Eh that's a bit of a different mechanism. If you bootstrap a platform from 0 users with the core concept being a lack of moderation, then you're likely to attract those who have been banned, excluded, or otherwise ostracized from existing platforms. This happens because those who support lack of moderation but still have a choice to remain are likely to remain on the existing platforms due to network effects.

Whereas if you start with the popular platform and progressively remove moderation, you end up with different effects, because you still have the core, non-bad-actor population. That is, if your signal-to-noise ratio goes down, but the absolute amount of interaction with your platform increases, it may still be worth it.

I think that's more of a product of displacement. Those people get pushed out of big sites into smaller free-speech absolutist platforms. Thus, the proportion of these actors in the latter is much higher. Loosening moderation on a big platform would not have this same displacement dynamic. Sure, previously excluded people might rejoin but the bulk of the user base will remain. So there's no drastic shift on proportions here.

Furthermore, there's a difference between totally doing away with moderation and pruning some of the more ideologically slanted moderation policies at twitter.

I think "moderation going away" is a gross exaggeration of what Musk has said he wants.

Twitter has had spam and crypto scams in replies for years now. Every tweet by Elon Musk has had scammy fake giveaways that steal people's financial info, from accounts that copy his profile picture and name. Anyone would agree Twitter's response has not been adequately effective, and he has complained about this for a while, and even said during today's TED event that he wants to stop this sort of spam.

If anything, I think it's more likely we'll see hardcore engineering efforts - I'm not sure why Twitter hasn't looked into some sort of perceptual hashing database for profile pictures of popular accounts, and hide replies from anyone who uses a similar profile picture.

This is obviously different from the political censorship, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, where I think Musk strongly disagrees with current leadership.

Parler/Gab failed in having approximately zero engineering efforts to prevent spam.

While I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that assessment, I think those examples of Gab and Parlor are weak. Those platforms were essentially created and marketed specifically to individuals and groups who were kicked off of other platforms. That demographic will naturally include a much higher proportion of "less than desirable actors".

Many of the largest platforms featured much less moderation in their past - even when they were much larger than Gab or Parlor - while also enjoying a smaller proportion of "less than desirable actors". Of course, whether that level was acceptable is debatable. Free speech is a double-edge sword and moderation is an astoundingly complex problem.

"When moderation goes away, platforms become rife with racism, spam, scams and less than desirable actors."

so... Twitter

but twitter is already all of those things.

Why does everyone think Elon Musk wants zero moderation? He always talks about free speech, not zero moderation. There’s an important difference.

So create free market plugins to filter based on preferences.

Imagine: scam protection plugin. spam protection plugin. anti racism plugin.

Let users vote who gets ears. If users say they want to silence racists, by saying racists things a user ends up being blocked by all the people who want to silence all racists. Users then vote and racists know that algorithmically they cannot heard because they know the majority have silenced them. But they also aren't enraged that they are being silenced because they aren't. They're just blocked by the user base who doesn't think their words have value.

If twitter does not allow as much free speech as possible, that speech simply ends up moving to other platforms anyways. So much to all the pro censorship crowd's chagrin, their censorship isn't actually doing anything except protecting their ears from hearing what they don't want to hear, and in reality making the other side band together even more fiercely. Might as well keep all the speech and just allow people to choose their own protection.

You never have to listen to them if that's what you choose. Let people choose what gets silenced instead of letting some authority choose for you. Giving up that power has historically lead in only one direction, and I don't see why its any different in this case. Adults are not children. Let them discern what is right and what is wrong.

The only way forward is to keep free speech available, and we can keep it and have protections for those who want it, so why not?