The difference between Twitter and Reddit, hacker news, or 4chan, is that on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow. If you don’t like the content someone is putting out, you just unfollow them. Twitter is more like email than Reddit in that sense, and no one is arguing for email to be moderated.
> on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow
But that seemed to becoming less and less true in recent months. I was often seeing tweets from people I wasn't following because the algorithm was starting to recommend them based on other tweets I had clicked on. I deactivated my account this past weekend and moved over to mastodon - it seems so much more chill.
Reddit home now shows me repulsive “suggestions” that are very toxic. The popular tab is almost unusable.
The only difference is you don’t see the toxicity in arguments as often, because any dissent is downvoted and effectively squelched. It’s more toxic righteousness, consistently.
I don't think Twitter is more like email than Reddit. Twitter is built around increasing engagement via increasing what you see and who you interact with. Which makes sense: it's a centralized platform for speech and it needs to grow its user base and their level of engagement to make money. You need to fight against that system to curate your feed so that you don't ever see something you don't like. I don't think Musk has any brilliant ideas to 10x Twitter's revenue and somehow change this characteristic about it.
Considering that, there are also many different ways you can experience harassment on Twitter. Are these ways solvable with technical solutions? Perhaps. But these are people we're talking about here, not 0s and 1s. You can't solve all people problems with technology. And as parent comments have said, anyone who's been in a position of having to guide a community knows this to be true.
