Block a tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it

The little heart button isn’t endorsement though. Lots of people use it as a bookmarking tool, or as a stochastic retweet button.

It's not petty, it's just controlling your inputs.

I think blocking anyone who liked it also may be a bit harsh. Maybe "mute" them for a few days instead and if they're repeat bad actors then block.

This may seem a bit crass, but I mean it honestly. Why not just leave twitter?

I assure you, you will quickly realise you miss nothing.

Unfortunately, no. Not yet.

But this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??

And then I’d love a game-of-life style visual simulation of the effect of both kinds of blocks.

Will the Twitterverse split in two? Into n?

Will everyone end up in their own Twitterverse of 1?

Will Twitter implode with blocking taking all the resources away from tweeting?

I know this is a (sort of) joke but does any know if it is technically possible?

next step: the metametablock, a tool that blocks all the people who block the people who use this tool.

I've been actively removing connections who comment or like posts that add no value to me. But LinkedIn is rapidly going downhill - some days my feed is just full of rubbish.

I honestly don’t know that many people that still use LinkedIn. I have an account, and most people I know have an account, but I’m not aware of any of them actively using it.

Seems like it’s mostly there for when you need to reach out to folks if you’re looking for a job.

I actually stopped logging in and sending/accepting connections not long after I started my current job (8 years ago).

I have already given up on LinkedIn as a social network. My profile only exists as a public resume for recruiters and peers to see, I never interact with anything on the site except to update my profile and check my privacy settings.

It took a while, but unfollowing anyone who produced low quality content did eventually result in an interesting LinkedIn feed. I wish I had started doing it sooner.

The ML community has been so focused on recommender systems, maybe what we need is un-recommender systems.

(I'm joking, it obviously has very similar perverse results)

Same here. Besides author wise block I desperately need topic wise block. For instance this Will Smith slapgate has totally screwed up my carefully curated timeline. My only option is to take a two week Twitter sabbatical and hope it dies down.

After reading this comment, now I wish there was a way to create something analogous to Pandora or Spotify channels for Twitter. If you want to view news on ML research, change to your ML channel where you've followed relevant researchers and used this blocking tool for all else. Want to follow certain artists, change to your art station. Same for politics, sports, animals, etc.

I'm sure the way to do this for someone who wanted to is just to have multiple profiles but it'd be cool to have Twitter with a Spotify-like interface to use the site through different contexts with a single click.

I often wonder how valuable a public block list might be and even if more valuable than a follower/following list. In this case as in many other cases there is probably more insight to be gained in silent evidence than in positive evidence.

Very similar to upvoting on reddit.

Like what? It's become a semi-public endorsement in some ways, at this point -- Twitter frequently recommends tweets in the feed because someone you follow liked it.

If you use Twitter, you probably know that. So, liking a tweet is not very similar to up-or down-voting on Reddit or HN, which is private.

I’ve seen people on Twitter brag about having 6 figures blocked. So it at least works for that many. I know Marc Andreessen notoriously has a lot of people blocked. I wonder if it’s in the millions.

As a programmer I’d be more worried about the lookup cost. There are efficient ways to lookup a name in a list and very inefficient ways that would be fine for small lists, but struggle with large lists.

Compressed bitmap indexes are the way to do this in theory. Very efficient storage.

This made me curious and I wondered how it might work...

The simplest approach would be to start from user id 1 and increment up blocking each one but then you'd block millions of inactive, dead, or suspended accounts which would probably get you suspended.

A better approach may be to choose a "recent" tweet id, block the author, count up from there, checking if each author is blocked and blocking if they're not. The best part is that you don't even need to know the author when you make a request. For example, tweet id 1508540042817376256 is Elon's and it resolves to him whether you use https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1508540042817376256 or https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1508540042817376256

This is no longer blocking "every single Twitter account" but blocking "every single active Twitter account" but may still be able to trigger whatever limits.

The act of filtering still exposes you a little. Using tech to wholesale blackhole "wrongthink" is probably one of the worst aspects of social media. Frankly I think terms like "bubble" dramatically trivialize just how dangerous this kind of myopia is.

