Musk is right on this one. It wasn’t serving any real purpose to let me selectively block other people from _seeing_ my posts (but _interacting_ does make sense).
If I genuinely don’t want someone to see my posts, I just can’t put it on Twitter/X unless I have a private profile (is that still a thing?).
Otherwise, it’s a public platform, in that anyone can register with little more than an email address and see my posts. Claiming to block someone from seeing them seems like it provides a false sense of security to users.
Twitter itself recognized there are levels of public early on. The original site was every post in one timeline.
The things I say to a room or to people at a table are not meant for everyone at the event. The phrase context collapse came about and persists for a reason. A blocked person has been kicked out of the public local to the poster and their followers. It doesn't make sense for them to be able to continue to act like they're in the space, but just not speaking.
The fact that someone can violate the rules and norms of a space doesn't mean you don't have rules and norms.
"Can be seen by anyone in the world except for tom because fuck tom" isn't a different "level of public", it's just caprice. As the GP mentioned, if you want to restrict who can see your tweets, set your account to private.
Maybe caprice except in the exceedingly common instances where someone is the target of harassment. I mean this is the obvious example, there are others. In that case "make your profile private if you dont want to be harassed/stalked" is not really that palatable.
It’s an additional barrier. It also provides the blocking user the ability to block the new account. This isn’t very difficult to think through. And if it’s so easy, why the need for this new “feature” to begin with?
> also provides the blocking user the ability to block the new account. This isn’t very difficult to think through
The harasser can view from their new accounts and respond on their main account. Unless someone is very tightly curating their follower list, at which point it doesn't make sense for them to be publicly tweeting, there would be no indication which account was responsible.
The problem in harassment is the harassment. Not the harasser's access to the public domain.
Again, then why the need for this feature if it is so easy to get around a block? A harasser can do many things, but removing a barrier for the person being harassed to mitigate it because… reasons feels very odd to me. Can you explain what this new feature provides legitimate users that doesn’t already exist?
> Can you explain what this new feature provides legitimate users that doesn’t already exist?
In America we have case law that prohibits public officials from blocking their constituents from their official accounts [1]. Not every country does.
Also, that ruling doesn't cover material edge cases. Should a public figure be able to block journalists they don't like? Oil companies anyone with an environmental leaning to avoid tipping them off on something they weren't searching for?
We have a media-bubble problem in America that is increasingly defined by partisan lines. From a social utility position, clarifying that public means public strikes me as more important than edge-case harassment concerns. Particularly when the stakes are so low on both sides of the scale (due to the ease with which blocks can be circumvented and the fact that we're dealing with content the speaker has explicilty chosen to make public).
> In America we have case law that prohibits public officials from blocking their constituents from their official accounts [1].
Can’t they just make a new account to see the posts? Are you stating that you think this is the reason this is being implemented? As for the rest of your post, your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this thread.
> Can’t they just make a new account to see the posts?
Sure. But they may not know they've been blocked.
> you think this is the reason this is being implented?
No. I think it's being done to increase engagement. Engagement scales with outrage, and a pretty simple way to boost outrage would be by showing people stuff they've been blocked from.
> your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this argument
Not really. Blocking users from seeing your public content degrades weak relationships. My interest in what my state Senator is doing is a weak relationship; I don't think I'd be able to tell if they stopped e-mailing me for at least a full election cycle. Harassment, on the other hand, is a strong relationship. That provides circumvention motivation.
My argument is that there appear to be marginal benefits to this policy. If the cost is making unmotivated harassers' jobs a little easier, inasmuch as it pertains to them viewing (not responding to) public content, that seems to be worth it.
> In that case "make your profile private if you don't want to be harassed/stalked" is not really that palatable.
If someone is harassing you on twitter, then blocking them still stops that, modulo them making a new account. Stalking, in the sense of looking at your public posts, can't be stopped, because it's trivial for them to open your posts in a private window, or create a new account just for stalking (which of course they wouldn't tell you about, hence you couldn't block it). So in fact the only option you have to avoid such stalking is to make your account private, period.
I agree if getting a seat at the table requires some vetting, but if something is being shouted publicly into a megaphone your analogy doesn't work. If something is so public that a logged out user can see it, it's weird of a logged in account to not see it.
> The things I say to a room or to people at a table are not meant for everyone at the event.
But that's not what Twitter/X is, it's more akin to standing in an open access field with a megaphone. You have no right to say who should be in the field or not, and if you don't want someone to hear something, the best thing to do is not say it in the field in the first place.
It's bad UX. Telling people that blocked users can't see your posts mislead them, because all that's needed for as blocked user is to open a window in incognito mode.
Good user interfaces don't tell users things that are far from true. Even if we all wish the things could be true.
>The things I say to a room or to people at a table are not meant for everyone at the event.
Not what Twitter was or is? You have misunderstood the site like a Facebook timeline boomer poster. "uuoooh people can see this!!!" Yes. Twitter is not your own IRC server. But seeing as it started with MacBook Starbucks hipsters, I am not surprised they just made something up in their minds and rolled with it.
The only effective way I've found to stop seeing stuff from people I dgaf in my feed was to block them.
I was even considering creating a Github repo. with all the usernames I've been selecting out for years, so that people could easily de-shittify their Twitter feed.
The set includes (excludes?):
* the most prominent accounts that post political content; no partisan bias, they're all gone for me
* most major news accounts, including anyone that regularly posts any kind of content related to any side of any war, ever
* "science influencers" where the "science" are actually ads or some deranged guy screaming while wearing a lab coat
* Ian Miles Cheong and the Krassenstein Brothers
* hundreds of e-whores
* hundreds of "I made 1 million dollars last week" accounts
Much of the worsening of Twitter is centered around them deciding what you should see in order to maximize outrage, engagement, revenue.
This means that in the replies to a tweet, for example, they can now rank highly all the spam and culture war bullshit that people have previously blocked.
If I understood correctly, the change here is that now those hundreds of e-whores and Ian Miles Cheong will be able to see your posts. So blocking is still the right strategy for what you want (for now).
That should be OK so long as they don't get to respond to those posts or link to them, and that should include posts they are referenced in or embedded in.
Retweeted posts also seems too far. That person could be agreeing or criticizing them, but you can't comment on it? That means any dissenters can just not comment on your posts.
That's fantastic, Jason Calacanis blocked me, idk why, I think I said I didn't like one of the All In Podcasts and he didn't like that. But it's annoying because I like to see his posts.
With that kind of decisions, always assume that there is a hidden agenda.
In that case, i could imagine for example that this can be something done to ease a further AI feature. it is almost impossible to train an AI for content with individual customization. So if Y is blocked to see your content, that is impossible to have AI trained on your tweets and still be sure that Y can't get the content of your tweets.
Honestly I don't think that the few "blocked" tweets where you still can't interact with is making a real difference in term of ad monetizable engagement.
You will see what will come next and it will be clear.
If not for AI indexation, another hypothesis is something like removing the paywall needing an account to access user content or something like that.
> don't think that the few "blocked" tweets where you still can't interact with is making a real difference in term of ad monetizable engagement
Engagement scales with outrage. If there is a singular marker of outrage, it's in blocking.
> not for AI indexation
Why would Twitter want to help third parties train their AI on its data? Musk already has an AI venture. If there were a secret agenda around AI, it would be in reducing visibility. Not increasing it.
> removing the paywall needing an account to access user content
What paywall? The sign-in wall? Again, why would Twitter have a hidden agenda to undermine something Twitter is doing to boost user numbers?
These hypotheses are incoherent because they don't stem from any observations, but are trying to work backwards to justify the existence of a hidden agenda.
For the AI indexation I didn't mean to help third parties read messages, more that for Musk own AI agent to be usable by the Public and able to use or reference tweets, he wouldn't need a shit storm where you use Groq to browse content that is normally blocked to you.
Regarding the other hypothesis related to the "sign in" wall, based on number it looks like that this wall is not working anymore to boost users as the number of users is collapsing. So there might be a plan to enlarge "page views" and so user engagement by reopening the Public view of tweets.
If the previous Elon/X rumors are true(a big if, perhaps), I feel like the hidden agenda here is more likely that someone blocked Musk and Musk is upset that he can no longer see the posts.
It's quite foolish to assume that they couldn't quietly code up a "God mode" for Elon's account, or assume that isn't already in place, and instead had to create a feature to roll out to 350M users where Elon had an account no different than the unwashed masses.
It's his site, they would code up whatever he asked, X is no longer design by committee. Remember when the Reddit CEO/owner/whatever was hand editing the database to alter users' comments to make it look like they posted something they hadn't?
> It's quite foolish to assume that they couldn't quietly code up a "God mode" for Elon's account, or assume that isn't already in place, and instead had to create a feature to roll out to 350M users where Elon had an account no different than the unwashed masses.
Maybe they want to keep the code simple or ready for immediate open sourcing if desired.
Idk he has at least three alts (the weird baby role play one, Adrian Dittmann, DogeDesigner). Though maybe the people who have blocked him who he wants to see also know to block those to be fair
It's the other way around: with the new change, the blockee will be able to see (but not reply to) the blocker's posts, but the blockee's posts will still be hidden from the blocker.
I'm not on Twitter but in its current form, wouldn't a blocked user be able to see the blocker's posts just by using an incognito window or logging in as a different account?
The point of blocking is to prevent harassment, no? Hiding the blocker's posts from the blockee puts up an additional barrier to interaction. Even if it can be circumvented, it still requires some effort and may dissuade the person from continuing the harassment. There is a reason why this is the standard implementation for almost every social media site, and petulance has nothing to do with it.
