> 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.
> 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.
Exactly. They weren't really interested in true privacy or free speech, they were just using those keywords to attract customers.
When Parler praises "free speech" they're really just using that as a cover for running a cheap Twitter clone with no investment in moderation. They exist to extract profit with minimum overhead.
Just make your own website, as long as you've done it before and are intimately familiar with all the dangerous defaults built in to our collective tech.
Perhaps they aimed too high too fast (dunno, never even went there), but I just can't bring myself to make beginner-shaming a core pillar of my criticism.
I do not believe any private posts were archived by the security researcher. From my understanding they were able to access all public posts, including ones that had previously been deleted (which was the bad part).
The other security faux pas was that they did not scrub GPS metadata from images or videos at all.
As someone who does deeply believe in and care about free speech (from all parties), I could not be in deeper agreement with you. (for non-native English speakers: I fully agree).
Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stunts. Looking forward to whatever the new solution is.
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.
He is saying what he needs to say to get the next clubhouse of impatient, misguided rich people to fund "vision". Standing on principles my ass.
The only thing I am happy about is how fast the cycle is operating these days ie how quickly mindlessly ambitious self important people who get propped up through pandering to the right clubhouse get discarded.
> 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
This is a lie, it’s just a question of whether or not he believes it or if he’s just saying what he needs to say to land another role. Parler moderated all kinds of people off the platform for a variety of reasons, including political speech. Anything they said to the contrary was no more than PR puffery, not reality.
> 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.
>> Parler positioned itself as less radical than Gab .. How can 4chan, Gab, and the even darker parts of the internet manage to persist online
Some of it has do with the fact that when it comes to political speech you can not be moderate.
if you do you fall lock step in with one of the extreme's you painted by both extremes as the other...
For example many times, in the same conversation or talking about the same topic with different groups I have been called a Socialist, Commie, Nazi White Supremacist, racist, etc...
Political extremism seems to be the only political conversation left on the internet, this goes for both the "left" and the "right"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] jerrysievert|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
I tried to delete my account but the option is not available or may be hidden behind the forced verification requirement.
[+] [-] wiremine|5 years ago|reply
Exactly. They weren't really interested in true privacy or free speech, they were just using those keywords to attract customers.
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lammy|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps they aimed too high too fast (dunno, never even went there), but I just can't bring myself to make beginner-shaming a core pillar of my criticism.
[+] [-] kyrra|5 years ago|reply
The other security faux pas was that they did not scrub GPS metadata from images or videos at all.
[+] [-] jiveturkey|5 years ago|reply
it has no or almost no connection to job performance of the C suite.
FWIW, I agree there is zero question that he needed to be sent packing immediately.
[+] [-] skynet-9000|5 years ago|reply
Parler should not have been de-platformed. That was a clearly partisan act, and the truth would have come out shortly about the company's total lack of care for its users. Say what you will about Gab, but they never pulled any of those stunts. Looking forward to whatever the new solution is.
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
People on HN are so much into 'technical' issues.
The notion 'The CEO must be fired' because he allows messages to be saved but the mission is privacy - is far too getting hung up on technicalities.
What the Parler CEO essentially wanted was a free and open platform, free from general intrusion.
That's it.
It's not a Singal, or Telegram - it's not about Snowden level security.
CEO's say all sorts of things all the time that are arguably inconsistent with the details of their reality, that's not a new phenom.
He's essentially saying he wants a WhatsApp/Twitter/Signal type platform, where people aren't blocked for arbitrary reasons.
He's not making statements about protection against state level actors.
And Parler does moderate anyhow.
[+] [-] motohagiography|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] op03|5 years ago|reply
The only thing I am happy about is how fast the cycle is operating these days ie how quickly mindlessly ambitious self important people who get propped up through pandering to the right clubhouse get discarded.
Thats a good thing.
[+] [-] ashtonkem|5 years ago|reply
This is a lie, it’s just a question of whether or not he believes it or if he’s just saying what he needs to say to land another role. Parler moderated all kinds of people off the platform for a variety of reasons, including political speech. Anything they said to the contrary was no more than PR puffery, not reality.
[+] [-] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dannyw|5 years ago|reply
It will be deplatformed from mobile stores, but even Cloudflare protects the reincarnation of TheDonald (patriots.win).
Parler, OTOH, constantly had threats of harm to elected representatives, or just democrats in general.
[+] [-] jiveturkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syshum|5 years ago|reply
Some of it has do with the fact that when it comes to political speech you can not be moderate.
if you do you fall lock step in with one of the extreme's you painted by both extremes as the other...
For example many times, in the same conversation or talking about the same topic with different groups I have been called a Socialist, Commie, Nazi White Supremacist, racist, etc...
Political extremism seems to be the only political conversation left on the internet, this goes for both the "left" and the "right"
[+] [-] michaeleng|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmydorry|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rtkwe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aahortwwy|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] raverbashing|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Qub3d|5 years ago|reply
Really great technical work all around.
[+] [-] tootie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rektide|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] koolba|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skynet-9000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakeadler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dnhz|5 years ago|reply
(https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...)
[+] [-] burnte|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] molbioguy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AntiImperialist|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unchocked|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Triv888|5 years ago|reply
I think I say a lot of somewhat controversial things, but they let it fly because I am not popular.
[+] [-] toomim|5 years ago|reply
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/1/19/bb-parler-moves-...
https://www.wired.com/story/parler-russia-privacy/
[+] [-] eganist|5 years ago|reply
Doubt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny
[+] [-] cphoover|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visarga|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcvarmint|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIiabMnQfzk
[+] [-] devwastaken|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dormento|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Zigurd|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rdxm|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] spoonjim|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ketamine__|5 years ago|reply