An under-remarked aspect of Parler being rebuffed by Big Tech : the people running it appear to be technology idiots

The platform had been reliant on Amazon Web Services … Amazon’s cloud computing service … to provide its alternative to Twitter. Amazon took the action after finding dozens of posts on the service which it said encouraged violence. Google and Apple had already removed Parler from their app stores towards the end of last week saying it had failed to comply with their content-moderation requirements. Parler announced their entire system has been shut down, no vendors will touch them, and that it will be offline for the foreseeable future. However, I found it was still accessible via the web – although nobody could create new accounts over the weekend, without which it was not possible to view its content. 

NOTE: Parler was hit by a massive data scrape. Security researchers collected swaths of user data before the network went dark Monday morning after Amazon, Google, and Apple booted the platform. See details at the end of this post.

Although only formed in 2018, there is actually quite a bit of “history” about the site so this morning I ran through a few of the more in-depth pieces.  Just a few points:

1. Parler lacks many features we expect on social media platforms. This includes algorithms used to define trending topics and engagement-based feeds. The lack of a robust search function makes it difficult to find meaningful conversations.

2. In all fairness, some users have said they prefer building a small community through random discovery via scrolling single hashtag results. But that’s not the norm. The bulk of social media users want to find threads to hop into to build connections. They want to use social media as a search engine – finding relevant content based on any search term, hashtagged, or not.

3. Parler’s stance on free speech is so strong it never implemented system-wide filters to enforce the simplest of policies. When trolls infiltrated the network by the thousands, many users begged for something to be done. Parler had neither the staff nor the resources to automatically flag potential pornographic or prohibited content. Eventually, Parler released a self-reported feature for users to mark their content as not safe for work (NSFW) before hitting the post button. Other than that, users needed to block such accounts one at a time — a three-step process. Parler’s short-term solution could have been to moderate new accounts. While it would have caused controversy, the platform would have likely diminished the loss of many active users.

But what is an under-remarked aspect of Parler amongst all the gnashing of teeth over its toxic content, free speech and being dropped by Big Tech is … the people running it appear to be technology idiots. Regardless of what mainstream media says, Parler has been losing traction, and not due to politics. The bulk of people flocking to the alternate platform knew what type of discussions to expect. It was Parler’s lack of preparation that prompted thousands of new users to consider leaving. Many did, many continue to do so. Some returned to give it another go, but many are now of the “been there, tried that” mindset. Still in its infancy, the network invited millions of people with neither the infrastructure nor staff to manage the requests. Since last summer, users have been struggling with outages. Even before Amazon pulled the plug, uploading images was a crapshoot. If you don’t time things just right, the preview of a linked website won’t appear.

The following thread is instructive. It is from Sarah Mei who is a software engineer and founder of RailsBridge and LivableCode and has been a key source through the years for helping me understand the infrastructure of the internet.

NOTE: most of my conversations this weekend about Parler, social media platforms in general and Trump’s “self-coup” (a longer post on that to come later today after a weekend of chats with my intelligence community contacts) happened in the “new new” thing in social media: the tectonic shift and growth of independent creatives building franchises around their talents, where I (and a growing tribe) now spend our social media time, away from the main firehose of social media. More in my post here. 

Sarah posted bits of it on Twitter. Here is the stream:

Sarah Mei

So just to be clear here:

1) their primary data store is relational
2) they put integer PKs on everything
3) they didn’t realize that the PKs limited the size of the tables
4) when it fell over, only one person could fix it – and Blair [Parler CTO] was asleep

ALL FOUR of these are total clown shoes for a social network – even a small one. And especially for a CTO who’s an “infrastructure specialist”. I mean, COME ON.

A social network that depends on a relational store is just … bananapants. Showing a feed is like a nine table join – people x posts x permissions x avatars x comments x likes x shares x (etc). So there’s that, but if we’re being charitable, perhaps Blair inherited that decision from Thomson [Parler founder who is an engineer but left the tech role to others]. It still doesn’t excuse Blair’s total lack of awareness of how primary keys work. He called it “a limit we weren’t actively aware of.” HELLO! You are the CTO!

And then there’s the problem that ONLY Blair could fix this. Perhaps they’ve hired more backend folks since then, because if not, they have a -30% chance of ever reappearing on the internet.

I just find this whole thing ridiculous. And hilarious. Don’t get me wrong – there was a point even several years into my career where I did not understand this nuance. Fortunately, at no time when I was so ignorant was I a CTO.

I’m shocked that the company who wanted to enter the crowded social networking scene on the business premise that the moderation policies of Facebook and Twitter suppress free speech has a hard time finding good talent. And Pirate Bay, the most censored website in the world, started by kids, run by people with problems with alcohol, drugs and money, is still up after almost 2 decades. Parlor and Gab and the other alt-right social web sites have all the money around [Rebekah Mercer funded the Parler start up and continues to fund it] but cannot find the skills or mindset to run it? Embarrassing.

They might have done better with four ferrets in a trench coat.

As many in the comments thread on her blog and Twitter pointed out, most do not remember Twitter was almost unusable for many months until they got their infrastructure under control. Engineering at scale is hard. But Twitter realized it immediately and quickly spent the $$$$$ to get it right.

NOTE: for comparison purposes, look at the brilliance of Jeff Bezos and internet infrastructure. Click here.

As Alan Neves (infrastructure analyst at CapGemini) told me: “I’m guessing Relational is probably fine until you hit a single digit percentage of Twitter scale. But considering this company intended to play in the big leagues right away, they just did not do their homework.”