[HN Gopher] Parler owner laid off 75% of staff and has only 20 e...
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       Parler owner laid off 75% of staff and has only 20 employees left
        
       Author : mfiguiere
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2023-01-11 20:32 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
        
       | ElfinTrousers wrote:
       | All else aside, when your contingency plan is to get Kanye to
       | take a mess off of your hands, you may be in too deep already.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | _whiteCaps_ wrote:
       | My understanding is that Parler is a Mastodon instance... I know
       | that every time headlines are posted about the number of
       | employees at X company, people ask why there are so many people
       | working there. But in this case I think it's justified. They're
       | just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?
        
         | ubermonkey wrote:
         | My cynical answer is that most such things on the American
         | right are, at some level, a grift.
        
           | isthisthingon99 wrote:
           | Not just https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lives-
           | matter-activ...
        
           | _whiteCaps_ wrote:
           | Ah good point. I also hadn't considered they're probably
           | putting a lot of effort into DDOS mitigation.
        
         | efsavage wrote:
         | > They're just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?
         | 
         | My first reaction was surprise that there were 20 people at
         | Parler to begin with!
         | 
         | From what I've heard of people running Mastodon servers, they
         | are not exactly lightweight, and a large one might actually
         | require a lot of housekeeping. So maybe 20 is not too
         | unreasonable...
        
           | vaidhy wrote:
           | They had 80 people to begin with. After 75% layoff, they have
           | 20 people left.
        
         | vkou wrote:
         | > They're just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?
         | 
         | Marketing, promotion, moderation, fundraising, interfacing with
         | your political allies, figuring out a way to make money with
         | whatever they are doing, grift.
        
         | ender341341 wrote:
         | > They're just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?
         | 
         | I assume (with no other info) that they probably had a bunch of
         | marketing/pr/sales folks.
        
         | tablespoon wrote:
         | > My understanding is that Parler is a Mastodon instance... I
         | know that every time headlines are posted about the number of
         | employees at X company, people ask why there are so many people
         | working there. But in this case I think it's justified. They're
         | just running a Mastodon instance, why so many people?
         | 
         | IIRC, when they were first in the news, I believe they were
         | running some insane thing built on top of WordPress (or some
         | other blogging platform like that). At least that was according
         | to someone who had claimed to hack them and scraped all their
         | user data. I think the site was a rush job meant to capitalize
         | on particular dissatisfactions with Twitter.
         | 
         | I believe gab (not so much MAGA as explicit neonazis) is a
         | Mastodon instance, and that's caused trouble for Mastodon
         | clients on various app stores (i.e. if you can use the generic
         | client to connect to gab, the app could fail the app store's
         | content policies and not get approved).
        
       | realAzazello wrote:
       | Already posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34343187
        
       | tomohawk wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-11 23:01 UTC)