Charlie Stross is a hard science fiction author, I believe his works (like Accelerado) have been quite influential and inspiring for many hn users. I believe it could be interesting to discuss his (pessimistic) take on this year.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-cra...
(The first chapter of Accelerando is about a two decades in the future 2018.)
On the other hand, when someone confidently opines about a lot of things and then rejects mild corrections (I literally just said something like "thing isn't part of B, it's owned by the same parent company"), you wonder what facts are feeding into those opinions.
Mr Stross seems not share that view. That's fine too.
Personally, strongly curating something like Twitter with all the tools they give you is pretty much the only way to keep somewhat high quality of conversation.
There are tools that are even more powerful than Twitters kinda lame (we’ll give you just enough control so you can’t reduce our engagement metrics” ones. A certain Mozilla founder who you can’t link to from here blogged about being dogpiled by the cryptobros, and mentioned https://megablock.xyz/ as a useful tool.
Way too many people think they have some right to the time of other people. They don’t. I can choose to never hear from you or anybody else at any time, there’s no legal or moral or ethical or even politeness problems with me doing that. The way you choose to use Twitter has zero impact on the way I choose to use Twitter, and if I want to be Blocky McBlockface for any reason at all, that’s just fine. You can go and r random stranger nit picky arguments with someone else. I wouldn’t put up with it in person, and I don’t have to put up with it online. And if you’re behaving in a way that even slightly annoys me, I will block not only you, but all the people who seem to be your friends or entourage. Sucks to be them if they actually wanted to talk with me, but you know what, I get to choose who I’m friends with, and if you hang out with people who are annoying to other people in public, you get tarred with the same brush. If your friend is a jerk in a bar, expect the bouncers to eject the whole group. Especially if it’s a certain SF SOMA nightclub…
https://twitter.com/mrfilmkritik/status/995446576536530944
> When someone disagrees with you online & demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a logically sound defense, u can save a lot of time by not doing that.
> Dude, I’ve known u for ten seconds & enjoyed none of them, I’m not taking homework assignments from you.
I can see hitting mute on accounts that make uninteresting comments, I'm not sure why you'd block someone that comments on ~1 tweet and isn't being persistent or otherwise antagonistic (I suppose it can be better curation to block).
https://twitter.com/maxerickson/status/685506107695972352
Anyone with that many followers is likely going to disengage with low-effort replies of that nature. It adds nothing of consequence to the lengthy post it is correcting.
And I learned something about his concern over accuracy. For instance, reddit hasn't quite lived in the shadow of Conde Nast in the meantime.
Muting fulfills all the goals those features are supposed to solve. Does blocking actually add anything sensible on top that I missed?
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/blog/hideki-kamiya-twitt...
That you'd be wound up about it five years later speaks volumes to how unhealthy the exchange between the two of you was.
I enjoyed reading his books as was certainly disappointed when like 2 years after my tweet I realized he had blocked me for it. I of course don't recall my state of mind when I sent the tweet, but I don't think I paid it much attention until years later when I couldn't see a tweet someone else was quoting and wondered why.
Your comment is way way too cancel culture for me. It hurts a lot having one bad exchange & having the door slammed in your face. Especially if it's some topic you feel strongly about, that you were trying to engage in.
You may be right that it's a better tact than engaging. It's a shit system though, deeply dehumanizing ways of treating each other.
The system was already deeply dehumanizing. "Block early, block often" is simply the inevitable and, frankly, only reasonable reaction to years of dealing with psychopaths, assholes and trolls on the internet.
I only wish Hacker News came with its own killfile. Mine would be hundred of entries long by now.
It's remarkable how callouslness & cruelty, how "fuck these people why should i give them any slack" options like you present run roughshod over civility. It's beyond words to me that such absolutely dejectable, hostile, negative, piss-off-and-die fucking-you attitude as you present is allowed to ride so high & mighty, that we believe that tension & disagreement, that some occasional fuckery means all those fuckers can all just fuck off and die. This is never going to beget a rising up, a better society. It will lead only to tension. And it's built in, at the deepest technical layers: an increased amplification of tension & pissery.
