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Wiki says Parler is a team of 30 people, So realistically, does that mean like 10 devs running a social network with 5-10 million users? I imagine its pretty

Wiki says Parler is a team of 30 people, So realistically, does that mean like 10 devs running a social network with 5-10 million users? I imagine its pretty ceazy there right now after getting booted off AWS, google just banned u off play store, so cant use them, i assume they cant use microsoft because theyll ban them there as well, it would be cool to see if they are able to get things up and running again. (Ive never used Parler but i assume its just like a simple Facebook type webpage/apps)

jjice 6y ago
I was thinking about it this morning. They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation. Not defending, just observing. It's interesting from a business/development perspective when it comes to rapid scale and team size.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  Setting aside moral qualms for a moment, the engineering problems they're having right now are probably one-in-a-career problems, so it would be interesting work, without a doubt.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  > They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation. Parler established itself as a "free speech" social network platform. Part of its objective, based on that principle, was minimal or no moderation. Ironically, of course, they banned many people who came in with left-wing views. Which means they actually worked to create the extremist bubble that is now causing them problems with others.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  > They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation. Maybe, but I would wager that there are a lot of tech people who sympathize explicitly with the people that Parler is trying to attract, and an even larger contingent who would work there under the auspices of protecting what they believe is the right to free speech, etc.
mrtksn 6y ago
Do you need to have many technical staff if you are renting your infrastructure? The scaling part probably is mostly handled by AWS so most of the the people there are working on product development, which shouldn’t require that many people since it’s just another social media software. I would guess that they spend quite a bit of resources on content moderation tools development as this is the bespoke part of their business.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
What I don't understand is: if you're going to host something like Parler, knowing that it is extremely controversial, why wouldn't you host it yourselves? The money they would have saved over using AWS (at the scale quoted in the previous comments) could have paid for the servers and the people to manage them. I suppose the deplatformers would have just gone after whatever data center they used, though, or if they'd have setup shop in their garage, then the ISP they used. It's turtles all the way down. My point is that I can't wrap my head around the fact that everyone is just assumed to use a cloud provider now, and the act of racking your own servers and managing your own proxies and firewalls seems to be a dead art.
- judge2020 6y ago
  They were a startup at heart, and what dev with access to millions of dollars will be interested in running some enterprise VM solution over the shiny toys you get by using AWS or GCP?
- tootie 6y ago
  Probably same reason everyone else uses cloud services. They're just way easier, faster and cheaper if you don't have the engineering capacity in-house. I'm sure they're pivoting to self-hosting right now, but it could easily be 2 months of frantic work to get back online with a system that can only handle a fraction of the traffic. And I'm sure they get hit with DDoS attacks 8 days a week.
- malwrar 6y ago
  > why wouldn't you host it yourselves Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell. Cloud is also expensive, but in return you get the ability to not need to think about hardware anymore. Prior to last week they probably assumed that AWS et. al. wouldn't have just suddenly cut them off, so they didn't factor in that risk except as a distant possibility. Up until a week ago we all were scared of FAATG's power after all and people were still talking about breaking them up.
  - TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

jjice 6y ago

I was thinking about it this morning. They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation. Not defending, just observing. It's interesting from a business/development perspective when it comes to rapid scale and team size.

TameAntelope 6y ago
Setting aside moral qualms for a moment, the engineering problems they're having right now are probably one-in-a-career problems, so it would be interesting work, without a doubt.
Jtsummers 6y ago
> They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation. Parler established itself as a "free speech" social network platform. Part of its objective, based on that principle, was minimal or no moderation. Ironically, of course, they banned many people who came in with left-wing views. Which means they actually worked to create the extremist bubble that is now causing them problems with others.
pavel_lishin 6y ago
> They probably didn't have an easy time finding new employees too because of the nature and controversy associated with the site, potentially part of the reason for lack of moderation. Maybe, but I would wager that there are a lot of tech people who sympathize explicitly with the people that Parler is trying to attract, and an even larger contingent who would work there under the auspices of protecting what they believe is the right to free speech, etc.

mrtksn 6y ago

Do you need to have many technical staff if you are renting your infrastructure? The scaling part probably is mostly handled by AWS so most of the the people there are working on product development, which shouldn’t require that many people since it’s just another social media software. I would guess that they spend quite a bit of resources on content moderation tools development as this is the bespoke part of their business.

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

What I don't understand is: if you're going to host something like Parler, knowing that it is extremely controversial, why wouldn't you host it yourselves? The money they would have saved over using AWS (at the scale quoted in the previous comments) could have paid for the servers and the people to manage them. I suppose the deplatformers would have just gone after whatever data center they used, though, or if they'd have setup shop in their garage, then the ISP they used. It's turtles all the way down. My point is that I can't wrap my head around the fact that everyone is just assumed to use a cloud provider now, and the act of racking your own servers and managing your own proxies and firewalls seems to be a dead art.

judge2020 6y ago
They were a startup at heart, and what dev with access to millions of dollars will be interested in running some enterprise VM solution over the shiny toys you get by using AWS or GCP?
tootie 6y ago
Probably same reason everyone else uses cloud services. They're just way easier, faster and cheaper if you don't have the engineering capacity in-house. I'm sure they're pivoting to self-hosting right now, but it could easily be 2 months of frantic work to get back online with a system that can only handle a fraction of the traffic. And I'm sure they get hit with DDoS attacks 8 days a week.
malwrar 6y ago
> why wouldn't you host it yourselves Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell. Cloud is also expensive, but in return you get the ability to not need to think about hardware anymore. Prior to last week they probably assumed that AWS et. al. wouldn't have just suddenly cut them off, so they didn't factor in that risk except as a distant possibility. Up until a week ago we all were scared of FAATG's power after all and people were still talking about breaking them up.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago