27 ms·

Parler CEO says he was fired by board

304 points by mrzimmerman 6y ago

jimmydorry 6y ago
Not surprising, when your first and foremost duty as the headhoncho should be doing what you can to keep your site online. It's been almost a month that the site has been down for now. Yes, an outage should be expected when you get deplatformed at a network level... however they could not put up anything more than a status page in this time.
- rektide 6y ago
  Rebekah Mercer is done being embarrassed by you! (Reminder: she's the board that fired him.)
  - redwood 6y ago
    Do you realize who she is? If she's embarrassed by anything it's that he hasn't brought the site back to glory yet
    - minsc__and__boo 6y ago
      I'm convinced that Parler was a data grab. They ran the numbers and figured it would be cheaper to run a social media platform to attract their target constituents rather than try to scrape it (like they did with Cambridge Analytica) or attempt to buy it. Hence the ID requirements.
      - Applejinx 6y ago
        No, it was ideological, but also drew the attention and support of state actors not from THIS country. Like with Cambridge Analytica, in fact. The data grab aspect serves as a means of control and access into a LOT of American citizens who've given up their identities in order to serve an ideological purpose. They might not have been clear on exactly who was looking to overthrow the USA, but by the time they signed on they'd decided for their own reasons that was what they wanted, so it's not as much a data grab as a pipeline for terrorism. As much as the data is valuable, control of the people is more valuable.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- aahortwwy 6y ago
  I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event. That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.
  - rodgerd 6y ago
    Given that he initially represented that they had no real hard dependencies on AWS, I assume that the Mercers quickly lost patience when it became clear that they were locked into AWS, with no contingency.
    - chubs 6y ago
      Maybe the problem is that no other capable provider was willing to take them in?
      - rodgerd 6y ago
        In which case you'd need to moderate your content to match your providers' T&Cs, or you'd need to moderate your ambitions to match your choice of providers. But telling your owner that you can meet their desire to allow people to breach T&Cs, and that you can scale to the size of their ambitions, means you're either lying or don't understand the problem that you're solving.
    - edbob 6y ago
      It sounds like they had prepared to move from AWS to another mega-provider like GCP or Azure. The site is too large (and probably poorly optimized) to just spin up a few DO droplets.
      - dilyevsky 6y ago
        Going with another major scale cloud provider was definitely poor planning there
        6y ago
- paulpauper 6y ago
  I don't see it being offline as problem for now as long as it is getting media coverage and people are aware it exists.
- tootie 6y ago
  Not just the technical issues, he took no steps to prevent deplatforming. I'm reading between the lines but I'm assuming Mercer et al didn't actually care about free speech as much as they wanted a place to spread Trumpism.
- Qub3d 6y ago
  Oh, don't worry, they also managed to get the nginx default page up on their api domain: https://api.speak-free.com/ https://api.speak-free.com/ Really great technical work all around.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Good Lord.. I'm just a hobbyist and even I can do better than that
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Or maybe with the recent election results they're not even trying hard to get it back on, I guess
- rtkwe 6y ago
  From some of the reports it sounds like they'd outsourced tons of their infrastructure and account creation steps to SaaS groups so coming back means doing some major rewrites probably. Also having been on AWs they're probably scrambling to rewrite to remove all the AWS service hooks and setup new stacks.
- jariel 6y ago
  Imagine how many little SaaS services they depend on dumped them for spite. I don't care about Parler, but this is getting bad. Voted for that angry guy? Sorry, you're off my Contact Management platform and your business is frozen, while you try to recoup from being booted from those 12 other services. I think some regulation is probably in need.
spoonjim 6y ago
If you’re going to be the CEO of a terrorist propaganda site, your first job is keeping the site up. ISIS would have fired al-Baghdadi too if he couldn’t get his message out.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  The hyperbole here astounds me.
  - psyc 6y ago
    This is where someone helpfully lays out a step by step justification of how the words technically fit, if you squint from the right (left) angle.
  - rriepe 6y ago
    At least we have you here to bravely speak out against the new hate regime with your throwaway account.
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
      I get you, I just already had people try to come after my job because I was complaining in public...
      - rriepe 6y ago
        Yeah I regret the snark. Stay safe/employed.
- colesantiago 6y ago
  Gab.com is doing a great job at this.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Gab is holding on by a thread called cloudflare. I’m SURE there’s strong internal pressure from within cloudflare to drop them as well.
jakeadler 6y ago
I would be running from that sh*t show if I was him. He was given the opportunity to leave without embarrassent or harassment from the community.
koolba 6y ago
Was he the CTO as well? That’s who should really be fired (unless Matze hired the CTO in which case sack them both).
- rahimnathwani 6y ago
  It doesn't matter whether you hired someone or not. If they report to you it's your job to make them successful. Maybe you deserve some slack for the first 100 days, but after that it's irrelevant whether you hired them or inherited them from your predecessor.
- 0xy 6y ago
  The incompetence is really astounding, politics aside. If they were behind Cloudflare or another DDoS protection website, you wouldn't even be able to tell they were an AWS customer at all. That coupled with their multi-million dollar monthly infrastructure bill and I'm scratching my head. The site seems like it was built by outsourced lowest bidder contractors and they scaled by throwing blank checks at the problem.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    > If they were behind Cloudflare or another DDoS protection website, you wouldn't even be able to tell they were an AWS customer at all. This is non-sensical. AWS certainly knew they were a customer, and they were the ones that kicked them off. Plus, Cloudflare has deplatformed other customers before, don't think they would have wanted to touch Parler either.
