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Comment by GoldenMonkey | Hacker News Reader

Whether you agree with the censorship of Parler or not. Big tech showed it's hand. And how it is willing to organize, to ban competing services.

I am getting calls weekly on how to deplatform off AWS services. These are normal businesses, not social media or news organizations. Decentralization is going to happen.

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I don't see any evidence of coordination or organization. Rather they all saw a dangerously out-of-control situation where they could be found liable, or at least involved (in the court of public opinion) in armed insurrection. They all demanded some form of the same thing: moderate the dangerous conversations that were calling for rebellion and violence. But they did not demand a particular methodology (which you would have seen in an organized endeavor).

If your service suddenly becomes synonymous with an armed uprising, and your response is to talk about free speech and how it is not your fault... then ya, you are going to loose business partners left and right.

If your service suddenly becomes synonymous with an armed uprising

Did parler have particular features enabling these so called 'armed uprisings', beyond what e.g. Facebook also offers to its users for free?

Yes, they had the heavily advertised feature of not removing posts when you plan an armed uprising.

My prediction (extrapolating from other large human-built systems) is that the infrastructure of the web will evolve into a soft bifurcation of companies that can leverage centralized Cloud infrastructure and companies that can't (for whatever reason... Infrastructural load too weirdly shaped, application too risky for service providers to want to sign off on it, pissed off the wrong people, etc.). People in the out-group will build more ad-hoc infrastructure for serving their needs, and we'll have a bifurcation into basically the "cleanweb" and the "trashweb" that will somehow (probably by URL shape) bubble up into the view of the end-user.

Things on the cleanweb will be average, safe, and predictable. Various deviations from user expectation will be punished (up to and including having your service provider yank a piece of your service Jenga tower out from under you if they're irritated enough about the offense).

The trashweb will spawn some serious beauty and truly novel things and an awful, awful lot of scams, hatred, illegal transactions, and garbage.

And most people will constrain themselves to the cleanweb but the trashweb will see a robust userbase.

> Decentralization is going to happen.

I wonder about that. If you think about it, Parler isn't particularly "decentralized", either. It isn't Twitter, but it is controlled and curated by a fairly arbitrary authority. In theory, if you didn't like Twitter's rules, and you didn't like Parler's rules, you could just move off to another competing service - if you or somebody else started one up (easy) and did the legwork of advertising it far enough that enough people used it to make it useful (hard). True decentralization would be something like Tor, I2P or Freenet, where all the users cooperate to share bandwidth and there's no plug to pull and no central dictator to ban content. However, truly decentralized services have been around for a long time now (I seem to recall installing Freenet once in the late 90's), and they have yet to catch on. As much as some of us fear the power of central planning, it seems as though the majority of people like knowing that there's nuclear kill switch that can be pulled if the communication platform gets to be too contentious.

Bitclout is actually quite promising as a decentralized service, but they do require a phone number at signup (or alternatively, a payment at signup) as an anti-spam measure.

I really don't understand this perspective. There was a severe emergency situation which prompted this response! It's like watching the police lock down an apartment building in response to an active shooter, and saying "they've shown their hand, cops just want to keep everyone locked inside their home".

I assume you mean the riot, for which all the organization happened on Facebook, not Parler?

I guess that's partly why they're reinstating the app then

Parler users GPS data was leaked, showing Parler users deep in the capital during the insurrection: https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-deep-inside-u-s-ca...

These geniuses were posting videos on Parler showing themselves during the insurrection.

"All" isn't an accurate description. Much of it did happen on Facebook, and in response Facebook swiftly put in place new policies to prevent the situation from escalating. Unlike Facebook, Parler was unwilling to enact emergency measures, so instead emergency measures were enacted on them.

FWIW, while I appreciate that you can technically pick at the word "all", if--as many people (I think correctly) believe--Parler was ancillary to the coordination (as in, without it existing the riot would certainly still have happened) but Facebook was key to it (as in, without it existing the riot might not have happened), I think the word "all" is appropriate, as that is how the word is used by actual English-speakers... think of the phrase "all of the nutrition in that meal is coming from the side of broccoli".

Regardless, it doesn't seem like Facebook put in these supposed emergency policies anywhere near quickly enough, right? Here is an entire article talking about the nuances of blame here... I just really get the feeling like a big part of what happened with Parler was "big tech" realizing their own culpability and then having to organize around a scapegoat, lest anyone decided to come after them instead.

https://www.salon.com/2021/01/16/despite-parler-backlash-fac...

I don't think that's an entirely false description, and I'm certainly not trying to claim that Facebook (or Apple, to be more on point) is blameless. But the reason Parler was an effective scapegoat was their unwillingness to acknowledge a problem and work to fix it. So I'm not convinced that this specific sanction of this specific company is relevant to the larger trends.

Lots of Big Tech apologists in this thread.

I agree. Decentralization is the future.

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