The point is that contacting you isn’t always needed to harass you if the opponent have enough influence (or bots under his control) to harass you with its minions.
Of course it could be bypassed but it requires effort and most harassers are in fact pretty stupid people who just happen to have an influence over a group of people as stupid as them.
> can be done by making an account private, or not posting the posts publicly
but not the criteria where you _want_ other people to see your posts publicly.
aka, the ask is to allow individuals to "excommunicate" a particular user, not just blocking.
I'm glad, tho, that twitter does not allow this. I think having this feature allows for echo chambers...(tho, this is currently already true so may be it's moot...?)
> To stop harassment, reach out to the platform, assuming it cares about harassment, and if it doesn't, contact law enforcement, or file a lawsuit
Your wording suggests that you seem to be aware that none of these avenues actually work in the real world, which is precisely why platforms have the ability to block.
> Your wording suggests that you seem to be aware that none of these avenues actually work in the real world, which is precisely why platforms have the ability to block.
You may personally infer that, but the precise reason platforms have the ability to block someone is, "I don't like this person for whatever reason so I don't want to see their posts or replies". Maybe you don't want to see their posts or replies because you feel they are harassing. Blocking/ignoring them stops you from seeing them. It shouldn't affect anyone else's ability to see their posts or replies to you.
Honestly, in what other public, online discussion forum can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts?
Having worked at a fairly prominent social media company, that is not why social media platforms have block functionality. Mute, functionality, yes, absolutely.
Blocking is typically a much stronger remedy, aimed at curtailing targeted harassment.
Having worked with multiple online public discussion forums / media over the decades, that is precisely what blocking / muting / ignoring is for: the digital equivalent of plugging your ears. Don't want to hear an account you feel is harassing you? Good news: you don't need to! The functionality you're describing, on the other hand, opens the door to trollish abuse like reply-and-ban-responses.
In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, and live in whatever bubble you wish, but not to control others' public speech. The platform has admins who can theoretically deal with law-breaking behavior like harassment or threats or CSAM, and if they choose not to, the platform sucks and I recommend you ditch it. coughtwittercough.
> In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
I mean, Facebook and Twitter have both worked this way for years. Arguably that constitutes most of social media for the last decade.
> In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
Regardless of all your other arguments here, the change being made to twitter here does nothing to prevent that. Blocking a user still prevents them from interacting with your posts in any way. Now they can just see the post without being able to reply to it. So I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
With Twitter you would have been able to just do incognito mode. In the "X" era, following someone's posts when not logged in is pretty difficult as the profiles don't actually show their current tweets but rather a sort of random pile, maybe popular ones?, and that's only when you don't just get directed to sign in. You can see a particular message if you have a direct link to it, but you can't see or follow any threads, etc...
Using a different account would work, sure, though that of course evades the block entirely, in both directions.
The point was probably moreso that the posts wouldn't show up in the blocked person's feed, they'd have to actively seek them out. That probably does make a real difference.
Good. They can see them anyways by logging out. I can understand blocking their ability to post on your post but I think they should be able to see your posts and quote them on their own profile.
I have no idea who that is, but Twitter/X increasingly sounds like it's degenerated into a schoolyard (where the richest kid asked his dad to buy the land next to the school building and put up a private playground for him).
This whole X debacle has fragmented the microblogging universe which is actually a good thing. TruthSocial and X have become right-wing staples. Threads seems to be full of positivity right now. Mastodon for the techies and niche communities. I've actually started exploring other sane places of community gathering like Reddit and oddly enough YouTube comments. As Karpathy recently commented, the YouTube comments section somehow became non-toxic overnight.
And would you care to document for posterity when was that last time? I think the change in YouTube comments happened some 7-8 years ago, so 2017 or so.
Ironically the current spam trend is for bots to post very vague and effusive positive comments "Wow, you're such an inspiration" to try to get clicks on their profiles. I think the only real hateful bot trend was lengthy religious screeds maybe 2-3 years ago. Nowadays the religious spam is either more positive or apocalyptic I would say. There's plenty of people who post lots of hateful material, but since it's generally at least germane I assume it's at most trivially automated?
For me, the last time I saw it was last week. Prior to that, probably the week before. It's definitely gotten better over the last 2-3 years, but it's certainly not perfect.
My local city's subreddit is just full of people sharing interesting things. It's the first thing I actually look forward to reading. I'm in a number of tech subreddits and personal hobby ones that are all just full of signal vs. noise/toxicity
I think most people commenting on YT have realized that only positivity gets visibility. Pick any video that has decent view count and you will see the first few comments saying "I just want to say, this video is so amazing" or "Wow you have put in so much work in making this video". Then the creator would like those comments and they stay at the top.
A lot of the time those look like bot comments that don't really say anything and could work for any video. Still much better than the bots that just copy a comment from someone else.
I have really come to understand that some Twitter users see Twitter as their own private garden somehow and do not realize that anyone can see your posts... So somehow it becomes uncomfortable when they are reminded of this fact.
You seem like one of these people.
You ONYL used twitter? You didnt use Reddit or Youtube? I am baffled but this makes the upset people make a bit more sense. Twitter was "theirs" so nobody else dare come in. They are the ones complaining about gatekeeping etc but treat Twitter like a chatroom and become offended when someone calls them out.
For the record, I do not have a Twitter account/phone banned. I am not in the USA. If I could vote in your elections I would vote Kamala. Just to be clear and to calm your blood pressue.
>Threads seems to be full of positivity right now.
Toxic positivity sure. ♥‿♥ YOU GO QUEEN!! SLAY!!! ♥‿♥
> TruthSocial and X have become right-wing staples.
I may be completely off, of course, but whenever I look at Twitter (without owing an account, so can't do it properly), I see people engaged in heated cross-wing arguments. If Twitter were so right-wing, wouldn't you expect far less arguments as there wouldn't be so many people voicing the opposite viewpoint? For comparison, how many users argue left-wing opinions on TruthSocial?
It might look like this, but thinking about it, I guess it's still useful in reducing unwanted interactions. People are lazy, and thus adding even a little friction can help a lot in preventing them from doing stalkering, spreading hate etc.
I.e. of course it's possible to login with another user, find the one who blocked you, make a screenshot or something and then quote it or perform any other interaction in your main account. But it's obviously not very easy.
So I'm sure it worked as a solution to reduce negative interactions on the platform. However, Musk doesn't want reducing these, his goal is spreading chaos and forcing his narratives, so the decision totally makes sense for him.
> his goal is spreading chaos and forcing his narratives
It may be as simple as revealing blocked content is a short path to increasing outrage and thus engagement. Like, I could see Facebook doing this on Threads.
I am actually very sure that Elon is an extremely smart person. I can also see that he amplifies and posts disinformation posts that spread hateful narratives. That's why I make a conclusion that his intentions are reaching his goals in this, quite evil and harmful for the society way.
Even if I liked him, this still would had hold true.
It provides friction for further misbehaving. Imagine you blocked someone who has serious issues with people who #foobar. It's better for you if they can't easily find you and repost your content to their community who also hate #foobar. It's not perfect, but the friction helps prevent drive-by bad behaviour.
> repost your content to their community who also hate #foobar
This is valid. I don't think it rises to the level of preventing them from seeing my public content. But perhaps a brake on their ability to repost it would be courteous.
How about if you're publicly saying things that offend a whole community, take personal responsibility for that and accept whatever offensive things they say about you in response. People have this dumb idea that everyone else should respect them for what they say in public but they have the right to disrespect others. If you can't handle that, stop saying inflammatory things to the whole world.
Yes and yes. It's called picking your battles. If you're not equipped to stand up for yourself or have anyone else do that for you, you're going to get hurt when you insult someone else's beliefs they they've linked to their identity or even their purpose in life.
Stop publicizing it to the whole world, yes. The world is chock full of homophobic people and some of them are going to see it if you share it with all of them.
What if you're a holocaust denier? What are you going to do? Somehow not share your belief with the world? Yes! Either that or accept the hateful responses you're bound to get if you do share it.
Don't forget this is all about public posts. Not anyone's private life or stuff they only share with people they trust. There's always going to be a Muslim somewhere who wants to kill you for being a practicing gay, or a holocaust believer who wants to punish you for disagreeing with their it-did-happen belief.
What about an ashiest who ties their belief to rejecting the identities of Christians? There's no end to what people vehemently disagree on.
By the way, you can always change your identity if you really want to. Just because you're gay doesn't mean that has to be your identity. You might primarily see yourself as a citizen of your country or what your job defines you as or your personality or religion or just simply yourself if you don't want to be part of a bigger group.
Society does not have to just let the worst people in it be as they are. Neither do platforms. Bullying and hateful abuse hurt the platform - users don't want to be subjected to it, advertisers don't want their name next to it. Blocking and other tools to reduce this vile garbage are positive things.
Who are these worst people and who made you the judge? Is it holocaust deniers? Gays? Muslims? Christians? Vegans? Humans are diverse and contradictory in their deeply held beliefs about right and wrong. What about climate change deniers? They get blocked without saying anything vile - just disagreement.
There's a long-established pattern linking bullying and suicide, and huge amounts of tougher-to-quantify lesser damage done. Giving people mechanisms to slow and reduce bullying makes perfect sense.