    - dilyevsky 6y ago
      Cloudflare fronts gab without issues afaik. I agree with parent comment that if they didn’t parade it so much they could get away with it
      - redisman 6y ago
        And the .win sites. But those seem to have taken their warning to moderate seriously
aurizon 6y ago
Differing points of view. The UK model where you can stand in Hyde Park and speak your mind spread to speakers corners in many places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner You could speak, and it could be written down and hit the papers, where you were interviewed and reported - by an announcer/reporter.Then comes Radio - again a reporter/announcer, same with TV. In other words a chain of accountability where you could be assessed, and if deemed a criminal incitement there was accountability. Then the Internet and cellular message services, and you could become widely spread in an instant - your words beyond recall, and often anonymous. Even if they wanted to arrest you - they had no connection to you. They could kill your handle, and you could get another throwaway 100 times/day. You can get 100 lined up, with innocent handles and use each one once. We see how some countries completely shut down facebook and other internet data flow centers - harder to do in the USA, but when it gets so bad that the Capital was attacked and people killed it attracts a need to limit incitement. It used to be a masked man could not enter a bank - in Covid times it happens a lot. I expect there was a paralyzed board at Parler and when Matze could not make changes that the web hoster or other internet access controlling group, like AWS would accept and no acceptable other could not be found on terms that AWS would accept, and that Parler could also accept = he was toast. We may be involved in a sea change. The events that led to the riot and the riot itself were turning points.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  Speakers corner used to be an American belief but censorship is now in fashion.
  - burnte 6y ago
    No, it's not. Freedom of speech never came with a freedom from consequences, nor a guarantee to a broadcast platform. You're still free to stand on the corner with a "God hates fags" sign or a "kill democrats" sign.
    - kyran_adept 6y ago
      I am genuinely curious if do you see someone with a sign saying "Kill X" and someone just talking on the internet about undemocratic power change differently? If you see them differently, then why? The acts they are talking about are both crimes. My assumption is that: 1. Not everyone on Parler committed crimes in the physical world - eg. storm the Capitol, so that means that talking about something is not enough to make you break the law, 2. people that did commit crimes will be prosecuted and convicted on already existing laws.
ketamine__ 6y ago
Why didn't Rebekah Mercer put money into Gab instead?
- gkoberger 6y ago
  Because it's not really about free speech, it's about money and influence.
dnhz 6y ago
I wonder how much damage that disastrous interview with Kara Swisher did (for the site and for Matze). I have no sense of this. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-john-matze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...)
- burnte 6y ago
  Honestly, probably not much. Since day one they've been vocal about not policing any of the speech there. That's the selling point. I can't fathom anyone on the board not knowing that. It's more likely they felt, "you job is to keep the company going, and if that means policing speech, do it," and he failed.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > and if that means policing speech, do it After the data leak there should be zero trust in their name no matter what the moderation story is/was.
  - sgift 6y ago
    > vocal about not policing any of the speech there. It's also been a lie from day one. Parler policed things that didn't fit into their definition of free speech. Just like Twitter et al.
drummer 6y ago
Looks like free speech won't be returning to Parler. No use putting the site back up if basic principles are abandoned.
- pocw 6y ago
  Just so ya know, inciting violence is not protected speech.
  - berryjerry 6y ago
    Things like Trump saying "Be Peaceful" and also telling rioters to "Go Home" cause him to be banned and impeached. Just imagine what stretches they take to say a normal Parler user is inciting violence.
- burnte 6y ago
  Do you consider disallowing death threats and plans to commit violent acts and crimes an untenable affront to the right to free speech? That's why they were taken down, it really, REALLY wasn't about the political speech.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Have you been on twitter lately?
    - portpecos 6y ago
      Didn’t Kathy Griffin re-share her bloody beheaded Trump image a couple of months ago on Twitter?
      - 8note 6y ago
        Oh, she beheaded trump a couple monthssss ago? How was he giving speeches? Was it a hologram or something? Did they see his head back on?
- 6y ago
devwastaken 6y ago
Wow, they can't figure out how to colocate a server? There are plenty of companies that would love to be the hosting face of Parler and agree with its userbase.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  > There are plenty of companies that would love to be the hosting face of Parler and agree with its userbase. I don’t know if that’s really true. At least not in the Bay Area, which holds the lions share of internet companies from hosting to CDN. It’s actually remarkably hard to run any kind of website of note and not be at the mercy of some company based out of SV.
  - devwastaken 6y ago
    I know a variety of websites that operate on the level of petabytes a month that are similar to parler (4chan), or are big hosters of files that directly infringe many peoples copyright. Parler isn't even half bad compared to some of the hosted content on the rest of the clearnet. The reason this is possible is because of 1. Cloudflare for media content and 2. Colocation for everything else. I don't know of an instance of a T1 or T2 data center "deplatforming" any servers that weren't directly operating illigally and had to be told it was illigal by law enforcement. Perhaps individual companies that you contract with to get that data centers internet line, sure, but again there's plenty of companies that don't care who you are and/or like parler. I know of one in New York that offers very affordable pricing.
