My understanding: When the Titanic sank, almost all the poor people died because it was standard policy to lock the gates at all times and prevent them from coming up on deck from their cheap accommodations. No one thought to unlock them as the ship began to sink.
Locking the gates after people begin trying to flee like rats from a sinking ship seems like rather desperate behavior and won't stop the ship from sinking. It reads like someone hemorrhaging money who has no clue how to entice people to want to be there, how to foster good conversation etc and is defaulting to habits that grow out of having power over people of a sort he does not have over Twitter membership.
I thought about passive-aggressively posting a movie clip of the Titanic sinking and the locked gates on Twitter but that's the behavior of someone afraid to speak their mind. I have fewer than 400 followers and no meaningful engagement that I'm aware of. Perhaps I won't know what I've got til it's gone, but Elon Musk is welcome to ban me if this comment is a bridge too far for the man.
Policy on HN is "Move slow and preserve things." People swear this site never changes, though it does. It just does so unobtrusively.
A lot of social stuff is hard to learn, even harder to teach, especially to someone doing it all wrong who wants to believe someone else's behavior is The Problem, the whole problem and nothing but the problem.
Social things don't work that way.
It takes two people actively cooperating to tango. It only takes one fool determined to step on everyone's feet to make it impossible to dance at all.
Not sure what my next step is, but it seems it's time to plan for a future without Twitter.
This is the behavior of someone who has no clue how social media actually works.
Edit: I will add that "free speech proponent" as a platform policy is always a shit show and only someone incredibly naive, to put it charitably, would think that's a great thing to promote as their official position/policy.