How Twitter ruined the amazing thing they built

Here is a simple truth:

Twitter exists despite the bravest efforts of its execs and engineers to destroy the product and sabotage its most interesting users.

I think the latest revelations from Project Veritas have made that abundantly clear (more on them below).  They also go a long way in explaining the decisions that have made Twitter the censodrome it is today.

I'd like to focus for a moment on that censorship problem Twitter "suffers from" (or, rather, inflicts on its users).

The purpose of moderation is to prevent users from seeing content that they don’t want to see. The purpose of censorship is to prevent users from seeing content that they 𝘥𝘰 want to see.

Twitter delivers the second while falsely pretending to deliver the first.

To make matters worse, in this particular sense, the way Twitter treats you — to wit, constantly preventing you from seeing what you want — is simultaneously insulting and offensive. The metric tons of indignation normal, non-busybody people feel at Twitter, come straight from this behavior of theirs.  There are only a few things more grotesquely offensive to normal human adults than being treated like oligophrenic children.

That justified indignation is amplified by Twitter's censorship being clearly punitive / vindictive.  The UI and the language they use leave no doubt about it.   If your tweet broke a rule, they could just hide it — thus fulfilling the stated purposes of the rules — and let your account continue.  Instead, they punish you.  Demanding that you apologize performatively for your "boo boo" by making you delete a tweet?  That process exists solely for the purpose of "making you think twice about what you've done" by humiliating you.   Twitter clearly took a page from narcissistic mothers there.

Now ask yourself:

What mindset is needed to come up with a system of censorship, and then make it as petty and censorious as Twitter's?

It's the mindset of the person who thinks you shouldn't be permitted to think for yourself.

That's not just a guess — come learn for yourself about the kind of people that Twitter employs:

Unsurprisingly, it's the exact kind of employee you'd expect— the "we know better than you what you must believe" kind.  He even uses the term "correct" to refer to his beliefs, which he feels duty-bound to impose on you.

All the garbage they've added to their product — the constant and biased censorship, the "fact checks" that are disinformation themselves — which has made their product noticeably worse for hundreds of millions of people, can be traced straight to this personality type: the bigheaded asshole you see right above this paragraph.

If you want to know why a company is the way it is, just look at its people.

Coda: here are the two latest Project Veritas undercover videos showing the class of people that Twitter employees really are.  You don't need to believe me, or Project Veritas — all you need to do is believe the employees themselves.