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Parlers goal of being the alternate free speech platform is horrendously thought out. The same companies and that they are trying to remove influence from (Sil

Parlers goal of being the alternate free speech platform is horrendously thought out. The same companies and that they are trying to remove influence from (Silicon Valley - amazon, twitter, facebook, etc.) are the same companies that they're doing business with. Gab is ridiculous and I get a very religious "holier than thou" (lol) vibe from them. Their founder(s) are very puritanical and will likely not survive the next few years. The true future of free speech is through federated platforms/services similar to how email servers were back 20-25 years ago. People have traded freedom for convenience over the past couple of decades and it shows.

benburleson 6y ago
It wasn't even that their goal was to be a "free speech platform," they existed specifically as a platform for radical conservatives (only). If they cared about free speech, they wouldn't have aligned with any specific ideology.
phoe-krk 6y ago
> People have traded freedom for convenience over the past couple of decades and it shows. I'd argue the completely other way: people have traded convenience for freedom. The convenience of using the Internet for has massively eroded freedom of speech. It's been immensely convenient for tens of thousands of people to be able to say any kind of harmful trash on the Internet without suffering any negative consequences and that's what they have been doing for years now, and so now we all pay the price. The term "freedom of speech" has been appropriated by alt-right and modern Nazi movements and is now associated almost strictly with, which means that it is now feasible to call this freedom a real and actual risk to human life and take real steps towards curbing that freedom in general, even for people who are not abusing it to actively work towards harming other people.
- throwaway45349 6y ago
  Another problem is the term 'harm' (just like 'freedom of speech') has also been poisoned by those on the left who would have you believe words are more dangerous than actual violence. When actual discussions and conversations cannot take place under the guise of pretend harm, real violence happens. I do wholeheartedly believe the attack on the capitol is just the result of a disenfranchised part of the population who've been shit on and deplatformed for the last 4 years by the establishment (including Orange Man, FWIW).
  - splistud 6y ago
    Well said
    - throwaway45349 6y ago
      Thank you.
  - OniBait 6y ago
    What I find scary and disheartening is that people have to use throwaway accounts to even point this out.
    - throwaway45349 6y ago
      Using a throwaway for anything political is just safer. I can comfortably talk about this with friends or colleagues, but I wouldn't broadcast it to the whole world with my name attached.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    If you do not believe that words cause actual harm, then you don't know anyone who's been in an emotionally abusive relationship. There is no shortage of women with PTSD from such relationships who've spent the past four years continuously triggered because Trump acted just like an abusive boyfriend or husband, and it was difficult to avoid him on the news or on social media.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - criddell 6y ago
    I wholeheartedly believe the attack on the capitol is the result of racism and hatred being spewed unchecked on Twitter and Facebook (and other smaller platforms). The loudness and accessibility of it worked to recruit susceptible people building a small group of angry people into a movement. If anything, the problem is that they weren't deplatformed early enough.
tesmar2 6y ago
Gab is doing great and growing like crazy. Edit: Downvoted for facts.
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  I guess some people may interpret "doing great" as an opinion and not a fact, although it depends on what you meant by that... it could be a fact.
- willcipriano 6y ago
  I don't know why you are being downvoted, from what I've read they have added a ton of users in the past few weeks. I think the Parler move is backfiring, prior to that it seemed like a battle between dozens of alt-social networks all trying to gain a foothold and after the Parler move it looks it everyone displaced from the traditional social media platforms has decided on Gab.
duxup 6y ago
The 'free speech platforms' almost always skew towards the extremest side (more so over time)and aren't anything about the benefits we think of when it comes to free speech, lots of ideas that can be discussed, and we can think about and learn from. I wonder how that can be avoided.
- scohesc 6y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't think it can be avoided - you can't have freedom of speech without having the worst of the worst be able to speak. I dislike the people that support facist, racist beliefs, but I 100% will defend their right to say such things. In my opinion, once you start talking about restricting speech, you get into the grey area - who decides what speech to restrict? Off the top of my head, the most "capable" organizations would be either: - The companies who run these glorified advertising platforms (which would regulate speech based on "how much money will we lose?"), or - a Governmental body (which by its nature has a monopoly on violence - "if you say something we don't like, your social credit score goes down and you can't leave the country or we throw you in jail"). I think freedom of speech is a very large part of what makes America distinctive from other countries. - Alternatively, we could have whoever the loudest complainers are control speech, which would be very reactionary - driven by misinformation or coordinated culture change campaigns(?) If the people with abhorrent opinions decide to start causing direct physical harm to people in reality - that's when police, government, etc. should step in and penalize them - not social media companies or governments, or the vocal minority determining what people should and shouldn't say.