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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Big tech companies especially Twitter and Google have zero longevity when it comes to new products. How about they add subscriptions to Fleets before giving up, I’ve enjoyed a few really great conversations there and it’s a decent product like much of Twitter it just needs some love in terms of features and how they work. For example why on Earth am I not allowed to read someone’s public tweets when blocked. Twitter is kind of the definition of getting lucky over being brilliant IMO, how it doesn’t have an edit function yet is beyond me.

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Are you really asking, why Twitter doesn’t allow to edit tweets after publishing them? I think this is a feature, it means you can’t change what you wrote. If this would be possible after you get responses, you could change the meaning of these responses.

If you use your imagination you can still edit tweets and also have them be immutable. Loads of systems have an edit history or alternatively just a means to delete and recreate a tweet in the first 5 minutes after publication. There are probably other even better ways to solve this.

Or you could clone HN with a single-threaded UI.

But you can anonymously edit your messages on HN?

Oh, you must be looking for a Wikipedia clone then.

Much shorter articles and only one editor…

If I block you, I want it to prevent you from reading my tweets. Obviously you can use a logged-out browser window, but that extra step is supposed to be annoying enough to prevent most non-psycho people from reading your stuff.

Why do you care if I read your stuff that’s public on the Internet, surely we should all be trying to understand each other’s point of view more not less?

To prevent context collapse. Some people are unable to understand what I say and take offence. That could be because of the way I'm saying it or because of them. Either way, I don't care. I would like to expend energy on my audience. Ideally, I can talk to my audience and to no one else.

Great, make your account private then… or do you want all the benefits of a completely public account without any of the costs? I’m not suggesting blocked people should be able to interact with your content, just that they can still read it. This applies especially to information being disseminated by government.

I mean, I could just as well say "Log out of your account then". That will negate the effect of the block.

Yes, it’s inconvenient though, I’m trying to be informed about what everyone thinks, even very thin skinned people who hit the block button at a tiny difference in opinion, some of their opinions are informative and helpful to me so yes as the information is in the public domain it should still be easy to access.

The difference here is that my change to blocking doesn’t affect the things you’ve said one bit, how will someone misunderstanding your tweets but not being able to interact affect you, you’ll never interact with them misunderstanding you! Why you want Twitter to lie to you about the availability of information you produce is not really for me. Maybe you should be clearer in your tweets if people outside of your audience are misunderstanding you?

My audience knows that when I tell it to kill all the Apaches, that it’s advice to kill each forked process of Apache2. The consuming madness that causes others who do not speak the language to conclude that I am calling for genocide is not something I choose to engage with.

I have a tool. It is effective. Cope with it or don’t. It’s not my problem. Having just realized this tool isn’t going away, I no longer feel the need to continue this conversation.

I find your arguments quite disingenuous to be honest. It’s a complete straw man example you’ve made up that doesn’t support your argument (nonsense about people being so stupid as to misunderstanding technical and genocidal tweets is absurd). If the information is public you can still be confusing no matter how many people you block. How will you know that people are confused by you if they can’t interact with you? You are right though, Twitter are not getting better at product any time soon.

twitter is way better than most social platforms in terms of being open and be able to view the content with out logging in. I think the main purpose of blocking is to prevent you from engaging with the said user / tweet. if you really don't want your tweets to be made public you can make the account private and only allow your followers

That’s exactly my point, I should still be able to hear what someone I disagree with says and even agree or understand their thinking on occasion. Blocking seems like an extremely blunt tool.

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