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Parler shuts down as new owner says conservative platform needs big revamp
- csubj 3y ago[flagged]
- wpietri 3y agoIt turns out Mark Twain didn't say the quote that I was thinking of. Instead, it was Clarence Darrow who wrote the original version: "All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."
- unsupp0rted 3y agoI'd wager not all men. I have never read an obituary notice with great satisfaction and I hope I never do. Some men realize that life is fleeting, there is no good and evil, and when things go badly enough with someone all you can do is shrug and walk away. Violence doesn't help (unless you're a nation-state) and, for me at least, there's no relief nor joy in vengeance. Revenge is a dish best not served.
- fooster 3y ago"there is no good and evil" That is a very very strange sentiment. There certainly are good and evil people. There certainly are good and evil acts.
- mjr00 3y ago> There certainly are good and evil people. An extremely small percentage of people throughout history have been purely good or purely evil. The vast, vast majority are somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, too many adults have been raised by Marvel movies and want to label everyone in the world as "good" or "evil" with no nuance.
- scottLobster 3y agoThe argument put forth isn't that there's a spectrum of good and evil, it's that good and evil don't exist. Presumably along the naturalist lines that we're all just animals doing animal things and morality is a useless fictional construct. An idea I find rather naive.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWhat is the measure of an idea though?
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThe measure of ideas are whatever people can be convinced they are. The trick is to make it sound like it's not you that's saying it. We launder it through God, society, reality, and it comes out sparkling clean to everyone who's gullible enough to believe it. It's a trick, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
- ryandvm 3y agoYou lay it out so nicely and then rebut with "nah"?
- scottLobster 3y agoI'd argue that it's a form of nihilism, and that nihilism itself is at best benign and at worst destructive. You can't build a functioning society or legal code based on "good and evil don't exist, we're all just animals". Even acknowledging that partial truth you eventually have to choose a subjective value system to make moral decisions. Perhaps it's a somewhat useful perspective in evolutionary science/research, but that's as far as it goes. I wouldn't recommend it as a life philosophy unless you just want to be an ascetic hermit, and there's a reason ascetic hermits are viewed as more zoo animals than anyone of importance, and they aren't very common or influential. Not that a true ascetic would care, their entire existence is eating their own tails to feel superior.
- Tr3nton 3y ago[dead]
- theredfury 3y agoI believe this is known as ethical subjectivism and it’s not entirely uncommon. What you’re expressing is ethical objectivism. Both are fine and common viewpoints, but I’m not sure it’s accurate to express either with complete and utter certainty. Hopefully someone with more depth in the matter can correct me or add color.
- TexanFeller 3y agoI'd agree there is no good and evil in the sense that we don't have any universal agreed upon secular principles to base our morals/ethics on. There are exceptions to almost moral rule you can imagine.
- gdulli 3y agohttps://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://nitter.net/dril/status/473265809079693312
- fghsqwads 3y agoThe morals and their exceptions are all people's opinions, and we now live in times where it's practically an act of courage to bother making a fucking decision on whether or not XYZ is morally okay. The bug-brained stance is to just agree with moral relativism. "Oh gosh stealing/assault/murder is okay if you're poor," etc. Fuck that shit.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI think that depends on your view of evil. One could conceptualize it as the absence of good. It's a subtle distinction, but its implications are far reaching.
- ASalazarMX 3y agoThat would be a strange definition. Good is deliberately helping others, evil is deliberately harming others. If no one helped others, but also didn't harm them, life would be still be much better without people doing evil things. For example, no volunteer would clean a beach of other's trash, but also no visitor would pollute the beach intentionally.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago> evil is deliberately harming others Oh I can think of plenty of evil acts that don't involve deliberately harming others. But at the end of the day the evil-doer doesn't think they're evil and nothing I say will convince them otherwise. And indeed I can't be sure they're an evil person or a person merely committing evil acts or a person committing neutral acts that seem evil to me. All I can be sure of is that I don't want or need to be around them. It does me no good to hate them or revel in their misfortune. I can be relieved when they stop doing whatever was objectionable to me though.
- ASalazarMX 3y agoYes, there are plenty of edge cases to philosophize about, but for the overwhelming majority of situations, if you intentionally harm others, you're being evil, regardless of how you rationalize it. This implies that everyone is both evil and good to some degree. Even if you debate the edge cases forever, most of the situations where significant harm was purposefully done would be clearly evil.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago> evil is deliberately harming others I don't think this definition of evil survives the trolley problem.
