> People shouldn't scream at each other. And people shouldn't watch people scream.

There are decent social networks with this property, like HN (to an extent). Twitter is famously not that. Why would purchasing Twitter and then driving off it's distinctive user base make economic sense?

A lot of academics, industry experts and celebrities were accessible on Twitter.

A conspiratorial viewpoint is deplatforming the first two groups. It's not a plan to make Twitter succeed.

Only what I've heard, I don't use Twitter.

> Why would purchasing Twitter and then driving off it's distinctive user base make economic sense?

Why try to make a service less full of jerks? One of the main reasons I don’t use Twitter is because of the vitriol. I might consider using it if they remove the 5% of loud jerks. I suppose there is some way to make money without people screaming and being rude.

But Twitter isn't driving off the jerks. If anything, Musk's policy of unbanning right-wing accounts on principle and undermining people's filters in order to force content they don't want into their feeds has caused the platform to turn far more hostile since he took over. Everything he's doing seems to be the exact opposite of what one would do if one wanted Twitter to be a more polite and civil community.

In contrast, I really like that Twitter is the one place where very rich and very powerful people can be told to their faces they're silly, stupid, and wrong by a large number of people.

Most proposals to make Twitter more polite would eliminate this property.

Anecdotally I’ve actually noticed comments on Twitter being worse in quality than before the acquisition.