Nah. The SnR of Twitter is absolutely abysmal. The only way you can possibly use it effectively is to accept that there will be false positives caused by your filtering heuristics.

Yeah, mass blocking people only creates more isolated filter bubbles for everyone involved. Seems like a great way to create an echo chamber though.

Edit: wait, why the downvotes?

Yeah, can we get the corollary that follows the people who disagree with the blocked parties but that has the same political alignment as the blocked party?

That would be amazing if it was true.

How great would it be to separate off the mediocrity who think every conversation has to be about their amazing take on CO2 and their envro cult links on Wikipedia to Jevons paradox and the precautionary principle.

Why would I want their take on the latest version of PHP? It'd be great to be in a chamber of accelerated ideas where they stick. Nothing echoes on HN for instance.

It's an interesting experiment, if people used it.

I think the unforgiveness is the problem. People should be able to make some mistakes. This might output middle ground ideas or might create a 'like'-less subculture.

I'm certain I'll be fine, and survive without flat Earthers, 5G-causes-COVID, and similar ilk. That's a critical lack of, ironically, critical thinking skills in windmill-type people that this Don Quixote instance considers not worth time nor nerves fighting with nor for.

I don't think getting rid of the Russian bot accounts will meaningfully degrade the discourse on Twitter.

This isn't a bad thing if you're use of Twitter is not to get life critical news and political debates.

I don't think getting isolated from Rabbit breeders to dwelve in a lazy cat pictures bubble is something to lament about.

Its definitely interesting to consider something like that. Stats as to why might be cool, but odds are nothing is going to change my mind. I am actually more curious about how many users on my list end up getting banned for being bots eventually.

There used to be a tool I think called something like block with me, where you could follow other users block lists. Although I can't seem to find it any more. Options like that would certainly be interesting. But Twitter isn't incentivized to do something like that.

That must be the Spin̈al Tap version.

For others, nine was enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations

It's either that or a browser extension which is even more dangerous.

I agree.

A while ago a deleted an old profile I had that followed a number of political and/or hot-take types, which were addictive but never left me feeling happy. With my new account, I follow only makers, artists, engineers and software people.

I don't mind if those people very occasionally post something political, but if they do it too often I unfollow. Nothing personal, I just want my Twitter experience to be a happy and inspiring place.

Now, what if one of those people liked some post that I don't think people Ought to like? Should I ban them by association, even though I previously enjoyed their creative content?

(I guess this is moot -- a person who follows based on their interests rather than their political echo-chamber wouldn't use this tool.)

Despite having used the megablock tool in the past when I was on twitter (no longer active on there), I completely agree with your idea of social gardens. It's a large part of why I moved from there and tumblr to dreamwidth which has attracted a significantly more laid back and nuanced collection of people than the other two platforms. It's nice because you can subscribe to people's journals who have a very different collection of hobbies, and yet it doesn't feel forced for engagement or anything - it's their whimsies and thoughts, hollistically, and under various privacy filters if it's a delicate topic.

The main reason I used megablock on twitter was to reduce harassment from younger folks who send death threats for the sole perceived crime of creating NSFW art. I wish I were joking. Didn't follow anybody, it was already too toxic with those messages alone ... and why post if you can't create?

Isn’t this just Twitter topics?

> What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens"

You can already make Twitter work this way: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/

I mostly see relevant information and never anything promoted by Twitter, because I never look at my timeline.

All the garden-tenders are happily reading their RSS feed-readers in peace.

> What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens" on platforms like Twitter, platforms that allowed us to better cultivate the topics we care about while allowing us to keep out some stray topic from someone who we otherwise follow because of something entirely different.

isn't this essentially what mastodon is?

> Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow.

Exactly this. If you put some effort into following and unfollowing people regularly and you're the type of person who can resist engaging with inflammatory content, Twitter can actually be quite nice.