I'm not talking about bullying, where the person being offended is the only one who suffers from it, but rather things like saying "X is false" which offends believers of X and they retaliate with insults. Yes, people get angry when you offend them or even just disagree with them. If you don't want to cause that, don't offend them. Unfortunately a lot of people are so arrogant about their own beliefs, they feel they have the right to both offend people who disagree and be protected from being offended in response.
Not saying the people making death threats are innocent and of course the law should try to stop them, but often it's not powerful enough so people who don't want that unfortunately have to keep quiet or be anonymous when they want to step on the toes of death-threat-happy communities.
This just means that the only people who will post on your platform are toxic. Users don't want that. Advertisers don't want that. Instead, we can build tools to make life harder for the toxic users to discourage them and reduce their impact.
Again, it's not just bullying. Real world example:
* The quarterback (QB) for Miskatonic University throws an interception on the last play of the game.
* Internet members (trolls) find their Twitter handle. Trolls harass QB, insult QB, and make QB's lives miserable. They publish QB's handle on their forums where other trolls also harass QB.
* QB blocks the trolls
Which scenario is better for QB, non-trolling users, advertisers, and the world?
1. The trolls still see can follow QB and respond to everything they do. Maybe QB can't see their messages, but the trolls are free to harass QB's followers, the staff of any location QB posts to being at, and so on. They continue harassing over and over. For years and years they can see QB's posts and continue engaging.
2. The trolls cannot see QB's posts, follower lists, or engage with them. A few particularly dedicated trolls may use alt accounts but it's a tiny percentage of the original trolling and much easier to manage. They eventually get distracted with some other player who made a newer mistake and leave QB alone.
1. is better because in general because nobody actually knows who's a all-bad troll and who's a worthwhile activist. Least of all the person being criticized. QB himself isn't hurt after he blocks them and can carry on with his life as if it's not happening.
I've heard celebrities say they don't read what anyone says about them on social media. That sounds like a good idea because there's always going to be haters to any popular public figure. Just ignore them and you're fine.
3rd parties being affected? Well stop associating with the widely-hated public figre if you can't handle the heat of celebrities.
Not at all. I do think people should share their beliefs even when other people don't like them, and other people should be tolerant of that. But the reality is some of those other people will try to hurt you for expressing a belief they don't agree with.
It's the opposite. People with serious issues (i.e. stalkers, trolls etc.) will continue following on a second account or proxy. Meanwhile regular accounts with legitimate criticisms (for example pointing out misinformation, calling out bias, and so on) get blocked by bad actors and those will not find them anymore and repost because they don't invest time in it.
Blocking mainly prevents regular normal users from seeing tweets. Best example is Lex Fridman who's blocked a million people for no apparent reason. Say something he doesn't like: You're blocked. Never even interacted with him but commented on a topic he doesn't approve of: Blocked. You under-cook fish: Believe it or not, he blocks you.
Just to be clear they still won't be able to interact with you after they're blocked. The only change is they can keep seeing your tweets directly in their account, as opposed to having to log out.
This I think is good. I don't really care about what is shown, because in my opinion, twitter discussions are rarely worth anything, but I get the point of 'more visibility = good'. I just dislike brigading. And I don't follow anything political on Twitter, I used to follow cybersec and US sports, still there you had brigading (and sometimes attacks got _really_ personal, like a bunch of people making dogwhistle comments about someone who criticized their favorite basketball player because he looks ashkenaz. I think he's a tv personality now btw).
Blocking doesn't really fix the brigading problem, regardless of whether people need to log out or not.
Most X users will just post a screenshot of the tweet, breaking accessibility in the process and disassociating the original author from the thread against their will.
This isn't always a good thing, as it leads to people being surprised by crowds of strangers suddenly screaming at them and not being able to see the source of their anger.
Some people do this as a "preventative measure", so that their post still makes sense when the original tweet is deleted.
> Blocking doesn't really fix the brigading problem
Automated blocking absolutely solved most of the problem. In the late 2010s it was common for political accounts to use scripts that went through follower graphs for their worst repliers and blocked everyone, or went through the list of people liking a certain tweet and blocked all those accounts.
They were quite fond of that approach and were happy with the outcome pre-Elon. Even if someone in the "bad group" screenshotted a tweet from their target to make fun of it, the target didn't really get bothered by it because they walled themselves well enough. The screenshotter is incentivized to not interact with their target so they don't get blocked again, and no one excited by all the dunking cared enough to go harass the target anyway.
Now as someone who found themselves in a few blockchains during peak Bernie-mania, I like the proposed change. I've been blocked by several popular accounts because of who I followed, and I will enjoy being able to reliably read someone's content even if I'm not allowed to interact.
> Most X users will just post a screenshot of the tweet, breaking accessibility in the process and disassociating the original author from the thread against their will.
But that means the blocking worked. Another person will now have to go to the extra effort of either finding that tweet or going directly to the profile to interact with them. And those extra steps were exactly the feature the blocking provided. It changes "click reply, type 'kill yourself you <slur> <slur>'" into "login into non-blocked account, retype part of the text from the screenshot, search, find the matching tweet, reply, type". And that's a lot of work for a quick response.
Sure, it won't stop everyone. It reduces the effects though.
You could design Twitter in a way where handles in quoted tweets aren't clickable if the quoter is blocked by the quotee, but the quotee can still be notified that they've been quoted by somebody they blocked, and optionally choose to see the post. Same for deletion, you could make quotes literally include the original post and preserve it forever, but notify viewers when the original is deleted.
Not to mention people attempting to slander others behind a block (so the person being slandered has no idea until the damage is already done), or temporarily unblocking to say something to someone, and then blocking again.
> Not to mention people attempting to slander others behind a block (so the person being slandered has no idea until the damage is already done)
I saw someone once post about their outrage over the practice of criticizing someone on Twitter without tagging the person you're criticizing in your tweet. ("Subtweeting.") Apparently the thinking goes that if anyone anywhere says something about you, you have the right to be notified.
I'd argue that it really depends on the kind of criticism. What I had in mind was more along the lines of accusing someone of wrongdoing rather than just criticizing them.
I think tagging someone when you're accusing them of wrongdoing is the fair thing to do, considering how quickly that sort of thing can whip others into a frenzy. I see a lot of this sort of thing, where someone will accuse someone of heinous things like pedophilia from behind a block, and by the time the person being accused understands what's going on, they're being hounded by people who get off to drama about why they haven't denied the accusations yet.
On the other hand, tagging when simply criticizing someone often feels like attention-seeking to me. I see this a lot with space stuff, where someone will offer (often completely ignorant) criticism, while pinging Musk, Bezos and/or other figures in the space discussion community.
It's kind of the opposite of this quote from Christian Bale: If you have a problem with me, text me. And if you don't have my number, you don't know me well enough to have a problem with me.
If it's one tweet that's blocked, is there really much damage/slander? If people actually start talking about it then the affected person will get notified anyway from one of the non-blocked accounts responding.
No it doesn't. The people who are malicious about it will be using multiple accounts. The block button doesn't stop them. If anything, it provides them ammunition to go "See, this person is a sensitive one, let's add them to the list".
Either your posts are public or they're not. There's a pretty clear distinction between the two, and anyone who thinks otherwise is sorely mistaken. The risk of people re-posting your content is a natural consequence of your aspirations to be popular on social media, and we shouldn't be giving people a false sense of security.
No and nobody claimed it does. Making it just a bit harder and making the other party jump through an extra hoop reduces it though. The extra friction has been implemented on many platforms and it works. Instagram adds friction in a different way, but also claims it has a positive result: https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/key-be...
You can also see people migrating to other platforms who raise the lack of search / being easily found as a feature. It's not black and white and it's not public or not. There's a whole range of how accessible your content is to parties who will attack you.
This is the old "it's not perfect, therefore, it's useless" type of argument. No one claimed it's perfect, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
You don't want to interact with me? Fine. Then why should I still see your posts? Yes, some crazy people will go to lengths to see it anyway, but most don't and will take the hint, shrug, and go away.
Nah this is a classic case of the no true perfect double-edged slippery-sloped sword of damocles being the enemy of the good no true double-edged slippery-sloped sword of damocles that shouldn't be thrown in glass houses where the chickens have come to roost.
"It's not perfect, it's useless" sounds illogical, though I would first disagree with the characterization of saying that it's not perfect. You're putting words in the mouth of the opponent, straw manning, by having the opponent accept the characterization it's not perfect to be juxtaposed with the opinion that it's useless. I would say that it isn't only not perfect, it's useless.
Feel free to steel man and tell me why you think it's useful. I think the friction it causes is cancelled out by the effect of annoying the mostly well-meaning portion of the people who are blocked while not annoying the truly toxic users who will quickly and easily bypass it at all.
I don't tend to participate in twitter fights. A type of twitter fight that comes to mind is people who work at FAANGs being annoyed that people are criticizing their employer's agenda. I saw this against Google with AMP and with Chrome hiding the path from the address bar in a dev channel release. That isn't really coming out of a place of toxicity. The complainer doesn't really deserve to be blocked, but the FAANG employee has a right to keep their mentions and reply threads clean. For minor scuffles like these, a lighter form of blocking is nice.
Well, Twitter's implementation is more provocative than it needs to be. It leaves "This tweet is hidden because the person blocked you" tombstones everywhere which is worse than just showing the tweet but gently disabling the reply button if you're blocked or even hiding their reply threads entirely.
If you're blocked by prolific reply guys in your circle, you regularly have to not just scroll past their censored replies at the top of the reply section, but you see other people's replies to them which compels you to switch accounts to see what dumb thing they said this time. And now you can simply reply to them on your other account.
