was a decent alternative to Twitter and then realised that I don't want to ever use Twitter or an alternative any more. Its like Twitter has ruined social media entirely
- jrnichols 6y agoThey did, via Gab. It was a big deal for a while. Other instances started to defederate from them and apps blocked them. but then even Gab de-federated itself and now sits in its own echo chamber. Just like Parler is going to.
- kyriakos 6y agoI signed up, I see its already full of spam regardless of what hashtag you try.
- aaron695 6y ago> adds 2M users in a single day I'd love this to be true. A fast moving populace that can uptake tech quickly. But I've never heard of numbers like these. Where does this number come from? Where are the campaigns pushing this being run? I simply don't believe it without more of an explanation. Did BBC fact check this?
- dopylitty 6y agoThis was my question as well. It’s actually sort of funny that people complain about the “left wing media” when the BBC and others are uncritically parroting a press release from a right wing echo chamber.
- ykevinator 6y agoIt's a gathering place for alternative reality. In parler, trump won, covid is not a problem, and Jesus is real and global warming is not.
- swiley 6y ago"This platform sucks! I know, let's find a new one!"
- professoretc 6y agoFor myself, I was one of those new users, but not by choice. Someone created a Parler account using my email. I guess that's one way to bump up your numbers?
- vangelis 6y agoSearch Jews or Goy for a fun time!
- robodale 6y agoIf Trump creates a Parler account...they're going to have more than 2M users in a single day. I'm staying far away from that powder keg...
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoI just read about this "alternative" here, so whats the benefit of joining this instead of a mastodon instance which has probably better moderation and community support other than the cool factor ?
- goatmeal 6y agofor cultural reasons I don't fully understand yet, mastodon instances are becoming the type of places where the word "stupid" is an ableist slur, among other examples of extremely heavy-handed moderation. at this point I don't understand who mastodon is for besides the small community vibe. this doesn't match up with the culture of pleroma instances, where anything goes. pleroma also uses activitypub and the instances do sometimes federate with mastodon but most of the mastodon instances have a very long blacklist. I don't think that enough people are ready for the concept of federated social networking since they still tend to gravitate heavily towards centralized services like parler. they're more familiar.
- spoopyskelly 6y agoIf you want a safe space for right crazies join Parler, if you want a safe space for left crazies join Mastodon.
- kemonocode 6y agoMy main issue with all these platforms supposedly being born to defend "free speech" is that they're a reactionist measure from certain ideas being deemed inappropriate by the common populace, so it's less about all kinds of free speech and more about protecting their speech. I'm convinced that no centralized platform is able to provide true free speech and even if it does, people should not be denied of the benefits of moderation/curation so I do think distributed/federated platforms are the way to go, even if they have issues scaling up. True, in the end, they may just end up being bubbles and echo chambers, but you ultimately get to choose which ones to engage in, instead of leaving that choice to someone else and their fickle mood to appease shareholders.
- forest_dweller 6y ago> My main issue with all these platforms supposedly being born to defend "free speech" is that they're a reactionist measure from certain ideas being deemed inappropriate by the common populace, so it's less about all kinds of free speech and more about protecting their speech. Protecting your free speech also protects everyone elses. Typically you can post whatever you like on these plaforms. 4chan is always derided because of the infamous /pol (which tbh is mostly people just trolling) but they never talk about the LGBT channels. The issue with the large platforms is that they are interfering with people discussions based on what they think is best and they frequently get it wrong. This can be not understanding the irony or not understanding a "shitpost" or they don't understand regional customs. Recently a diner was censored for using the word "faggots". Faggots are a dish in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faggot_(food) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faggot_(food) https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/woman-advertising-faggots-fannys-cafe-16886019 https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/black-country/woman-adverti... Also I don't consider parler to be free speech platform. They have removed people for certain posts normally anime breats and other forms of shitposting. Nonetheless it isn't a free speech platform.
- atoav 6y agoThere is at least a tension between those who want to say tough controversial things and those who don't yet dare to speak out their inner feelings and insecurities. To construct a space that can handle both is probably impossible. Tough hard arguing has it's merit and value, but often it can turn into a contest who is the most stubborn, most convinced and least principled actor in the discussion. This kind of "war with words" scares away a whole other world of speech that could never happen in it's wake. I am not saying that we should go without one or another, but saying a space for free speech is one where you can say controversial in a rough voice is not necessarily an indicator for the value of the conversations that take place. Think about HN: how would the conversations on here work without the restraint everybody shows by staying on topic?
- RIMR 6y agoThe most hilarious part about Parler is that they ban "content posted by or on behalf of terrorist organizations", which seems reasonable at face value until you realize that the admins consider "Antifa" to be a terrorist organization, and purge any content related to anti-fascism. They also, until recently, had a zero-tolerance policy on nudity and eroticism, only compromising by forcing users who want to post NSFW content out of view entirely. This includes content related to LGBTQ+ people and sexual health. Parler is not a "free speech" website. Parler is a safe space for right wing extremists who got tired of getting banned from traditional social media sites for posting hate, and who prefer an environment that is as hostile to minority groups as they are.