You're not only correct, but Scott effectively acknowledges this. One of the comments on his own Substack is from a person pointing out that his own moderation policies are not in line with this proposed MVP. He has rules that more or less reflect his personal preferences and bans anyone who doesn't follow them (though he leaves up the offending comment).
When asked why, the first reason is he uses Substack and they don't offer this as a feature, and when he was on his own self-hosted site, he didn't have the technical skill to implement it himself. But then he says that even if he could, he wouldn't, because he wants his community to reflect a certain ethos and character that creates a community he actually wants to be a part of.
How he doesn't see the contradiction here, I don't know. But this gets at the core of the issue. Virtually nobody actually wants a free-for-all, even one that is opt-in. But whereas some blogger with a devoted following is allowed the freedom to cultivate his garden, as he has described it in the past, when you get as big as Twitter, the larger public starts to feel like it's their community and they should get to decide, not the owners, or that it's even so big as to be this "de facto public square" people keep calling it, and now it has to just follow the same rules as a government, even though it is a private platform owned by people with their own preferences for what they think the character of the platform should be.
The only fairly large platform I can ever think of that really did adopt the more or less anything that won't get us shut down by the FBI is fair game policy is 4Chan. But if everyone who is so hung up on Twitter being too restrictive is mad about Twitter's policies, 4Chan still exists. Why not just go there? You can't even say it doesn't have reach. There are plenty of users there. Meaningful real world movements have started there. The only thing you lose is the real news doesn't follow and write about 4Chan nearly as much as they do Twitter.
When asked why, the first reason is he uses Substack and they don't offer this as a feature, and when he was on his own self-hosted site, he didn't have the technical skill to implement it himself. But then he says that even if he could, he wouldn't, because he wants his community to reflect a certain ethos and character that creates a community he actually wants to be a part of.
How he doesn't see the contradiction here, I don't know. But this gets at the core of the issue. Virtually nobody actually wants a free-for-all, even one that is opt-in. But whereas some blogger with a devoted following is allowed the freedom to cultivate his garden, as he has described it in the past, when you get as big as Twitter, the larger public starts to feel like it's their community and they should get to decide, not the owners, or that it's even so big as to be this "de facto public square" people keep calling it, and now it has to just follow the same rules as a government, even though it is a private platform owned by people with their own preferences for what they think the character of the platform should be.
The only fairly large platform I can ever think of that really did adopt the more or less anything that won't get us shut down by the FBI is fair game policy is 4Chan. But if everyone who is so hung up on Twitter being too restrictive is mad about Twitter's policies, 4Chan still exists. Why not just go there? You can't even say it doesn't have reach. There are plenty of users there. Meaningful real world movements have started there. The only thing you lose is the real news doesn't follow and write about 4Chan nearly as much as they do Twitter.