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Comment by pastor_bob | Hacker News Reader

I personally would love to see how many people a person has Blocked, similar to Following/Followers number.

would find it very informative about a tweeter

In general, I would expect a person's blocklist to correlate roughly with how active they are on the site, and how long they have been on the site. More activity leads to more interactions with spam and other undesirable accounts.

I'm not sure how that confers much useful information about a user.

I found out that at least 300+ people block me, but I'm not blocking anyone. Even 9 people are blocking my private Twitter account, despite the fact they have no idea what I post on that account.

Well in Elon's ideal world the spam bots would be purged so they'd have no presence on block lists.

Ideally the blocked list would be viewable.

I think it's important if you believe Twitter is 'the town square', people should be able to see who and who isn't allowed to enter that town square to respond.

Not likely.

This is a strange kind of town square.

First of all, it has to protect wealthy elites, emperors, and so on, in a society with appalling wealth inequality. All people who would be unable to enter a town square without elite soldiers / praetorian guard / varangian guard to protect them.

Secondly, this town square is not a public space, it's the wholly owned private property of a collection of ultra-wealthy people and institutions (or a single wealthy individual, who may as well be Caligula at this point).

Finally, the town square already isn't a great model: there were town squares during the reign of Caligula, the entire institution of serfdom, during slavery in the American colonies, during Jim Crow. What was discussed there? Whose "free speech" was protected there?

Spam extends beyond bots! Besides, there's also still the "and other undesirable" accounts part.

There are a lot of reasons a person may choose to block another account, from harassment to simply curating a better experience for themselves.

> people should be able to see who and who isn't allowed to enter that town square to respond.

Do you use Twitter? This isn't how Twitter works at all. The fact that a person blocks you doesn't prevent you from entering the "Town Square" in any way.

I have been blocked by so many people solely because of people I follow - many of whom I don't follow because I like them, but they have an effect on broader communities and it's good to keep tabs on them.

There are notable actors/actresses who've blocked me because of this. It just immediately makes me dislike anything they are in because I just can't think of them as a person worth respecting.

How do you notice when a notable actor/actress has blocked you?

So you can judge how much they are harassed? Why would you care?

This assumes that people only block others because they are harassed by them.

When Mark Anderson blocked Jack Dorsey was it because of harassment?

To me, something like that is a valuable piece of info. I wouldn't have known had Jack not pointed it out.

It's an excellent assumption though because that's what most people do most of the time.

I don't know why, my block list is over 60k.

Why? We used to be able to import block lists, so I have 59,990 or whatever accounts blocked that spam.

Agree. Anonymous dissent has a real place in a functioning democracy.

What does blocking someone have to do with anonymous dissent?

I think that would be a bad idea because it might make the person a target for haters.

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