Ye’s ‘Buyout’ Of Parler Looks Very Much Like A Failed Company Taking Advantage Of Troubled Rich Guy
from the this-is-just-kind-of-sad dept
Ye, formerly Kanye West, has had quite a week or so. He got locked out of both his Instagram and Twitter accounts for posting anti-semitic nonsense. Immediately following that, he went on the Drink Champs podcast/video show and spouted even more such nonsense. He’s continuing to spew similar nonsense in other interviews as well. Indeed, it seems like anyone putting him on right now is really exploiting someone who is dealing with some pretty serious issues.
I’m not one to diagnose someone randomly, though Ye has been open about his bipolar diagnosis and the fact that it is a constant effort to manage the condition.
But then things got even stranger on Monday, as Parlement Technology, the parent company of Parler, announced that Ye was now “buying” Parler. He’s not buying Parlement, which was formed when Parler tried to expand beyond its flailing social network by purchasing Dynascale and claiming that it was now building “uncancelable” cloud services (they’re not the first to try this. They’ve also dabbled in NFTs and other nonsense, none of which seems to be doing well).
So the deal with Ye is not to buy the company, but to unload the flop of a social media platform that has very few users left as the market for “Twitter-but-for-assholes-removed-from-Twitter” was already pretty small, and is now divided between way too many platforms: Parler, Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, and some other wannabes.
Over at the Verge, they’re reporting that Parlement has been trying to offload Parler for a few weeks now at astronomical prices, while noting that basically no one uses the site any more: somewhere around 50,000 daily active users, which is a rounding error that Elon Musk would sue over on Twitter.
According to a source familiar with the discussions, Parler’s parent company, Parlement, has been trying to offload its social media platform to potential buyers over the last few weeks. One prospective buyer described Parlement’s asking price for the platform as wildly inflated, and said they were stunned by the site’s low number of daily active users.
[….]
The service currently maintains around 50,000 daily active users, a source familiar told The Verge, compared to hundreds of millions for even moderately sized networks like Twitter and Snapchat.
Put all that together, and this really seems like an opportunistic Parlement taking advantage of Ye, who is upset about his treatment on Instagram and Twitter, who has money to burn, and was talked into taking on this albatross of a failed social media platform to pretend to be creating a site for “free speech.”
Instead, this just looks to be a sad situation, especially given how Ye has been lashing out in his nonsensical rants about others trying to take advantage of him, when the reality is that it’s now that he’s actually being taken advantage of.
Filed Under: anti-semitism, content moderation, kanye west, social media, ye
Companies: parlement technologies, parler
Comments on “Ye’s ‘Buyout’ Of Parler Looks Very Much Like A Failed Company Taking Advantage Of Troubled Rich Guy”
And to add to this, Ye has been paling around with Candace Owens for some time now, and her husband just happens to be the CEO of Parler.
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How fucked in the head do you have to be to marry into and carry the water of a group that intentionally hates everything you are? Candace Owens and Ye might very well be made for each other, in the same way that girls entering puberty write shitty fanfiction.
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why does kanye need to own the platform in order to speak freely? isnt parler already marketed as a free speech platform? should kanye expect his best friends husband to cancel his profile if he doesnt buy the platform?
none of these are discussed in order to display the narrative the author wants. but a major event regarding kanye has been completely ignored; the fact that jp morgan chase is dropping him personally and yeezy brands. kanye now needs things parler has spent time building, like payment processors and custodians who refuse to bend the knee.
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“why does kanye need to own the platform in order to speak freely?”
He doesn’t. He’s a celebrity with many large platforms. But, conversely – why should Twitter put up with his crap if they decide he’s no longer welcome there? I presume Parler would let him speak either way, unless they’re falsely advertising something.
“should kanye expect his best friends husband to cancel his profile if he doesnt buy the platform?”
That’s between them. He doesn’t have any automatic right to be on Parler either way, and the decision would ultimately rest with the owner of the site.
“a major event regarding kanye has been completely ignored; the fact that jp morgan chase is dropping him personally and yeezy brands”
That’s not ignored, but it is the free market at work. I somehow don’t think that buying a megaphone after the last one told him to take his bigotry elsewhere is the best move long term, but again that seems to be the free market at work.
Ye:
(1) Get back on your meds.
(2) Get off the Internet.
(3) Go relax on a beach somewhere… just chill, dude.