Tons of stuff can be improved, sure. However, in general I think this is changing things in the wrong way – there should be more control over who you interact with, rather than less.
Twitter ossified their feature set a long time ago, which is not surprising because "stick with what made us big" is a reasonable course of action. In that sense great diversity and more experimentation in different approached with Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon is generally a good thing (even though I don't really use any of them, mostly out of laziness).
> It's not perfect, but the friction helps prevent drive-by bad behaviour.
> No it doesn't.
There's really no use in continuing this discussion when one party is unable/unwilling to use precise language to discuss marginal effects. Obviously I presume what you mean is that the marginal effect is too small to be relevant, but discussions with people who round that off to "No it doesn't" rarely go anywhere productive.
The way I think is this: there are infinite computer tricks you can use to do all sorts of things, but how many malicious people are also good enough with computers to know about them?
For example, if all they know is the app, they may even think you NEED the app to see posts, or that you CAN'T create multiple accounts on the same app because they signed up with their phone number instead of e-mail.
Just like the smallest UI hurdle blocks onboarding users, the smallest UI hurdle also stop malicious behavior.
Not every malicious user is the hacker type. Sometimes it's just someone stalking their ex-partner. The malicious user could be an elder, could be a teenager, they could be from the U.S. but they could also be from Africa.
When you consider non-English speaking countries, expertise drops tremendously because any high level information is kept behind a language barrier.
But the point is you can’t see these posts from a particular account. It makes interaction between the two accounts a bit more difficult and so a bit less likely.
Yes, the article says “engagements are still not allowed under blocks”. Then again, interaction in the general sense can still happen (you can always take a screenshot and post that).
The blocked person can obviously create a new account and bypass that block to some degree, but as other have mentioned it will prevent them from reposting on their main account
To be fair, you can barely view any post while unauthenticated these days. Sometimes I click on a link to a tweet on my work laptop (where I'm not authenticated) and I get immediately assaulted by several pop-ups and cookie bars and redirected to the landing page when try to dismiss them.
I have given up trying to view content unauthenticated
Same. I’ve accidentally made it 18 years without creating a Twitter account and there’s no content compelling enough for me to want to break my streak.
There does seem to be an exception for public outlets.
I clicked a link to NYPDs twitter and didn’t have to AuthN. Makes sense too; every org who wanted their content to be fully available to anyone would leave if twitter mandated login
> every org who wanted their content to be fully available...
Every single public account I've visited still has the feed in non-chronological order which instantly makes it useless to me. I don't care about a post from my city government in 2019.
I thought so too, but also fun to see people posting they've been blocked by person they're debating... well arguing with, whether the blocked deserved it because they're being an ass, or whether the blocker was simply thin skinned. I think the latter, seeing people rage quit because they can't rationalize their position, is actually pretty useful signal.
This is pure speculation. It's not implemented yet and there is no detailed explanation of how it will work. It could easily still prevent your posts from being algorithmically recommended.
Reddit's implementation is even worse. It breaks all sorts of commenting/replying even down the comment chain, if anyone in the parent is blocked. And, the mobile app shows no usable errors. But, you can log out, or even make a second account, and see everything.
I block people on Twitter all the time, but I can't even remember the last time I had to block anyone on reddit (it was years ago). This speaks to the different models between the two -- on reddit I'm only interacting on specific subreddits, which because I've chosen them, have much nicer and more reasonable people than "all of Twitter". Twitter is always just nonstop fighting and yelling.
It has become weaponized. If someone blocks you, they can see your posts but you can't see theirs, and there is a good chance they will block you if you get into any kind of long argument where they feel personally insulted that they are being disagreed with. Once you are blocked you cannot block them, so they will always see your posts but you can't see their their posts and there is no recourse for this, it is just is, forever. So you end up proactively blocking people so that can't happen.
Someone needs to analyze this as game theory and write a paper on it. It is so poorly thought out and implemented that it would be funny if reddit didn't have a monopoly on long form written discussions on a lot of topics.
You can block users that block you -- if you know their username. But you don't know who has blocked you, and if they block you, you don't get to see their posts any more/
And you wouldn't notice if anyone blocked you -- that's the whole point -- but entire posts and threads could be right under your nose and hidden.
Regardless of whether it affects you or not -- it is ill conceived, does not accomplish its stated goal, and is easily abused by bad actors and thus should be heavily revised or removed.
The restriction isn't on them seeing your posts. It's on you seeing their posts. If you don't want them to see your posts, Twitter provides that functionality too. It just isn't called "blocking".
> You can't view the post while authenticated but you can view the post while unauthenticated.
As per the article (emphasis mine):
> While a source at X told The Verge that the platform is making this change because people can already view posts from users who’ve blocked them when using another account or when logged out, several of us at The Verge (myself included) have noticed that X actually prevents you from viewing someone’s profile if you’re logged out.
For my part, I can see some accounts but not others, though the “rule” is not clear. Even then, on the accounts I can see they only show a dumb disjointed list of tweets ordered by popularity regardless of post date.
Sure it does. Very few people are going to obsessively look over every person's twitter account using multiple logins to check and see if that account maybe posted something that is being hidden from them.
I assume it still blocks actions when someone tries to interact with the user, so the fact that they're blocked isn't a secret. It seems like more of a convenience feature for the person who got blocked (since they would otherwise need to log out), which is an odd direction to push a product.
So since abusers, stalkers, and harassers can't just log out to view the blocker's posts, X is making it so that they can view those posts without logging out or changing to an alt account. That makes it a lot more convenient for people who were already blocked for bad behavior to get mad at what someone posted.
Sounds like they're catering to the kinds of people who would normally have gotten around blocks by using private browsing.
Sure. But let's look at where we are now. If you're blocked from viewing an account, you need to switch to a different account (possibly in an incognito window rather than adding the account?) and explicitly load the tweet in question.
Hold up, how does the blocked person even know about the tweet? That should be an indication that we're not talking about reality any more.
The purpose of the block button, which Elon still doesn't understand, is to remove your posts from that person's algorithmic feed. Make it so that they don't get exposed to or notifications about your content, at least without creating a new account (not much you can do about that).
Why does that matter? Harassment. There are tons of people on Twitter, with large followings, that dunk-tweet or otherwise harass people, and in doing so end up triggering a brigade. If you've ever had the misfortune of being the victim of one of these negative engagements, you would understand how much this sucks. It destroys usability of the app as you have to wade through literally hundreds of cheap variation of middle school insults just to find any legitimate content.
You can't block the hordes of marauding masses, but if you block the key instigators, the problem goes away. They can't interact with you or subtweet you, yes, but they ALSO aren't notified of the things you say, and therefore aren't likely to spread links to your content in private group chats where this trolling behavior is organized.
You can autistically insist that akshully the block feature doesn't prevent someone from jumping through some hoops to view your tweets, but that's missing the point. It still solves a real world problem in its current form.
> I assume it still blocks actions when someone tries to interact with the user
That would be weird, the block is there so you don't see their posts & replies, but your block shouldn't affect what they can do. Maybe other people want to see their replies, why should a third party block them from this?
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, but not to control their public speech.
Given that I can't easily the post (and certainly can't follow a thread) without a login, is it really public? It's deliberately obfuscated at the very least.
In some cases yes you do. It depends on how the account is flagged, I'm not sure what the flag is, but valid links can and do return a 404 if you're not logged in.
You also can't view replies or context for individual tweets, which makes seeing one tweet next to useless.
You know to look because you see a QT or reply and where the original tweet would be, there's a message about how you can't see the tweet. It's been like that forever.
It has. I speak from personal experience. I have multiple times experienced massive brigading from certain accounts. I blocked them and it stopped. Sure they could still find my tweets and try to instigate something, but in practice they don't. They just whine once about being blocked and move on to some other target.
An alternative is to present a never ending loading screen to users who got blocked, making "access denied because someone blocked you" indistinguishable from regular infrastructure failures.
Twitter may be doing something like that already, where some old links will result in "Hmm...this page doesn't exist. Try searching for something else.", even though the same link is visible via a Nitter proxy.
What thread has Elon lost really? When Elon bought twitter there was a huge wave of people and the media telling us it was over in 6 months, when Elon fired staff they told us X would go down forever in a few months.
Under Elon imo X has gotten a lot better, I see more content that relates to me and has since found myself using X more than all the other social media platforms combined.
Blocking content makes no sense on a platform like X, if you block me and I still want to read your posts all I have to do is to make another account and read them. This just gets rid of the friction. If I block someone I just don't want to interact with them, I still want them to see me and my friends have fun.
> I see more content that relates to me and has since found myself using X more than all the other social media platforms combined.
You do know that you shouldn't be looking at stuff it's recommending to you, right? Think of something you'd like to know more about and then look it up yourself.
And why not? What's your authority on the subject? From here, it looks like more internet arguments. I mean, I don't use twitter at all. I've never understood the UI. But if you like what it's recommending, why should I believe your assertion that I "shouldn't" be looking at it?
that's the issue. Look at clickthrough rates and see how much one extra click can cut down on engagement. You want to de-escalate something, or at least try to.
> If I block someone I just don't want to interact with them, I still want them to see me and my friends have fun.
I agree they should have added an ignore feature as well as block. Different approaches for each individual.
Or stuff you interacted with in sort-of click bait way. That's why I'm using the block functionality so much on X.
