News Roundup #9: Parlor Rises To The Top of App Store

Read to the end to learn how a business model changed a company culture

Li Jin

Nathan Baschez

Nov 17, 2020 · 3 min readUpdated Dec 17, 2025

Thanks for rating this post—join the conversation by commenting below.

Comments

You need to login before you can comment. Don't have an account? Sign up!

This Week’s Interview: Li & Nathan!

This week on Means of Creation we did something a bit different: a casual Q&A and hangout with us, Li Jin and Nathan Baschez! We walked through the week's passion economy news, and took live questions from the MoC community.

Find it as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Breaker or wherever you listen to podcasts, or as a video on YouTube here. Or subscribe to the Means of Creation YouTube Channel. Now, onto the news.

Parlor Surges

What happened?

Parlor hit #1 in the App Store after Facebook and Twitter started attaching warning labels to election misinformation.

The platform is largely being used by political conservatives who feel ideologically censored on Facebook.

Gab, founded in 2016, is also growing but their growth is limited because they were kicked out of the App Stores.

Li’s Take:

Any moderation on a social platform always breeds an alternative that’s “free”.

For example, it was just after Patreon tightened their moderation policy that OnlyFans became popular for sex workers (many of whom migrated from Patreon).

While the incumbent platform usually remains large, it opens up a small opportunity for an unmoderated site to emerge. While Parlor is hot, it still only has 10 million users,a lot fewer than Facebook’s 2.7 billion users.

Nathan’s Take:

There are two options for platforms: have moderation, or don’t have moderation. If you don’t, your site will become a scum pile (like 4chan).

At the same time, the Sam Lesson piece on the societal problem of only needing 1,000 true fans to succeed highlights the potential problems with niche communities: they promote ideological siloes instead of collectively working through a common narrative.

When you subscribe to Means of Creation, you also get:

The Means of Creation talk show every Friday at 11:00am PST / 2:00pm EST featuring founders and investors in the passion economy. Recent guests include Ankur Nagpal, Joseph Cohen, and Blake Robbins.

Passion Economy News (you’re reading it now!) where we break down the latest news on the passion economy — platforms, creators, startups, and trends.

Everything else in the bundle, including great stuff from all our other paid newsletters: Divinations, Superorganizers, Praxis, Napkin Math, Ask Jerry, The Long Conversation, Free Radicals, and Almanack. And we’re adding new stuff all the time!