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I worry less about having the worst of the worst speak, as it is platforms inevitably trend extreme as folks either drop off or are pushed out and the result is just a one sided platform without some heavy handed moderation. Here's I think the real issue, we make discussion platforms... people don't want to discuss. They just want to put up and push posters of what they believe. And we're surprised when things go wrong.
    - 6y ago
snarf21 6y ago
I think the main issue is that people expect free. And free means ads (unless some billionaire is going to fund it out of pocket). And ads means you can't have child porn and terrorism on your platform.
- smackmybishop 6y ago
  AWS is neither free nor ad-supported.
  - MBCook 6y ago
    I believe they were talking about Parler, not who is hosting them. An issue they would run into in the future.
  - echelon 6y ago
    AWS wouldn't exist if the web had been P2P. If YouTube was based on BitTorrent. If Facebook was based on Diaspora, Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, etc. If Messenger was based on Matrix. Centralized platforms make ad revenue, form moats, and become big business. Hosting isn't their core competency, so they outsource. Thus AWS.
    - warkdarrior 6y ago
      Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to do decentralized discovery/recommendation. Google Search centralizes discovery for the web, Facebook centralizes discovery for the social graph, YouTube centralizes discovery for the videos, Whatsapp centralizes discovery for chat.
    - evgen 6y ago
      Speaking as someone who was actually there, this is a delusional view of what might have been based more on fantasy than reality. The web _was_ P2P at the start, but it became centralized because that was more efficient and increased both value and communication. The original social networks (BBS and chat channels, Usenet, etc) _were_ distributed, but it turns out that this made them easy prey for parasitic and toxic actors and all of the available tools to prevent this imposed asymmetric costs on the recipients and did not scale at all. Distributed systems are easy, but making distributed communication systems not suck is incredibly hard. The Internet is a distributed system that was a lot better before all of you showed up and cast us into the hell of eternal September.
jorblumesea 6y ago
Good points but I'd go a bit farther and say that the same companies they are trying to remove influence from are the same companies they [parler] are becoming or will become. The idea that parler or gab is somehow "freer" or less censored than any other site seems untrue. They are more tolerant of a certain political identity and less tolerant of another one. It's just replacing their boogiemen with one of their own design.
- bazooka_penguin 6y ago
  Somewhat agree. These are ultimately politically reactionary platforms. Not making a value judgment, but they're clearly geared at winning over conservatives to their platforms and are intended to be platforms for right wingers. That may mean tolerating everyone else while they're growing and trying to gain clout but I can see that changing quickly once they have power.
julienb_sea 6y ago
I think the future of controversial speech is in closed, private groups on large platforms. Those fly under the radar and can escape public pressure, which has the side effect of easing pressure on Facebook to halt the "controversial" discussions. This is why violent protests will likely continue to be primarily organized on high profile platforms like Facebook.
- jki275 6y ago
  I have watched significant centrist websites go closed or semi-closed over the past two weeks, deleting or closing historical data, removing seo, disallowing public indexing, etc. So yes -- this is probably how it will go, it's already started.
  - Pfhreak 6y ago
    Which sites? Without any specifics you are just adding meaningless anecdotes and/or FUD.
    - jki275 6y ago
      Your belief or disbelief of my comment has no bearing on reality. I'm not interested in slaking your thirst for conservative blood to win fake internet points.
      - Pfhreak 6y ago
        Read up on the Fundamental Attribution Error and reread my post. I'm not coming after you in the way you think. I just said that your post was low signal. I neither said nor implied that I believe or disbelieve you. It's not a matter of belief at all, frankly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
richardARPANET 6y ago
Gab is great and will survive long into the future because users of the website pay to use it. Rather than being sold to advertisers. Value for value exchange. Look past the religious aspect and you'll see the content on there is much less toxic than on Twitter.
warkdarrior 6y ago
> The true future of free speech is through federated platforms/services similar to how email servers were back 20-25 years ago. Isn't the whole problem for Parler that no major providers will host their servers? How would federation help? You need a full P2P layer, fully decentralized, routed over Tor to prevent blocking by ISPs.
rodgerd 6y ago
> Parlers goal of being the alternate free speech platform is horrendously thought out. Parler's goal is whatever the billionaire Mercer family want it to be; presumably "Twitter for Brietbart readers", since that's another of their media properties.