A couple of blocks a day keeps the rusobot content way.
If only I could get rid of of OF girls following me or violent content in the same way, that would be great.
I don't think X has gotten any better, if anything it is overrun by bots and crazy conspiracy theorists now. In addition, Elon has been engaging in soft-censoring people he doesn't like while amplifying those he likes.
>What thread has Elon lost really? When Elon bought twitter there was a huge wave of people and the media telling us it was over in 6 months, when Elon fired staff they told us X would go down forever in a few months.
Indeed. According to the media and on Reddit, since Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads have collectively gained 70 bazillion users on seventeen different occasions, and have caused Twitter to collapse and disappear eleven times.
Sounds entirely reasonable. You post something in public it is public. Blocking direct interaction is fine, but any expectation that other party cannot see your stuff is just insane. Only absolutely clueless or stupid should have believed that.
If you don't want someone to point out your stupid takes don't make them in public.
Oh don't worry, I never commented on the platform. But when it's still the most popular place for indie devs to talk about their stuff I'm still reluctantly forced to at browse around.
I find that Twitter users somehow misunderstand this. Especially small ones that only interact with themselves, posting misinformation. See a lot of the Palestine Twitter. Then a bigger account comes and comments/corrects or spreads their OWN PUBLIC POST. Then it's an "attack". Its baffling.
I am not an X user, I remember Elon making a lot of noise about bots, did Elon fixed the bot issues? Or all that noise was an attempt to get a discount.
>Was he complaining about bots before he signed? Genuinely can't remember.
I can't google it for you, so from my memory , he complained that he was tricked by Twitter because a large number of users are bots , and then he promised that he will fix this issue after he get's the control. Probably bots and trolls are good for business since other social media like reddit are also making super easy to create tons of bot/troll accounts and spam the network.
> he complained that he was tricked by Twitter because a large number of users are bots , and then he promised that he will fix this issue after he get's the control
How making a noise about it after the price is agreed be “an attempt to get a discount”? If anything, it was an attempt to get out of the deal.
(And if I remember correctly, the argument failed because he had been complaining about bots prior to signing. Either way, has nothing to do with discounts.)
Well, during that time he was trying to pull out of the deal, when he was citing the bots as an argument of why he should be able to, he was using that as leverage to try to get Twitter to agree to give him a discount: the idea being "I might be able to get out of this deal completely, but let me buy at a 20-30% discount instead and I'll go quietly." So it was kind of both an attempt to get out and an attempt to get a discount.
The bot stuff was pretty transparently not a good faith argument from Musk; the real issue likely being more that the markets had gone down since the offer and what was already an overpay on day 1 was now a big overpay. The same dynamic made Twitter determined to keep the original offer: shareholders had basically demanded to take the offer to begin with, and with the down market (not to mention Musk himself publicly running the company down during his efforts to escape the deal) it was just that much more of a better deal than they could otherwise hope to get.
He signed the world's most iron-clad corporate acquisition contract you could for a price far above market rate right before the tech crash, and waived every single right to due-diligence which normal investors include, specifically for things like "oh what if the financials/users aren't what they seem?" or "what if the stock price substantially changes".
It was an utterly ludicrous agreement to sign (though far eclipsed by the the number of financial institutions which agreed to put up the money for it and are basically never going to get it back - though a bunch of the managers and executives losing their bonuses for it is kind of funny).
IIRC he tried to back out of the deal under the premise that twitter over-represented its value by under-reporting bots. He stated something like he wanted proof of non-bot users before proceeding. When taken to court, the judge ruled he could get more info from twitter. I don't remember what came next, I think elon quietly dropped the point and the next set of rulings held him to the already signed purchase agreement.
Citations:
"Elon Musk says Twitter deal 'cannot move forward' until he has clarity on fake account numbers" [1]
"Musk was seeking information on essentially all of Twitter's account reviews and actions. Judge McCormick dubbed that request "absurdly broad," noting Twitter has already agreed to produce a "tremendous amount information.""[2]
It looks like a reverse of a trend I have seen of people understading the details of selectively hiding information from others and using it for manipulation.
,,Show to group of people except X'' is manipulative behaviour (instead of kicking out the person from the group, or in this case not sharing publicly what's not public).
On instagram I have seen a lot of these things, for example posts, stories, archived stories all have different very strange behaviours that only people to take the time to understand (more manipulative people) use, which makes people more manipulative in itself.
Good. Blocking is unidirectional, you prevent yourself from seeing the other person's posts. It should not be bidirectional, as this informs the other person that you have blocked them.
Reddit implements blocking as bidirectional, and even tells you (using coded language such as "deleted" and "unavailable") that there is a post in the thread from a person who has blocked you, and includes a permalink to that post. The permalink can be loaded in private browsing mode, and you can see the post from the person who has blocked you. (Make sure you load the Reddit front page first, otherwise Reddit assumes you're an AI harvesting spider and auto-blocks you from the site)
> Blocking is unidirectional, you prevent yourself from seeing the other person's posts. It should not be bidirectional, as this informs the other person that you have blocked them.
I agree, this is how Discord does it INSIDE SERVERS. Not sure why you are downvoted but like on Reddit and HN people just downvote what they do not like.
Hiding your posts from abusers is a legitimate use case because most people (emphasis on most) won't bother to go on private browsing every day just to be annoying.
There's an argument here that the previous blocking behavior might give users a false sense of security. In reality, you should not post any information publicly that you wouldn't want someone in particular to read, even if you've blocked that person.
I don't think anyone was ever confused about that. It's about choosing who you interact with and who interacts with you, same in many other areas in life.
Private browsing doesn't work because Twitter basically requires users to be logged in to see anything. So it really requires having a separate burner Twitter account you'd use to follow people who've blocked you on your main. It's a decent bit of extra effort that also requires a second phone number at this point.
Ideally blocking an account should block every account sharing that phone number (though it shouldn't tell you about the other accounts being blocked, since that would deanonymize which accounts share a phone number).
I don't understand. Having someone blocked prevents them from interacting with you, no?
So what harassment are you referring to?
Also, most of the time blocking is being done by people who spew hateful or misinforming content and then immediately go private the moment they get called out. This happens every day.
This is just one more example of Twitter going out of their way to work against the best interests of their users. As twitter continues to treat its userbase like a controlling/abusive spouse I hope more and more people realize that they deserve better and leave.
>This is just one more example of Twitter going out of their way to work against the best interests of their users.
Why does it matter?
If I block people in a Discord server THEY can still see what I type. Why does it matter? I have really come to understand that some Twitter users see Twitter as their own private garden somehow and do not realize that anyone can see your posts... So somehow it becomes uncomfortable when they are reminded of this fact.
If I had a Twitter account and blocked someone, it would be with the intention of devaluing the service for them. Someone who was awful enough that I bothered blocking them would devalue my service if they could keep annoying me.
An example of blockers losing value: Tesla bears were chronic blockers, even passing around blocklists. Nowadays Tesla bears seem to have lost all relevance.
I moved to the fediverse (a Mastodon instance) over a year ago. I found it less exciting at first, before realising that Twitter was only exciting because I could get outraged at the a*holes it insisted on exposing me to.
Now I love the fediverse. Local instances mean more local news/gossip, but at the same time I can follow global interests (just saw a post from Brian Krebs, for instance) just as easily. Hashtags let me follow my interests, and comments are more constructive and perceptive because there is no reward for provoking people. I don't doom-scroll any more and I don't have to filter out advertising - I'm much more efficiently informed.
Lots of speculation about the motive in here, but isn't the simplest answer (not necessarily the correct one) that it saves billions of DB joins per day? I don't think Elon has made a Twitter decision yet that would have made it more rather than less expensive to run.
Well hang on I mean we're also excluding option 3 here: they just straight up broke the service which provided that feature somewhere between haphazardly decommissioning a data center without planning, and the mass layoffs based on code commit printouts, and now no one knows how to fix it.
On the flip side of this, they turned on the (at least at first, fictitious) view counts for the opposite reason - despite being costly to calculate accurately, they provide an ego boost.
The simplest answer is that Elon is blocked by a lot of people, as are many people whose voices he wants heard, and believes that it goes against his flavor of "free speech".
He's been unblocking himself over the years, and this feels like the next logical step for him.
I think its simple... a lot of people have blocked Elon, so Elon thinks blocking is bad.
I don't particularly care to argue about whether or not that's true, I'm just pointing out that it's not the change being discussed here, which works in the opposite direction.
That's such a silly take I can't know if you're even serious.
Not that many important people block Elon, but even if they did, Elon could just ask the team to adjust his client / account accordingly especially if it doesn't give him any special (non-public) rights
He’s missing the ability to think about his own self in context of others. So he thinks that if he’s blocked, that’s a real problem facing everyone, so it must be fixed in the name of free speech.
Even if he did ... which I don't think is true, if and when it produces positive and logical results like this, that's always good. How this worked before made little sense, and this could really as well have been fixed during the Twitter times without seeming any less on point.
I do like tech platforms where the decisionmakers and stakeholders actually know and use the product. Elon candidly streaming Diablo, even for some long sessions, once a while on X is a great thing to see and I hope it is putting pressure on the team to improve streaming there even more, given the latency and layout are still a bit behind the bigger players on that even though improvements like the stream chat have been added.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 412 ms ] threadIf I genuinely don’t want someone to see my posts, I just can’t put it on Twitter/X unless I have a private profile (is that still a thing?).
