Social media app Parler buys cloud-services provider | Hacker News Reader

Social media app Parler buys cloud-services provider

reuters.com

40 pointsthm24 comments

Apparently there is a need 'to focus on customers who run the risk of being pushed off the internet'.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not into the alt-righters, but a little push-back against the Google's and Amazon's of the world can't hurt. I've seen a few to many stories of people dropped by Google on a whim.

Maybe they can start payment services as well, seems Pornhub might be looking for one in the not so distant future.

>there is a need 'to focus on customers who run the risk of being pushed off the internet'.

Epik has owned this market (at least for the US alt-right) for years, and AFAIK Parler is still hosted and registered there.

Yeah, Gab is hosted there too.

I also think people should be able to voice their opinions, even if they are very opposed to my personal beliefs. There is a need for that, to evade corporate or state sponsored censorship.

> Don't get me wrong, I'm not into the alt-righters

You don’t need to be into alt-righters to to know that freedom can only exist if we all have it.

I’d rather have a current-internet where people are free to host whatever controversial content they wish, than a future-internet where trillion dollar companies decide what opinions are valid.

> You don’t need to be into alt-righters to to know that freedom can only exist if we all have it.

More people need to understand this point.

Folks don't realize that we're easily corrupted by power and that sooner or later it will be abused.

It's not hard, for example, to imagine a future where Amazon and Google start labeling unions as extremist organizations and removing them from internet. That might sound far-fetched, but it would only take a handful of incidents of bad behavior by union members or organizations for tech companies to say, "Look, these organizations are inciting violence in their members."

Nothing sounds far-fetched after the last few years.

Certainly. Which is why people get very nervous when alt-righters insist on their freedom to deny freedom to other people.

Society is all about resolving conflicts of rights. One of those ways is that privately-owned infrastructure belongs to its owners, who get to say who gets to use it. I'm all for them deciding to use it to chuck off those who want to use it for the explicit purpose of harming others, which is fundamental to the alt-right program.

The bits and bytes of the Internet are a mishmash of private and public infrastructure, with no straightforward solution, but I'd agree that even hateful assholes deserve the ability to send and receive IP packets. But I have no problem with any private entities that refuse to help them do that.

The “privately owned” argument is bad and frankly it’s disingenuous. Nobody making this argument believes that “privately owned” entities should be able to discriminate against racial minorities, sexual minorities, religious minorities, or any other intersectional group.

It is only their specific political opponents who are acceptable targets for discrimination.

I think you missed read the previous poster so I'll repeat the important part of their post.

> I'm all for them deciding to use it to chuck off those who want to use it for the explicit purpose of harming others,

If your political identity is about harming others, then yes that poster thinks you should get booted from the internet. If your political identity is not about harming others then they're not talking about you or your political identity.

I'm tired of this comparison of discrimination against speech to discrimination against protected classes. Please learn the difference between the two.

The person isn't being banned. Their activities are. This is legal, and always has been. Without it, someone could disrupt religious services with obscenity or blasphemy and there would be no recourse, to take just one example.

The above is entirely unlike discrimination against people on the basis of race or sex or orientation or religion because those are unchangeable characteristics.

Makes me nervous, but I agree. I'm not sure what the solution to negating organized disinformation campaigns is, though. Education doesn't seem to work. That strikes me particularly hard, because I've basically dedicated my life to education thinking it was the "Great Answer."

Good thing it's Friday.

I sort of agree with this, except Parler and their ilk don't actually give a flying fuck about free speech.

Even people who don’t care about free speech deserve it, I think.

This is exactly right. The other thing is that the only way to guarantee free speech to everyone who deserves it is by going a little too far and giving it people we think don't deserve it.

So people should be free to prevent others from exercising their freedom of speech?

Has anyone actually been banned from the internet for free speech?

Banned? No. Deplatformed? Absolutely. This is very obviously a response to tech companies refusing to work with Parler because of their views.

I've wanted to see an alternative internet for a long time now, but I don't think I've wished for an alt-right internet. This is some djinn stuff.

One last grift.

I am surprised that Parler has lasted this long, much less experienced growth.

SimilarWeb says it's not particularly big:

>Global Rank #60,885

>Total [Monthly] Visits 1.2M

(SimilarWeb visits are basically user sessions, not views)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com