- vernon99 3y agoGood and evil are constructs in the realms of morals and ethics, which are also constructs produced by society. And so on. If you continue delving into these constructs, you will discover that the only ultimate truth is your firsthand emotional, physical, and mental experience. Yes, you can map these manifestations to those end-of-the-chain constructs, but does it make them true or real? Or are they merely your personal, fuzzy classifications based on your experience and programming? Viewed from this perspective, there is neither evil nor good indeed.
- rwmj 3y agoThat's an absurdly reductionist viewpoint. You might as well say there are no people, only particular groups of molecules that can be fuzzily classified into humans.
- vernon99 3y agoIt's reductionist, but what makes you say "absurdly"? It's a matter of personal choice which viewpoint to use, and I was just commenting on the original point and the viewpoint provided. I personally find this reductionism quite helpful in seeing through these layers of constructs and making it my own choice which ones to adopt, rather than simply accepting them all as given. Edit: typos
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agosubjectiveness across a large enough populace constitutes morality*, as much as those non-conformists may object * "according to who?" you may ask: well, according to the populace, ultimately the only measure that matters
- fzeroracer 3y agoViewed from this perspective, reality itself is subjective. Math doesn't exist, neither does physics or anything else we assume grounds us in reality. It's a rejection of common reality and not worth engaging with because it's an argumentative dead end.
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- MattPalmer1086 3y agoGood and evil are subjective judgements. They do not objectively exist. One person's good is another person's evil.
- nateb2022 3y agoI would beg to differ. One person's good is another person's evil. It would appear you are falsely equivocating benefit (which is indeed, subjective) with good; it therefore follows that you also equivocate injury with evil. While indeed, something beneficial is often considered "good," this does not imply that all good consists in benefit, or that all benefit is inherently good. It would be evil, for instance, for one to benefit by exploiting another. Contrariwise, their mutual co-operation would be good and result in their mutual benefit. The distribution[0] of your major and minor terms is of great importance when reasoning upon matters as grave as a system of objective morality. One may benefit from good or evil actions. To equivocate between good and benefit in toto is to possess a fundamentally mistaken idea of the principles of objective morality. In so doing, you do not reject objective morality, but rather your misunderstanding thereof. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_proposition#Distributivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_proposition#Distri...
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoThank you, that was illuminating. I was not in fact saying that good must always involve benefit and evil injury. It is obvious that acts which some will categorise as evil can provide benefit, and vice versa. I was merely saying that there is no objective definition of good and evil independent of human judgement and people do differ in how they ascribe those labels.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago> there is no good and evil > Revenge is a dish best not served. If the first statement is true, then you have no basis for saying the second. I believe the second statement, not the first.
- moolcool 3y agoI used to think that revenge was a dish best served cold, but then I learned that it means "getting back at someone".
- RangerScience 3y agoDargo taught me that revenge is best served immediately!
- TexanFeller 3y agoViolence and revenge are useful tools in many environments. The advantages they provide are why evolution made them prominent in our nature and pretending otherwise instead of accounting for it seems unwise. Our primate cousins famously practice war, genocide, infanticide etc.
- donatj 3y agoViolence in most cases just begets more violence. It's really not a very useful tool. No one's opinion was changed because you injured them or their friends.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoA big chunk of what evolution programmed me to do is counter-productive at best
- scottLobster 3y agoSomeone who says there's no good and evil has never experienced the presence of evil. That's a form of privilege that rarely gets discussed. There are some people the world is objectively better off without. The issue of course is who gets to decide that, and under what circumstances. But there's no denying that violence, properly applied, can solve many problems very efficiently. I was quite relieved when Rush Limbaugh died, for example. I will feel a great deal of relief when Putin and Xi eventually kick the bucket. I feel no need to piss on their graves, but only because I have better things to do.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> There are some people the world is objectively better off without. “Better” is always subjective, so this is false. > The issue of course is who gets to decide that This is an issue exactly because better is always subjective.
- scottLobster 3y agoIf you zoom out far enough reality itself is logically subjective. And you can sit still and starve yourself secure in the knowledge that you have logically derived truth and you're not actually hungry, it's just a bunch of chemical signals that signify nothing of importance. From a more practical perspective, we can all agree that there are more and less desirable states of human life, and that is the context where the term "objectively" is used in common parlance. I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 3y ago> If you zoom out far enough reality itself is logically subjective Maybe, but value is subjective even when you zoom in. > I reject your nihilism and substitute my subjective values as a superior model. I never expressed nihilism, I stated that values are subjective, and describing them as objective is incorrect and obscures the source of the practical problem you yourself described with implementing them.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago> Revenge is a dish best not served. But the quote isn't talking about revenge, it's talking about schadenfreude.
