Not clear to me that you can't have it both ways to at least a degree: The corollary of twitter's moderation practices is not "at least there is no abuse".

Even though I'm not a twitter user on multiple occasions I've had to deal with impersonators there pretending to be me and acting abusively towards friends and colleagues with threats and harassment, only to have twitter dumbly respond with that no rules are being broken and only taking action after enduring months of it and rolling the report dice over and over again. In the mean time, I got to watch friends calling out abuse get suspended for harassment and forced to remove their posts.

A lot of people see twitter's moderation as politically motivated, and while I don't doubt that some of it is-- a lot of it is just bad and chaotic: allowing deeply abusive behavior to persist when randomly raining hell fire down on someone who merely said something a bit controversial. That inconsistency convinces people that it's politically motivated because they notice when someone is suspended over something inconsequential while at the same time so many examples of serious abuse continue.

There isn't any guarantee that it's possible to do better, for sure-- but I'd like to think that it's possible. Certainly there are other sites (like HN!) which do a much better job, but they tend to be facing challenges of an entirely different scale.

All that blather aside, the obvious implication of that 5 billion dollar revenue isn't that it could be grown-- it's that much more of it could be returned to twitter's owners. For all twitter spends on development, it still manages to be a service where even its CEO posts photographs of text to tweet longer messages. Perhaps there is a good reason for all the longstanding gaps in functionality-- perhaps twitter is all it could be -- but if so, it could be returning a lot more value to its owners.

People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is. Even HN has its share of colorful commentary from time to time. If individuals here and there decide it's best for them to not be on any social media, nothing the platform can do - even if it brings more users overall - will keep those individuals.

He's still on Twitter, as recently as this morning.

Now imagine if Twitter gave users like Stephen Fry the option to not see toxic comments. Let them live in their happy little bubble. But oh no, Twitter got rich off of anger porn, so they're stuck in the local maxima where every single person is subjected to the worst toxic behavior daily. They don't want people like Stephen Fry who would rather leave than feed the anger porn machine. Time for a change, I say.

Anybody who stands in front of a crowd to say anything should expect some heckling. The bigger the crowd, the greater the risk of this. I would have expected a comedian to cope with it better than most, but if Stephen Fry decided he no longer wanted to tolerate heckling, then it sounds like leaving Twitter was the right choice for him.

Can't say I see the problem here.

>You can't have it both ways.

What are the two "ways" that supposedly are in conflict?