"It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out."

Or permanently. I once responded to an inane Kardashian tweet with a very dry restatement that she got famous for a boring porn tape and a father who got OJ Simpson off of a murder rap.

I was told that was "a threat" and perma-banned. 12 years of an account, spun into the void. I'd be angry but it's more embarrassing as an observation.

Twitter supports a usenet-on-acid model of bumrushing fan-bases on one side, and a long tail of bots and noise. It's truly strange how its become what it has.

This episode demonstrates the foolishness of Twitter's prospective new owner.

He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam.

That's an instant contradiction, of course, because spam is perfectly legal under the US constitution.

And every attempt to eliminate spam and bots, whether human or automated, will necessarily sweep up many non-spam and non-bot accounts as false positives.

>He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam.

He's used to making these sorts of promises.

He could change it to a pay-to-play model where the payment is miniscule. It may not eliminate all spam, but I wouldn't be surprised if accounts have to go through a kyc payment mechanism in order to prove their identity.

It would eliminate multiple accounts per user, make all users known for wrongspeak prosecution, and largely cure the spam issue unless you're a well funded organization that can pay poor people to risk getting a lifetime ban to promote your spam.

A pay-per-Tweet scheme would reduce the total number of Tweets by 90% or more. We can all discuss whether that would be net-good or net-bad, but the vast majority of that reduction of speech would come from speech that is legal under the US constitution.

I think he means something like WhatsApp, which was 1 dollar per year in the beginning. But then again their model wouldn't work here either, because you could gift a 1 year membership to someone else. Given how much more valuable those bots are than 1 dollar per year, it would mean nothing to gift it to large amounts of people.

Similarly if you enforce it for everyone to pay for themselves, there would immediately be large parts of the world population that wouldn't be able to pay for it. Note that afford and be able to pay isn't the same thing. Which would turn it into the same western echo chamber they basically want it to be.

Wow, who would have thought that you could get banned in multiple ways on twitter? How unfair!

I remember a day when WordPerfect employed thousands of local college students to staff top-notch help lines. They had what at the time was state-of-the-art phone queue management and tried very hard to minimize your wait time. If you needed help adjusting margins or creating footnotes, just call their support and they'll fix you up.

Can you imagine Google answering a phone call or a chat line to explain how to arrange bookmarks in Chrome? Ok, Chrome doesn't cost money, so maybe that's fair. How about Microsoft helping to move the taskbar back to the bottom of the screen? How about Samsung explaining how to set DoNotDisturb? Facebook walking you through how to recover from somebody taking over your account?

Ah, the bad old good old days...