About Safety Mode and autoblock by Twitter | Hacker News Reader

About Safety Mode and autoblock by Twitter

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22 pointsCyberRabbi27 comments

I've gotten into the habit of posting my opinions on my own site because it simply makes them a bit more concrete and enduring.

I am so tired of wasting time in posting to apps/sites like Twitter and Reddit, they really have no interest in fostering a community. Everything is intentionally on rails that we cannot operate within. The Social Media aspect only serves to cover up the real focus.

It's good to finally begin to see that people are acknowledging the deceptively engineered flaws in our current tech world.

Here's my personal opinion about this:

http://circuitbored.com/communicate/viewtopic.php?p=218

My Twitter account is likely to be "autobanned" as a result of posting it, but I pretty much resigned from it long ago anyway. :P

Lookup "mastodon". It's decentralized meaning there are multiple instances (copies) of it run by different people each with their own code of conduct & rules regarding what kind of content is allowed. You can find one you like, or host your own. by default each instance can see the others unless they're specifically blocked, & you can follow people from other instances & see their posts or "toots" (yes that's really what they're called.)

A 'downvote' button appeared for replies on my Twitter timeline today. I wonder if that's feeding data into this feature.

Reminds me of the times I came across an account I had never interacted with having already blocked me

Not sure if it still exists but there was a tool which let you mass block accounts. I've got no idea what you needed to do to end up on one of the lists that shipped with it - but it seemed rather sketchy. I'm also not sure what would motivate someone to spend time on such a thing; Twitter is already enough of an echo chamber.

One use case is mass blocking anyone who likes a post or follows someone you find contrary to your views.

Well, twitter (very fucking annoyingly) shows your tweets to people who don't follow you.

So you don't have to interact with people in any way to annoy them.

The simple solution to that is to turn on protected tweets.

If you have a verified "blue tick" account, you could lose your blue tick if you do that.

Will that stop me from seeing tweets from people I don't follow?

Sadly not

You don't need to interact with someone to get blocked, for instance, if I read discussion and saw people with facemasks, syringes, Ukrainian flag or emoji for other current trending thing I blocked these people, so I won't waste my time with reading their opinions in future and clean my experience at least from those obviously misguided people.

But that was before I left Twitter wasting my time, now I just passively read few accounts through Nitter, rarely opening Tweet discussion and not interacting in any way anymore. I plan soon to do same thing with Reddit, both of these are in the end just waste of time.

Just like how YouTube is using bots for auto-banning and demonetizing users. Now Twitter will have a similar process for users.

Like I said, These companies will never change and it is only going to get worse.

Obviously those complaining about the feature have never been subject to massive spam or abusive behaviour (which only takes a bit of digging to find out multiple cases)

It's fine if you don't see the point but the attitude "works for me so it doesn't need "fixing" is being naive of other people's needs

No precise definition of what constitutes repetitive, spammy or abusive replies. They even say "indiscriminate" following & unrelated hashtags can get the user autoblocked, which sounds like overreach. Considering some replies far exceed the silly Twitter character limit necessitating multiple replies, will those be struck down by autoblock as "repetitive"?

Twitter seems to be slowly moving in the direction of FB, which is already a moribund graveyard. Shooting themselves in the foot by diluting their key strengths? Seems sensible.

Experiment in production, I like the sound of it

Awesome, now I don't have to make my bubble myself, I can just have Twitter block everyone that may have a different opinion on a matter outright.

I think you underestimate how dependent some Twitter users are on recursive blocking to avoid interacting with people who have nothing better to do than brigade them on behalf of their favorite parasocial celebrity relationship.

Like you seem to imagine that Twitter is this enlightened Socratic circle and how dare you censor opinions in the marketplace of ideas when it's really just no life edgelords who get off on saying hurtful things to minorities and then being like "u mad pepolaugh?"

Encouraging brigading by angry mobs is something that Big Tech deliberately design into their platforms. It helps boost their "engagement" stats, so they sell lots of ads by doing it. The marginalized minorities who are put off from e.g. Twitter due to all the angry hate that results from this are too few and far between to matter, they simply don't enter into the Big Tech AI-bots' unforgiving calculus of what's "optimal" for the site.

This reminds me of why I closed my Twitter. The final straw was I was tweeting back and forth with someone directly, and discovered it was not giving me notifications of their replies. If I would go open my last tweet, their reply would be hidden under some kind of “more tweets…” interface. I realized it was automatically but lightly suppressing the other party’s tweets to me.

I am talking to someone directly, it’s a mild conversation and a computer is jumping in the way like a secret service agent in front of the President.

Can I refuse the computer’s “help” in deciding who is allowed to address me? No? Ok — it’s broken.

After a year of regular use I deleted my account at once.

If I feel like doom scrolling now, I use Instagram. There is no rage on Instagram. It shows me chicks, rockets and vintage computers.

That was also my experience with instagram, until "people you might know" showed me some people i interacted IRL, but wished to keep my online life separate from.

Taking no prisoners, i nuked my instagram account. The phone has permanent house arrest now, no SIM card, only wifi.

This seems like a really stupid idea, reminds me a little bit of the Google auto-account-closing thing where no-one knows the real logic or algorithm behind it. And that doesn't work great at all either, as one can see by the countless HN threads of people getting their whole businesses destroyed due to that. Is one even going to get notified when someone gets auto-blocked by Twitter for them?

"detects and blocks potentially harmful language or repetitive, unwelcome interactions"

I couldn't see anything about an opt-in or opt-out for it. When they call it 'safety-mode' are they saying its something you enable yourself?

> unwelcome interactions

I guess they would block themselves when I get notified with tweets of people I don't follow.

This is an official features that's supposed to be easier to use than block chain extensions.

But the whole point of block chain is that it's completely decentralized. It will probably work a lot better than this centrally managed feature.

Honest question: Is this a bot reply? Because the previous answer was about the browser extension "Twitter Block Chain" which has nothing to do with blockchain technology.

I've been wondering for a while how come that so many online conversations derail to shilling cryptocurrencies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com