Eh that's a bit of a different mechanism. If you bootstrap a platform from 0 users with the core concept being a lack of moderation, then you're likely to attract those who have been banned, excluded, or otherwise ostracized from existing platforms. This happens because those who support lack of moderation but still have a choice to remain are likely to remain on the existing platforms due to network effects.
Whereas if you start with the popular platform and progressively remove moderation, you end up with different effects, because you still have the core, non-bad-actor population. That is, if your signal-to-noise ratio goes down, but the absolute amount of interaction with your platform increases, it may still be worth it.
> Whereas if you start with the popular platform and progressively remove moderation, you end up with different effects, because you still have the core, non-bad-actor population.
Pretty sure that will just let bad actors back in and drive the good faith users away. You could be underestimating the number of normal users a single bad actor can drive away.
Even when you remove the more centralized moderation, there still have to be some mechanism there to remove the bad actors.
All this theory is nice, but let's look at actuals. Of all the people I know who have been booted off of twitter (several dozen), none of them are bad actors (except maybe Alex Jones). They were booted off because their political opinion was not liked by left-leaning moderators, who made up laughably incorrect assessments of their tweets.
Twitter is being used as a political weapon in a political war.
Actual bad actors who spam, harass (which requires repeated unrelenting action, not just one-time nastiness), defame or incite violence... nobody cares if their posts get removed. Defending them is not what Musk or the political right is on about.
Whereas if you start with the popular platform and progressively remove moderation, you end up with different effects, because you still have the core, non-bad-actor population. That is, if your signal-to-noise ratio goes down, but the absolute amount of interaction with your platform increases, it may still be worth it.