A free speech absolutist would not ban links to Mastodon, Instagram, Substack, Linktree, and most recently hide Threads from search and trends.

A free speech absolutist would not say things like "saying cis is a bannable offense."

So can we please stop giving credibility to this claim, because it's complete BS. Musk's idea of "free speech" is that "you can say anything you want, as long as I like it."

The problem for Musk is that a Twitter that is attractive to advertisers isn’t attractive to Musk.

Let that sink in, because advertisers are turned into public sentiment moreso than most, because their dollars are on the line. And where is public sentiment? Pro LGBTQ, pro abortion, pro BLM, anti MAGA, anti white supremacy, pro democracy. Essentially the antithesis of Musk. Musk is very un-American.

This is why Twitter must fail as a business for as long as Musk owns it. He wants it to be his personal playpen, but his ideal world is a white ethnostate where he is the boss.

And that’s why Twitter ads are now crypto scams and waifus pushing anime porn games. Because Musk’s Twitter audience is now Nazis, white supremacists, MAGAs, and Kremlin apologists.

which is what is really missing in every HN discussion of how you could rebuild twitter in a weekend.

that's only if all you see is the front end which is users talking to each other.

the backend problem of making advertisers happy is a whole different issue, which is a large data warehousing / analytics / reporting / billing problem.

and then there's content moderation, which is both demanded by a large subsection of users and advertisers and by political regimes that you operate under that you can't opt-out of.

and the content moderation task is made harder by the technological war with the 'bots' which requires backend tooling.