Parler owner laid off 75% of staff and has only 20 employees left | Hacker News Reader

Parler owner laid off 75% of staff and has only 20 employees left

arstechnica.com

79 pointsmfiguiere33 comments

My understanding is that Parler is a Mastodon instance... I know that every time headlines are posted about the number of employees at X company, people ask why there are so many people working there. But in this case I think it's justified. They're just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?

My cynical answer is that most such things on the American right are, at some level, a grift.

Not just https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lives-matter-activ...

The headline and story don't really support your interpretation.

Reading as a prereq definitely weeds out most of the MAGAs.

I provided no interpretation other than to imply grift isn't exclusive to one political leaning.

Not really a helpful comment, though, since my post suggests that MOST such thing catering to this portion of the American right have grifty components -- not that grift exists only on the right.

We know what you mean. You're still wrong.

Evidence does not support your claim, boyo.

Let's go with your assumption. What you are saying is purely due to political leaning, one is more likely to grift than another?

Stop making homophobic and transphobic posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34402242

Ah good point. I also hadn't considered they're probably putting a lot of effort into DDOS mitigation.

I'm not so sure that it's so much grifts, possibly more that these people are so out of touch with reality and living in echo chambers, they vastly overvalue themselves and their business acumen.

> They're just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?

My first reaction was surprise that there were 20 people at Parler to begin with!

From what I've heard of people running Mastodon servers, they are not exactly lightweight, and a large one might actually require a lot of housekeeping. So maybe 20 is not too unreasonable...

They had 80 people to begin with. After 75% layoff, they have 20 people left.

> They're just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?

Marketing, promotion, moderation, fundraising, interfacing with your political allies, figuring out a way to make money with whatever they are doing, grift.

> My understanding is that Parler is a Mastodon instance... I know that every time headlines are posted about the number of employees at X company, people ask why there are so many people working there. But in this case I think it's justified. They're just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?

IIRC, when they were first in the news, I believe they were running some insane thing built on top of WordPress (or some other blogging platform like that). At least that was according to someone who had claimed to hack them and scraped all their user data. I think the site was a rush job meant to capitalize on particular dissatisfactions with Twitter.

I believe gab (not so much MAGA as explicit neonazis) is a Mastodon instance, and that's caused trouble for Mastodon clients on various app stores (i.e. if you can use the generic client to connect to gab, the app could fail the app store's content policies and not get approved).

> ...caused trouble for Mastodon clients on various app stores (i.e. if you can use the generic client to connect to gab, the app could fail the app store's content policies and not get approved

Then they better start banning web browsers. I yearn for that comparison to be the official PR response, for those individuals that find themselves in the position of power to make those decisions at Apple and Google to feel the weight of its responsibility. A federated blogging client should be well above the acceptable threshold on a spectrum from Firefox to CSAM.app.

Apple, to a certain extent, does ban web browsers other than their own.

Then why don't they ban their own web browser?

Because they apply different standards to themselves than they apply to others.

Though one could say they deprioritize their own browser in order to push producers to using their more lucrative app store.

It doesn’t take much to refute this claim. If iOS browser is so much worse than Android’s, why don’t companies just make an iOS app and tell Android users to use the web app?

Also, it came out in the Epic Trial that 80% of App Store revenue comes from pay to win games.

Outside of games, the most popular apps either front services that don’t have in app purchases at all like Spotify, Netflix, Facebook etc.

Which ones do they ban? I have Chrome, Orion, and the Onion browser on my phone, I'd think one of those would be on the ban list if such a thing existed.

It's easy to escape this argument by allowing for factoring in what percentage of the app's use is for policy violations (which the curator gets to set) and then relying on the browser being used by everyone not just niche groups so always having the majority of user use being in line with what the majority of users agree with as being good use. Not saying it makes banning these clients right I'm just saying this argument doesn't really get you anywhere in the real world.

I seem to remember it was firebase, for some reason.

> They're just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?

I assume (with no other info) that they probably had a bunch of marketing/pr/sales folks.

Scaling Mastodon is actually very challenging - there's been a bunch of good blog posts on this recently with the exodus, and a number of more popular servers cutting off new signups.

Given the nature of Mastodon, why not just scale horizontally? Cap your_server at N users and just open signups for your_server_2, then your_server_3 etc. which are all federated with your_server?

There are a few "local" interaction features that benefit from being on the same server. The domain is also an integral part of your user name - imagine having name@us-west03.gmail.com as your e-mail address.

Probably even they want to cut down on the terroristic threatening and the neonazis doing most of it. I bet there is a lot more interaction with the FBI and DHS than most people would think.

All else aside, when your contingency plan is to get Kanye to take a mess off of your hands, you may be in too deep already.

I signed up for Parker to see what was happening there. It's far from my politics. It was funny to see how their email list sent me lots of ads for hair loss replacement and similar demographics. I would venture to say there were more ads than outrage in those emails.

Already posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34343187

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