Parler’s New Owner Shuts Down Site: ‘No Reasonable Person Believes Twitter For Conservatives Is A Viable Business Model’
from the no-one-will-miss-you dept
Ah, remember Parler? They were the first of the “alternative” social media companies targeting the Trumpist crowd, in which I pointed out that their whole “we don’t moderate” schtick wasn’t going to work. The company speed ran the content moderation learning curve faster than most. But even from the beginning, the Trumpists who joined admitted it was just no fun when they couldn’t whine about how victimized they were.
Anyway, the site is dead now. You may recall there were stories last fall of Kanye West buying the site, which we noted appeared to be the failed site (with around 50,000 daily active users) trying to take advantage of a troubled rich guy. That deal quickly fell apart.
On Friday, it was announced that Parlement, the company that owned Parler had sold the site to a company named Starboard, which simultaneously announced it was shutting the site down. Both Parlement and Starboard are smallish companies trying to cater to the Trumpist world with digital services.
It’s not at all clear why one would buy the site just to shut it down, but the CEO of Starboard claimed he still hoped to “retain the platform’s audience.” But… elsewhere he admitted that there’s no real market for a Trumpist social media network.
“No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more,” Arlington, Va.-based digital media company Starboard said in announcing Friday that it had acquired Parler.
Basically, it sounds like what Starboard really bought was a marketing list of Parler users that Starboard is going to try to onboard to its other products.
“Parler’s large user base and additional strategic assets represent an enormous opportunity for Starboard to continue to build aggressively in our media and publishing business,” Starboard CEO Ryan Coyne said in a statement. “The team at Parler has built an exceptional audience and we look forward to integrating that audience across all of our existing platforms.”
Except that, by all accounts, most of Parler’s users had abandoned the site for any of the other Trump supporting micro-blogging sites like Gettr, Truth Social, or Twitter.
Anyway, there’s not much more to say about this one, but it seemed worth marking the passing of one of the many failed social media sites that seemed to think that there was a market for catering to out-of-touch insecure assholes with inferiority complexes, by promising them that they could be as horrible as they wanted to be with no consequences.
Filed Under: competition, content moderation, social media
Companies: parlement, parler, starboard
Comments on “Parler’s New Owner Shuts Down Site: ‘No Reasonable Person Believes Twitter For Conservatives Is A Viable Business Model’”
Business model
Yeah, everyone knows the real money is in “nutritional supplements”
Re:
Somehow, I think there’s more money as a Financial Structurist specializing in pre-bankruptcy and tax havens.
Being the guy with the money is great, but being the guy with the shovel can be better.
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And here I thought the money was in pillows.
So birds of a feather don’t want to flock together?
Parler is dead.
Oh wow, who saw this coming. It’s almost as if basing a social media business entirely on pandering to a political wing was a bad idea.
Re:
More like pandering to those looking for targets for their bile will only work if you also attract their targets, and keep them around..
Re: Re:
Which is why some of the liberal news outlet comment boards are active. That’s where the soul vampires you correctly identified flock to. It’s a target them, and not all of the targets have learned the best response to an asshole is silence and shunning. Asshole in stewed bile. No one likes it on their plate, but no one minds watching it be made.
Re: Re: Re:
As is here.
Though I’d like to think Techdirt at least knows how to handle these assholes, even if it takes a while to learn.
Re: Re: Re:2 me, too
So would I. And if it were not for that pesky reality where I see tons of responses to those assholes, I would probably make the leap to thinking that Techdirt knew how to handle them.
Once they figure out how to flag them (and maybe fix ``flag” and ``preview” to work without javascript as on the old site) and not have responses, I will be pleased to say that Techdirt has figured out how to deal with those several horses patoots.
Re:
Well, this may be the year of the Social Media Corpses. Who knows if the bird site will survive going into receivership.
Musk has already rearranged ownership of twitter, to insulate himself financially from the fallout. He might not as easily escape the bitter recriminations, though.
Re: Re:
I hadn’t heard about that.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/twitter-company-no-longer-exists-is-now-part-of-musks-x/
Re: Re:
Twitter already existed as a subsidiary of X. X1 holdings and X2 holdings were the companies that bought twitter in a reverse triangle merger to maintain contracts for Twitter Inc.
