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I... don't understand? You were an unpopular speech platform. I worked in porn for 20 years. I know what it's like to get kicked out of AWS, so does John Young.

I... don't understand? You were an unpopular speech platform. I worked in porn for 20 years. I know what it's like to get kicked out of AWS, so does John Young. Why weren't they dockerized and prepared to move containers and backups at the drop of a hat? Why didn't they have hot spares elsewhere? There are literally thousands of hosting companies running the gamut from penny-ante to larger platforms like Rackspace, operating in a hundred countries, many of which don't know and don't wanna know what you're doing. The same is true to a lesser extent of registries. And Apple/Google kicking you out of their stores? You can still bookmark a mobile-friendly web app onto the home screen of an Apple device. You're not going to lose Qspiracy fans and nazis just because they have to do an extra step to get to your site. Nevermind that maybe, just maybe, if your platform users advocate for violent revolution, you're going to have a harder go of things. Prior to approximately October, 2001, there was a taleban.com too. I didn't read any hand-wringing when they got the axe. Newsflash: At least Tor can't remove you. The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom.

relativeadv 6y ago
"The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom." I think its more boring than that. Their platform was built by amateurs who didn't know what they were doing. Things like soft-deleting posts and auto-incrementing post IDs. This is why it was so easily crawled in a day before the shutdown. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parlers-amateur-coding-could-come-back-to-haunt-capitol-hill-rioters/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parle...
- bsenftner 6y ago
  The whole story smells like a collection of idiots and imbeciles.
- swat535 6y ago
  Off topic but what's wrong with using auto-increment?
  - grzm 6y ago
    The most common criticism I'm aware of is that it leaks information about your system and its users. For example, you can gauge growth by how fast ids grow, and relative age of accounts. The former is potentially financially valuable. Often the latter is exposed properly through the UI, but the that can be a choice, rather than exposed due to an implementation detail. There are likely other criticisms as well.
    - dralley 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem#Historical_example_of_the_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem#Historical...
      - grzm 6y ago
        That's a great example, isn't it? :)
  - sonofhans 6y ago
    Auto-incrementing ids makes guessing subsequent or previous items trivial. There was a post here a few weeks ago about it -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244872
    - slavik81 6y ago
      That doesn't seem like it would matter much on its own. You can pretty easily guess HN item IDs, too. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244871 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244873
      - sonofhans 6y ago
        Of course you’re right — nothing matters on its own. It’s one possible factor in a defense in depth strategy —- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing)
- Tokkemon 6y ago
  This is the real answer. It was very clear they had no competence to make an app of this scale. It would have collapsed under its own weight before long.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    I mean, Reddit was pretty poorly built in the early days prior to getting popular and went down frequently due to load. It's easy to blame incompetence, but startups are startups and many things are hacked together in a hurry when you're growing fast.
hurt_and_afraid 6y ago
I don't think it's unreasonable for Parler to attempt to create the same kind of mainstream platform that these other services enjoy. Their service is not criminal in nature. Regardless of what some may claim, their service is simply a social media platform. If you're a technical user you can probably figure out the 'Darkweb'. You can't blame them for not wanting to restrict their userbase to only technical users. They're trying to be a viable alternative to the Silicon Valley giants. That's a reasonable thing to do.
- peteretep 6y ago
  > Their service is not criminal in nature They are getting kicked off AWS because of content that is absolutely criminal in nature, and their inability and inaction in moderating it.
  - oceanplexian 6y ago
    They provided ~90 example out of millions of posts and comments. I signed up to see what all the fuss was about and didn’t see any examples of violence whatsoever, other than some nutty conspiracy stuff and some vaguely violent language that wouldn’t be out of place on Vox or Mother Jones. If a platform has ANY illegal content what standard is then acceptable? If you moderate 99.999% of your content is it reasonable for you to be blacklisted for the 0.001%? If someone found 90 examples of calls to violence on Twitter would that make it OK to deplatform them too?
    - peteretep 6y ago
      > If you moderate 99.999% of your content is it reasonable for you to be blacklisted for the 0.001%? This sounds like you're trying to get us to pretend along that Parler had a moderation policy that was in any way effective, equally applied, or not just pandering to the crowd it was trying to entice.
      - BlueTemplar 6y ago
        Same kinds of criticism are regularly voiced at Facebook and Twitter too. For instance: https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in-myanmars-attacks-on-minorities/ https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in... (IMHO both Facebook and Twitter should be shut down. Size matters.)
sumedh 6y ago
> Why weren't they dockerized and prepared to move containers and backups at the drop of a hat? Why didn't they have hot spares elsewhere? Maybe the techies with those skills dont want to work there and so the existing employees might not have the skills to do that.
- notatrumper 6y ago
  Difficult to compete with companies that have billions of dollars to spend.
  - doyouevensunbro 6y ago
    The Mercers have billions they could spend on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/parler-backed-by-mercer-family-makes-play-for-conservatives-mad-at-facebook-twitter-11605382430 https://www.wsj.com/articles/parler-backed-by-mercer-family-...
    - notatrumper 6y ago
      Just because the invested some money in that, doesn't mean they should bet all their wealth on it?
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Exactly, these people don't want to put in the work. They just want to use shortcuts, but just as you're not entitled to an account Twitter, you're also not entitled to a cloud service provider. Parler hasn't seen 1/10th the the deplatforming that The Pirate Bay has seen for example, yet that managed to survive throughout the years and is still up now. The reality is that whoever was running Parler had no clue what they were doing.
  - notatrumper 6y ago
    Who says it is the end of the story for Parler? They came on the scene many years after Twitter and Facebook. They have a lot of catching up to do, with a lot less money at their disposal. In the early days, Twitter ran on Ruby on Rails, hardly a scalable decision, either.
notatrumper 6y ago
I would assume they simply haven't been around long enough, and didn't have enough money to throw at the issue yet. I hope they will be back, stronger than before.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  They should have seen this coming. But then, so did the Capitol police.
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
apparently it's harder for them to get back than they thought. I guess they are now facing the equivalent of the Holywood blacklist. Dockerized setups will not help if you can't get an alternative host. "Matze said that Parler had faced trouble in finding a new service provider, ... He also said that others had refused to work with Parler: "Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Attempts_to_return_online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Attempts_to_return_onli... It is probably easier to find an alternative hosting platform when you are booted from AWS because of porn. In the case of parler they also might need to migrate more data.
- garrickvanburen 6y ago
  Their lawyers bailing gave me pause. Suggests things are substantially more serious than Amazon, Apple, Google, and Twilio suddenly finding a paying customer distasteful.
  - de6u99er 6y ago
    Exactly. Soon people will understand why it was taken down.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      Something like organizing an assault on the nation's capital in order to overturn a vote?
  - dilyevsky 6y ago
    They are probably worried about the company solvency
ketamine__ 6y ago
Simplest explanation is that Rebekah Mercer knows how to write a check but can't evaluate talent properly.