But for the people who just can't scroll past ragebait or inflammatory Tweets, Twitter is not a good place to be. People who can't exercise self-restraint or shrug things off seem to get pulled into angry, combative bubbles. It's basically the old mailing list flamewars but with shorter content and faster pace. These people are better off staying clear of Twitter entirely.

Sounds like you're describing federated microblogging. There's mastodon or pleroma that you could check out.

My biggest issue with Twitter these days is that my curated social garden keeps being invaded by engagement farmers who use the thread feature to post obnoxious listicles. I’m constantly being recommended tweets like these in my feed:

“I hunted, killed, and ate a wild baboon (brains and all)…Here are the 13 things I learned about human health along the way.”

“I read all 40,000 words from Jeff Bezos' Amazon shareholder letters. Here are 9 lessons worth your time:”

“We keep seeing the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. Time for a thread”

They remind me of Buzzfeed articles back in the early 2010s and there’s no way to turn it off besides muting the word thread and its emoji.

These gardens sound like federated social networks, like mastodon or pleroma hosts in the Fediverse.

I think that would be conflating Twitter with a different type of social tool. Because Twitter has such a critical mass of users it's not surprising that they're hitting some fundamental issues with internet communities, and users want to solve them on twitter instead of using a tool or platform better suited to the task of having a tightnit community or a space for discrete topic matters.

> There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers

I think it's chasing a red herring to think we can harmonize such broad points of view in the same room, so treating Twitter like a discussion platform while also trying to think of it as a broadcasted social network, you just get a lot of yelling and extremely shallow discussions. If you want in depth discussions, more than a few people is usually too many, let alone tens to hundreds to thousands. I've seen some entirely novel conversations come out of twitter, but I've seen far, far, far more shallow bullshit. It's the wrong tool.

> Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.

I think you're very right here, people are afraid of not being part of the bigger conversation, and so they hesitate to find places to start their more discrete conversations elsewhere. I think that's made people forget how to have in depth discussions online, instead most topics circle around the same more broadcasted points as to not stray too far from the consensus, and accidentally disagree with their peers on the finer details.

social gardens, like what google+ could have been.

but greed and internal team politics led to the demise of the project. and this is an outsider's remark by the way. greed because google+ was chasing after an ever increasing monthly active users. internal team politics because of spamming. it made no sense, to me at least, that the same company that gave us gmail could not deal with spamming on google+. spamming has also become rampant on youtube as well.

so yeah, google has been there and abandoned the idea.

What does this even mean? Are you responding to the link?

I agree, but this isn't exactly a novel concept. Mass block lists have received media coverage in the past: https://slate.com/technology/2015/08/twitter-blocklists-they...

I want my personal account to be an "echo chamber" (or rather, devoid of the culture war I have been conscribed to the front of), simply because I don't go on Twitter to argue.

Being trans sometimes also turns these tools into safety mechanisms to combat harassment.

The other day, someone told me that believing in the Holodomor made me a Holocaust denier, and ten people favorited it.

If I had had this tool, I would have used it.

Twitter is entertaining but can be noxious.

I do like that idea. Less false positives on the real people, and more likely to find those bot armies.

Blocking people is a great way to avoid conflict. It's much better than the platform kicking people off.

eh twitter is fine if you're careful about who you follow

I don't see how it could.

If you use this in a community, on a post that lots of people liked, you've essentially booted yourself.

If enough people boot themselves from a community that it becomes too small to be viable... I dunno, maybe the world is better off without that community.

Kill drones? Social credit scores? Re-education island?

What are you crazy?

The status quo works fine. People you don't like (and, bonus, the ones you do, too) stay indoors addicted to bad dopamine cycles. You don't sell footage of their incarceration to netflix - their incarceration is _watching_ netflix. It's also their re-education. It's robotic enough, it (eventually) kills them off, it's already here, and it's already profitable. You don't have to bother processing their next of kin's data either, because by and large they won't be having any, sitting alone, at home, for all their free time. For the foreseeable future, efforts should be focused on improving the efficiency of systems that already exist, not building solutions in search of a problem.

Sakes alive, you people are clueless. Leave depop to the professionals.

Except it's only for you.