- fooey 6y ago
  No colo is going to touch them, because if they did whatever other existing business they had would leave. Which of course, is the real reason AWS turfed them, and no other cloud provider will pick them up. Not even Oracle, who are desperate for any cloud attention and were buddy buddy with Trump are taking Parler's calls.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    Oracle's more correctly buddy buddy with the US government, so obviously they ain't inclined to be welcoming of people who tried to interfere with said government.
motohagiography 6y ago
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 nobody making investments can afford cheap things. The irony is Parler positioned itself as less radical than Gab, and it was that very position of bargaining with its platforms is what killed it. How can 4chan, Gab, and the even darker parts of the internet manage to persist online with hardly any money, but someone with Mercer level backing can't keep a site online? The lesson is an example of things we already know, which is that anyone who needs platform permission do to a disruptive startup is already dead. We absolutely need alternative platforms, and our societies need tools that can survive popular histrionics. Getting owned by some sanctimonious prick at Amazon is not pro level play.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > our societies need tools that can survive popular histrionics. Getting owned by some sanctimonious prick at Amazon is not pro level play. Seems like banning communities that led directly to an insurrection in congress should be one of those tools, no? I mean, that part was a bit more than just "histrionics" by "sanctimonious pricks". I know you won't buy this because of the environment that we find ourselves in, but I assure you that those of us on the left care JUST AS MUCH about civil liberties and free speech as you do. We do. I swear it. We just don't think that forum moderation is really that much an infringement on them (I mean, you're posting this on a heavily moderated forum right now). And we're less willing to forgive or excuse the spillovers from speech into action that we've seen. No one who posted on Parler should be denied a voice on other forums. They just need to do so in places where they can't get away with calling for real violence.
  - 22c 6y ago
    A large amount of insurrection planning was performed in Facebook groups. If you're going to apply a standard, at least apply it fairly.
Triv888 6y ago
Give me Parler's software and I will host it in Russia... that's where USA's free speech usually come from anyways (free as in somewhat controversial, popular and still allowed). I think I say a lot of somewhat controversial things, but they let it fly because I am not popular.
- eganist 6y ago
  > Give me Parler's software and I will host it in Russia... that's where USA's free speech usually come from anyways (free as in somewhat controversial, popular and still allowed). Doubt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny
  - drivingmenuts 6y ago
    Russia only really has a problem with speech when it’s against them. People slagging the US is fine by them.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - visarga 6y ago
      Isn't it exactly the same with US? They would happily host any website critical of Russia's elite.
      - tolbish 6y ago
        It is not exactly the same. Being critical of Biden will not get you deplatformed. Supporting insurrections will. Those are not similar. Please vocalize your argument if you disagree.
        BlackFly 6y ago
        It is exactly the same: Armed insurrections planned on Twitter/Facebook in the middle east (the Arab Spring): widely celebrated in the USA. Armed insurrections planned on Parler/Gab in the USA: better shut those down completely. The distinction between these two is precisely political, the view on the legitimacy of the conversation is premised on whether you view the government as legitimate or not.
rdxm 6y ago
lol. if a tree falls in the forest......
jerrysievert 6y ago
> We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. 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. if this was truly their mission, then their platform was already doomed, and a full housecleaning of most of the leadership should probably be done, not just the CEO. I don't care what side of a political spectrum you come from, or whether you support the site's mission or what it became, these failures should be unacceptable in any company.
- newman314 6y ago
  FWIW, I recently found out that AirBnB now requires government id to be shared as verification after not having logged into AirBnB since 2014. I tried to delete my account but the option is not available or may be hidden behind the forced verification requirement.
  - johnisgood 6y ago
    That is so typical. My experience with Discord: I need to login to my account to be able to delete it, except what if I cannot log into it?! At first they disabled it, then I e-mailed them requesting them to delete my account, but all they did was a soft-delete, of course. All of the private messages are still there, etc. Even if I were to delete my account myself, it would still leave all my messages intact. I guess my definition of delete is different from theirs. They think delete = disable without saying it is disabled. Of course not being able to re-create the account with the same e-mail just further proves it. All that "delete account" does is remove your profile photo, change your nick, and disable your account, nothing more. I cannot even request them to delete all my private messages. I tried. They just do not give a shit.
    - oaiey 6y ago
      Who owns the message? The sender or receiver? That is a question that bugs me once in a while.
cphoover 6y ago
This is a big risk for cloud native applications sure they have the benefit of built-in fault tolerance and replication with many of their services, but good luck moving quickly to another provider when they shut you off.
- visarga 6y ago
  Should have bought and self-hosted their own servers and tunneled the traffic to a number of hosting providers. One click change. Like wearing replaceable armor.
- 8note 6y ago
  Well, good luck moving to another provider when no providers want to host your product
ChuckMcM 6y ago
