It’s not hard to believe thy existed to foment conflict when you start looking into the private life of the founder.

I know moderation is expensive, but how much of a cost is it to Twitter on the scale of their various expenses? Is Parler's idea a reasonable cost savings from a business perspective?

Seems like some of the appeal was the lack of moderation

Is staffing your meat packing plant with sickly orphans a reasonable cost savings from a business perspective?

> Is staffing your meat packing plant with sickly orphans a reasonable cost savings from a business perspective?

I think you're taking an overly negative tone with someone who appears to agree with you.

GGP: It's a bad choice, but it saved a bunch of money.

GP: I don't think it even saved much money, percentage wise, did it?

And then your reply takes a very negative tone, as if the GP is suggesting that some amount of cost savings would have justified it. The GP is not suggesting that some amount of cost savings justifies what was done.

I'm a socialist. I'm just curious if Parler was more of an ideological or a business play. If it's a business play, then the ideological dressing could be interpreted as just a hook to get rubes onto the platform (though it could be both too).

If only... except it’s funded and managed by Rebekah Mercer.

Moderation is highly subjective and Parler seemed to have limited moderation mostly to illegal speech. We have built an entire country on the premise of legal vs illegal speech and have very clear laws and systems in place for reporting and handling violations. If a company chooses to adhere to the law but not also impose their own biases when it comes to moderation, that is their right. As long as they are undoubtedly doing their best to actually adhere to the law and remove and report illegal content promptly. The technology exists to do this effectively. The real issue lies on the subjective preferences people have over what. otherwise legal, speech should be allowed to remain on the platforms. Clearly it’s a slippery slope which is the basis for the spirit of the 1st amendment in the first place. Whether the 1st amendment ought to apply to the subset of private companies which have collectively become our virtual public forum is a separate debate. But the concept of restrictions on speech still applies to social platforms.

The issue with Parler is that they weren't purely banning on illegal vs legal speech, they were banning left-wing "trolling" which isn't illegal (even if it was actually trolling).

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...

And didn't exactly perform adequate moderation based on the rules they did have:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26022229

That's a thing I never figured out: why would they ban left-wing trolls? The right-wing trolls enjoy fighting with left-wing trolls, and in my experience, they usually win. Especially when they have numbers on their side.

I had thought that what would kill them would be that those echo chambers rely on an enemy to be opposed to. Without it, they would just get bored and wander off. That's what they like about public forums such as Facebook and Twitter. They're not perfect echo chambers. They're opportunities to have their echoes amplified, then go off to fight the good fight against their dastardly foes.

Beating up on the left-wing trolls should be fun. Sure, some of the left-wing troll masquerade as right-wing trolls to throw people off, but really, it's hard to tell the difference. Poe's Law is more and more prescient.

No, it's a cover they're using for pushing the extreme-right agenda of the Mercer family (Brietbart, Cambridge Analytica, etc).

The wealthy use this tactic to install their politicians. There aren't enough rich people to win elections on their own so they find easily manipulated groups to do their bidding. Stirring up the rabble with identity politics let's them mold governance in their favor. It creates a nice feedback loop of discontent when the puppets always enact policies that strengthen the ire of the base.

From whom are they extracting profit? I think the word you're looking for is "producing", not "extracting".

From their users, presumably. I never visited the site, but I assume they ran advertisements.

They had moderation. They were not free speech as in "any ideology of opinion goes". They were "arbitrary radical right wing speech goes". Free speech would mean aggressive communists could participate freely too. It was not the case, anything left was cut away.

Their moderation was to show post to 5 users and go with their decision. It was guaranteed to create bubble.

We should not use "free speech" as euphemism for "arbitrary racist, arbitrary inciting right wing speech". Free speech means those opposing right wing are equally unmoderated.

Absolutely. They aggressively removed adult and blasphemous content

If anything it was less free speech than Twitter