WaPo article: https://archive.is/wip/sgViP
Company owner Elon Musk tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” to deter third-party scraping of data from the social media platform. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk wrote.
User "elonmusk" not found
There is a part of me that respects and appreciates how Elon will unilaterally and with zero notice fundamentally change how a site as large as twitter operates.
They may be stupid unilateral decisions, but you at least know they weren't focus-grouped and signed-off on in meetings with dozens of middle managers where pastries were served.
Part of the reason I'm personally sympathetic to Elon is that he comes off as this highly opinionated nerd. And being a highly opinionated nerd myself I can't help but sympathize with one of my kind.
Except I don't have like $100 Billion and he does, so as a general rule I'm incapable of putting my money where my mouth is nearly to the same extent as Elon can.
And you're right: these giant online forums like twitter and reddit are never meant to be profitable as forums because that makes no sense. They're meant to shape opinion and are valuable on that basis alone. And if you're trying to run one of these things as an honest-to-god public forum where people can give their honest opinion, that's going to conflict with the goals of a site trying to shape public opinion.
I don't have 100 billion dollars, but I'm still right all the time. If people don't want to use that, and who could blame them, be my guest. It's occasionally frustrating but mainly no skin off my back.
He is the essence of the self-actualized Prince, exploiting natural human hierarchy vs. the Borg collective System that liberal orthodoxy has imposed on us through The Managerial Class. Neither is wholly positive. One path can seem beholden to the whims of inconsistent, amoral dictators, while the other acts like a chicken with its head cut off at times, yet somehow always inches towards the proverbial cliff of absolute degeneracy, directed by human vice and cowardliness.
These are two distinct paths that humanity can take and neither one will compromise with the other. I - and I think most of the dissident Right - prefer the former, while the Left is obviously under the spell of the latter.
It may just be as you said that he's a vocal nerd but I think that speaks to naturally appealing aspirations in all of us, which collectivism stamps out in the cradle.
I've simply come around to the "pitchfork solution" hypothesis which states that any socio-political problem ought to be solvable by a pitchfork waving mob congregating in front of your house.
We are unaccustomed to that being a solution to our problems because we have resolved that power must be so diffuse that it cannot be. Yet the drive to send a pitchfork waving mob to someone's home remains, waiting for someone to pick up that crown currently lying in the mud.
That only works when the regime is on your side.
What you're describing is more or less the appeal and the pitfall of monarchy.