I am not sad :-). But it is interesting in this day and age to just flat out terminate the CEO. It seems like most have a contract and firing them creates a exposure to risk. (hence all the negotiated exits). That makes me curious to know if he was working without a contract or they had a really solid 'for cause' case against him.
- skynet-9000 6y ago
  It looks to me like people who were not professional investors or immature executive leadership caught the tail of the tiger when they launched a passion project or activist platform and it took off. (To be clear, I wish it'd worked out, but they definitely need to step back and rebuild it properly, repay technical debt, and beg users for forgiveness.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
michaeleng 6y ago
Parler was poor quality because it was a product of extreme political grift. People who work in politics unfortunately don't understand the mindset of actually high quality products or services. What they're interested in is quick and loud splashes to attract a huge amount of attention, pull in a bunch of capital/resources, and then underdeliver in the extreme in the hopes that the attention of the crowd will move on and ignore the failures. This is of course a bipartisan trend, but as far as I can tell affects Republicans more. It was absurdly poorly run--literally on Wordpress with very little security and obviously no bug bounty program. They probably have never even heard of the concept of a bug bounty. All around disappointing. The next iteration, if it is to work at all, will require a complete mindset switch.
- jesterson 6y ago
  You can replace the word politics in your sentences with pretty much any field and statement will still be correct.
wellthisisgreat 6y ago
How can people fall for this trap of discussing Parler incident as a transgression of free speech? It was a vile specialized platform that fostered very particular anti-social, frequently murderous behavior. They had plenty of time to prove otherwise and they clearly did not care or did not want to. Now they poison the actually good idea of free speech with their infantile appeal. In theory and in practice they are on the wrong side of history and everyone involved is less and less redeemable as they try to flip the situation and present themselves as victims of oppression. Sure bad apples / users exist but calls for violence on Parler were systemic and we have proof now.
- bzb6 6y ago
  Ah, so free speech is only a good idea when you agree with it. I get it.
  - wellthisisgreat 6y ago
    No it’s only when it doesn’t involve calling for killing other people. This argument of yours doesn’t apply to calls for murder. Or you ok with people organizing to kill you specifically with “mah free speech” paradigm?
aaron695 6y ago
Very childish comments so far even for HN. The simultaneous attack from Google, Apple and Amazon was unprecedented. It should not have been planned for. The PirateBay for instance was slowly attacked at expected places with lots of warnings over years. The security issues were meh compared to other security breaches and even then normally no one would even care a few days later. Metadata was not removed for baby users and something published but deleted was still around.... Wasn't well moderated, back to children who weren't around on all the big sites at the the beginning. Youtube, Reddit, Twitter. The fact HN thinks this is all normal, that's scary. He was fired due to a war from a section of the population who didn't want any speech from that site online. Pick your reality I guess.
- throwaway19937 6y ago
  > The simultaneous attack from Google, Apple and Amazon was unprecedented. It should not have been planned for. The PirateBay for instance was slowly attacked at expected places with lots of warnings over years. AWS cut off Parler's service after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-v-amazon-web-services-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-...). It seems highly unlikely that they had a better relationship with either Google or Apple. > He was fired due to a war from a section of the population who didn't want any speech from that site online. Pick your reality I guess. Accountability ends at the top. Would you be happy with his performance if you were Rebekah Mercer? Replacing the CEO also makes it easier to try to build a relationship with another cloud service. Parler's CEO was lacking in at least the following areas: He didn't keep the site up - excuses don't matter when you're the CEO. He failed to keep service providers happy with Parler's content moderation. His public statements about moderation (see documents at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-amazon-web-services-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a... ) also made relationships with AWS, Apple, and Google much harder. The security issues didn't help with their reputation. I agree that other services have had comparable issues.
dormento 6y ago
There was a... board!?
Zigurd 6y ago
Discussions of right wing social media sites on HN are disturbingly sanitary. Before I posted this comment, the word "racism" appears one time among nearly 400 comments. "White supremacy" appeared only a handful of times. “Woman” or “women” appears nowhere in a discussion of a deeply misogynistic platform, movement, audience. Just as dark patterns, predatory business models, and enablement of antisocial behavior harm other product domains, Parler incubated a disease that spread to, and diminished the value of, other social media. If you cannot bring yourself to label bad things with forthright labels, you will not be able to keep them from damaging the value of what you create in technology.
- bearjaws 6y ago
  HN has a strong libertarian crowd, who would not agree with anything that impacts freedom of speech, even hate speech.
  - a_new_start1 6y ago
    Which is ironic, considering HN is one of the most heavily modded forums around.
unchocked 6y ago
Makes sense. I don't think the board ever intended Parler to be a business, but rather either a stick in the eye of contemporary culture or, as another poster put it, a data grab to identify their political constituency (see ID requirement).
molbioguy 6y ago
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.
- AntiImperialist 6y ago
  Only boneheaded libtards think that shutting down Parler was done for any other reason that for political one.
pcvarmint 6y ago
Dan Bongino's take (which does not reveal the whole story): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIiabMnQfzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIiabMnQfzk

