[ixxie]

It seems a bit unlikely Musk is doing this to Twitter out of stupidity or ideology; I'm sure he has a good measure of both, but I doubt he has them in this quantity.

Could Elon's actual play here be: 1. Radicalize Twitter as the ideal platform for right-wing American voters 2. Use this asset this to gain political leverage during a key election cycle 3. Use this juice to advance some of his long-term objectives

[rsynnott]

In this particular case, I’d suspect it’s just stupidity, tbh. There’ve been a number of changes to Twitter which read as “things that Musk likes, and doesn’t realise that not all users like”; for instance, see the briefly-mandatory dark mode.

[andrewinardeer]

The first reason that occurred to me why Musk did this was to reduce compute costs. Perhaps the previous blocking algo was too resource intensive and he is looking to lower server costs.

[Wingy]

Keeping a cache of “users who have blocked me” for every user is probably not that expensive. If Bob blocks Oscar, update Oscar’s row to add Bob to Oscar’s blocked_by list.

[sunaookami]

Most Twitter users aren't americans.