If someone is harassing you on Twitter, muting them doesn't stop them from interacting with your tweets. You don't see it anymore, but people looking at your tweets still do, so now people see things attached to your tweets you have no idea about.

Some also argue that its better someone is explicitly told "you can't interact with this person" vs them trying and it getting hidden silently and them having no idea they can't reach you that way, and thus suggest blocking over mute also for people who didn't attack you. (A "don't show this person unless they directly talk to me" would be nice to have instead)

In addition to detaro's comment, it also stops them from retweeting you from their high-profile account in order to cause a "pileon" of abusive messages to you.

Of course people routinely work around blocks, mutes, and account suspensions by posting screenshots of tweets, but there the interactions are de-automated - you can't reply to the screenshot, you'd have to dig up the original tweet author.

It’s a good point. That anyone intentionally moving to block all dissenting voices always considers the other people to be the radical ones.

You'll always get voices from outside the bubble... even if they come in the form of people in your bubble dunking on the dumbest takes from outside it.

There are - muted words is a function in settings.

Twitter does in fact have that. Settings -> Privacy and Safety -> Mute and Block -> Muted words

I don't see an issue with it, it's a decent tool for curating who you see and interact with on the already-toxic platform.

Twitter has its purpose, deep deep below the miles of garbage.

You can't think of a single good use case for a tool like this? Consider receiving a bunch of hate-tweets based on some physical aspect of your appearance.

It's a natural tool in a digital world. IRL you can literally walk away from a conversation to express your disgust and disinterest in argument in a low-effort manner. On Twitter you can't make the same gesture, so an analogous low-effort measure is to stop listening. It would not be nice to block people like that IRL, but it's a different thing on the internet where millions of people and their cats can easily waste your time.

Twitter doesn't have good platform-wide moderation. By default, you get all the notifications about people talking to you in one place. You can't see comments from friends or business contacts without wading through the strangers demanding your attention and death threats too.

There's a number of people who pretty much have to use Twitter for their job. Writers, pundits, journalists, etc.

You're implying Twitter is worth using at *this* point. Removing the irredeemable 20% from our collective feeds might actually make a Twitter a more positive place and worth using again.

Silicon Valley elite VCs (like Mike Solana - the guy who requested this feature) are terminally online. They have opulent wealth, but spend their day glued to a phone. I suppose that’s a sign of a true addiction. When you could be doing almost anything else, and yet you spend time on an app that embodies pure hell.

There's a lot of creatives that need twitter in order to make their second income viable (promotion for their patreon/etsy/gumroad stores, etc).

... and there's a lot of those artists who get sent death threats for the sheer crime of drawing NSFW art or even milder LGBT+ works.

I used to be on that track of indie artist promotion but swore off twitter after repeatedly seeing that level of harassment. Why post? While I was on there, this was an enormously helpful tool that at least cut down on the level of toxic messages seen.

turn back on the computer and play elden ring. touch grace

Do you feel similarly about spam filters?

I don’t think everyone needs the full spectrum of opinions being played at them 24/7, sometimes it’s nice just to use a platform like Twitter to converse with friends.

Nitter is everything I wished Twitter was. Well except the upcoming support for following folks. Viewing the same profile in each is like viewing 2 completely different platforms with how different the displayed content is.

Do not engage at all.

The only way to win is to not play the game in the first place.

Let them fight it out in their echo-chambers. They will get bored really soon and realize that there is more to life than screaming and banning each other in the blue bird site.

Some things just need to be ignored and left alone. The outrage that is happening on the blue bird site is one of them. It is not worth it.

Twemex replaces the useless trending panel with more useful context.

I changed my Explore location to Japan. I don't read Japanese so it is easy to ignore.

The thing that I dislike the most on twitter are the posts where so many people liked it twitter decides to show it to me even though I am not following the person who wrote it.

I understand why they are doing this, but most of it is noise. I feel like if I had a way to browse twitter without any posts with more than 1,000 likes, it would be a much better experience.

Use Tweetdeck. Using Twitter's homepage or mobile app is just a complete shitshow.