benburleson 6y ago

It wasn't even that their goal was to be a "free speech platform," they existed specifically as a platform for radical conservatives (only). If they cared about free speech, they wouldn't have aligned with any specific ideology.

phoe-krk 6y ago

> People have traded freedom for convenience over the past couple of decades and it shows. I'd argue the completely other way: people have traded convenience for freedom. The convenience of using the Internet for has massively eroded freedom of speech. It's been immensely convenient for tens of thousands of people to be able to say any kind of harmful trash on the Internet without suffering any negative consequences and that's what they have been doing for years now, and so now we all pay the price. The term "freedom of speech" has been appropriated by alt-right and modern Nazi movements and is now associated almost strictly with, which means that it is now feasible to call this freedom a real and actual risk to human life and take real steps towards curbing that freedom in general, even for people who are not abusing it to actively work towards harming other people.

throwaway45349 6y ago
Another problem is the term 'harm' (just like 'freedom of speech') has also been poisoned by those on the left who would have you believe words are more dangerous than actual violence. When actual discussions and conversations cannot take place under the guise of pretend harm, real violence happens. I do wholeheartedly believe the attack on the capitol is just the result of a disenfranchised part of the population who've been shit on and deplatformed for the last 4 years by the establishment (including Orange Man, FWIW).
- splistud 6y ago
  Well said
  - throwaway45349 6y ago
    Thank you.
- OniBait 6y ago
  What I find scary and disheartening is that people have to use throwaway accounts to even point this out.
  - throwaway45349 6y ago
    Using a throwaway for anything political is just safer. I can comfortably talk about this with friends or colleagues, but I wouldn't broadcast it to the whole world with my name attached.
- bitwize 6y ago
  If you do not believe that words cause actual harm, then you don't know anyone who's been in an emotionally abusive relationship. There is no shortage of women with PTSD from such relationships who've spent the past four years continuously triggered because Trump acted just like an abusive boyfriend or husband, and it was difficult to avoid him on the news or on social media.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- criddell 6y ago
  I wholeheartedly believe the attack on the capitol is the result of racism and hatred being spewed unchecked on Twitter and Facebook (and other smaller platforms). The loudness and accessibility of it worked to recruit susceptible people building a small group of angry people into a movement. If anything, the problem is that they weren't deplatformed early enough.

tesmar2 6y ago

Gab is doing great and growing like crazy. Edit: Downvoted for facts.

bonestamp2 6y ago
I guess some people may interpret "doing great" as an opinion and not a fact, although it depends on what you meant by that... it could be a fact.
willcipriano 6y ago
I don't know why you are being downvoted, from what I've read they have added a ton of users in the past few weeks. I think the Parler move is backfiring, prior to that it seemed like a battle between dozens of alt-social networks all trying to gain a foothold and after the Parler move it looks it everyone displaced from the traditional social media platforms has decided on Gab.

duxup 6y ago

The 'free speech platforms' almost always skew towards the extremest side (more so over time)and aren't anything about the benefits we think of when it comes to free speech, lots of ideas that can be discussed, and we can think about and learn from. I wonder how that can be avoided.

scohesc 6y ago
Unfortunately, I don't think it can be avoided - you can't have freedom of speech without having the worst of the worst be able to speak. I dislike the people that support facist, racist beliefs, but I 100% will defend their right to say such things. In my opinion, once you start talking about restricting speech, you get into the grey area - who decides what speech to restrict? Off the top of my head, the most "capable" organizations would be either: - The companies who run these glorified advertising platforms (which would regulate speech based on "how much money will we lose?"), or - a Governmental body (which by its nature has a monopoly on violence - "if you say something we don't like, your social credit score goes down and you can't leave the country or we throw you in jail"). I think freedom of speech is a very large part of what makes America distinctive from other countries. - Alternatively, we could have whoever the loudest complainers are control speech, which would be very reactionary - driven by misinformation or coordinated culture change campaigns(?) If the people with abhorrent opinions decide to start causing direct physical harm to people in reality - that's when police, government, etc. should step in and penalize them - not social media companies or governments, or the vocal minority determining what people should and shouldn't say.
- duxup 6y ago
  I worry less about having the worst of the worst speak, as it is platforms inevitably trend extreme as folks either drop off or are pushed out and the result is just a one sided platform without some heavy handed moderation. Here's I think the real issue, we make discussion platforms... people don't want to discuss. They just want to put up and push posters of what they believe. And we're surprised when things go wrong.
  - 6y ago

snarf21 6y ago

I think the main issue is that people expect free. And free means ads (unless some billionaire is going to fund it out of pocket). And ads means you can't have child porn and terrorism on your platform.