- jfengel 3y agowhen things go badly enough with someone all you can do is shrug and walk away Unfortunately, some people can't shrug and walk away. You can't walk away from racism; you carry your face with you. You can't walk away from an abusive home if you have no money. You can't shrug off the next blow when you're a victim of violence. Being able to shrug and walk away is an ability to be treasured. Not everybody has it.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoI have walked away from racism on multiple occasions. Obviously if someone is actively striking you or detaining you that's a different category, which is well outside the context of my comment.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoLet's not be disingenuous. I'm sure you understood what was meant.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoI guess I didn't understand what was meant. When I encountered problems based purely on my physical characteristics / ethnicity / nationality I was very upset and my response was to give up and go home for the day. I didn't try to harm the other person and I wouldn't have wanted them harmed. But nobody ever beat me with a baseball bat. That's a different category of racism that I haven't commented on and that obviously is different from the topic at hand.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoFair enough. As a black person living in America, let me offer my interpretation of GP's statement, then. You can't walk away from racism, because it's always there. It will follow you whether you want it to or not. It's pervasive to the point that even if it's not immediately visible, you can rely on it to surface sooner or later. Your options are either to exit society altogether or learn to live with it. It doesn't require being beaten with a baseball bat for racism to have a significant impact on your life.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoI felt the same way about twitter before Musk
- cplusplusfellow 3y agoSo you dislike when people with whom you may not entirely agree have a voice, yeah? That’s cute.
- kgwxd 3y agoYeah everyone, just shut up and let these people express their opinions by making laws against basic human rights, telling you what's best for you and your children, violently attacking you, marrying 12 year olds, and destroying democracy at ever turn. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Except you of course, you're not allowed to defend yourself.
- wpietri 3y agoI get why people build straw men. It saves them from having to deal with complexities; they get the pure feeling of being right. But I think it's especially ridiculous in this context. What's the point of supposedly being strongly for free speech if you're not going to listen to what anybody's actually saying?
- slg 3y agoWith Musk now in charge of Twitter, there is less of a reason a platform like Parler needs to exist.
- bmarquez 3y agoThe types of people who used Parler went to Gab, since Gab has stayed consistently online the last few years.
- Pxtl 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eldritch_4ier 3y ago[flagged]
- Pxtl 3y agoWest literally got banned for posting a swastika. Parler rejected his attempt to buy the platform because of his comments praising Hitler. He embarrassed Trump by bringing Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier to dinner. I mean, the guy is obviously mentally unwell and this has gotten him hoodwinked into a very awful subculture. But still, what would you call that? See also Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, another guy unbanned by Musk, in his own words: > The goal is to ethnically cleanse White nations of non-Whites and establish an authoritarian government.
- jakear 3y agoIt was not a Swastica, it was a blending of a Swastica and a Star of David, accompanied with a "can't we just all have love for one another" message. You may disagree with that, but it's disingenuous to misrepresent the facts to buttress your argument against him. Any decent argument ought to be able to be presented without the use of lies and deceit.
- aristus 3y agoThe acquirer / euthanasia specialist is called "Starboard" ie, the right-hand side of a ship. Snerk.
- fsckboy 3y agoit's the side of the ship with the steering; the other side, port, was pulled up to the dock to keep "the steerboard" out of the way.
- danpalmer 3y ago[flagged]
- polygamous_bat 3y agoJust on HN I have seen _so many_ claims of "I could rewrite Twitter in a weekend, what were the 5,000 engineers doing, laying off 75% of the employees was the obvious choice." Apparently, that's not so obvious, huh.
- Pxtl 3y agoI mean you don't have to write it, most of these are just defederated Mastodons with the serial numbers filed off. The problem is that once you've got your private Twitter, it's still expensive and tedious to run for very little benefit other than stoking your own ego.
- shadowgovt 3y agoWarhol's quote was only partially correct. Forget fifteen minutes of fame... In the future, everyone can afford to be their own William Randolph Hearst.
- danpalmer 3y ago> I mean you don't have to write it, most of these are just defederated Mastodons ... still expensive and tedious Exactly this. Mastodon depends on relatively small instances federated together to scale, if you tried to run every current Mastodon user on a single instance it would fall over regardless of how much compute you throw at it. As the network grows it becomes exponentially harder to make it all work. Also, while Mastodon is fine for early adopter use, it's much slower than Twitter and relatively unreliable.