Otherwise, it’s a public platform, in that anyone can register with little more than an email address and see my posts. Claiming to block someone from seeing them seems like it provides a false sense of security to users.
The things I say to a room or to people at a table are not meant for everyone at the event. The phrase context collapse came about and persists for a reason. A blocked person has been kicked out of the public local to the poster and their followers. It doesn't make sense for them to be able to continue to act like they're in the space, but just not speaking.
The fact that someone can violate the rules and norms of a space doesn't mean you don't have rules and norms.
Super low-effort harassment, where the harasser can't bother creating a new Twitter account.
The harasser can view from their new accounts and respond on their main account. Unless someone is very tightly curating their follower list, at which point it doesn't make sense for them to be publicly tweeting, there would be no indication which account was responsible.
The problem in harassment is the harassment. Not the harasser's access to the public domain.
In America we have case law that prohibits public officials from blocking their constituents from their official accounts [1]. Not every country does.
Also, that ruling doesn't cover material edge cases. Should a public figure be able to block journalists they don't like? Oil companies anyone with an environmental leaning to avoid tipping them off on something they weren't searching for?
We have a media-bubble problem in America that is increasingly defined by partisan lines. From a social utility position, clarifying that public means public strikes me as more important than edge-case harassment concerns. Particularly when the stakes are so low on both sides of the scale (due to the ease with which blocks can be circumvented and the fact that we're dealing with content the speaker has explicilty chosen to make public).
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-611_ap6c.pdf
Can’t they just make a new account to see the posts? Are you stating that you think this is the reason this is being implemented? As for the rest of your post, your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this thread.
Sure. But they may not know they've been blocked.
> you think this is the reason this is being implented?
No. I think it's being done to increase engagement. Engagement scales with outrage, and a pretty simple way to boost outrage would be by showing people stuff they've been blocked from.
> your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this argument
Not really. Blocking users from seeing your public content degrades weak relationships. My interest in what my state Senator is doing is a weak relationship; I don't think I'd be able to tell if they stopped e-mailing me for at least a full election cycle. Harassment, on the other hand, is a strong relationship. That provides circumvention motivation.
My argument is that there appear to be marginal benefits to this policy. If the cost is making unmotivated harassers' jobs a little easier, inasmuch as it pertains to them viewing (not responding to) public content, that seems to be worth it.
If someone is harassing you on twitter, then blocking them still stops that, modulo them making a new account. Stalking, in the sense of looking at your public posts, can't be stopped, because it's trivial for them to open your posts in a private window, or create a new account just for stalking (which of course they wouldn't tell you about, hence you couldn't block it). So in fact the only option you have to avoid such stalking is to make your account private, period.
But that's not what Twitter/X is, it's more akin to standing in an open access field with a megaphone. You have no right to say who should be in the field or not, and if you don't want someone to hear something, the best thing to do is not say it in the field in the first place.
Good user interfaces don't tell users things that are far from true. Even if we all wish the things could be true.
Not what Twitter was or is? You have misunderstood the site like a Facebook timeline boomer poster. "uuoooh people can see this!!!" Yes. Twitter is not your own IRC server. But seeing as it started with MacBook Starbucks hipsters, I am not surprised they just made something up in their minds and rolled with it.
I think that's the real motivation, actually.
The only effective way I've found to stop seeing stuff from people I dgaf in my feed was to block them.
I was even considering creating a Github repo. with all the usernames I've been selecting out for years, so that people could easily de-shittify their Twitter feed.
The set includes (excludes?):
* the most prominent accounts that post political content; no partisan bias, they're all gone for me
* most major news accounts, including anyone that regularly posts any kind of content related to any side of any war, ever
* "science influencers" where the "science" are actually ads or some deranged guy screaming while wearing a lab coat
* Ian Miles Cheong and the Krassenstein Brothers
* hundreds of e-whores
* hundreds of "I made 1 million dollars last week" accounts
* ... and many more
gg to that
Do you see people's posts even if you don't follow them?
My "For you" page is ~95% the things described above and only ~5% things related to the accounts I follow.
This means that in the replies to a tweet, for example, they can now rank highly all the spam and culture war bullshit that people have previously blocked.
If I understood correctly, the change here is that now those hundreds of e-whores and Ian Miles Cheong will be able to see your posts. So blocking is still the right strategy for what you want (for now).
In that case, i could imagine for example that this can be something done to ease a further AI feature. it is almost impossible to train an AI for content with individual customization. So if Y is blocked to see your content, that is impossible to have AI trained on your tweets and still be sure that Y can't get the content of your tweets.
What kind of decisions? Why?
The motivation seems simple: increase engagement by broadening the amount of content someone can see / be shown.
You will see what will come next and it will be clear.
If not for AI indexation, another hypothesis is something like removing the paywall needing an account to access user content or something like that.
Engagement scales with outrage. If there is a singular marker of outrage, it's in blocking.
> not for AI indexation
Why would Twitter want to help third parties train their AI on its data? Musk already has an AI venture. If there were a secret agenda around AI, it would be in reducing visibility. Not increasing it.
> removing the paywall needing an account to access user content
What paywall? The sign-in wall? Again, why would Twitter have a hidden agenda to undermine something Twitter is doing to boost user numbers?
These hypotheses are incoherent because they don't stem from any observations, but are trying to work backwards to justify the existence of a hidden agenda.
Regarding the other hypothesis related to the "sign in" wall, based on number it looks like that this wall is not working anymore to boost users as the number of users is collapsing. So there might be a plan to enlarge "page views" and so user engagement by reopening the Public view of tweets.
It's his site, they would code up whatever he asked, X is no longer design by committee. Remember when the Reddit CEO/owner/whatever was hand editing the database to alter users' comments to make it look like they posted something they hadn't?
Maybe they want to keep the code simple or ready for immediate open sourcing if desired.
Of course it could be bypassed but it requires effort and most harassers are in fact pretty stupid people who just happen to have an influence over a group of people as stupid as them.
No, the point is "I don't like this person for whatever reason so I don't want to see their posts".
"I don't want this person to see my public posts" can be done by making an account private, or not posting the posts publicly.
Otherwise it opens the door to trollish behavior like reply-and-block-to-prevent-retort.
To stop harassment, reach out to the platform, assuming it cares about harassment, and if it doesn't, contact law enforcement, or file a lawsuit.
but not the criteria where you _want_ other people to see your posts publicly.
aka, the ask is to allow individuals to "excommunicate" a particular user, not just blocking.
I'm glad, tho, that twitter does not allow this. I think having this feature allows for echo chambers...(tho, this is currently already true so may be it's moot...?)
It does though? That is exactly what blocking does both before and after this change.
Your wording suggests that you seem to be aware that none of these avenues actually work in the real world, which is precisely why platforms have the ability to block.
You may personally infer that, but the precise reason platforms have the ability to block someone is, "I don't like this person for whatever reason so I don't want to see their posts or replies". Maybe you don't want to see their posts or replies because you feel they are harassing. Blocking/ignoring them stops you from seeing them. It shouldn't affect anyone else's ability to see their posts or replies to you.
Honestly, in what other public, online discussion forum can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts?
Blocking is typically a much stronger remedy, aimed at curtailing targeted harassment.
In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, and live in whatever bubble you wish, but not to control others' public speech. The platform has admins who can theoretically deal with law-breaking behavior like harassment or threats or CSAM, and if they choose not to, the platform sucks and I recommend you ditch it. coughtwittercough.
I mean, Facebook and Twitter have both worked this way for years. Arguably that constitutes most of social media for the last decade.
Regardless of all your other arguments here, the change being made to twitter here does nothing to prevent that. Blocking a user still prevents them from interacting with your posts in any way. Now they can just see the post without being able to reply to it. So I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
Using a different account would work, sure, though that of course evades the block entirely, in both directions.
The point was probably moreso that the posts wouldn't show up in the blocked person's feed, they'd have to actively seek them out. That probably does make a real difference.
What sane subreddits have you found?
I've stayed clear from CS/IT subreddits for a long while now though.
You seem like one of these people.
You ONYL used twitter? You didnt use Reddit or Youtube? I am baffled but this makes the upset people make a bit more sense. Twitter was "theirs" so nobody else dare come in. They are the ones complaining about gatekeeping etc but treat Twitter like a chatroom and become offended when someone calls them out.
For the record, I do not have a Twitter account/phone banned. I am not in the USA. If I could vote in your elections I would vote Kamala. Just to be clear and to calm your blood pressue.
>Threads seems to be full of positivity right now.
Toxic positivity sure. ♥‿♥ YOU GO QUEEN!! SLAY!!! ♥‿♥
I may be completely off, of course, but whenever I look at Twitter (without owing an account, so can't do it properly), I see people engaged in heated cross-wing arguments. If Twitter were so right-wing, wouldn't you expect far less arguments as there wouldn't be so many people voicing the opposite viewpoint? For comparison, how many users argue left-wing opinions on TruthSocial?
I.e. of course it's possible to login with another user, find the one who blocked you, make a screenshot or something and then quote it or perform any other interaction in your main account. But it's obviously not very easy.
So I'm sure it worked as a solution to reduce negative interactions on the platform. However, Musk doesn't want reducing these, his goal is spreading chaos and forcing his narratives, so the decision totally makes sense for him.
It may be as simple as revealing blocked content is a short path to increasing outrage and thus engagement. Like, I could see Facebook doing this on Threads.
But IME, the kind of people I want to block are the exact kinds of people that would go through all that effort to keep trying to cause drama.
