Removing the politics from this is rather impossible because it was so deliberately timed and explicitly positioned as political. But as a PM addressing the pure product question, I’d say it’s an unnecessarily risky product move. You’ve basically forgone the option to use humans professionally incentivized to follow guidelines, and decided to 100% crowdsource your moderation to volunteers (for amplification control, not just labeling btw). Every platform is different, but the record of such efforts in other very high volume contexts is mixed at best, particularly in responding to well financed amplification attacks driven by state actors. Ultimately this is not a decision most any experienced PM would make, exactly because the risk is huge and upside low. X’s experience with crapification would get any normal PM swift and permanent retirement (user base down roughly 60%, valuation down $30B - how’s the look on your resume?... So I go back to the beginning - this is plutocrats at play and not even remotely in the domain of a carefully considered product decision.
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