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Comment by newacct583 | Hacker News Reader

Parler was, at the end of the day, a somewhat amateurish Twitter clone whose essential growth hack was that they decided to serve as a kind of ban evasion mechanism for Twitter. They had virtually no organic growth of their own, they worked by accepting the banned castoffs from another service and promising not to do any moderation.

And then we had a historical incident of political violence perpetrated by the same demographic. Move fast and break things indeed.

But "staying online" isn't the Parler goal. Matze wanted to run an internet giant, not keep a seedy right wing reactionary forum alive. I mean, 4chan and 8kun already fill that market.

He's just going to pack it up, keep his head down, and try not to get sued (or charged).

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Not sure why the downvotes. This essentially is the same as my take. This is the inevitable result of pushing your brand as "no content moderation" but not actually having any skills or plans on what to do when it eventually caught up with them.

Anyone familiar with 4chan knows that some of the earliest content that was banned on the platform include childporn and organizing raids/doxxing. If you read the terms of service, you'll see that content is still banned (even if not uniformly enforced).

The fact that parler couldn't muster even 4chan levels of moderation shows you that they really had no comprehension of the content creators they would be courting with their service.

Its downvoted because a large portion of HN users prefer alternative facts that allow them to feel superior as opposed to actual reality.

Since when is "not enough moderation" grounds for terminating hosting? Amazon does a terrible job of moderating their own catalog and reviews. Should their ASNs be blackholed?

You can read the comments on any given CNN article, and see racist statements. Should CNN reporters be barred from attending press conferences?

It is grounds for terminating hosting when AWS has repeatedly asked you to remove said content AND they've offered to help you migrate you off of AWS.

See court filings - https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.294664...

Or for specific sections, see https://twitter.com/questauthority/status/134916216569825280...

I was skimming through it and couldn't really find any smoking gun about them missing any hard deadlines for content removal. If you take a site like Reddit, it can take days before all violent / threatening language is removed from a given thread. A lot of the content AWS uses as exhibits is borderline, so its not as simple as approve some auto filter. I am assuming Parler just took on the scale of weeks to months to fail to remove some bad stuff but it would great to see that in writing to confirm.

It would be foolish of Amazon’s legal team to make an argument like they did and not be able to back it up with proof, imo.

If Microsoft sends an email to Valve telling them to delete certain unlawful posts on Steam, or else they'll use Windows Defender to block the Steam executable, would you defend that?

Why not? It's not like Valve owns the computers of their customers. They're in clear violation of the Windows terms of service. If you violate the ToS, then Microsoft has every right to remove you from their operating system and Valve is in turn free to migrate to a different OS.

This is factually false. There was moderation, there were terms of service and they banned appeals to violence from their site. The glee with which so many in tech are celebrating was essentially an attempt at corporate murder, on ideological grounds, is revolting.

And yet, in the Amazon suit, Amazon clearly says that Parler did not.

So, it's not "factually false". At best, it's up for a court of law to decide who is telling the truth.

But considering that it's trivial to show messages from Lin Wood, among others at the capital protests messages on parler calling for "appeals to violence" exactly in contradiction to your suggestion that there isn't... Well your argument doesn't appear supported by the facts.

From Amazon's response to the lawsuit... 'The email also notes Parler “remove[s] some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency,'

You can read Amazon's entire response to their sham lawsuit which debunks every one of these theories.

> and they banned appeals to violence from their site

Lin Wood, the president's election lawyer[1] LITERALLY called for VP Pence to be executed the week before the riot. This was shared everywhere on the internet, was shared right there on Parler like tens of thousands of times, and AFAIK was still up and unmoderated when the site was shut down.

Parler's moderation was a community-run thing. Effectively, popular users could say anything they liked.

There was no meaningful moderation at all.

[1] Or whatever. The relationships were totally muddled, but nonetheless this guy was a big thought leader among the Kraken set.

> Parler was, at the end of the day, a somewhat amateurish Twitter clone whose essential growth hack was that they decided to serve as a kind of ban evasion mechanism for Twitter.

The growth hack was to be funded by the Mercer family (Cambridge Analytica, Brexit) to the tune of a few million a year to help promote their agenda.

This is really interesting. Where can I learn more about this?

WSJ, amongst other news sites, has provided coverage: https://www.wsj.com/articles/parler-backed-by-mercer-family-...

You can read about the Mercers winding up Cambridge Analytica, which they funded: https://apnews.com/article/64280ae1f30c44eb8b82049f6875dddd

Likewise their involvement with Brietbart: https://www.dw.com/en/who-are-the-mercers-the-wealthy-backer...

As far as the "millions" figure, that's come out of claims that their AWS bill was in the region of $300k per month.

and w/ everyone moving to gab and them seeming to have their ducks more in order in terms of scaling/moderation, i think unless he really wants to die on the hill to preserve whatever was going on w/ parler, they will just drop it lol.

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