Am I crazy? Yishan's whole thread is completely irrelevant because it assumes Musk is telling the truth when he says he cares about free speech. Free speech enforcement is probably pretty low on Elon's list of reasons to buy Twitter.
As an outsider looking at Twitter I think they're fooling themselves if they think the problem is lack of free speech.
When I click a Twitter link what I usually see are:
- bots and spam
- low quality replies that add nothing (usually from bimbos or 3rd worlders trying to get the attention of a celebrity)
- shallow one liners to an idea that people don't like
As much as upvotes were made fun of, I think Reddit had the right idea because at least the upvoted posts were almost guaranteed to be of "readable" quality. And if you wanted to, you could easily sort the thread by most controversial and read the unpopular opinion.
Now Reddit is a website where free speech is actually lacking with shadow bans and slightly controversial posts getting removed.
I think the bigger point, above free speech, was that running a social network is hard, and Musk will fail at it, regardless of what his "goal" is, unless his goal is to run it into the ground.
A good example of this is comments on this post. They're basically awful and reduce worthwhile traffic on this site by driving away more people than they attract.
The reality of every forum, as the original author says, is that unless you censor topics that attract cranks, you'll eventually become a qanon platform (or the equivalent) and drive out all worthwhile participants.
I'm not sure what the global rule is called, but something like volume nonlinearity or kookiness asymmetry it something. If you have a bunch of looks everyone else leaves. You're options are to get rid of them or fail. It sucks but there it is.
Exactly. The average Redditor can see through Elon's BS, most people here and Yishan can't. Or they want Twitter be owned by someone who is closer to them politically.