304 points by mrzimmerman 6y ago

Not surprising, when your first and foremost duty as the headhoncho should be doing what you can to keep your site online. It's been almost a month that the site has been down for now. Yes, an outage should be expected when you get deplatformed at a network level... however they could not put up anything more than a status page in this time.

rektide 6y ago
Rebekah Mercer is done being embarrassed by you! (Reminder: she's the board that fired him.)
- redwood 6y ago
  Do you realize who she is? If she's embarrassed by anything it's that he hasn't brought the site back to glory yet
  - minsc__and__boo 6y ago
    I'm convinced that Parler was a data grab. They ran the numbers and figured it would be cheaper to run a social media platform to attract their target constituents rather than try to scrape it (like they did with Cambridge Analytica) or attempt to buy it. Hence the ID requirements.
    - Applejinx 6y ago
      No, it was ideological, but also drew the attention and support of state actors not from THIS country. Like with Cambridge Analytica, in fact. The data grab aspect serves as a means of control and access into a LOT of American citizens who've given up their identities in order to serve an ideological purpose. They might not have been clear on exactly who was looking to overthrow the USA, but by the time they signed on they'd decided for their own reasons that was what they wanted, so it's not as much a data grab as a pipeline for terrorism. As much as the data is valuable, control of the people is more valuable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aahortwwy 6y ago
I can think of plenty of SV darlings that would take far longer than a month to recover from such an event. That said, given the content Parler was hosting they really should've planned for something like this, so it makes sense to terminate the CEO.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  Given that he initially represented that they had no real hard dependencies on AWS, I assume that the Mercers quickly lost patience when it became clear that they were locked into AWS, with no contingency.
  - chubs 6y ago
    Maybe the problem is that no other capable provider was willing to take them in?
    - rodgerd 6y ago
      In which case you'd need to moderate your content to match your providers' T&Cs, or you'd need to moderate your ambitions to match your choice of providers. But telling your owner that you can meet their desire to allow people to breach T&Cs, and that you can scale to the size of their ambitions, means you're either lying or don't understand the problem that you're solving.
  - edbob 6y ago
    It sounds like they had prepared to move from AWS to another mega-provider like GCP or Azure. The site is too large (and probably poorly optimized) to just spin up a few DO droplets.
    - dilyevsky 6y ago
      Going with another major scale cloud provider was definitely poor planning there
      - 6y ago
paulpauper 6y ago
I don't see it being offline as problem for now as long as it is getting media coverage and people are aware it exists.
tootie 6y ago
Not just the technical issues, he took no steps to prevent deplatforming. I'm reading between the lines but I'm assuming Mercer et al didn't actually care about free speech as much as they wanted a place to spread Trumpism.
Qub3d 6y ago
Oh, don't worry, they also managed to get the nginx default page up on their api domain: https://api.speak-free.com/ https://api.speak-free.com/ Really great technical work all around.
- airstrike 6y ago
  Good Lord.. I'm just a hobbyist and even I can do better than that
raverbashing 6y ago
Or maybe with the recent election results they're not even trying hard to get it back on, I guess
rtkwe 6y ago
From some of the reports it sounds like they'd outsourced tons of their infrastructure and account creation steps to SaaS groups so coming back means doing some major rewrites probably. Also having been on AWs they're probably scrambling to rewrite to remove all the AWS service hooks and setup new stacks.
jariel 6y ago
Imagine how many little SaaS services they depend on dumped them for spite. I don't care about Parler, but this is getting bad. Voted for that angry guy? Sorry, you're off my Contact Management platform and your business is frozen, while you try to recoup from being booted from those 12 other services. I think some regulation is probably in need.

spoonjim 6y ago

If you’re going to be the CEO of a terrorist propaganda site, your first job is keeping the site up. ISIS would have fired al-Baghdadi too if he couldn’t get his message out.

throwaway3699 6y ago
The hyperbole here astounds me.
- psyc 6y ago
  This is where someone helpfully lays out a step by step justification of how the words technically fit, if you squint from the right (left) angle.
- rriepe 6y ago
  At least we have you here to bravely speak out against the new hate regime with your throwaway account.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    I get you, I just already had people try to come after my job because I was complaining in public...
    - rriepe 6y ago
      Yeah I regret the snark. Stay safe/employed.
colesantiago 6y ago
Gab.com is doing a great job at this.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Gab is holding on by a thread called cloudflare. I’m SURE there’s strong internal pressure from within cloudflare to drop them as well.

jakeadler 6y ago

I would be running from that sh*t show if I was him. He was given the opportunity to leave without embarrassent or harassment from the community.

koolba 6y ago

Was he the CTO as well? That’s who should really be fired (unless Matze hired the CTO in which case sack them both).

