Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam/astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.

If he charged $2 / month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 / month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people?

I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?

How many do you think is realistic? Reducing your revenue by an order of magnitude to reduce your headcount by an order of magnitude seems like a bad plan.

Right now there are 360,000 blue check marks on Twitter. If I spot you the first million blue checkmarks and the first 100,000 business profiles, that's only $144M of revenue per year. Even if that is 90% profit, $130M / year profit on a $50B investment is not particularly brag-worthy.

Once a company gets big enough, 95% of an employees job is navigating the bureaucracy. So the head count goes way up.

Companies tend to hire more employees as long as the marginal benefit to doing so is greater than the marginal cost. Even minor improvements to a product like Twitter can boost revenue by millions. Reducing the headcount might not maximise their income.

There will be exceptions though. Valve does lot more than most video-game companies with far fewer employees.

Wait a minute when did Valve go back to being a video game company?

• How many are engineers?

• How many work in customer service?

• How many are in compliance?

• How many are in marketing?

• How many are ICs and how many are managers?

• How many are in HR?

• How many are in finance?

This runs into a problem because of the inherent inequality of "crime".

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to force a business to censor speech, get a court order.

Which they can do, once you get over a very high bar indeed.

We have literally seen the Supreme Court protect speech advocating for violence against the Government.

>Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".

Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

I much prefer the rule of law to the rule of Twitter mob.

P.S. Requiring someone to have a credit card doesn't feel like free speech absolutism to me. A pretty big number of people don't have the ability to make credit card payments. Do their voices not matter?

I'm not so sure what a four chan mode would look like. Can you please elaborate? Inspite of the constant mockery of the janitors, my understanding is they work practically around the clock for zero pay trying to keep the boards (not that I go to /b/ much) as clean as possible. It definitely is not a free for all and my understanding is most people gladly support heavy handed IP bans for example if someone posts commercial pornography on a "work safe" four channel board like technolo/g/y.

Moreover, some of the boards are very slow to the point that frequenters seem to get annoyed by a low quality post pushing down better posts by saying things like "thank you for your blog post" (I assume sarcasm, I don't know for sure) or "a thread died for this".

Also there are (from what I've read) filters available to filter out posts with certain keywords and people coming up with ways to have their posts show up for people with filters using different techniques.

I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.

I don’t think there is a requirement for being part of the in crowd to post on 4chan. Then again, I’ve never posted there either.

I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.

I think what I've learned from 4chan is that words like (redacted) shit general in /g/ or calling OP a (redacted) is ok on 4chan specifically. Except the name(redacted) and trip(redacted), we are all pseudonymous there so when someone says you are a (redacted), they don't mean to say you are of a specific ethnicity or gender. It means you are acting like an idiot or something they disapprove of?

I can imagine a 21+ social media network that has no explicit moderation but you would still need protection from spam, flooding, and other bad actors once you get to a certain size.

No, this isn't free speech absolutism, and adding a paywall to any conversation on twitter would kill the site.

The problem with that is that yesterday it was swastikas, today is the letter Z, tomorrow who knows what else we might have in store?

Also, putting in prison all the people who have displayed their swastika-love thingie online [1] would have meant Mariupol falling sooner to the Russians, a thing contrary to the beliefs of many who propose laws like that.

[1] https://twitter.com/tyengeni1954/status/1503955204059938817