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Comment by sandofsky | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing many people say you've blocked them without ever having interacted with you. Many have jumped to the conclusion that you simply block people who disagree with your politics. I don't tweet about SF politics, but after I tweeted this, you replied tell me it's funny but wrong, and then blocked me: https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1491167231467999236

Which is fine. I block plenty of people. I also mute people, because a block carries a message. And if I found myself in role that gets considerable scrutiny, I'd probably reevaluate my entire approach to social media.

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I'm in the blocked club and have no idea why. Here's the one tweet I ever sent @garrytan, responding to his reply to me: https://twitter.com/nelson/status/1185919273065041925. (I'm happy to report that business reopened with new owners and the rumor was the old owners just went broke.)

I agree blocking people is fine and should be stigma free. But Mr. Tan's framing of his reasons for blocking seems at odds with the visible pattern. Fair enough; feel free to block me just because you're tired of my bullshit.

I don't think I ever interacted with him on Twitter, but I do from time to time press the "like" button on tweets in favor of criminal justice reform, in favor of the tax measure that voters passed in San Francisco to support homeless services (and that Stripe and its investors, YC included, loathe), and some similarly "progressive" issues in the Bay Area. FWIW, I also press "like" on some number of tweets that are considered "moderate" (to use the wacko language of San Francisco politics) but that's neither here nor there.

I don't particularly care that I triggered his Twitter blocking scripts. But I do take it as a sign that he wants to send a signal to founders looking to raise from his firm that they'd do well to support his political views or stay quiet on social media.

> ... in favor of the tax measure that voters passed in San Francisco to support homeless services ...

Ok come on, a tax on gross receipts is asinine. Of course low margin businesses with high volumes left. Square left, Stripe left, PayPal left. That cuts into the tax base which in turn means less revenue to help the homeless.

Regardless of whether you think what they did with it was good, the actual calculus of who has to pay how much makes zero sense.

Then of course there's the fact that money went to putting the hobos under highway overpasses in tent cities instead of building more houses.

I'm with Garry on this one.

I’m old enough to remember when the Square CEO campaigned for the gross receipts tax. It was the tech industry’s idea.[1]

Bonus points for saying “hobo”!

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/SF-Citi-video-plugs-...

God I was there at the time. I’m also old enough to remember when he looked like a normal human. Although with that in mind I was referring to Prop C in 11/18.

This was his reward for actively working to push out politicians the right wing VC set didn't like

I'm in the blocked club and have never interacted with him!

I am not blocked by him, which means I haven’t spent enough time making fun of him for putting “.eth” in his name then silently removing it.

Same. It's clear there is a connected graph of follow edges all of whom were blocked by this guy. Seems he can't live outside his filter bubble. Perfect for the leader of YC, honestly.

If bias is built in, being transparent is a favor to the always fleeting time.

It is very imperfect, I would say

There are a bunch of block-tools which are of the kind "block everyone that liked this tweet", "block everyone that follows this person" etc. Casting that wide of a net probably also carries some "false negatives" (which could explain the "I'm blocked but never interacted with the person).

Paul Graham does something similar. (He's blocked me and we've never interacted.) He said somewhere that he blocks people when he sees them behaving badly, or something like that, and that in the past when he has randomly stumbled across somebody he had previously blocked and taken a second look at their tweets he's felt only vindication.

Now, look, Graham blocked me on these grounds, so I'm not thrilled to say that I think he's completely right about this. I block people I haven't interacted with all the time. Not everybody on twitter is a good actor there, even if they're nice people in other contexts, and it makes life easier to kick some of those people to the curb before they're even aware you exist.

I probably said something tendentious or snarky or unfair or maybe even mean and I might have blocked somebody for the same thing, were the shoe on the other foot.

to be fair i block people too when i don't like their memes

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