I have similar thoughts...

Not long after twitter started showing me algorithmic recommendations, it decided to show me some comments that were so vile I couldn't help but call them out. The person responded by asking "Who are you and what are you doing in my replies?". Which was a valid question. Why was I there? I didn't want to be talking to that person. Why did I even see that content? Was I rewarding the algorithm's choice by responding? Gross.

Is that the new normal for twitter? Do I have to wade through enraging AI content as payment for following the creators I love?

No. If thats the trade, its a bad trade to make. I deleted twitter and I haven't looked back. There's some fantastic creators on twitter doing cool things. But there's too many interesting ways I could be spending my time to waste time dealing with that.

Twitter made me so angry I just stopped going there for my own mental health. The other day my partner linked me to a well liked thread featuring two people on Twitter arguing why it was or was not ethical to travel to Hawaii now given the oil spill in the aquifer by the Navy. One was arguing that visiting Hawaii in light of the spill would be unethically affecting hard-working everyday Hawaiians. The other argued that tourism dollars buoy the economy. After first 5 hot takes by both with many likes, you get to the bottom of the thread and realize than one of them is a European teenager and the other an Australian, neither having ever even visited Hawaii in their lives let alone lived there.

It's a cesspool for sure. Depending on your interest in Twitter, the crack down on BS from Russia and related areas has made some of it more tolerable.

> But then twitter had to remind me what the trending hashtags were

I use Adblock Plus to block Twitter's trending topics and it is a huge improvement; the topics are just annoying things that get engagement. Another thing that makes Twitter tolerable is to mute words with abandon, e.g. everything from "supreme court" to "wordle". Finally, I block anyone who tweets something stupid.

I haven't found any technologists on Twitter who avoid posting or interacting with political or social-issues stuff.

Everybody has an opinion on Trump, Biden, BLM, Trans Rights, Free Speech, racism, sexism, religion, immigration, abortion, war... the list goes on.

I'd actually pay money to follow technologists whose opinions on anything outside the tech in question I have no good guesses about.

The standard refrain is "well all tech is political". Well no: it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from when you're talking about a quirk of CSS or a cool e-ink project... or at least it doesn't interest me who you are or where you come from: I'm interested in what you're learning/teaching/doing with the tech.

consider that Twitter is not an appropriate platform to receive critique. many people might simply not want to use it that way.

I don't know who Mike Solana is, maybe he's also bad at taking feedback in real life, but still.

Critiques are nice, critiques from complete strangers on the internet are rarely helpful and often unwanted.

This seems to be a prevailing view of Twitter as a newpaper replacement or for political discourse.

For the sake of it, Twitter as a tool has many other uses:

There's a ton of illustrators and photographers that post their work on Twitter, it's an excellent alternative to Instagram in that respect, in particular for those who don't want to deal with Facebook/Meta.

Blocking an artist who's work you don't like isn't creating any nocive filter bubble, you get in exchange a timeline of nice pics that make you happy.

I think a lot of people want to have political discourse and interact with the news events of the world, and desperately look for a place to do it. I'd wager any tool/platform that is chosen for that will very fast look like a cesspool of nastiness. People who feel Twitter is crushing their life should rethink what they're looking for in Twitter, and follow, I don't know, @hourlywolvesbot ?

Yes. And to go further, discuss what you read with your friends and family: "Hey, did you hear about X? What did you think of it?". There is a high chance that at least some of these people have a different perspective, and there's a high chance some can bring a new perspective.

Disagreement is fundamentally healthy, as long as all parties hold their beliefs in good faith. It's much easier to hold a bad faith discussion on the internet than in person.

Please don't read the news paper; it's editorialized thought vomit without a shred of skeptical empiricism. The news industry might just be the most potent industry for willfully manufacturing confirmation bias among the masses.

Free speech is important. It also has nothing to do with me letting other people take up screen space on my monitor.

Blocking people from my Twitter account isn’t curtailing their free speech.

There is certainly truth to this, but surely there is some middle ground where I don't need to invite constant commentary about pop culture and events I don't have control over.

