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.