Twitter is doing more damage then they can possibly imagine to their business by reacting in such a heavy-handed manner. They are trying to flex their control but by banning people they relinquish the ability to censor and moderate. It's better to be in control of the conversation then to not be privy because it happened beyond your purview.
The central idea here is that you need to hire large numbers of engineers and have an immense compute footprint to run a site like Parler. This simply isn't true anymore.
People had millions concurrent users on a server 8 years ago. Having a couple of million users total should be no problems at all unless you use the very heavy popular server frameworks.
That’s not true at a large scale, and they have lots of media files in addition to text. One problem to especially consider is how timelines work: a forum generates one view for a much smaller number of users but any service with a follower model has to efficiently distribute updates. This isn’t incredibly hard, of course, but they’re not just spinning up an IRC server here.
This is pretty incredible. The idea that a non-left-leaning twitter-alternative must be a Russian ploy to destroy America is pretty rich. We've got a new Cold War, this time led by the Left. It's going to be a wild ride methinks.
Not that rich. We saw Trump act as a useful idiot for Putin in the last four years. Perhaps the Kremlin believe they can influence U.S. conservatives easier than liberals. Target those who feel like they're a minority and constantly attacked yada yada.
Disclaimer: No sources on this, only my opinion and anecdotally what I've seen over the past few years. Maybe an irresponsible comment that could ignite a flame war. Mods do your thing
Fun Fact: Most of the backbone cables from China run through Russia rather than under the pacific. It makes distinguishing attacks between the two countries nearly impossible
Edit: as other comments added in the past couple minutes, the answer is Rebekah Mercer (thanks, gumby, for the link):
> On Saturday, CEO and co-founder John Matze said one of the privately owned company's early investors is Rebekah Mercer, who along with her father, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, has been a backer of President Trump and is also a major donor to conservative causes, including Breitbart News and former White House strategist Steve Bannon. "John and I started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech," Rebekah Mercer wrote on Parler on Saturday.
Just like Americans are funding dissidents and bolstering free speech in Hong Kong in order to undermine democracy there, this is an obvious and blatant attempt by Fascist Russia to undermine American democracy by promoting free speech and undermining repressive and antisocial megacorps!
"Now it seems that Paler[sic] may be finished. Just a short while ago, Parler CEO John Matze was on Fox News to talk about the situation. During that conversation, he revealed that not only will no other hosting service accept them, but their law firm has dropped them."
Social media is anything but traditional. It is alien to how traditional human discourse has evolved over millennia. And not alien “in a good way.” It is a monstrosity.
I don't know anything about Parler's funding and connections in US politics, but the insinuations about the founder's wife are just ridiculous.
Young woman from Russia loving Russian flag is somehow bad and unusual? Her mother being an honored engineer somehow implies something bad? A young woman having instagram handle "cherry on top" means anything at all?
I am Russian and not the biggest fan of Russian regime, but come on!
If you think this has anything to do with free speech, please take some time on Parler.
I don't know if these are Russian agents or actual Americans behind some of the pages (probably both) but its page after page of content conspiring murdering public figures.
this was such a valuable post, raising questions about a shady mysterious new player that all other coverage had just skipped right over. so powerfully good. I think of it semi regularly.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 85.5 ms ] threadI buy it’s easier/cheaper to manage infrastructure, but scale requires infrastructure and I don’t understand why that would have changed.
I asked why the required number of server is smaller than previously, which is what the OP said.
Sure, you’re right.
Compared to the scale you had to worry about 20 years ago, I guess you need less severs to get the same thing now.
https://vimeo.com/44312354
How does it monetize its traffic?
Disclaimer: No sources on this, only my opinion and anecdotally what I've seen over the past few years. Maybe an irresponsible comment that could ignite a flame war. Mods do your thing
Ah yes, the day after this post was written so said npr (https://www.npr.org/2020/11/14/934833214/conservatives-flock... ) and Newsmax (https://www.newsmax.com/politics/rebekah-mercer-parler/2020/... )
Not a secret.
> Boom. @WSJ has just confirmed that the Mercers and their hedge fund are behind Parler.
Also, it's from November 2020.
Any updates in the past 2 months?
Edit: as other comments added in the past couple minutes, the answer is Rebekah Mercer (thanks, gumby, for the link):
> On Saturday, CEO and co-founder John Matze said one of the privately owned company's early investors is Rebekah Mercer, who along with her father, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, has been a backer of President Trump and is also a major donor to conservative causes, including Breitbart News and former White House strategist Steve Bannon. "John and I started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech," Rebekah Mercer wrote on Parler on Saturday.
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/14/934833214/conservatives-flock...
"Now it seems that Paler[sic] may be finished. Just a short while ago, Parler CEO John Matze was on Fox News to talk about the situation. During that conversation, he revealed that not only will no other hosting service accept them, but their law firm has dropped them."
https://redstate.com/streiff/2021/01/10/it-looks-like-the-bi...
This is not about any specific political figure or social media platform.
This is about whether any traditional concepts of freedom of expression, association, or contract remain.
This moment is taking on aspects of a digital French Revolution.
May peace prevail instead.
Young woman from Russia loving Russian flag is somehow bad and unusual? Her mother being an honored engineer somehow implies something bad? A young woman having instagram handle "cherry on top" means anything at all?
I am Russian and not the biggest fan of Russian regime, but come on!
I don't know if these are Russian agents or actual Americans behind some of the pages (probably both) but its page after page of content conspiring murdering public figures.
Conspiring murder is a crime for a reason.