Reddit would have killed the toxic sub and been done with it. Parler couldn't, because they were the toxic sub.
They were adding six digit numbers of users a day. Was a temporary backlog that unreasonable?
> Reddit bans whole subs when they get too out of hand to moderate, while Parler effectively is one of those banned subs.
Reddit (per Wikipedia) has 330 million users and 138,000 subs. Parler had 10 million users, equivalent to more than 4000 subs, not one.
And I think that's the root of it. "Nuke from orbit" against something that had the capacity to be saved through measures dramatically less drastic than that.
That's about 1/3 the size of /r/askreddit, and comparable to /r/politics. Your approach to the math here is silly for a variety of reasons (users can be members of multiple subs, membership isn't split evenly among all subreddits, there's a long tail of subs with 1 or 2 members, etc.) Parler was equivalent to a mid to large subreddit. It would have been around the 50th largest.
/r/politics, for comparison, has a moderation team of ~60, most of whom have years of experience moderating the subreddit, and is assisted by a number of bots (automoderator, as well as some /r/politics specific bots) developed and tuned over the years to help. They also have direct lines to the admins (most major subreddits do) for when they need more official assistance. The sub also has a fairly well understood set of rules, and users who are willing to report offending content.
Parler had none of those things. I've had the pleasure of moderating a (much, much!) smaller community. I once encountered a situation where it got viral for a very controversial reason. I and the rest of my moderation team was unable to keep up with the quantity of content being posted, so we did something very simple: we locked the subreddit temporarily, preventing anyone without a history in the community from participating.
I stand by that decision having been the responsible thing to do. I can understand why, for profit reasons, Parler didn't want to do the same thing, but it would have been the responsible thing to do.
> "Nuke from orbit" against something that had the capacity to be saved through measures dramatically less drastic than that.
I've yet to see any evidence that this was the case. "Saving it" in the way Amazon wanted seems to be entirely anthitetical to the approaches Parler was willing to take. Even now, the best approach Parler has been able to come up with is to use some AWS ML scanner to detect bad content.
But Parler _didn't even try_ any of these less drastic measures. They could have properly moderated, or if that's not possible because they were growing so fast they could have limited posts from new users, or added moderation bots, or could have blanket-banned the most problematic subgroups. They didn't do these things.
They did have restrictions on new users. People accused them of suppressing leftists by doing this.
> But Parler _didn't even try_ any of these less drastic measures.
Prior to the riot their failure was no greater than that of Facebook. Parler (but not Facebook) was forced offline almost immediately after it before being given any meaningful opportunity to do anything different in response.
It's also not obvious that their existing measures wouldn't have been as effective as alternatives once their user base stabilized and the backlog was cleared.
IIRC, Parler billed itself as an unmoderated "free speech" space [1]. IIRC, what little moderation it had was done by unpaid volunteer moderators, which in this case is akin to letting the inmates run the asylum.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/parler-apple-g...: "Over the past several months, Parler has become one of the fastest-growing apps in the United States. Millions of President Trump’s supporters have flocked to it as Facebook and Twitter increasingly cracked down on posts that spread misinformation and incited violence, including muzzling Mr. Trump by removing his accounts this past week. By Saturday morning, Apple listed Parler as the No. 1 free app for its iPhones."