I Spent 24 hours on Parler Watching it Implode
This pic of a white guy yelling at himself in the mirror is the perfect summation of Parler (photo by Christopher Ott)
By Borden Ornelaz
With all the news circulating around Parler, I was too curious about the bull posted there and wanted to keep engaging MAGA in the hopes of actual discourse (okay, I wanted to talk shit, just factual shit), but I didn’t want to make an account and have the feeling of tarnishing my e-mail or handle.
Once I made an account though, I posted three comments on Parler.
I couldn’t resist trolling them.
The attack responses began within minutes.
It took a while to get used to it’s stuttering interface and odd flow of threads, but getting past that I threw up a few original posts: they got mad really fast. My notifications went wild. In my first hour or so on the site, these people proved they are the flakiest of snows.
I wanted to test the free speech aspect, just to be a dick, because you can do that with no consequences on the site (at least so they say, despite only popular conservative pundits being allowed to post links for some reason). So, I told Osama bin Laden’s niece that, if she wanted people to take her seriously, she would show her cleavage. What a fucking wild time that something like that is possible, man. And that wasn’t the only comment suggesting the same, with no moderation to stop that sort of harassment. You can block, but there’s no ‘report’ option.
Some two hours in perusing the vitriol and decidedly unhappy content, I had to call it for the night.
The next morning I woke to 100+ reply and up/down vote notifications. I had posted a total of six times, but could check off users calling me insults like cuckold, Nazi, “demoKRAT”, and troll.
When it was announced Amazon was going to pull Parler’s servers I needed to step up my trolling game. Before Parler was shut down, I made it to seven posts and under 50 comments, but received a solid collection of wild notions and responses for 24 hours on the site. I even responded to a post about Recep Erdogan with a made up very obvious conspiracy about a blood offering and honestly couldn’t tell if their response was a serious one. I’m still scratching my head about that one.
The whole thing was just a clunky, slow Twitter ripoff poorly run by a staff of about 30 for around 4 million misinformed, angry, staunchly “I’m right and that’s it” people, with the only worthwhile parts being a more smoothed look and ability to up/down vote in the Reddit fashion, which gets a solid work out with all the “shut up demoRAT” and “do your research” conspiracy responses.
The way Parler sets up its thread feeds is so frustratingly disorganized; continuity is an afterthought at best, making it difficult to read most conversations in a logical manner.
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