If you want to make a quick, but cynical buck, start on Facebook.

My Facebook feed was full of pins, shirts, mugs, and posters of Ruth Bader Ginsberg with a tacky Notorious B.I.G. crown on her head for weeks after her death. Sometimes they’d even say “Rest In Power” whatever that means.

They must have been selling like hot cakes.

Same was happening on Twitter for quite a while with 2 bots chatting to each other on every popular thread about Trump: "just drinking from this <mug with "leftist tears">", "OMG, where did you get that", "<link to shop>".

I expect they made lots of money there if they outsourced to print on demand.

These are breadcrumbs, the money are in the big time items you affiliate for.

During the Ron Paul craze I had some Gold adverts printing money.

Yeah, cheap things with huge value. But if you want to sell very expensive but completely worthless, if not downright harmful things, you need to go to the other side.

Parler isn’t a tech startup like any other. It’s unlikely to ever be profitable. Why Mercer and others think it’s a good idea to plow money into it is the question.

Twitter is ridiculously overstaffed for what they are and it resulted in very few improvements over the years. I really wonder what most people there do. And yes, I’ve run popular apps so I’m not underestimating anything. If Parler can grab a percentage of this market and not unnecessarily overextend themselves, they’ll be just fine.

You’ve run popular apps on the scale of Twitter? It’s left ambiguous, but personally or with a team that’s much smaller than Twitter? That sounds very impressive. Can you share more details?

Significantly smaller than Twitter of course but big enough to have a pretty good direct idea of sizes of various teams that are needed and also indirectly when working with larger apps of others. And for completeness I’ll admit that it was 3+ years ago. Twitter is not exactly going through explosive growth either.

Parler also never had expensive real estate holdings in SF.

So just like most consumer tech startups then?

No tech startups at least aim to make money either from the operations or from increasing the value of the business.

Having seen the decisions made by many of these startups, I'm extremely sceptical that this is the case.

Because they're not in for the money but for a space of freedom for their ideas?

If it was crowdfunded somehow I’d think that. This is someone with plenty of room for their ideas (Mercers are pretty extreme in this sense!) so it’s someone making a space for others’ ideas in that case.

But more likely it’s a scheme to create a platform to deliver ideas to a specific target group. Or a way of attacking the established actors and regulation in the space. Or a way of simply creating division. Or (my guess) all of the above.

A quick leaf through the ads in the National Review (back when I would occasionally happen across a paper copy) yielded a pretty good indication that right-wing stuff usually comes with a fairly good serving of grift.

And that was in a kinder, gentler age, when more of the arguments were about tax policy and the political management of South and Central America. In today's considerably more polarized era...

In an amazing coincidence, people who believe that masks have 5G chips in them to allow Soros/Gates to perform mind control (or is it via the chemtrails?) and that climate change scientists are being manipulated by Big Solar turn out to be easy to sell things to. Who would have thunk it?

I think the idea here is more into logically thinking in a critical manner, and in the last few years especially due to wikileaks, some of your worst nightmares are real AF, and then Epstein happened.