The onlyy thing I know musk to have done is legally rebrand the company from Twitter, Inc. His ownership and liability haven’t changed.
Re: Re: Re:
Just to be clear, that’s not the case here. The new X Corp. is DIFFERENT and unrelated to X1 Holdings and X2 Holdings. It confused a lot of people (including the NYT) and allowed the new company to slip under the radar for three weeks, but X Corp is a new entity entirely, and moving Twitter into X Corp is actually something new, and potentially a big deal in that it gets Twitter out from under Delaware law and into Nevada.
Feel free to credit this, since I forgot…
Conservatives: “Let The Free Market Decide”
Parler: “Shuts Down”
Conservatives: “Dagnabbit.”
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Almost Critical Mass
In January 2021, it was so viable that the leftist corporations panicked and had it shut down. After they got restarted, there was additional competition from Truth Social, and now Twitter 2.0. The point behind a social media company is to have a good portion of the folks you care about as users of the site. You just can’t do that with competition. Consolidation makes the system more useful, so it’s a good thing in this situation.
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The new owner of the website: “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more,” Arlington, Va.-based digital media company Starboard said in announcing Friday that it had acquired Parler.
The Kolby comes in with his idiot contribution. Now who am I to believe. /sarc
Re: Re:
Bear in mind that this was all on top of a narrative that Parler was absolutely going to destroy the fuck out of supposed “left-woke-LGBT-driven media” and serve the actual needs of the “silent majority” who would definitely assuredly totally throw money at the likes of Trump just to have a different platform. “Competition” and “the market” were desirable, or at least formed the backbone of their talking points as to why Parler and Truth Social were good things.
But realistically what happened was that every single shitposting edgelord just congregated with their circlejerking buddies to boast about how much they were owning the libs, then fucked off once they realized they weren’t getting a constant stream of hype and engagement. Because right-wingers aren’t so much users as they are parasites. Each of them will accept nothing less than taking up all the oxygen in the room. They’ll turn on each other if they have to, and once they’ve absolutely destroyed the ship they’re standing on they’ll abandon it to look for the next big thing.
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Parler never stood a chance of being “viable” in the sense that it was going to be any real competition to Twitter. In addition to entering the social media scene with nothing new to offer beyond being “Twitter but for conservatives”, the fact that it essentially marketed itself as “Twitter but for conservatives” meant it was never going to attract a significant fraction of the amount of users away from Twitter or turn significant users into Parler-exclusive users. 50,000 daily users might be impressive for a Mastodon instance, but when compared to Twitter, that number is effectively meaningless—just like Parler was, is, and always will be.
Re: Run away little coward
Thanks fucking stupid even for you k-dawg.
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Ding ding ding – victim card played…
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Aye, I remember Parler doing so well they were begging left wing figures to come to the site, offering to pay them $10-20,000 to try and make it more than just angry right wingers breathing their own farts on there as they couldn’t retain anyone but the furthest right and qAnoners. Normal conservatives joined, cheered their free speech then got bored then returned to Twitter because of the lack of engagement.
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“the leftist corporations”
Interesting, is there an overton window for corporations?
What is a leftist corporation? It’s funny some people think Conservative News Network is leftist.
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A corporation that uses a transwoman to sell beer, maybe?
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No; some simply enforced their terms of service after trying to help Parler conform to those terms. It wasn’t out of panic.
Nice bit of shade at the end there. Love to see it.
Good thing they have experience getting scammed
Buys the site only to shut it down with a comment that catering to Eternal Victims isn’t a viable business strategy, giving them access to all that juicy user data that they claim will be used to cater to Eternal Victims on other services…
Oh yeah, I don’t see this going poorly for the people who were on that site at all.
list
This was 100% a email list acquisition deal. Starboard bought Parler purely for direct response (list rentals to GOP candidates/conservative causes.) I’m not familiar with Starboard, but there are dozens of companies in this space who make hefty margins renting their lists (or brokering the lists of past failed GOP candidates.) The grift continues loooooong after a campaign shuts down or, in this case, an app.
“No Reasonable Person Believes…”
And we come to the crux of the situation.