It shouldn't be that hard to check if an image looks like a tweet and, if it does, find out the exact match.
This is valid. I don't think it rises to the level of preventing them from seeing my public content. But perhaps a brake on their ability to repost it would be courteous.
What if you're a holocaust denier? What are you going to do? Somehow not share your belief with the world? Yes! Either that or accept the hateful responses you're bound to get if you do share it.
Don't forget this is all about public posts. Not anyone's private life or stuff they only share with people they trust. There's always going to be a Muslim somewhere who wants to kill you for being a practicing gay, or a holocaust believer who wants to punish you for disagreeing with their it-did-happen belief.
What about an ashiest who ties their belief to rejecting the identities of Christians? There's no end to what people vehemently disagree on.
By the way, you can always change your identity if you really want to. Just because you're gay doesn't mean that has to be your identity. You might primarily see yourself as a citizen of your country or what your job defines you as or your personality or religion or just simply yourself if you don't want to be part of a bigger group.
Society does not have to just let the worst people in it be as they are. Neither do platforms. Bullying and hateful abuse hurt the platform - users don't want to be subjected to it, advertisers don't want their name next to it. Blocking and other tools to reduce this vile garbage are positive things.
Communities have given death threats to college students who made bad plays in sports games. https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/ncaa-1-3-star-athletes-receive...
There's a long-established pattern linking bullying and suicide, and huge amounts of tougher-to-quantify lesser damage done. Giving people mechanisms to slow and reduce bullying makes perfect sense.
Not saying the people making death threats are innocent and of course the law should try to stop them, but often it's not powerful enough so people who don't want that unfortunately have to keep quiet or be anonymous when they want to step on the toes of death-threat-happy communities.
Again, it's not just bullying. Real world example:
* The quarterback (QB) for Miskatonic University throws an interception on the last play of the game.
* Internet members (trolls) find their Twitter handle. Trolls harass QB, insult QB, and make QB's lives miserable. They publish QB's handle on their forums where other trolls also harass QB.
* QB blocks the trolls
Which scenario is better for QB, non-trolling users, advertisers, and the world?
1. The trolls still see can follow QB and respond to everything they do. Maybe QB can't see their messages, but the trolls are free to harass QB's followers, the staff of any location QB posts to being at, and so on. They continue harassing over and over. For years and years they can see QB's posts and continue engaging.
2. The trolls cannot see QB's posts, follower lists, or engage with them. A few particularly dedicated trolls may use alt accounts but it's a tiny percentage of the original trolling and much easier to manage. They eventually get distracted with some other player who made a newer mistake and leave QB alone.
I've heard celebrities say they don't read what anyone says about them on social media. That sounds like a good idea because there's always going to be haters to any popular public figure. Just ignore them and you're fine.
3rd parties being affected? Well stop associating with the widely-hated public figre if you can't handle the heat of celebrities.
Blocking mainly prevents regular normal users from seeing tweets. Best example is Lex Fridman who's blocked a million people for no apparent reason. Say something he doesn't like: You're blocked. Never even interacted with him but commented on a topic he doesn't approve of: Blocked. You under-cook fish: Believe it or not, he blocks you.
Most X users will just post a screenshot of the tweet, breaking accessibility in the process and disassociating the original author from the thread against their will.
This isn't always a good thing, as it leads to people being surprised by crowds of strangers suddenly screaming at them and not being able to see the source of their anger.
Some people do this as a "preventative measure", so that their post still makes sense when the original tweet is deleted.
Automated blocking absolutely solved most of the problem. In the late 2010s it was common for political accounts to use scripts that went through follower graphs for their worst repliers and blocked everyone, or went through the list of people liking a certain tweet and blocked all those accounts.
They were quite fond of that approach and were happy with the outcome pre-Elon. Even if someone in the "bad group" screenshotted a tweet from their target to make fun of it, the target didn't really get bothered by it because they walled themselves well enough. The screenshotter is incentivized to not interact with their target so they don't get blocked again, and no one excited by all the dunking cared enough to go harass the target anyway.
Now as someone who found themselves in a few blockchains during peak Bernie-mania, I like the proposed change. I've been blocked by several popular accounts because of who I followed, and I will enjoy being able to reliably read someone's content even if I'm not allowed to interact.
But that means the blocking worked. Another person will now have to go to the extra effort of either finding that tweet or going directly to the profile to interact with them. And those extra steps were exactly the feature the blocking provided. It changes "click reply, type 'kill yourself you <slur> <slur>'" into "login into non-blocked account, retype part of the text from the screenshot, search, find the matching tweet, reply, type". And that's a lot of work for a quick response.
Sure, it won't stop everyone. It reduces the effects though.
I'm surprised that the platform does not do ORC on text images by default.
And it wouldn't be hard to check if a particular image looks like a tweet and, if it does, find out the exact match.
I saw someone once post about their outrage over the practice of criticizing someone on Twitter without tagging the person you're criticizing in your tweet. ("Subtweeting.") Apparently the thinking goes that if anyone anywhere says something about you, you have the right to be notified.
I think tagging someone when you're accusing them of wrongdoing is the fair thing to do, considering how quickly that sort of thing can whip others into a frenzy. I see a lot of this sort of thing, where someone will accuse someone of heinous things like pedophilia from behind a block, and by the time the person being accused understands what's going on, they're being hounded by people who get off to drama about why they haven't denied the accusations yet.
On the other hand, tagging when simply criticizing someone often feels like attention-seeking to me. I see this a lot with space stuff, where someone will offer (often completely ignorant) criticism, while pinging Musk, Bezos and/or other figures in the space discussion community.
"You can talk to me, but it's unethical to talk about me."
Either your posts are public or they're not. There's a pretty clear distinction between the two, and anyone who thinks otherwise is sorely mistaken. The risk of people re-posting your content is a natural consequence of your aspirations to be popular on social media, and we shouldn't be giving people a false sense of security.
It might have not been ideologically consistent but it was effective.
No and nobody claimed it does. Making it just a bit harder and making the other party jump through an extra hoop reduces it though. The extra friction has been implemented on many platforms and it works. Instagram adds friction in a different way, but also claims it has a positive result: https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/key-be...
You can also see people migrating to other platforms who raise the lack of search / being easily found as a feature. It's not black and white and it's not public or not. There's a whole range of how accessible your content is to parties who will attack you.
You don't want to interact with me? Fine. Then why should I still see your posts? Yes, some crazy people will go to lengths to see it anyway, but most don't and will take the hint, shrug, and go away.
Feel free to steel man and tell me why you think it's useful. I think the friction it causes is cancelled out by the effect of annoying the mostly well-meaning portion of the people who are blocked while not annoying the truly toxic users who will quickly and easily bypass it at all.
I don't tend to participate in twitter fights. A type of twitter fight that comes to mind is people who work at FAANGs being annoyed that people are criticizing their employer's agenda. I saw this against Google with AMP and with Chrome hiding the path from the address bar in a dev channel release. That isn't really coming out of a place of toxicity. The complainer doesn't really deserve to be blocked, but the FAANG employee has a right to keep their mentions and reply threads clean. For minor scuffles like these, a lighter form of blocking is nice.
If you're blocked by prolific reply guys in your circle, you regularly have to not just scroll past their censored replies at the top of the reply section, but you see other people's replies to them which compels you to switch accounts to see what dumb thing they said this time. And now you can simply reply to them on your other account.
Twitter ossified their feature set a long time ago, which is not surprising because "stick with what made us big" is a reasonable course of action. In that sense great diversity and more experimentation in different approached with Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon is generally a good thing (even though I don't really use any of them, mostly out of laziness).
> No it doesn't.
There's really no use in continuing this discussion when one party is unable/unwilling to use precise language to discuss marginal effects. Obviously I presume what you mean is that the marginal effect is too small to be relevant, but discussions with people who round that off to "No it doesn't" rarely go anywhere productive.
For example, if all they know is the app, they may even think you NEED the app to see posts, or that you CAN'T create multiple accounts on the same app because they signed up with their phone number instead of e-mail.
Just like the smallest UI hurdle blocks onboarding users, the smallest UI hurdle also stop malicious behavior.
Not every malicious user is the hacker type. Sometimes it's just someone stalking their ex-partner. The malicious user could be an elder, could be a teenager, they could be from the U.S. but they could also be from Africa.
When you consider non-English speaking countries, expertise drops tremendously because any high level information is kept behind a language barrier.
Something that less aggravates people prone to bad behavior is the right move.
Same. I’ve accidentally made it 18 years without creating a Twitter account and there’s no content compelling enough for me to want to break my streak.
You can view a single tweet, but it won't display a thread for you unless you log in.
I clicked a link to NYPDs twitter and didn’t have to AuthN. Makes sense too; every org who wanted their content to be fully available to anyone would leave if twitter mandated login
(Although they still use Facebook)
Every single public account I've visited still has the feed in non-chronological order which instantly makes it useless to me. I don't care about a post from my city government in 2019.
But everybody still calls them "tweets" because it was an amazing bit of branding.
Someone needs to analyze this as game theory and write a paper on it. It is so poorly thought out and implemented that it would be funny if reddit didn't have a monopoly on long form written discussions on a lot of topics.
BTW, you can block users that have blocked you: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/sp0zdb/how_do_i_block...
And you wouldn't notice if anyone blocked you -- that's the whole point -- but entire posts and threads could be right under your nose and hidden.