rahimnathwani 6y ago
It doesn't matter whether you hired someone or not. If they report to you it's your job to make them successful. Maybe you deserve some slack for the first 100 days, but after that it's irrelevant whether you hired them or inherited them from your predecessor.
0xy 6y ago
The incompetence is really astounding, politics aside. If they were behind Cloudflare or another DDoS protection website, you wouldn't even be able to tell they were an AWS customer at all. That coupled with their multi-million dollar monthly infrastructure bill and I'm scratching my head. The site seems like it was built by outsourced lowest bidder contractors and they scaled by throwing blank checks at the problem.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  > If they were behind Cloudflare or another DDoS protection website, you wouldn't even be able to tell they were an AWS customer at all. This is non-sensical. AWS certainly knew they were a customer, and they were the ones that kicked them off. Plus, Cloudflare has deplatformed other customers before, don't think they would have wanted to touch Parler either.
  - dilyevsky 6y ago
    Cloudflare fronts gab without issues afaik. I agree with parent comment that if they didn’t parade it so much they could get away with it
    - redisman 6y ago
      And the .win sites. But those seem to have taken their warning to moderate seriously

aurizon 6y ago

Differing points of view. The UK model where you can stand in Hyde Park and speak your mind spread to speakers corners in many places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner You could speak, and it could be written down and hit the papers, where you were interviewed and reported - by an announcer/reporter.Then comes Radio - again a reporter/announcer, same with TV. In other words a chain of accountability where you could be assessed, and if deemed a criminal incitement there was accountability. Then the Internet and cellular message services, and you could become widely spread in an instant - your words beyond recall, and often anonymous. Even if they wanted to arrest you - they had no connection to you. They could kill your handle, and you could get another throwaway 100 times/day. You can get 100 lined up, with innocent handles and use each one once. We see how some countries completely shut down facebook and other internet data flow centers - harder to do in the USA, but when it gets so bad that the Capital was attacked and people killed it attracts a need to limit incitement. It used to be a masked man could not enter a bank - in Covid times it happens a lot. I expect there was a paralyzed board at Parler and when Matze could not make changes that the web hoster or other internet access controlling group, like AWS would accept and no acceptable other could not be found on terms that AWS would accept, and that Parler could also accept = he was toast. We may be involved in a sea change. The events that led to the riot and the riot itself were turning points.

dkdk8283 6y ago
Speakers corner used to be an American belief but censorship is now in fashion.
- burnte 6y ago
  No, it's not. Freedom of speech never came with a freedom from consequences, nor a guarantee to a broadcast platform. You're still free to stand on the corner with a "God hates fags" sign or a "kill democrats" sign.
  - kyran_adept 6y ago
    I am genuinely curious if do you see someone with a sign saying "Kill X" and someone just talking on the internet about undemocratic power change differently? If you see them differently, then why? The acts they are talking about are both crimes. My assumption is that: 1. Not everyone on Parler committed crimes in the physical world - eg. storm the Capitol, so that means that talking about something is not enough to make you break the law, 2. people that did commit crimes will be prosecuted and convicted on already existing laws.

ketamine__ 6y ago

Why didn't Rebekah Mercer put money into Gab instead?

gkoberger 6y ago
Because it's not really about free speech, it's about money and influence.

dnhz 6y ago

I wonder how much damage that disastrous interview with Kara Swisher did (for the site and for Matze). I have no sense of this. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-john-matze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...)

burnte 6y ago
Honestly, probably not much. Since day one they've been vocal about not policing any of the speech there. That's the selling point. I can't fathom anyone on the board not knowing that. It's more likely they felt, "you job is to keep the company going, and if that means policing speech, do it," and he failed.
- visarga 6y ago
  > and if that means policing speech, do it After the data leak there should be zero trust in their name no matter what the moderation story is/was.
- sgift 6y ago
  > vocal about not policing any of the speech there. It's also been a lie from day one. Parler policed things that didn't fit into their definition of free speech. Just like Twitter et al.

drummer 6y ago

Looks like free speech won't be returning to Parler. No use putting the site back up if basic principles are abandoned.

pocw 6y ago
Just so ya know, inciting violence is not protected speech.
- berryjerry 6y ago
  Things like Trump saying "Be Peaceful" and also telling rioters to "Go Home" cause him to be banned and impeached. Just imagine what stretches they take to say a normal Parler user is inciting violence.
burnte 6y ago
Do you consider disallowing death threats and plans to commit violent acts and crimes an untenable affront to the right to free speech? That's why they were taken down, it really, REALLY wasn't about the political speech.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Have you been on twitter lately?
  - portpecos 6y ago
    Didn’t Kathy Griffin re-share her bloody beheaded Trump image a couple of months ago on Twitter?
    - 8note 6y ago
      Oh, she beheaded trump a couple monthssss ago? How was he giving speeches? Was it a hologram or something? Did they see his head back on?
6y ago