I could delete twitter, but that's essentially like blocking everyone on it.

I do agree though. I don't want to be in an echo chamber where only opinions I like are validated, that's bad for me even if I like it.

Maybe this is untrue, but surely there is a difference between blocking all opinions you don't like vs not wanting to see any opinions at all because it affects your mood and mental health.

Scrutiny doesn't seem to have eradicated "the 2020 election was stolen", or "the coronavirus vaccines don't work".

Good news, you now have to read every tweet made on Twitter or you're against free speech!

Not everyone uses social media to watch anonymous users screeching their opinions at each other. It is a nice tool to cut down on encountering content you don't necessarily care for.

This is always going to be the argument against anything like this, and of course it should be used with caution. Then again, my life is too short to be dealing with (say) bots, literal nazis etc. While their opinions may be interesting occasionally, it's not always worth the energy expended on some people.

> the antithesis of dialogue

Yes, perhaps

> , freedom of speech,

No absolutely not. Not in any interpretation of "freedom of speech" is individuals choosing not to listen to other indivuduals the antithesis of freedom of speech.

In a world awash with information and everyone optimizing to keep you and me engaged, aggressive defense of time and attention becomes a necessity to maintain sanity. No one deserves to gain your attention by default. If a tweet has > 50% chance to enrage me, I'd rather not see it. Important news and information will find a way to reach me.

Loud Twitter voices are hardly "neighbors".

What if you find that your lawn is on fire because there is a burning cross on it and your neighbor standing next to it in a hood and robe?

You might think I'm being alarmist, but for a lot of people that use these tools this is what they are blocking from their timeline - hatred, anger, and vitriol to the very fibre of their being and existence.

What to you is a dialogue, and democratic expression of freedom of speech, is to another person a threat on their very life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Not every position is worth engaging in "dialogue" about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

P.S. We're not talking about "harassment" here by the way - not the way you think it is - where you could report someone to Twitter, or any authorities. We're talking about politicians, celebrities, and news media with an audience who can abstractly debate someone's right to existence or happiness without overtly attacking any one specific person.

Im a fan of this. Never used it and don’t see why I would ever need to

My wife's Twitter 2FA is on my phone and she has to ask me for it whenever she wants in. By her own choice.

Actually, she only gets notifications from mutual follows and she mutes threads that get aggressive or overlong, so if someone were to instigate a pile on, they might as well be behind soundproof glass.

This is the correct approach.

ha! I was going to say the same thing, in fact I think that blocking people just ends up giving them the satisfaction that they had this power over you but also could serve as a powerful signal to twitter users with lot of followers.

Twitter does to a certain degree do a good job of hiding replies under 'show more replies' I get the feeling that people with 5 digit and up followers do not click it, if they do, most do not go out of their way to block people.

Strict curation is the key to Twitter usage. Otherwise it's just an avalanche of crap.

My posts only get greyed out when people can't handle the truth!

huh, that would be awesome, actually! would 100% improve everyone's experience of the site without any sort of collateral damage.

Precisely! Sure, block abrasive assholes, but blocking those who follow them or like their tweets will only serve to isolate YOU from those who might be able to present their view point in a more nuanced and respectable way. I think this can be a very harmful tool if misused.

I learned a lot of valuable things I wouldn't have otherwise had I used a tool like this.

Folks suggest quitting social media all the time, to the point it became part of a meme (quit Facebook join a gym etc).

I for one could use a little less madness such as QAnon. It used to amuse me from some theoretical viewpoint, but since it has penetrated mainstream it just drains me.

Some of us are important and think we don't need unimportant information in our brains. Some of us are unimportant and think we need important information in our brains and everyone else's too.

I feel like the people who always use these features spend all day talking about how awful the divide in the world is growing and how there's not enough love, while in another tweet dehumanizing people for petty disagreements.

When (not if) the Black Mirror feature of blocking people irl becomes reality, I'm very sure people will be eagerly lining up to block people for having opinions that were somehow wrong, and they'll have no way to ever redeem themselves.

