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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

TFA mentions Twitter at the beginning, but doesn't follow up at all with how terrible their interface is and has been for targeted users. The "solutions" discussed in TFA require the coordinated voluntary actions of users and site administrators, and are therefore impractical. We need instant technical solutions. It should be possible to "un-@" any other user, with no questions asked. That is, after 'alice takes this step with respect to 'bob, no matter how many times 'bob includes the string "@alice" in his tweets, neither 'alice nor any of her followers would ever see those tweets or any other by 'bob. This would not be difficult, and would make Twitter much less threatening.

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> That is, after 'alice takes this step with respect to 'bob, no matter how many times 'bob includes the string "@alice" in his tweets, neither 'alice nor any of her followers would ever see those tweets or any other by 'bob. This would not be difficult, and would make Twitter much less threatening.

The problem with is then @alice controls whose tweets I can read if I want to follow her content. :/ Just because I want to hear what @alice has to say doesn't mean I want @alice to control whether I can talk to @bob.

I think solid ignoring features is really the limit to this approach due to that fact. [e.g. @alice ignores @bob, @bob never shows up in her feed no matter what]

OK, split it down the middle. If you're already a @bob follower when you start following @alice or when @alice un-@s @bob, whichever happens later, then @alice's action has no effect on you. Even if @bob has been hidden from you by @alice's action, it only affects internal-to-twitter links like retweets. If you have a link directly to @bob or his tweet from Google or from an email, you can follow it successfully, and that action removes the hiding effect for you. These extra complications would probably be good for @alice, since it would make it much less obvious to bullies that she had taken this action in the first place. (Yes, if @bob has observant friends, they'll notice eventually, but that's probably OK.)

I agree with you, the main point is that @alice doesn't have to smell @bob's shit anymore.

The point isn't to nail it down exactly right here and now. The point is that this is a discussion that should have taken place many times at Twitter, and we should see some concrete results by now, rather than fluffy PR-focused fake-internal memos to the effect of, "ok guys now we gotta try hard!"

> OK, split it down the middle. If you're already a @bob follower when you start following @alice or when @alice un-@s @bob, whichever happens later, then @alice's action has no effect on you. Even if @bob has been hidden from you by @alice's action, it only affects internal-to-twitter links like retweets. If you have a link directly to @bob or his tweet from Google or from an email, you can follow it successfully, and that action removes the hiding effect for you. These extra complications would probably be good for @alice, since it would make it much less obvious to bullies that she had taken this action in the first place. (Yes, if @bob has observant friends, they'll notice eventually, but that's probably OK.)

That could work well enough. :)

Yeah, my main concern was a power user who people wouldn't want to unfollow abusing the feature to silence critics.

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