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Notes -
In the era of pre-Pao Reddit, there was no notion of a corporate (really, government wearing the term 'private company' as a skinsuit) censor being able to do what it did. The assumption when Voat was created was that Reddit would meet the same fate as Digg, and one or more successors would inherit the entire userbase. The idea of e.g. ISPs and DDOS mitigators suddenly becoming political actors was as unthinkable as the Pentagon declaring that everyone using ARPANET had to swear allegiance to Richard Nixon or be booted.
As for Musk, I don't think he has any real 'intentions', or a master plan of any kind. He's vaguely right-libertarian, and he saw something wrong, and he tried to do something he thought would help. Same deal as Trump, really. Musk's issue as far as curation is that he has a tendency to "trust the experts" more than he should, and the "experts" told him that having a team of people trying to manually curate the algorithm was better than the pre-2016 system in which you took a pair of neural networks and taught them to map posts to users likely to enjoy them with no other restrictions.
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