Regardless of whether it affects you or not -- it is ill conceived, does not accomplish its stated goal, and is easily abused by bad actors and thus should be heavily revised or removed.
https://help.x.com/en/safety-and-security/public-and-protect...
https://help.x.com/en/safety-and-security/how-to-make-x-priv...
(Note that, because it's always possible to create new Twitter accounts, a whitelist is the only way to prevent someone from seeing your posts.)
As per the article (emphasis mine):
> While a source at X told The Verge that the platform is making this change because people can already view posts from users who’ve blocked them when using another account or when logged out, several of us at The Verge (myself included) have noticed that X actually prevents you from viewing someone’s profile if you’re logged out.
For my part, I can see some accounts but not others, though the “rule” is not clear. Even then, on the accounts I can see they only show a dumb disjointed list of tweets ordered by popularity regardless of post date.
Sounds like they're catering to the kinds of people who would normally have gotten around blocks by using private browsing.
Hold up, how does the blocked person even know about the tweet? That should be an indication that we're not talking about reality any more.
The purpose of the block button, which Elon still doesn't understand, is to remove your posts from that person's algorithmic feed. Make it so that they don't get exposed to or notifications about your content, at least without creating a new account (not much you can do about that).
Why does that matter? Harassment. There are tons of people on Twitter, with large followings, that dunk-tweet or otherwise harass people, and in doing so end up triggering a brigade. If you've ever had the misfortune of being the victim of one of these negative engagements, you would understand how much this sucks. It destroys usability of the app as you have to wade through literally hundreds of cheap variation of middle school insults just to find any legitimate content.
You can't block the hordes of marauding masses, but if you block the key instigators, the problem goes away. They can't interact with you or subtweet you, yes, but they ALSO aren't notified of the things you say, and therefore aren't likely to spread links to your content in private group chats where this trolling behavior is organized.
You can autistically insist that akshully the block feature doesn't prevent someone from jumping through some hoops to view your tweets, but that's missing the point. It still solves a real world problem in its current form.
That would be weird, the block is there so you don't see their posts & replies, but your block shouldn't affect what they can do. Maybe other people want to see their replies, why should a third party block them from this?
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, but not to control their public speech.
Once again, Elon utterly fails to understand the service he bought.
You also can't view replies or context for individual tweets, which makes seeing one tweet next to useless.
Even if it doesn't fully block, it makes stalking etc. more annoying.
Twitter may be doing something like that already, where some old links will result in "Hmm...this page doesn't exist. Try searching for something else.", even though the same link is visible via a Nitter proxy.
Or , they're trying to drive aways users.
Or both.
Elon has lost the thread.
Under Elon imo X has gotten a lot better, I see more content that relates to me and has since found myself using X more than all the other social media platforms combined.
Blocking content makes no sense on a platform like X, if you block me and I still want to read your posts all I have to do is to make another account and read them. This just gets rid of the friction. If I block someone I just don't want to interact with them, I still want them to see me and my friends have fun.
You do know that you shouldn't be looking at stuff it's recommending to you, right? Think of something you'd like to know more about and then look it up yourself.
that's the issue. Look at clickthrough rates and see how much one extra click can cut down on engagement. You want to de-escalate something, or at least try to.
> If I block someone I just don't want to interact with them, I still want them to see me and my friends have fun.
I agree they should have added an ignore feature as well as block. Different approaches for each individual.
Or stuff you interacted with in sort-of click bait way. That's why I'm using the block functionality so much on X. A couple of blocks a day keeps the rusobot content way. If only I could get rid of of OF girls following me or violent content in the same way, that would be great.
About $42B.
I don't think X has gotten any better, if anything it is overrun by bots and crazy conspiracy theorists now. In addition, Elon has been engaging in soft-censoring people he doesn't like while amplifying those he likes.
Indeed. According to the media and on Reddit, since Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads have collectively gained 70 bazillion users on seventeen different occasions, and have caused Twitter to collapse and disappear eleven times.
If you don't want someone to point out your stupid takes don't make them in public.
It's usually the other way around for me. I'd rather not have every post about some game I like devolve into a culture war.
Then you should probably stop using X altogether.
I find that Twitter users somehow misunderstand this. Especially small ones that only interact with themselves, posting misinformation. See a lot of the Palestine Twitter. Then a bigger account comes and comments/corrects or spreads their OWN PUBLIC POST. Then it's an "attack". Its baffling.
Why not just "expectation that it's less convenient for other party to see your stuff"?
Are you just being ironic for the feels?
Was he complaining about bots before he signed? Genuinely can't remember.
I can't google it for you, so from my memory , he complained that he was tricked by Twitter because a large number of users are bots , and then he promised that he will fix this issue after he get's the control. Probably bots and trolls are good for business since other social media like reddit are also making super easy to create tons of bot/troll accounts and spam the network.
How making a noise about it after the price is agreed be “an attempt to get a discount”? If anything, it was an attempt to get out of the deal.
(And if I remember correctly, the argument failed because he had been complaining about bots prior to signing. Either way, has nothing to do with discounts.)
The bot stuff was pretty transparently not a good faith argument from Musk; the real issue likely being more that the markets had gone down since the offer and what was already an overpay on day 1 was now a big overpay. The same dynamic made Twitter determined to keep the original offer: shareholders had basically demanded to take the offer to begin with, and with the down market (not to mention Musk himself publicly running the company down during his efforts to escape the deal) it was just that much more of a better deal than they could otherwise hope to get.
He signed the world's most iron-clad corporate acquisition contract you could for a price far above market rate right before the tech crash, and waived every single right to due-diligence which normal investors include, specifically for things like "oh what if the financials/users aren't what they seem?" or "what if the stock price substantially changes".
It was an utterly ludicrous agreement to sign (though far eclipsed by the the number of financial institutions which agreed to put up the money for it and are basically never going to get it back - though a bunch of the managers and executives losing their bonuses for it is kind of funny).
Citations: "Elon Musk says Twitter deal 'cannot move forward' until he has clarity on fake account numbers" [1]
"Musk was seeking information on essentially all of Twitter's account reviews and actions. Judge McCormick dubbed that request "absurdly broad," noting Twitter has already agreed to produce a "tremendous amount information.""[2]
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/17/elo...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-scores-half-win-ab...
I guarantee this move is because too many people blocked Elon.
I primarily follow entrepreneurial & fitness accounts.
Honestly X, youtube and HN satisfy just about everything I need for user generated content.
That’s some of the most disingenuous shit I’ve seen in a while.
Maybe you don’t realise they are bots?
,,Show to group of people except X'' is manipulative behaviour (instead of kicking out the person from the group, or in this case not sharing publicly what's not public).
On instagram I have seen a lot of these things, for example posts, stories, archived stories all have different very strange behaviours that only people to take the time to understand (more manipulative people) use, which makes people more manipulative in itself.
Reddit implements blocking as bidirectional, and even tells you (using coded language such as "deleted" and "unavailable") that there is a post in the thread from a person who has blocked you, and includes a permalink to that post. The permalink can be loaded in private browsing mode, and you can see the post from the person who has blocked you. (Make sure you load the Reddit front page first, otherwise Reddit assumes you're an AI harvesting spider and auto-blocks you from the site)
I agree, this is how Discord does it INSIDE SERVERS. Not sure why you are downvoted but like on Reddit and HN people just downvote what they do not like.
So what harassment are you referring to?
Also, most of the time blocking is being done by people who spew hateful or misinforming content and then immediately go private the moment they get called out. This happens every day.
This is a good change
Why does it matter?
If I block people in a Discord server THEY can still see what I type. Why does it matter? I have really come to understand that some Twitter users see Twitter as their own private garden somehow and do not realize that anyone can see your posts... So somehow it becomes uncomfortable when they are reminded of this fact.
An example of blockers losing value: Tesla bears were chronic blockers, even passing around blocklists. Nowadays Tesla bears seem to have lost all relevance.
People get blocked for all kinds of reasons, most of them relatively innocent.
Now I love the fediverse. Local instances mean more local news/gossip, but at the same time I can follow global interests (just saw a post from Brian Krebs, for instance) just as easily. Hashtags let me follow my interests, and comments are more constructive and perceptive because there is no reward for provoking people. I don't doom-scroll any more and I don't have to filter out advertising - I'm much more efficiently informed.
He sees this as an antidote to cancel culture; he's allowing people to support things they agree with without society's repercussions.
He's been unblocking himself over the years, and this feels like the next logical step for him.
I think its simple... a lot of people have blocked Elon, so Elon thinks blocking is bad.
The guy has been forcing his accounts and shit takes onto everyone's timelines.
Accounts have mysteriously started following his account when they never manually did it.
Muting his account hasn't properly worked since he bought twitter.
It's literally what he's been doing it since day 1 of purchase.
Sorry if that sounds a bit rude, but I'm just baffled by people literally denying reality when it smacks them in the face repeatedly.
If you blocked Elon's account, you'll still see it on your timeline.
Not that many important people block Elon, but even if they did, Elon could just ask the team to adjust his client / account accordingly especially if it doesn't give him any special (non-public) rights
He’s missing the ability to think about his own self in context of others. So he thinks that if he’s blocked, that’s a real problem facing everyone, so it must be fixed in the name of free speech.
I do like tech platforms where the decisionmakers and stakeholders actually know and use the product. Elon candidly streaming Diablo, even for some long sessions, once a while on X is a great thing to see and I hope it is putting pressure on the team to improve streaming there even more, given the latency and layout are still a bit behind the bigger players on that even though improvements like the stream chat have been added.