Re: No Reasonable Person Believes
Trump believed it.
Mike Pillow believed it.
Re: Re:
Since when were they reasonable people.
Will they be retaining Parler’s core business model of “We’re Cambridge Analytica 2.0 selling the PII of dumb rubes (our userbase) drawn in to our frozen-peach-flavored honeypot to political malvertisers” ?
Color me not brokenhearted
For a few months, it appeared that Parler would actually succeed, and panic ensued.
Then someone noticed nobody but nutcases were on there whining about TFG losing the election, it became obvious there wasn’t enough money in the world to keep it going.
It should have been named “The Seventh level of Hell” for all the popularity it had.
I do wonder though if the Jan 6th decimated the audience, because that’s where most of them hung out.
When nearly all of your audience is in prison, there is a problem collecting subscription fees, I understand.
Oh, well, no great loss to mankind.
Parlement? Starboard? I’m expecting some sort of Muthership Connexion next.
Re: Make my funk the P-funk!
Oh, this is too good!!
The desired effect is what you get when you improve your interplanetary funksmanship. Dig! Dig!
Meinspace go down the hole…
Well, Musk stole their business by making Qwitter the social media for Republicans.
I think you can just say “Twitter” now.
When will we get a Twitter for non-conservatives?
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Most social media services fit that mould. That’s why the right is in a perpetual state of outrage – they say what they actually want to say, and the majority of people tell them to GTFO, leaving them to only be allowed in the places that cater to people like them (and nobody wants to associate with people like them, including themselves).
The only question is how much work you have to do to manage your own feeds vs. what’s done for you by default.
OMG .. and now for your viewing pleasure we present
TruthGPT
LMAO
https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-says-he-will-start-truthgpt-or-maximum-truth-seeking-ai-fox-news-2023-04-17/
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I guess Microsoft didn’t want to part with Tay.
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Great, now Musk will shadow ban anything this thing points out to be the “Truth”.
Re: Re:
When some people use the word truth, I think they actually mean the word faith. If they believe it to be true, then it is. It gets weird when data analysis is twisted pretzel like to fit a desired outcome.
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Big tech killed it in a weekend
Remember when all you morons said “bullshit, it still exists”? Well, it would have. Big tech killed it off right when frustration at Twitter’s ideological dystopian bullshit was at it’s maximum. Precisely because they didn’t want a conservative twitter to exist.
It’s just been limping along since, and now it finally died.
And now that Musk has bought (and largely fixed) twitter, there’s no need for a conservative twitter. But there might have been a true twitter competitor had you assholes not conspired to kill it off.
Good news is that we probably would never have found out that the ideological censorship was real (which has been proven, despite Masnick’s claims) nor found out that the government was engaging censorship by proxy (ditto).
So we probably live in a better world, overall, without Big tech killing off a true twitter competitor, Musk might not have bought Twitter, and we wouldn’t have learned how deep the corruption was.
But a handful of companies still shouldn’t be able to kill off a company in a weekend. Get fucked, Masnick.
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Put down the wine box mom.
Now sit yourself down and have a nice little nap.
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Aw, what a shame that the idiot brigade was left with just Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, and now Twitter.
It wasn’t “big tech” that killed off Parler. It was too much competition for a tiny slice of the market for dumb fucks.
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Are you supposed to be Matthew Bennett’s imaginary wife? Or is this your true body euphoria speaking?
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Re: Re:
You are a hateful, despicable little man. I see why my husband lurked on this site for 20 years but only started to post after you Democrat scumbags forced him out of hiding.
Elon will win, and then he’ll show you haters.
Re: Re: Re:
Does your wife know you’re using her name to shitpost, Matthew?
Does she know that you’d rather spend time mocking Masnick than with her?
Re: Re: Re:
[Projects facts contrary to evidence]
Re: Re: Re:
You can’t fool us, Matthew.
And I’m sorry YOU made your wife do this.
Re: Re: Re:2
This is what happens when you allow straight men to breed.
Re:
It’s always someone else’s fault, isn’t it?
Be a man for a change and own it.
You didn’t support it enough, and it failed. It’s your fault it’s in the shitheap.
Nice bit of shade at the end there. Love to see it.
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