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Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

Why not have user curated and shareable blocklists? So if I never want to see anything from Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos and the like, I just subscribe to a blocklist that eliminates far right commentators. You could even create networks of trusted users where anyone they block, is blocked for everyone in the network. Or have shareable rulesets, like "block anyone who uses this word", or "block anyone who follows this account".

Of course you could create huge echo chambers that way, but that happens anyways when you curated your followers, so I don't see that as a huge issue. Just now in addition to deciding who you follow, you also decide who you block.

Twitter (or whatever platform) would still be responsible for eliminating bad actors (spammers, people posting illegal content) but other than that could just let users curate what they see on the platform.

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Why isn’t it sufficient to not follow Alex Jones? I’ve never seen a tweet by him. Twitter is one of the least pushy platforms in algorithmically pushing content. Just follow people you want to see content from, and unfollow if they tweet things you don’t want to see.

Do you use the official Twitter clients? Because they seem to push different, “popular” content pretty hard. Many people joked that ‘Super follow’ should have been replaced by ‘Super block’

No, it's not enough. Twitter constantly showes me nudes that are liked by some people I follow. I hate this feature.

They should be an option to limit your feed only to the people you follow, but it is unlikely we'll see it because it contradicts the platform aim to increase engagement, by hook or by crook.

Follow better people? (Or at least don't follow their "personal" accounts)

The people are ok. It just happened that within russian opposition female members have a weird tradition to do #nudesthursday

I am generally interested in what they write but on Thursdays they post nudes and like nudes of other females I don't follow, and Twitter shows me a lot of their likes. It annoys me to no end.

I think that feature exists unless I am imagining things? There should be a ... button on the top of the tweet and there should be something like "Not interested in this tweet" there. When you click it, I think it says "show fewer tweets by X" and there should also be an option to see fewer of the likes / retweets from a person.

But in reality, in twitter, like is a soft form of retweeting and users know it. So if someone you follow uses the "like / favorite" feature it also kind of means they want people to see it. For bookmarks, there is a different bookmark functionality. On twitter, like is a low weighted retweet that does not show up in the user's profile directly.

The feature exists, but it doesn't work. Repeatedly asking for "fewer likes by this person" doesn't visibly reduce the frequency of those likes being pushed onto you. The whole thing is a stupid misfeature: Likes are not retweets, so they shouldn't behave like them.

They behave like that and pretty much every user (past a couple months) knows that. When a person presses "like" they know that some of their followers will see that. It signals "this is interesting" publicly, what other purpose could it serve? People that follow you would like to see it, of course. If you don't like people's likes don't follow them.

That said, the feature has always worked for me - actually it works too well that I have to think before I use it. Because after setting it once, it seems like I never hear from that person again. So it feels like an unfollow for me. Maybe the functionality depends on how much you interact with the person on Twitter? I don't know. I don't interact with people much on twitter, so when I choose that option, I don't see any likes from that person ever again, and it feels like I see their tweets A LOT less often than desired.

> what other purpose could it serve?

1. Agreement with the tweet, directed at the author only.

2. A form of "bookmarking" tweets for later. It's no accident that for most of Twitter's life this wasn't called a "like" but a "favorite" (with a star instead of a heart symbol).

As for "some of their followers will see it" and "I don't know [how it works]": That is precisely the problem. Your timeline isn't determined by your choices and the choices of the people you follow. The "algorithmic" timeline also adds a lot of randomness and unwanted choices that you can't control.

I've been saying "Show this less often" / "Fewer likes by this person" / etc pretty much continuously on every element ever since that option appeared.

As far as I can tell, it has never had any effect whatsoever. I still see the components I dismiss, and I still see likes from the same people. Possibly less often... but it's hard to tell when it's every time I open the page.

At this point I click it mostly out of stubbornness and perverse curiosity, to see if the company is at all capable of changing this awful course.

> They should be an option to limit your feed only to the people you follow

You can functionally get the same thing by using the "list" feature instead of following people.

Or by using Tweetdeck.

Then use Tweetdeck, and leave the "activity" column closed. The only things in your "home" column are things tweeted or retweeted by people you follow, and you can exclude the retweets if you want. There's other filters too.

https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

There is an even better way. Never look at your timeline, so never see any pushed material at all: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

> Why not have user curated and shareable blocklists?

Not a fan of this.

I've found myself banned a couple times, only to find out I likely got caught up someones blocklist that put out a large blanket block on anyone friends with someone who followed someone else. Or some similar indirect nonsense.

The idea being you're isolating yourself from someone who's friends with an asshole, so you're less likely to encounter someone you don't like.

And if innocent people get caught up in the dragnet, then so be it.

I found this incredibly unfair, and not really smart, either -- not every "follow" is an endorsement. :P

Sure, but that is the users choice when they chose to use a particular list. I think it is better to give someone the option to choose which people or classes of people to block than decide for them. If someone thinks the risk of blocking someone they are interested in is outweighed by the cost of being exposed to people who's opinions they find damaging, that is their choice.

Personally I wouldn't really block anyone, but I think it is better to have the option that to not.

I find myself blocked from all kinds of accounts that I've never interacted with and as far as I can tell the primary reason is because I follow Sam Harris which is a ludicrous reason to block someone.

> Why not have user curated and shareable blocklists?

Because often the goal is to control what _others_ can see.

Whilst what you say isn't bereft of truth, your phrasing conjours up a shadowy cabal - which in turn makes me wonder if you're deep down one of several potential conspiracy rabbit holes yourself.

If you don't want to give this impression you would benefit from modifying your tone.

It was a simple statement of undisputed fact proclaimed by Twitter management and their peers.

This does happen on a small scale with third party apps, but it seems like doing it on a large scale would just shift the review problem to the curators of the blocklists. If I ran a "known doxxers" blocklist, I'd have to rely on the same kinds of scripts that got Twitter in trouble here.

Shared twitter blocklists are a thing through third-party apps. (Twitter did have basic CSV import/export for block lists too, but didn't further improve that feature and silently dropped it at some point)

I think this is a pretty good solution to the social media algorithmic problems. In a post-S230 world, it'd be pretty neat to see platforms implement decentralized moderation schemes.

In a post-S230 world there are no platforms.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

Thanks for linking me to an article that I've already read, but I made none of the statements written there, nor does that article state that "In a post-S230 world there are no platforms."

You could probably get some value from https://secateur.app/ but there are also various blocktogether the groups.

BlockTogether shut down in January, after Twitter disabled the APIs it used.

Well, arse.

I started to build this out, but the twitter api access grants are basically all or nothing and that dismayed me enough to give up

Twitter does allow sharable blocklists. I maintain and distribute a very popular one.

Why would big tech voluntarily surrender the unprecedented power to shape worldwide discourse?

"Power intoxicates men. It is never voluntarily surrendered. It must be taken from them." — James F. Byrnes

> "Power intoxicates men. It is never voluntarily surrendered. It must be taken from them." — James F. Byrnes

A great quote that could be understood as a proof that decentralization is a mirage. For decentralization to work it requires its participanta to voluntarily surrender their prerogative to accumulate a relative advantage through exceptional personal agency.

"Decentralization for thee and not for me."

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