We absolutely do. If you know some people are fundamentally wrong, it is absolute waste of time to entertain their world view. Can they still come up with something useful in the distant future? Sure! Can they change given enough time and information? Sure! Can what you think is fundamentally wrong change given enough time and information? Sure! So, you can prune your blocks every news cycle or every 2 years or 5 years or 10 years or whatever you are willing to tolerate.

Grouthinking is necessary to build a new ideology, which may sound wrong today but may be the ideology of the future. To build your own groupthink and allow for others to have theirs, it is necessary to have several different independent ones co-exist. While companies like Facebook has helped to some degree, companies like twitter rely on keeping the debate going at all costs which is why tools like this are great.

Twitter is already a “tool that catalyzes groupthink stratification”, the problem is that you have some high-profile Twitter personalities that weaponize their fanbase against targets of opportunity on Twitter—sometimes unintentionally, other times maliciously.

The bad actors on Twitter sometimes get banned but that shouldn’t be the only solution. Blocking a tweet and everyone attached doesn’t just mean that you are removing them from your feed, it means that you are removing yourself from their feed. It means that your tweets won’t get retweeted, tagging the Twitter personality you think is a threat.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had something retweeted by a real Twitter personality that hates you. It can basically make the platform unusable for a period of time, or worse.

YouTube is the worst offender. I block and thumbs down the author… which of course means please recommend me every video they ever made. Youtube seems ripe for someone else to come and take a large part of the market if video storage wasn’t so expensive to enter into.

Isn't that what this is...? Ignoring the person who said it

I can’t speak for everyone who uses this or tools like it (in fact I don’t even use twitter, Facebook, mastodon, or any of the big social networks). However, I can understand the mentality. When the “public discourse” is crushing your mental health because it is just thinly veiled bigotry given only the slightest edge of legitimacy, I think you’re well within your rights to step away from the trolls. We shouldn’t criticize people for choosing to opt out of the hate that is thrown their way. Now, sure, some people might be overreacting in a way that undermines legitimate discourse, but it’s not fair to point at the existence of these tools as a sign of The Death Of Discourse.

Exactly.

Though to be fair I see 3 escalating levels of reaction when you come across content you don't like:

- Level 1: Navigate/ignore away from the content.

- Level 2: Block the person/content on the platform so you never come across it again.

- Level 3: Have the person/content banned from the platform so no one ever comes across it again.

At least up to level 2 (which this is) you can't stop someone else from consuming that content.

Young people didn't leave Facebook because it was cancerous. They left it because it was boring. The "cancerousness" on Twitter isn't even skewed older: if anything it's skewed younger.

So, if someone is celebrating Hitler, and 100,000 people "love" it, you don't think you should be allowed to block those toxic people? Hey, I get they need, help, but many of them, if not all, are too far gone.

The only thing that gives these people power is their voice.

What do you expect when dealing with an environment as deliberately toxic as Twitter, with millions of bots fake-networking all over the place to be later used to generate fake hype or fake support, and the engagement schemes optimized for three minute hates.

People have very finite bandwidth. You already suppress voices by consciously deciding not to follow them. This tool just improves curation effectiveness.

How is your expression suppressed? Free speech doesn’t mean I’m obliged to listen to you.

Surely there is a spectrum here. On one side is vaguely annoying expressions that are just... well, annoying. They're not the types of things that you'd say, and not the types of things you'd prefer others say, but you generally put up with them (i.e. ignore them) because that's the expected thing to do in polite society. On the far other side are things that you really find very distasteful or upsetting or offensive. Things that you would very much not like to see.

Everyone is going to have a different threshold within this spectrum regarding where they deploy a "megablock", and people are naturally going to disagree about if that was the right threshold to apply. I don't use twitter, but my first reaction is: it's plausible that I might find sufficiently disturbing things on twitter such that I would deploy such a tool.

At times it goes beyond suppressing objectionable ideas and into the outright denial of reality.

If you silence all opposing ideas, you can start to believe things that appear quite ridiculous to those exposed to a wider spectrum of thought.