My first thought when I looked at the deal was that they previous owners plan to bleed Ye dry while charging him to run a failing social media platform. I’m glad you wrote this so at least enough people will know that maybe something not to horrific will come out of all this.
Ignorance is bliss
Ye could plead that he thinks that he can say whatever he thinks. But, the rational/real world will judge the fool (as defined by Mr. T) as being off his meds and a sucker (as defined by the attributed P.T. Barnum quote).
Let him crash and burn without the public having to put up with his ramblings.
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“Ignorance is bliss”
I used to think there was truth in that, but so many of the most ignorant people online just seem to be so angry all the time.
“Let him crash and burn without the public having to put up with his ramblings.”
If only. As long as the media landscape is obsessed with celebrity, we’ll hear them – and if there’s something the media loves more than celebrity, it’s a train wreck.
Typo
Third paragraph: You say “unconcealable” when I think you mean “uncancelable” (which I know is not actually a word). 😎
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Yup. I think I had gone through it quickly and seen that it got a squiggly and assumed that the autocorrect suggestion was the proper spelling without looking too closely at it… But it’s now correct.
Ye getting validation from the worst possible people will only entrench their exploitation of him. The dude needs serious help—and none of the people who are validating his anti-Semitism will get him that help.
It reminds me of the movie Pitch Black. The monsters appear every few decades and consume all the life on the planet, and when nothing is left, they eat each other.
Only replace “monsters” with “grifters.” Or don’t, same thing.
Re: that reminds me…
I gotta see Pitch Black; the monsters in the trailers reminded me of the grues from Zork…
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Pitch Black is cool, as are the Riddick games on the XBox.
The other 2 movies where the lore is expanded… not quite as successful. But, as a relatively stripped down monster movie with an interesting anti-hero at its core, Pitch Black is pretty good.
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Y’all begin to understand how the happy fun loving immortal became a sociopath watching the humans doing the same things over and over…
So about that free market/marketplace of ideas...
That’s strange, there’s been such an ongoing outcry about how many people want and need a ‘censorship-free platform where people can speak their minds without having to worry about the PC snowflakes silencing them’ that you’d think platforms like that would be overflowing with users in the millions if not tens or hundreds of millions.
To hear that one of the major ones is averaging a few tens of thousands daily is almost enough to make you think that people don’t in fact want that sort of thing for some mysterious reasons.
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They probably do want it, but they want the PC snowflakes to be on that same platform with them, or there’s no point. With no liberals around, there’s nobody to own.
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A good point, it’s no fun being an asshole if you’re the only one in the room or everyone else there is just like you, hence why even that lot don’t use those platforms in any significant numbers.
And his inner circle who are the only ones who had any shot of trying to stop this latest meltdown decided their paycheck matters more than anything else.
I sure hope they invested well because the day is coming when the crazy will no longer sell and the money train will stop.
Ye / Bipolar
If you’re just speculating, could you leave us bipolar persons out of the conversation. We get enough headaches without random articles assuming that being bipolar is the cause of problem. Maybe Ye / Kanye West is just an asshole.
And yeah, every bipolar person has a constant effort to manage the condition. That’s what happens when you have a lifelong illness that hard to properly treat.
A failed company because Amazon, Google, and Apple colluded to kill Twitter’s competition for something that Facebook did.
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Yeah, that’s why those companies might not want to be involved in them, because it competes with Twitter….
This is nothing new. Justin Timberlake bought MySpace.
What’s sad about this? Kanye is a piece of shit who frankly deserves to go bankrupt and disappear into permanent obscurity. And that’s putting it incredibly nicely.
Anyway, losing money in attempts to buy social media companies is just what rich untalented idiots do for fun these days.
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Whatever you think about Kanye West as an artist or a person, the people most able to help him manage his bullshit better are clearly doing little-to-nothing to help him manage his bullshit. Whether their exploitation is incidental or overt is ultimately irrelevant: They’re not trying to help him manage his bullshit so they can keep getting whatever they’re getting out of being in his orbit.
Anyone with any sense could look at Parler’s metrics and tell you that buying it would likely be a bad investment. I have to wonder: How many of the people in Ye’s “inner circle” would have the courage to tell him that?
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Well, how many would have told him not to be a jerk, not to hang out with orange-faced jerks, not to announce that he wishes to go ``death con 3” on Jews, be careful dealing with JPM Chase, and generally avoid doing that thing where parts of his face move and sounds come out?
By the most recent count, the answer is ``too few”.