Hacker News Reader

Comment by btmiller | Hacker News Reader

Parler was explicitly unmoderated by choice and hate speech was its selling point. You’ll have a hard time finding a) a service provider willing to tolerate that and b) much public sympathy for the service promoting hate.

Yet it called into question freedom of speech.

Same thing today with WSB, but the focus is clearly not hate speech (even if Discord says so). I find today’s bans way more objectionable than Parler, yet I still cannot reason why people truly believe that any service providers owes it to us a 1st Amendment platform. Discord and Reddit are free to select whatever content they find palatable.

It sucks because I found WSB entertaining, but no one here should be mixing up Big Tech with the 1st Amendment.

View on HN

And if you intentionally want to have content that is objectionable, putting it on AWS seems like an awful idea. That's how Sci-Hub and TPB have managed to stick around for decades, and they've shown censorship on the internet isn't really a thing. God knows how many powerful forces have tried to censor them, to no avail.

While I agree that in some ways this is worse than the Parler case, it also is a free service that costs Discord a ton of money, especially with the hundreds of people constantly hanging out in voice chat [0]. A ventrilo server of that size would probably cost upwards of $100 a month [1]. So I'm not surprised with Discord wanting to enforce their ToS more readily than AWS who was actually making good money out of Parler.

[0] https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/1354532238524874753

[1] https://www.ventrilo4.com/ventrilo-server-hosting-prices.php

The Discord server in question claims "we got over 1,000 server boosts" [0]. That's Discord's monetization scheme, a sort of server-specific patreon subscription that users opt into, to collectively unlock features for that server specifically.

Judging by the going rate for "server boosts", Discord would have easily had $5,000 a month in revenue tied to that server [1].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/wher...

[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028038352-S...

There were over 1000 sever boosts mentioned. It depends on the timeframe and how they got the boosts, but a single boost seems to cost at least $4 and can be up to $6.

I don't know how much you visited Parler but it was literally the same as every platform. If you don't like someone, don't follow them and block them.

>Parler was explicitly unmoderated by choice and hate speech was its selling point.

It's worse than unmoderated. That would imply some sort of free speech zone where anything goes, but in reality any sort of left leaning stance will quickly get you banned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com