I see a lot of parallels with Freenode.

That was also running totally fine before a rich guy claimed ownership and started changing everything to his will, though the users were perfectly satisfied with how things were running till then.

People started to leave which annoyed him and he started to make ever more rules and eventually deleted all the channels. Which means that reputable channels for open-source projects were now owned by randos who just happened to be the first to join after the reboot. Chaos ensued.

The Twitter drama feels very similar. And that's not a good sign if we look at how Freenode played out. Freenode is now a fringe network. The previous management simply started a new network called Libera and two weeks later it was like the whole thing had never happened, just under a different name.

Twitter is a lot bigger sure but big things can fall too. And they have for lesser reasons. Think Yahoo or MySpace.

A lot of these owners seem to forget that the users are on their platform by free will. There is nothing tieing them down and it's only the tiny hassle of creating a new account that's a barrier to move.

I don't feel too bad for him

If I got that first huge multimillion dollar payout he hit early in his career, I would've stopped there. I'd still just be quietly living in a modest house in a small town decades later

His twisted, broken personality is what enabled him to become a billionaire in the first place

Don't forget the birth lottery! I've lived in South Africa, and I've seen first-hand the human consequences of the policies that built his family wealth.

I remember forum mod wars in the 2000s. Never thought there'd be billion dollar mod wars.