I set up an account this evening and it’s unusable due to loading times. They’ve added 1.7m in 4 days which may explain it. Be interesting to see how long it takes them to scale
What puts me off Gab and Parler is that the vast majority are those alienated or banned from other platforms for the same reason, for the most part they all think the same way and the topic of conversation is almost exclusively political. Gab has some interesting groups which slightly mitigates this.
I agree with you about the political agitation but I would say its becoming less of an issue on Gab. Parler was quite toxic. However, I prefer MSN messenger style chatrooms, so I use Telegram mostly which has now reached 500 million daily active users.
These platforms aren't just filled with people banned from facebook anymore, and will become less political as time goes on
parler is owned by partisan media personalities such as dan bongino now. gab is political, but more so in terms of ideas and values. parler is explicitly, aggressively, partisan political from what i can see. I don't use either platform
I’m not as optimistic as your last prediction, unless Twitter and facebook start eating their own and that Sparks a more diverse range of points of view coming on board. I also think that in terms of interests, people joining these platforms will always have politics as number 1
If they get large quantities of Gen-X and baby boomers to move from FB to Gab, I think that will kill FB.
When they open up digital marketing on a platform thats less saturated, that will be the real test though. If Gab can do digital marketing decently corporations will start paying them money and stop criticising them so openly.
Scott Alexander put it well in Neutral vs. Conservative[1]:
"if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches."
This piece may be the single most intelligent thing I have read all week (though this perhaps does not speak well of my usual information sources...). :)
I feel like one of the defects in most of our discourse these days (from any position, on any subject) is an almost complete disregard for trying to understand opposing views (and even a lack of concern that ones assumptions about the opposition might not be entirely correct).
Curiosity, exchange of views, diversifying the news and information I’m exposed to, follow some people I am interested in hearing from, respect for censorship stance. These are the first that spring to mind