It is cancel culture. And it's amplified enormously by technical systems which don't have options like digital juries, don't have options for justice to be enacted, which afford only digital death to the other. Fuck this times a million. This is callous bullshit we exist in, and the enormousness of people being bad online isn't some weak-kneed shit ass justification for being bastards to one another like you claim: it's part of the fucking problem, and it is cancel culture. 100%. Saying that the fucker deserved it, that there's so many fuckers about, doesn't make it less so.
We do need defense. But fucking a!!! Not like this.
Stross blog has a user known as "the seagull" who creates new accounts frequently and spams vulgarity daily. She knows Stross personally and apparently he has decreed that she is allowed to do that. So a lot of his readers install plugins to suppress her comments... and have to regularly block new accounts that she creates (she has a very distinctive posting style)
Even if they were, they aren't inherently infinite or remorseless; they aren't permanent and irrevocable. (And, on some platforms, they aren't even total when in place.)
And, as most algorithms require a certain level of positive engagement to retain the baseline visibility even of something you aren't actively following, most platforms have at least one more, less extreme, negative signal—don’t positively engage with the content you don't like.
So, no, blocking accounts is not only acceptable, but the only line of defense for someone who still wishes to engage in honest discourse on those platforms.
This is not technology thoughtlessly trampling over human dignity; this is human nature expressing itself within a certain environment.
This is me realizing I cannot suckle off the financial teet of my parents and the state; and I actually must go out, make money, and keep my "work life" balance in-check -- because I'm a bag of meat with a reward-behavior system that needs certain things to remain functioning.
Online discussion is where I get my "fix." It's one source of stimulation that keeps me functioning at my best, and prevents me from degrading into a certain state of being that my biology considers "not good" -- one where I cannot meet the goals my entire mind and body have decided are "to be done."
I'm not some nobleman's son living in utter luxury and leisure. I do not have the resources available to live in an "ideal" world where I can spend my time worrying about the ultimate repercussions of blocking someone. I live in the "real" world, where I have to manage the repercussions of my own actions against my goals, and take into account how seriously engaging some nitwit on an online shit-flinging message board is going to affect my goals, and therefore my feelings and behaviors.
One could make an argument here that material inequality (and its great disparity between the two ends) has lead us to such a state of affairs; and that man's greatest faults are caused by his greatest sufferings: a system that breaks him down, and grinds away at this soul, preventing him from living a life predicated on ideals, and some greater cultural values.
But to disparage the tools which man made to try and adapt to the circumstances of his environment is silly.
I could choose to become a hermit, and live a life of anarchist pacifism, in order to live an exemplified life of idealism; but I don't want to.
Like me putting a Gmail rule in place to move messages from a specific source, say a specific mailing list thread that I'm not interested in out of my inbox.
Is this considered taboo on Twitter?
Block prevents the blocked user from seeing your tweets from logged in contexts and ability to reply to any of your tweets and so on. That it sort of curates a feed by limiting replies can go in both directions of course.
Is it easier to block or to mute? Which one is the de facto default in the UI?
It seems most people who use twitter don't understand this though.
If you mute him, you'll still have him and his hundreds of friends shitting in your feed.
If you block him, he won't see your tweets, and you've raised the effort he has to put in if he wants to shit in your feed.
Some people will put that effort in, others won't.
It’s basically twitter’s fault/design choice that choosing not to see someone’s replies to you also blocks them from seeing anything you post [0] (of course, cleverly circumvented by simply logging out)
> Blocking helps people in restricting specific accounts from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following them.
There were some court cases [1] to this effect since politicians would block annoying trolls/constituents, but this apparently violates the blocked users’ first amendment rights to access the public information. I don’t know, never made much sense to me, point is, blocking someone is, I wouldn’t say taboo as it’s quite normal, but it’s also very annoying to be blocked.
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/someone-blocked-me...
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/can-government-officia...
I block them then even if people I follow retweet I never see them.
For me, it makes twitter infinitely more pleasant.
(This includes compliments. They're bad for you.)