- kgwxd 3y agoCouldn't one entity just run a bunch of small instances and federate them all together?
- dylan604 3y agoFTA: Parler sold to firm that says conservative Twitter clone isn't a "viable business." apparently, neither is Twitter! so it looks like they got that part of the clone right
- gjsman-1000 3y agoWell... then what did they buy it for? I wonder if "using data gained from Parler for advertising" is a viable business...?
- shadowgovt 3y agoNot to be a conspiracy nut, but "Putting the kind of folks who would go out of their way to be on this site on an FBI watchlist" is also a viable business when you're the government and it's your business to track such people. Olympic media is based out of Arlington, VA. (Note: No, I don't actually think this is the FBI using government funds to buy a social media site just to know who was using the site. I'm just having fun making up a conspiracy web from whole-cloth).
- kgwxd 3y agoIt's also a viable business if that business needs grunts willing to do the types of things that would land them on the FBI watchlist.
- fsckboy 3y agothe subhead is a misquote (as headlines often are), they actually said "No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more" and goes on to say "While the Parler app as it is currently constituted will be pulled down from operation to undergo a strategic assessment, we at Starboard see tremendous opportunities across multiple sectors to continue to serve marginalized or even outright censored communities—even extending beyond domestic politics,"
- whiplash451 3y agoIf Elon was able to bring Twitter to break even in a few months, there are reasons to believe he could make it profitable with a bit more time.
- paulpauper 3y agoTwitter + Truth Social made Parler obsolete.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoTwitter is now the Conservative twitter
- fm2606 3y ago> Analytics firm SimilarWeb says Parler's website had 851,000 visits on desktop and mobile in the past month. In October, TechCrunch reported that Parler had 250,000 monthly active users on its iOS and Android apps How does an outside entity get this type of data?
- jaredtking 3y agoBuying data panels of web browsing history from web browser extensions is one technique that is possible.
- tartuffe78 3y agoDisgruntled employees, estimates based on traffic to/from other websites, analytics from advertisers.
- Analemma_ 3y agoIf either the website or the mobile apps use any one of a large number of ads libraries or analytics toolkits, they get the data which is then packaged and sold.
- humanistbot 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Similarweb#Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Similarweb#Technology
- all2 3y agoAbout 850k monthly unique visitors to their website and 250k mobile users. Parler declined Ye's purchase offer after Ye said positive things about Hitler. Parler declined a 40% stake from Trump after Jan 6, 21. The purchaser is Starboard, formerly known as "Olympic Media".
- LegitShady 3y ago>Parler declined a 40% stake from Trump after Jan 6, 21. It doesn't sound like trump offered - it sounds like parler offered and trump didn't accept, since parler wanted exclusivity, and negotiations (which can mean anything) ended after january 6th. https://www.businessinsider.com/parler-trump-organization-40-percent-ownership-deal-talks-ethics-concerns-2021-2?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/parler-trump-organization-40... Its also not clear if Kanye was being talked into buying it or he was the origin of that idea - I don't want to make assumptions. A lot of people might be looking to take advantage of an ultra rich person with serious mental health issues. It feels more like the people who built parler weren't making any money and wanted to wash their hands of it with anyone who had enough money to interest them in selling.
- gumby 3y agoI don't understand. I seriously doubt they paid for the company and only then learned it was worthless. Why buy something and then shut it down because it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up? Why not just build from the ground up and launch the new thing without paying someone for the dead business? Do they think the brand name will be worth something when the new thing is built?
- LegitShady 3y agomaybe they paid so little they were really only interested in the customer data?
- gumby 3y agoAhhh, thanks! I hadn't thought of that as I'm not the kind of person who wants customer data (and I try to block others from collecting mine).
- CamperBob2 3y agoExactly. Trump's success at grifting showed that the audience at sites like Parler was made up of (mostly) older people with either substantial disposable income or a combination of fixed income and poor decision-making skills. That's money in the bank to conservative fundraisers.
- yamtaddle 3y agoReading between the lines, if they're gonna do anything with the data other than sell it as donor lists, the last bit of the article suggests it'll have something to do with AI—I could see this being useful for training certain kinds of propaganda AI (especially training it to strike the right tone and content to get high positive engagement from a certain audience), or, relatedly, donation-request-copywriting AI (get a profile of the potential donor, tune your message to that person specifically to maximize likelihood of donation, that kind of thing)
- pooper 3y ago
- jrochkind1 3y ago> Parler sold to firm that says conservative Twitter clone isn't a "viable business." I mean, Twitter itself is apparently not a viable business, so...