relativeadv 6y ago

"The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom." I think its more boring than that. Their platform was built by amateurs who didn't know what they were doing. Things like soft-deleting posts and auto-incrementing post IDs. This is why it was so easily crawled in a day before the shutdown. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parlers-amateur-coding-could-come-back-to-haunt-capitol-hill-rioters/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parle...

bsenftner 6y ago
The whole story smells like a collection of idiots and imbeciles.
swat535 6y ago
Off topic but what's wrong with using auto-increment?
- grzm 6y ago
  The most common criticism I'm aware of is that it leaks information about your system and its users. For example, you can gauge growth by how fast ids grow, and relative age of accounts. The former is potentially financially valuable. Often the latter is exposed properly through the UI, but the that can be a choice, rather than exposed due to an implementation detail. There are likely other criticisms as well.
  - dralley 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem#Historical_example_of_the_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem#Historical...
    - grzm 6y ago
      That's a great example, isn't it? :)
- sonofhans 6y ago
  Auto-incrementing ids makes guessing subsequent or previous items trivial. There was a post here a few weeks ago about it -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244872
  - slavik81 6y ago
    That doesn't seem like it would matter much on its own. You can pretty easily guess HN item IDs, too. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244871 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25244873
    - sonofhans 6y ago
      Of course you’re right — nothing matters on its own. It’s one possible factor in a defense in depth strategy —- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing)
Tokkemon 6y ago
This is the real answer. It was very clear they had no competence to make an app of this scale. It would have collapsed under its own weight before long.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I mean, Reddit was pretty poorly built in the early days prior to getting popular and went down frequently due to load. It's easy to blame incompetence, but startups are startups and many things are hacked together in a hurry when you're growing fast.

