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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t Twitter be an unambiguously more successful business if Elon’s moderation moves brought it more in line with “the normal consumer?”

Seems to me he simultaneously put out a dogwhistle for one audience (far right commentators agree on this) and was openly hostile both to individuals and standard sensibilities among another audience (e.g. it’s distasteful to treat employees of your newly acquired company the way he did).

That could fully explain “the shift” without any “omg conspiracy Overton window biased moderation” mumbo jumbo.

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You'd have to isolate the political bias changes from all of the other changes, including loudly antagonizing advertisers.

But that was part of “the shift” that GP is crediting for moving toward broader appeal.

Agreed on the general point, this stuff can’t really be disaggregated in a meaningful way, but of course it doesn’t need to be disaggregated: the overall set of Musk’s decisions have been extremely destructive to the company (so far).

Sorry. I wasn't claiming Elon made Twitter more appealing, but rather was trying to point out that when management changed so did the bias.

I realize my poor grammar made it difficult to fully capture what I was trying to say.

My core argument is that I have now seen twice what looks like Yishan making excuses for moderation decisions that fall outside most people's discourse window.

I also am not making claims about what makes more money. It could possibly be true that people with a particular political pursuasion are more likely to convert.

> Wouldn’t Twitter be an unambiguously more successful business if Elon’s moderation moves brought it more in line with “the normal consumer?”

Purely for revenue maximization, I think it would be optimal to give each user a view through their own personal Overton window. However, people in positions of power often find additional goals beyond merely maximizing revenue. Such as "moving" that Overton window.

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