- gdulli 3y agoIt was profitable in the relatively recent past. I wonder if had it never been acquired, it could have easily gotten back to that with the same round of layoffs as the rest of the industry had and without all the chaos of added debt, lost advertisers, lost trust, etc.
- johnlocke8 3y ago[flagged]
- the_doctah 3y agoLost trust? Twitter was running an industrial censorship complex where dozens of 3-letter agencies were working hand-in-hand with the platform to decide what gets heard and what doesn't. Private citizens were targeted for censorship by government agencies. They deserved no trust to begin with.
- throwaway5959 3y agoAsk Matt Taibbi what he thinks of censorship on Twitter now.
- nimbius 3y agoturns out most businesses predicated on outrage rarely have a long-term profit viability and frequently turn out to be a nothing more than a grift at best. Facebook and Twitter at least, to a degree, managed to monetize trigger emotions like rage, fear and sorrow and spin it into a captive, saleable audience receptive to modern marketing that preys almost exclusively on envy, fear, doubt, and personality matrix of the id and superego. the only issue is this sort of thing is generally entropic; culpable for human misery and uncontrollable chaos. it can be seen as having transformed baby boomers into a generation fueled by white-hot rage for anything that defies the most recalcitrant worldview, despite the internets general attempt to expand and broaden the personal horizon. faecbooks inevitable collapse into an exotic and semiliteral "captured audience" in a virtual world no one asked for, and twitters hardline unregulated pantomime of an Ayn Rand cliffnote that literally spends its dying breath tumbling off a cliff of brand and marketing exodus, can be seen as the natural progression and tendency of what i like to call the rage economy. ironically Parler will likely meet the same fate as twitter, flailing ineffectively with myopic strategic goals to revamp platform aspects or regain trust but with no real directionality outside the latter stages of 'industry that makes people sad or angry for money.' maybe a few name changes (hello Meta) or spicy policy changes ($popular_thing branded as a stage-agent, that aught to show $enemy_group) but the end result is the same.
- labrador 3y agoI don't imagine they paid that much for it. This is a good way to scrub those inadvisable hate posts you and your rich right wing friends made while drunk late at night in the heat of the moment
- badrequest 3y agoThe Conservative media "industry" is one of make-work for the children of millionaires with punchable faces and no life experience.
- gray5 3y ago[dead]
- nyolfen 3y agothere is nothing unique about conservative media in this regard
- red-iron-pine 3y agoAye, bored rich kids were working for places like The Economist, Vice, and (MS)NBC long before Parlor and Fox News exploded onto the scene.
- operatingthetan 3y agoVice News launched December 2013. Fox News launched October 1996. What are you even talking about?
- selimthegrim 3y agoVice has its origins in Montreal in the 90s IIRC
- the_doctah 3y ago[flagged]
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- bandyaboot 3y agoThey couldn’t possibly come up with a better fix to the platform than the one they’ve just instituted by shutting it down.
- ogogmad 3y agoDo people know about Gab? Its CEO is an anti-semite and white Christian nationalist. How did Parler compare to that?
- jliptzin 3y agoThat was their problem, they weren’t willing to go full-blown nazi/white nationalist which is what their user base wanted.
- scottLobster 3y agoPoorly engineered social app who's only market was culty political sub-factions doesn't make money. Film at 11. Q-Anon has lost momentum since the aliens didn't join forces with the military to reinstate Trump on Jan 6, and Trump himself has truth social. And I imagine most engineers competent enough to make a viable Twitter clone have political objections to working on an alt-right version. But it'll be a good money sink for far-right rich guys with inflated egos.
- jsemrau 3y agoUnderlines in how much turmoil the digital ad market is and also how much Trump means in monetary terms for engagement as he brought his audience to Truth Social.
- shadowgovt 3y ago"The team at Parler has built an exceptional audience, and we look forward to integrating that audience across all of our existing platforms." Joke's on them... That audience hates integration.
- phlipski 3y ago"No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more," I'd argue that no reasonable person ever believed that a conservative Twitter clone was a viable business in the first place!!! Looks like the Freedom phone is close to death as well. https://www.thedailybeast.com/conservative-freedom-phone-backers-turn-on-each-other https://www.thedailybeast.com/conservative-freedom-phone-bac...