First of all, I apologize, I think my comment was too snarky and took a tone of "this is so surprising" that I regret on reflection.

Under what circumstances do you feel introducing new policy ideas with the word "maybe this could be a good idea" is acceptable? To be clear, I think introducing the idea is totally fine, I just have a decently strong prior against widespread bans on "businesses that do this".

I don't expect anyone important to be reading this thread, certainly not important policymakers. Even if they were, I think it was pretty clear I was spitballing.

Agreed, I was not worried about this.

Let's not fall prey to the halo effect. Eliezer also wrote a long post about the necessity of back-and-forth debate, and he's using a platform which is uniquely bad at this. At some point, one starts to wonder whether Eliezer is a mortal human being who suffers from akrasia and biases just like the rest of us.

Fair enough. I agree the Eliezer point isn't strong evidence.

I didn't make much of an effort to assemble arguments that Twitter is bad. But I think there are good arguments out there. How do you feel about the nuclear diplomacy that's happened on Twitter?

I don't have time to respond at length to this part at the moment (I wanted to reply quickly to apologize mostly) but I agree it's the most useful question to discuss and will try to respond more later. To summarize, I acknowledge it's possible that Twitter is bad for the collective but think people may overestimate the bad parts by focusing on how politicians / people fighting about politics use Twitter (which does seem bad) and that even if it is "bad", it's not clear that banning short response websites would lead to a better long-term outcome. For example, maybe people would just start fighting with pictures on Instagram. I don't think this specific outcome is likely but think it's in a class of outcomes that would result from banning that seems decently likely.