smackmybishop 6y ago
AWS is neither free nor ad-supported.
- MBCook 6y ago
  I believe they were talking about Parler, not who is hosting them. An issue they would run into in the future.
- echelon 6y ago
  AWS wouldn't exist if the web had been P2P. If YouTube was based on BitTorrent. If Facebook was based on Diaspora, Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, etc. If Messenger was based on Matrix. Centralized platforms make ad revenue, form moats, and become big business. Hosting isn't their core competency, so they outsource. Thus AWS.
  - warkdarrior 6y ago
    Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to do decentralized discovery/recommendation. Google Search centralizes discovery for the web, Facebook centralizes discovery for the social graph, YouTube centralizes discovery for the videos, Whatsapp centralizes discovery for chat.
  - evgen 6y ago
    Speaking as someone who was actually there, this is a delusional view of what might have been based more on fantasy than reality. The web _was_ P2P at the start, but it became centralized because that was more efficient and increased both value and communication. The original social networks (BBS and chat channels, Usenet, etc) _were_ distributed, but it turns out that this made them easy prey for parasitic and toxic actors and all of the available tools to prevent this imposed asymmetric costs on the recipients and did not scale at all. Distributed systems are easy, but making distributed communication systems not suck is incredibly hard. The Internet is a distributed system that was a lot better before all of you showed up and cast us into the hell of eternal September.

jorblumesea 6y ago

Good points but I'd go a bit farther and say that the same companies they are trying to remove influence from are the same companies they [parler] are becoming or will become. The idea that parler or gab is somehow "freer" or less censored than any other site seems untrue. They are more tolerant of a certain political identity and less tolerant of another one. It's just replacing their boogiemen with one of their own design.

bazooka_penguin 6y ago
Somewhat agree. These are ultimately politically reactionary platforms. Not making a value judgment, but they're clearly geared at winning over conservatives to their platforms and are intended to be platforms for right wingers. That may mean tolerating everyone else while they're growing and trying to gain clout but I can see that changing quickly once they have power.

julienb_sea 6y ago

I think the future of controversial speech is in closed, private groups on large platforms. Those fly under the radar and can escape public pressure, which has the side effect of easing pressure on Facebook to halt the "controversial" discussions. This is why violent protests will likely continue to be primarily organized on high profile platforms like Facebook.

jki275 6y ago
I have watched significant centrist websites go closed or semi-closed over the past two weeks, deleting or closing historical data, removing seo, disallowing public indexing, etc. So yes -- this is probably how it will go, it's already started.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  Which sites? Without any specifics you are just adding meaningless anecdotes and/or FUD.
  - jki275 6y ago
    Your belief or disbelief of my comment has no bearing on reality. I'm not interested in slaking your thirst for conservative blood to win fake internet points.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      Read up on the Fundamental Attribution Error and reread my post. I'm not coming after you in the way you think. I just said that your post was low signal. I neither said nor implied that I believe or disbelieve you. It's not a matter of belief at all, frankly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

richardARPANET 6y ago

Gab is great and will survive long into the future because users of the website pay to use it. Rather than being sold to advertisers. Value for value exchange. Look past the religious aspect and you'll see the content on there is much less toxic than on Twitter.

warkdarrior 6y ago

> The true future of free speech is through federated platforms/services similar to how email servers were back 20-25 years ago. Isn't the whole problem for Parler that no major providers will host their servers? How would federation help? You need a full P2P layer, fully decentralized, routed over Tor to prevent blocking by ISPs.

rodgerd 6y ago

> Parlers goal of being the alternate free speech platform is horrendously thought out. Parler's goal is whatever the billionaire Mercer family want it to be; presumably "Twitter for Brietbart readers", since that's another of their media properties.