Twitter Enhancement Suite – BlockTheBlue
chrome.google.com
chrome.google.com
And the hilarious thing is that they're rolling it back now, by adding the blue check mark manually to "important" (or just popular) accounts that would be most subject to impersonation, essentially using it to mark "Twitter knows who this person is" as a signal to everyone else. Which is... exactly what the feature was for originally.
[1] Journalists, pundits and havers-of-opinions.
[2] At its core, the check mark is a feature for the rest of us, so we don't get scammed by reading imposter accounts.
Wait 'til you hear about Bud Light.
Twitter lost half its value according to Elon of all people.
It's undeniable that the stock is still down.
With that said, it's less than what some people seem to think. But it's also just a stock value which is based on speculation. The important sales figures will be visible far later. Bud seems to take it seriously by replacing the people in charge and doing a terrible ad targeting "patriots".
Another alternative is to make use of private lists, as recommended here:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/10/23549368/twitter-for-you-...
And Twitter is the "Blue Hellsite*".
Both are bad, both still show up in my browser history. I don't know why.
It's a bit silly, if they hate twitter they should stop using it.
nevertheless I approve of extensions allowing people to add functionality to sites.
Now let's enable people to block toxic posts, porn, adverts, politics as well. Something more helpful to people.
I get the intention of this, to try and claw back some usability of Twitter. I say let it be. Spend these dev hours working on a new platform or working on open source protocols so this type of mass takeover doesn't happen again on the whim of a billionaire.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/adver...
Filtering out all Elon and promoted tweets is a nice feature though.
A lot of these features are for those who want no change. Which I can understand, but the changes aren't as drastic as say, GMail's pointless UI churn.
What a useless feature, just block him?
* I don't care about high follower count tweets, I'm not there for viral tweets, or popular media or generally anything that there are 1M in the world even care about. I'm there for niche experts that can not be found anywhere else
* I really don't care about reading the tweets of people who have to pay in order to get their opinion boosted. I do know severa people that have paid for Twitter for a long time, and would whitelist them. But otherwise, a blue check mark has become a very good signal for lower quality content that is likely to be some BS political propaganda I don't want in my life. I don't want NFT hustlers or get-rich-quick schemers rising to the top of any discussion.
The whole "verification" scheme was always of minimal utility on the site, mostly for making sure that what you're reading from a notable person actually came from that person and not an imposter. That was the value for users. Now that it's gone, the blue check mark has no positive value to me, and in fact 99% of the discussion from blue check mark holders is pointless idiotic defense of their purchases which is a massive waste of everybody's time. I do not care, burn it all with fire so I can get rid of the noise.
If you're interested in non-political, high-quality content from those who are genuine about creating it then blocking Twitter Blue users is going to increase the overall signal to noise ratio.
Twitter blue acts as a sort of convenient filter heuristic; just filtering the lot out, you’re going to have a couple of false positives, but it’ll improve your experience.
Attention is like sex; if you have to pay for it, the other participants probably aren’t enjoying it much.
1. People promoting their own personal brand (including meme accounts and sex workers) 2. Musk stans 3. Crypto people 4. MAGA
I'm willing to cut a break for some of the accounts in (1) on a case-by-case basis but I've seen all I care to see of (2), (3), and (4) so even if any given tweet from someone is innocuous--and they're not clearly in (1)--the bluecheck is a great signal to block.