Who Is Funding Parler? | Hacker News Reader

Who Is Funding Parler?

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52 pointsdraugadrotten26 comments

This thread is back from Nov 13, 2020.

Any updates in the past 2 months?

Edit: as other comments added in the past couple minutes, the answer is Rebekah Mercer (thanks, gumby, for the link):

> On Saturday, CEO and co-founder John Matze said one of the privately owned company's early investors is Rebekah Mercer, who along with her father, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, has been a backer of President Trump and is also a major donor to conservative causes, including Breitbart News and former White House strategist Steve Bannon. "John and I started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech," Rebekah Mercer wrote on Parler on Saturday.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/14/934833214/conservatives-flock...

I don't know anything about Parler's funding and connections in US politics, but the insinuations about the founder's wife are just ridiculous.

Young woman from Russia loving Russian flag is somehow bad and unusual? Her mother being an honored engineer somehow implies something bad? A young woman having instagram handle "cherry on top" means anything at all?

I am Russian and not the biggest fan of Russian regime, but come on!

Moot, since Parler may be toast:

"Now it seems that Paler[sic] may be finished. Just a short while ago, Parler CEO John Matze was on Fox News to talk about the situation. During that conversation, he revealed that not only will no other hosting service accept them, but their law firm has dropped them."

https://redstate.com/streiff/2021/01/10/it-looks-like-the-bi...

This is not about any specific political figure or social media platform.

This is about whether any traditional concepts of freedom of expression, association, or contract remain.

This moment is taking on aspects of a digital French Revolution.

May peace prevail instead.

Social media is anything but traditional. It is alien to how traditional human discourse has evolved over millennia. And not alien “in a good way.” It is a monstrosity.

The central idea here is that you need to hire large numbers of engineers and have an immense compute footprint to run a site like Parler. This simply isn't true anymore.

Why would the required server footprint have changed since previously?

I buy it’s easier/cheaper to manage infrastructure, but scale requires infrastructure and I don’t understand why that would have changed.

Most forums can run on a single server, scale is cheap when you just exchange text messages.

BuzzFeed reported yesterday that Parler's AWS bill was over $300k per month: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...

Yeah, then this doesn't apply to them, they are funded by something. Just that you don't have to be to have a few million active users.

That’s not true at a large scale, and they have lots of media files in addition to text. One problem to especially consider is how timelines work: a forum generates one view for a much smaller number of users but any service with a follower model has to efficiently distribute updates. This isn’t incredibly hard, of course, but they’re not just spinning up an IRC server here.

That’s not what I asked.

I asked why the required number of server is smaller than previously, which is what the OP said.

Computers are faster than 20 years ago, and amateurs stated and ran big forums 20 years ago.

Haha, you made my day with that reply.

Sure, you’re right.

Compared to the scale you had to worry about 20 years ago, I guess you need less severs to get the same thing now.

People had millions concurrent users on a server 8 years ago. Having a couple of million users total should be no problems at all unless you use the very heavy popular server frameworks.

https://vimeo.com/44312354

I see Parler is tiny when compared to Twitter, but i have no idea how large or demanding it is.

How does it monetize its traffic?

If you think this has anything to do with free speech, please take some time on Parler.

I don't know if these are Russian agents or actual Americans behind some of the pages (probably both) but its page after page of content conspiring murdering public figures.

Conspiring murder is a crime for a reason.

I thought it was out in the open that Rebekah Mercer is funding Parler.

Ah yes, the day after this post was written so said npr (https://www.npr.org/2020/11/14/934833214/conservatives-flock... ) and Newsmax (https://www.newsmax.com/politics/rebekah-mercer-parler/2020/... )

Not a secret.

this was such a valuable post, raising questions about a shady mysterious new player that all other coverage had just skipped right over. so powerfully good. I think of it semi regularly.

Interesting info but there must be a better source.

Why link to the first thread in that tweet. The answer is in, like, tweet 20:

> Boom. @WSJ has just confirmed that the Mercers and their hedge fund are behind Parler.

Also, it's from November 2020.

I know one thing: neutral sure taste different.

This is pretty incredible. The idea that a non-left-leaning twitter-alternative must be a Russian ploy to destroy America is pretty rich. We've got a new Cold War, this time led by the Left. It's going to be a wild ride methinks.

Fun Fact: Most of the backbone cables from China run through Russia rather than under the pacific. It makes distinguishing attacks between the two countries nearly impossible

Tips fedora...

Not that rich. We saw Trump act as a useful idiot for Putin in the last four years. Perhaps the Kremlin believe they can influence U.S. conservatives easier than liberals. Target those who feel like they're a minority and constantly attacked yada yada.

Disclaimer: No sources on this, only my opinion and anecdotally what I've seen over the past few years. Maybe an irresponsible comment that could ignite a flame war. Mods do your thing

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