This is exactly what it comes down to.

"I'm a free speech absolutist. Twitter should allow free speech."

So we should allow spam bots shilling Bitcoin scams on every thread? "No, I obviously didn't mean that."

What about obvious phishing attempts promising Nigerian riches? "Those are obviously fake, and we need to keep users safe."

Hardcore pornography? "No, lots of children use the site. Those should be filtered out at least behind some kind of flag."

Explicit threats of violence? Blackmail? "No, all of that is obviously not allowed."

Should I be able to write a script to post a thousand Tweets a second? "No, that strains the infrastructure. There should be a rate limit."

So then we come back to a long list of rules for what should and shouldn't be allowed, and all the absolutism goes out of the window.

That assumes a dichotomy of either: everything is allowed, or Twitter blocks things they want to block.

There are other forms of moderation that might be acceptable to people who are otherwise free speech absolutists. Crowd-sourced block lists (i.e. subscribe to a list of accounts marked by other users as spam), with the option to introduce your own exclusions to the list.

Alternatively, a web-of-trust model where you only see tweets & replies from people you follow. Or maybe the people you follow + the people they follow. Or maybe configure it on a per-person basis, if you trust person A's followee list more than person B's.

There are a ton of options. The point is that users don't currently have a choice, and have to deal with Twitter's policies with no opt-out or whitelisting.

What you're describing is really just maintaining your own bubble in social media. This is something that most people think is a bad thing, on both sides of the spectrum. You're not talking about speech which is generally felt to not be permissible in public.

To give an example, this would like saying Elon Musk could simply block the twitter account that follows his private jet, rather than persuade the account to stop. It's not really the same thing.

Eh, it's just the squeaky wheels, like it is anywhere. I find that people are much more likely to speak out (or up/down vote) in support of something they also do that they feel vaguely guilty for, possibly in an effort to assuage their guilt be explaining themselves and looking for people to tell them it's okay, than people are to condemn others, depending on the acceptableness of what's being discussed.

I think most people don't want to come across as puritanical hard-asses, so either keep quiet or are not as forceful in their criticisms and condemnations in a public forums like this with lots of different subgroups. That may make it seems like people are generally accepting of a behavior when they're not.

Importantly, I think this isn't limited to online forums, but it is lessened when there's more conformity in group discussion which is easier when it's smaller. That has it's own dangers though, such as being much more accepting of problematic behavior because the group is all similar in a way that makes it acceptable.

I think the solution is to see it for what it really is, and just realize what you see isn't always representative of the norm.

Don't forget the majority of comments in this very popular and reasonable thread [0]

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087309&p=2

That thread begins at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087309.

Linking to the second page gives a skewed impression, since downvoted and flagged comments are ranked lower and thus more likely to be on later pages.

Imo that thread was worse and not comparable. This one is mostly revolving around Twitter and it's moderation policy, there's no veiled racism as far as I can see

Incredible thread. Definitely logged off for a while after that