hurt_and_afraid 6y ago

I don't think it's unreasonable for Parler to attempt to create the same kind of mainstream platform that these other services enjoy. Their service is not criminal in nature. Regardless of what some may claim, their service is simply a social media platform. If you're a technical user you can probably figure out the 'Darkweb'. You can't blame them for not wanting to restrict their userbase to only technical users. They're trying to be a viable alternative to the Silicon Valley giants. That's a reasonable thing to do.

peteretep 6y ago
> Their service is not criminal in nature They are getting kicked off AWS because of content that is absolutely criminal in nature, and their inability and inaction in moderating it.
- oceanplexian 6y ago
  They provided ~90 example out of millions of posts and comments. I signed up to see what all the fuss was about and didn’t see any examples of violence whatsoever, other than some nutty conspiracy stuff and some vaguely violent language that wouldn’t be out of place on Vox or Mother Jones. If a platform has ANY illegal content what standard is then acceptable? If you moderate 99.999% of your content is it reasonable for you to be blacklisted for the 0.001%? If someone found 90 examples of calls to violence on Twitter would that make it OK to deplatform them too?
  - peteretep 6y ago
    > If you moderate 99.999% of your content is it reasonable for you to be blacklisted for the 0.001%? This sounds like you're trying to get us to pretend along that Parler had a moderation policy that was in any way effective, equally applied, or not just pandering to the crowd it was trying to entice.
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Same kinds of criticism are regularly voiced at Facebook and Twitter too. For instance: https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in-myanmars-attacks-on-minorities/ https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/how-facebook-is-complicit-in... (IMHO both Facebook and Twitter should be shut down. Size matters.)

sumedh 6y ago

> Why weren't they dockerized and prepared to move containers and backups at the drop of a hat? Why didn't they have hot spares elsewhere? Maybe the techies with those skills dont want to work there and so the existing employees might not have the skills to do that.

notatrumper 6y ago
Difficult to compete with companies that have billions of dollars to spend.
- doyouevensunbro 6y ago
  The Mercers have billions they could spend on this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/parler-backed-by-mercer-family-makes-play-for-conservatives-mad-at-facebook-twitter-11605382430 https://www.wsj.com/articles/parler-backed-by-mercer-family-...
  - notatrumper 6y ago
    Just because the invested some money in that, doesn't mean they should bet all their wealth on it?
ehsankia 6y ago
Exactly, these people don't want to put in the work. They just want to use shortcuts, but just as you're not entitled to an account Twitter, you're also not entitled to a cloud service provider. Parler hasn't seen 1/10th the the deplatforming that The Pirate Bay has seen for example, yet that managed to survive throughout the years and is still up now. The reality is that whoever was running Parler had no clue what they were doing.
- notatrumper 6y ago
  Who says it is the end of the story for Parler? They came on the scene many years after Twitter and Facebook. They have a lot of catching up to do, with a lot less money at their disposal. In the early days, Twitter ran on Ruby on Rails, hardly a scalable decision, either.

notatrumper 6y ago

I would assume they simply haven't been around long enough, and didn't have enough money to throw at the issue yet. I hope they will be back, stronger than before.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
They should have seen this coming. But then, so did the Capitol police.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

apparently it's harder for them to get back than they thought. I guess they are now facing the equivalent of the Holywood blacklist. Dockerized setups will not help if you can't get an alternative host. "Matze said that Parler had faced trouble in finding a new service provider, ... He also said that others had refused to work with Parler: "Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Attempts_to_return_online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Attempts_to_return_onli... It is probably easier to find an alternative hosting platform when you are booted from AWS because of porn. In the case of parler they also might need to migrate more data.

garrickvanburen 6y ago
Their lawyers bailing gave me pause. Suggests things are substantially more serious than Amazon, Apple, Google, and Twilio suddenly finding a paying customer distasteful.
- de6u99er 6y ago
  Exactly. Soon people will understand why it was taken down.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Something like organizing an assault on the nation's capital in order to overturn a vote?
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  They are probably worried about the company solvency

ketamine__ 6y ago

Simplest explanation is that Rebekah Mercer knows how to write a check but can't evaluate talent properly.