Is Parler dead?

 

Parler's logo.

This isn't a traditional post and it isn't based on anything but my own experience. I haven't seen any news articles about this but I do know what I have seen. And what I have seen shows me that Parler seems to be in a lot of trouble. 

As you are surely aware, Parler was one of the conservative alternatives to Twitter. The website grew fairly rapidly but was canceled by Amazon and other tech companies in the wake of the January 6th counter-coup. The website was taken down and it took quite awhile to come back. 

That's when the problems started. Initially when the website came back the site was full of bots. You would post anything and get dozens of notifications, obviously from fake accounts. This problem was annoying but it was taken care of and now the bots are gone, but I think it drove away quite a few users. It was difficult, even for a small account like mine, to find out what my actual followers were trying to say to me. 

But what really killed the website was the technical glitches. For a long time when you visited the site, you had to log in every time. Even worse you had to verify your account every time, which involved getting a code texted to you on your phone. This problem was extreme, to the point where if you even closed the website for a minute, you were logged out again and had to go through the same drawn out and annoying process again. 

This drove away the people that stayed through the site being canceled and the spambot problem. And though the problem is long gone I think a lot of people have stayed away. It seems like I only have a couple of followers that actually post anything. My interactions are essentially non-existent. 

It's a shame because before the cancelation Parler showed a lot of promise. It was growing fast and so was my follower count. The website didn't have the obvious problems that Twitter have with their awful censorship policy and clinically insane blue checkmark user base. And I think the site design and moderation is better than Gab, which has a lot of bad users as well. It struck a nice balance between the two sites. 

So can Parler right the ship? I am not sure. I think a lot of people now think of Parler as the "twitter clone that doesn't actually work", and it will take time to fix that perception. They could probably get their user base back if President Trump made an account but that seems unlikely to happen, given his designs on making his own website. Without that, I am not sure what Parler can do to fix things. It might be too late.