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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Of all the "deplatformings" this one is the hardest to feel sorry for. They clearly had a lot of technical debt and very little expertise in what they were doing. Seeing their AWS bill, it's apparent they were not without resources either.

As far as I am aware, they are still just moving around their horrendously cobbled together Wordpress monstrosity to whatever giant benefactor that has a couch they can crash on. It's clearly other peoples' fault that they are so dependent on other's technology!

And while I am very receptive towards conservative ideals as well as criticisms of tech and mainstream media, this is a bit like watching someone starve to death because Blue Apron stopped delivering to them.

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From a purely technical perspective, I've never worked for a SaaS company that had SOPs for "what if our cloud provider pulls the plug on us today?". I'm sure big enterprise companies do this, but small nascent companies probably don't consider this to be one of the bigger risks that they face.

Sure, they run an unpopular business, but I would not predicted the convergence of (1) the Capitol Hill riots would have taken place and (2) that the media would characterize it as a coup attempt or similar and argue that Parler was responsible (as opposed to Facebook where the planning seems to have taken place) and (3) that this would result in AWS kicking them off of their platform overnight. It's really hard to predict where the mob will focus it's wrath or in what proportion.

> pulls the plug on us today

To be clear, AWS had been giving them warnings for months.

Parler's also not alone in not having any plans against "the event that we've been warned about for months actually happened".

Fair enough. I hadn’t heard that.

Well, we at OrgPad.com are not big or very complex but we sure thought about not having access to our main production platform (we heard about the "glitches" that DigitalOcean had and other such events). We explicitly backup to both the same and a very different provider so we can fully restore/ bootstrap everything within hours. We figured, this is good enough for now.

So you root for people based on their technical expertise, not for their cause?

Interesting. I guess I don't feel sorry for poor people anymore. They have poor skills, so they don't deserve to earn a lot of money. (Same logic).

A long, long time ago ACLU defended in court the right of neo-Nazi to hold a march.

Of course, such a thing would be inconceivable today, and ACLU itself would be canceled and deserted if it tried.

https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp...

Did you mean "today" literally or as in "modern times?"

They represented a white supremacist denied a permit by the city of Charlottesville in 2017 (for the rally where a Nazi sympathizer killed a protester). They were criticized; they weren't canceled or deserted.

I could care less about their terrible tech stack. What I will not stand for is the deletion of opposing viewpoints and the seeming lack of moderation over talk of violence, hate mongering and the cultivation of racist and neo-Nazi sentiment.

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