Conservative Twitter clone Parler shuts down, at least temporarily

[thewayne]

Parler sprang into being not long after trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook and was later de-platformed by Amazon for not moderating their content. They shortly found hosting and came back pretty popular with the conservative crowd.

At least for a while.

Now there's lots of conservative social media, including trump's "Truth" Social and now Twitter, which has reinstated trump, though he hasn't posted anything there probably has an exclusive deal with Truth Social for now.

Parler, at one point, was going to sell a big chunk of itself to Kanye 'Ye' West, but then he went on a Nazi tirade and Parler cancelled the deal.

Times got hard, layoffs happened and only a small core remains. And that has been sold, for an undisclosed amount, to an outfit called (from the article) "Starboard, formerly called Olympic Media, owns conservative news sites American Wire News and BizPac Review."

And Starboard has shut down Parler pending a review of the business. They claim that Parler will be integrated with the rest of their holdings, we shall see how that works out.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/parler-shuts-down-as-new-owner-says-conservative-platform-needs-big-revamp/

Comments

[dewline]

Partial victory? Maybe?

[thewayne]

Too soon to know.  It being offline is definitely a good thing, it was close to financial collapse and badly needed more backing.  The question is whether or not they return.

[disneydream06]

I was going to say, why would you buy something just to shut it down, but then I thought, they must have needed a tax write off. LOL...........
Hugs, Jon

[dewline]

And that rationale is how the release of Batgirl got burned, as I recall...

[disneydream06]

That does sound familiar. :o

[thewayne]

Subscriber lists.

[silveradept]

Good that Parler is off-line. That said, the idea of "we can integrate these people into our other products" suggests that there's already another Parler that exists in that company, and we're going to start hearing about it when they get all the Parler folks onto it. Or, what might be more likely, is that all the Parler user base is going to depart for Truth Social, because that's currently the place where they can get their preferred environment as well as direct contact with the messianic figure they so clearly want to fawn over.

[thewayne]

And Truth Social has some very bad financial problems - they owe a lot of money to programmers and hosting companies.

[silveradept]

Given who the principal figure (and at least part owner?) is on that site, at this point, I feel like anyone who knowingly goes into business with them at this point without demanding the full value of the contact up front is consenting to doing the work for free until whatever suit that actually managers to get through the wall of lawyers succeeds. I'm not saying that's a good thing or that he should be allowed to keep doing it, but that precedent so far suggests "stiff you, then try to outwait you with lawyers" is standard operating procedure for anything associated with him.

[thewayne]

One of their problems, aside from dealing with HIM, is that because of the nature of their content, they can't get big-money advertisers to work with them!  They don't want to be associated with TS (trump's shit?!).  So they've never had the revenue stream that they wanted or expected, and never will.

[silveradept]

That's true, but given how many supposedly anti-wokeness millionaires and billionaires there actually are, surely one of them could find some pocket change to keep the network going. All they really need is to find some way of getting Murdoch on board with them and the matter will be solved.