devwastaken 6y ago

Wow, they can't figure out how to colocate a server? There are plenty of companies that would love to be the hosting face of Parler and agree with its userbase.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> There are plenty of companies that would love to be the hosting face of Parler and agree with its userbase. I don’t know if that’s really true. At least not in the Bay Area, which holds the lions share of internet companies from hosting to CDN. It’s actually remarkably hard to run any kind of website of note and not be at the mercy of some company based out of SV.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  I know a variety of websites that operate on the level of petabytes a month that are similar to parler (4chan), or are big hosters of files that directly infringe many peoples copyright. Parler isn't even half bad compared to some of the hosted content on the rest of the clearnet. The reason this is possible is because of 1. Cloudflare for media content and 2. Colocation for everything else. I don't know of an instance of a T1 or T2 data center "deplatforming" any servers that weren't directly operating illigally and had to be told it was illigal by law enforcement. Perhaps individual companies that you contract with to get that data centers internet line, sure, but again there's plenty of companies that don't care who you are and/or like parler. I know of one in New York that offers very affordable pricing.
fooey 6y ago
No colo is going to touch them, because if they did whatever other existing business they had would leave. Which of course, is the real reason AWS turfed them, and no other cloud provider will pick them up. Not even Oracle, who are desperate for any cloud attention and were buddy buddy with Trump are taking Parler's calls.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Oracle's more correctly buddy buddy with the US government, so obviously they ain't inclined to be welcoming of people who tried to interfere with said government.

motohagiography 6y ago

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 nobody making investments can afford cheap things. The irony is Parler positioned itself as less radical than Gab, and it was that very position of bargaining with its platforms is what killed it. How can 4chan, Gab, and the even darker parts of the internet manage to persist online with hardly any money, but someone with Mercer level backing can't keep a site online? The lesson is an example of things we already know, which is that anyone who needs platform permission do to a disruptive startup is already dead. We absolutely need alternative platforms, and our societies need tools that can survive popular histrionics. Getting owned by some sanctimonious prick at Amazon is not pro level play.

newacct583 6y ago
> our societies need tools that can survive popular histrionics. Getting owned by some sanctimonious prick at Amazon is not pro level play. Seems like banning communities that led directly to an insurrection in congress should be one of those tools, no? I mean, that part was a bit more than just "histrionics" by "sanctimonious pricks". I know you won't buy this because of the environment that we find ourselves in, but I assure you that those of us on the left care JUST AS MUCH about civil liberties and free speech as you do. We do. I swear it. We just don't think that forum moderation is really that much an infringement on them (I mean, you're posting this on a heavily moderated forum right now). And we're less willing to forgive or excuse the spillovers from speech into action that we've seen. No one who posted on Parler should be denied a voice on other forums. They just need to do so in places where they can't get away with calling for real violence.
- 22c 6y ago
  A large amount of insurrection planning was performed in Facebook groups. If you're going to apply a standard, at least apply it fairly.

Triv888 6y ago

Give me Parler's software and I will host it in Russia... that's where USA's free speech usually come from anyways (free as in somewhat controversial, popular and still allowed). I think I say a lot of somewhat controversial things, but they let it fly because I am not popular.

eganist 6y ago
> Give me Parler's software and I will host it in Russia... that's where USA's free speech usually come from anyways (free as in somewhat controversial, popular and still allowed). Doubt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny
- drivingmenuts 6y ago
  Russia only really has a problem with speech when it’s against them. People slagging the US is fine by them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - visarga 6y ago
    Isn't it exactly the same with US? They would happily host any website critical of Russia's elite.
    - tolbish 6y ago
      It is not exactly the same. Being critical of Biden will not get you deplatformed. Supporting insurrections will. Those are not similar. Please vocalize your argument if you disagree.
      - BlackFly 6y ago
        It is exactly the same: Armed insurrections planned on Twitter/Facebook in the middle east (the Arab Spring): widely celebrated in the USA. Armed insurrections planned on Parler/Gab in the USA: better shut those down completely. The distinction between these two is precisely political, the view on the legitimacy of the conversation is premised on whether you view the government as legitimate or not.

rdxm 6y ago

lol. if a tree falls in the forest......

jerrysievert 6y ago

> We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. 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. if this was truly their mission, then their platform was already doomed, and a full housecleaning of most of the leadership should probably be done, not just the CEO. I don't care what side of a political spectrum you come from, or whether you support the site's mission or what it became, these failures should be unacceptable in any company.

newman314 6y ago
FWIW, I recently found out that AirBnB now requires government id to be shared as verification after not having logged into AirBnB since 2014. I tried to delete my account but the option is not available or may be hidden behind the forced verification requirement.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  That is so typical. My experience with Discord: I need to login to my account to be able to delete it, except what if I cannot log into it?! At first they disabled it, then I e-mailed them requesting them to delete my account, but all they did was a soft-delete, of course. All of the private messages are still there, etc. Even if I were to delete my account myself, it would still leave all my messages intact. I guess my definition of delete is different from theirs. They think delete = disable without saying it is disabled. Of course not being able to re-create the account with the same e-mail just further proves it. All that "delete account" does is remove your profile photo, change your nick, and disable your account, nothing more. I cannot even request them to delete all my private messages. I tried. They just do not give a shit.
  - oaiey 6y ago
    Who owns the message? The sender or receiver? That is a question that bugs me once in a while.

cphoover 6y ago

This is a big risk for cloud native applications sure they have the benefit of built-in fault tolerance and replication with many of their services, but good luck moving quickly to another provider when they shut you off.

visarga 6y ago
Should have bought and self-hosted their own servers and tunneled the traffic to a number of hosting providers. One click change. Like wearing replaceable armor.
8note 6y ago
Well, good luck moving to another provider when no providers want to host your product

