I agree, but it is 2023 now, it’s not super important how Twitter was founded.
Twitter has always given a proud middle finger to third party clients to suit its own strategy. Firehose access terminated to analytics companies after it acquired Gnip:
"...After acquiring Gnip in May of 2014, we decided to bring all data licensing activity in-house in order to better serve our customers and partners..."
When they acquired Tweetdeck in 2011, they started cutting off apps who "'mimic' products, services and experiences that Twitter itself offers"
They banned apps like UberMedia (UberTwitter), twidroyd and UberCurrent over trademarks and having the audacity to offer DM longer than 140 chars. There are dozens of more instances. They have literally never been a platform or ecosystem friendly company. Ever. They used 3rd party apps to gain traction than killed them.
How is this recent behavior any different?
At least as far as I can tell everyone is still using it with rare exceptions. The people most likely to post alarmist and FUDy stuff also tends to be the people least likely to abandon social media for some higher social/moral purposes.
Once enough time passes and we have enough inside information (and less current day emotion) we'll be able to better analyze these decisions and trends from a macro perspective. Twitter encourages debating things immediately with limited information on overall strategy and actual outcomes/consequences, so ironically I'm also critiquing the very thing Twitter morphed the Zeitgeist into, but oh well.
In terms of actual content it's a very marginal difference for the vast majority of people I'm sure.
Slightly more people posting angry outraged tweets != twitter content being significantly worse.
The technical failure complaints/predictions will probably find more purchase on HN, despite the feeds being much of the same.
I'm very skeptical Entertainment Tonight style negative PR for Twitter's business ops is what is bad for Twitter as a product for normal day-to-day users. Note: I'm not talking about what's bad for society, if that's what mattered The National Enquirer wouldn't have topped newspaper sales long ago.
At some point, you have to ask yourself if it's worth typing out and posting something that would be ChatGPT's response to "write a Hacker News comment decrying Elon Musk".
As a pretty avid Twitter user, I'm still enjoying it.
None of the situations you highlight involved a) zero advance warning b) a week of radio silence from Twitter c) lies from Twitter about the behavior of those banned and d) an after-the-fact change to the rules.
Twitter was not, well, Twitter without the users and developers. Hashtags, replies, threads…users and developers. Not the product managers.
And that’s relevant because: if you’re developing a product today, probably worth thinking about how so many features and practices are an emergent property of how it’s used, and not what you are narrowly planning for.