ChuckMcM 6y ago

I am not sad :-). But it is interesting in this day and age to just flat out terminate the CEO. It seems like most have a contract and firing them creates a exposure to risk. (hence all the negotiated exits). That makes me curious to know if he was working without a contract or they had a really solid 'for cause' case against him.

skynet-9000 6y ago
It looks to me like people who were not professional investors or immature executive leadership caught the tail of the tiger when they launched a passion project or activist platform and it took off. (To be clear, I wish it'd worked out, but they definitely need to step back and rebuild it properly, repay technical debt, and beg users for forgiveness.)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

michaeleng 6y ago

Parler was poor quality because it was a product of extreme political grift. People who work in politics unfortunately don't understand the mindset of actually high quality products or services. What they're interested in is quick and loud splashes to attract a huge amount of attention, pull in a bunch of capital/resources, and then underdeliver in the extreme in the hopes that the attention of the crowd will move on and ignore the failures. This is of course a bipartisan trend, but as far as I can tell affects Republicans more. It was absurdly poorly run--literally on Wordpress with very little security and obviously no bug bounty program. They probably have never even heard of the concept of a bug bounty. All around disappointing. The next iteration, if it is to work at all, will require a complete mindset switch.

jesterson 6y ago
You can replace the word politics in your sentences with pretty much any field and statement will still be correct.

wellthisisgreat 6y ago

How can people fall for this trap of discussing Parler incident as a transgression of free speech? It was a vile specialized platform that fostered very particular anti-social, frequently murderous behavior. They had plenty of time to prove otherwise and they clearly did not care or did not want to. Now they poison the actually good idea of free speech with their infantile appeal. In theory and in practice they are on the wrong side of history and everyone involved is less and less redeemable as they try to flip the situation and present themselves as victims of oppression. Sure bad apples / users exist but calls for violence on Parler were systemic and we have proof now.

bzb6 6y ago
Ah, so free speech is only a good idea when you agree with it. I get it.
- wellthisisgreat 6y ago
  No it’s only when it doesn’t involve calling for killing other people. This argument of yours doesn’t apply to calls for murder. Or you ok with people organizing to kill you specifically with “mah free speech” paradigm?

aaron695 6y ago

Very childish comments so far even for HN. The simultaneous attack from Google, Apple and Amazon was unprecedented. It should not have been planned for. The PirateBay for instance was slowly attacked at expected places with lots of warnings over years. The security issues were meh compared to other security breaches and even then normally no one would even care a few days later. Metadata was not removed for baby users and something published but deleted was still around.... Wasn't well moderated, back to children who weren't around on all the big sites at the the beginning. Youtube, Reddit, Twitter. The fact HN thinks this is all normal, that's scary. He was fired due to a war from a section of the population who didn't want any speech from that site online. Pick your reality I guess.

throwaway19937 6y ago
> The simultaneous attack from Google, Apple and Amazon was unprecedented. It should not have been planned for. The PirateBay for instance was slowly attacked at expected places with lots of warnings over years. AWS cut off Parler's service after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-v-amazon-web-services-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-...). It seems highly unlikely that they had a better relationship with either Google or Apple. > He was fired due to a war from a section of the population who didn't want any speech from that site online. Pick your reality I guess. Accountability ends at the top. Would you be happy with his performance if you were Rebekah Mercer? Replacing the CEO also makes it easier to try to build a relationship with another cloud service. Parler's CEO was lacking in at least the following areas: He didn't keep the site up - excuses don't matter when you're the CEO. He failed to keep service providers happy with Parler's content moderation. His public statements about moderation (see documents at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-amazon-web-services-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a... ) also made relationships with AWS, Apple, and Google much harder. The security issues didn't help with their reputation. I agree that other services have had comparable issues.

dormento 6y ago

There was a... board!?

Zigurd 6y ago

Discussions of right wing social media sites on HN are disturbingly sanitary. Before I posted this comment, the word "racism" appears one time among nearly 400 comments. "White supremacy" appeared only a handful of times. “Woman” or “women” appears nowhere in a discussion of a deeply misogynistic platform, movement, audience. Just as dark patterns, predatory business models, and enablement of antisocial behavior harm other product domains, Parler incubated a disease that spread to, and diminished the value of, other social media. If you cannot bring yourself to label bad things with forthright labels, you will not be able to keep them from damaging the value of what you create in technology.

bearjaws 6y ago
HN has a strong libertarian crowd, who would not agree with anything that impacts freedom of speech, even hate speech.
- a_new_start1 6y ago
  Which is ironic, considering HN is one of the most heavily modded forums around.

unchocked 6y ago

Makes sense. I don't think the board ever intended Parler to be a business, but rather either a stick in the eye of contemporary culture or, as another poster put it, a data grab to identify their political constituency (see ID requirement).

molbioguy 6y ago

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.

AntiImperialist 6y ago
Only boneheaded libtards think that shutting down Parler was done for any other reason that for political one.

pcvarmint 6y ago

Dan Bongino's take (which does not reveal the whole story): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIiabMnQfzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIiabMnQfzk