Twitter Users Will No Longer Be Able to Block Other Accounts | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Users Will No Longer Be Able to Block Other Accounts

variety.com

20 pointsjbegley36 comments

This isn't going to open the flood gates of harassment. You can still block accounts from your DMs and mute accounts more generally. Genuine assholes can easily roll new accounts or incite a mob of their own followers, just as they've always done. What this really does is make it harder for petty people to get the last word, and ironically this also includes Elon who's notoriously thin skinned.

If Twitter were to be the digital manifestation of a town square this would arguably bring it one step closer. Public spaces can be cruel and inhospitable places, they were never meant to be your personal safe space.

This is a bad and dangerous take, spoken as someone that has never faced real abuse on twitter. If you're any kind of minority, the hate is endless. You're acting as if blocking is mainly used to "get the last word", which it's not. It's to not have people constantly harassing you for just existing.

And if you can only mute, you will not see it all but instead be a vessel to spread abuse to all your followers.

The town square analogy sucks. No one would accept a hate group going into their circle to shout slurs. Free speech absolutists don't care about other's freedom to live peacefully, only their own "right" to harass people.

> If you're any kind of minority, the hate is endless.

I don't think this is true at all. People who get the most hate are not minorities but non-minority celebrities with controversial takes like J.K. Rowling.

No, Rowling is one of those spewing hate, then receiving pushback. Trans people however just want to live their lives in peace but get constantly harassed. A big difference.

... that's the far-left take on the dispute. It perfectly shows that what is viewed as "harassment" and what counts as "pushback" is highly subjective and dependent on political leaning. So blocking can be alternatively interpreted as blocking evil "harassment" or as unfairly blocking righteous "pushback". That's probably why so many people are in favor of blocking: They all employ the definitions of those terms in a way that is convenient to them.

She's asserting the rights of women to have female-only spaces, and to not be linguistically erased. That's not exactly "spewing hate" is it.

Perhaps trans women should have the right to a safe space as well, hence be able to block people?

No, because other people won't be able to block them either. Anything else would be unfair.

No, she's not.

Female only spaces would include all females. Not whomever Rowling decides has sufficient quantities of the essence of what she defines as woman.

A "female" is a biological sex category for all kinds of animals. It has little to do with the allegedly socially "constructed" concept of "gender identity".

"Trans woman Isla Bryson jailed for eight years for raping two women"

I wonder if you did not know about that, or if you think that that person should share dressing room and showers with biological women.

If you didn't know about that, maybe now it's simpler for you to at least a bit see how JKR is thinking?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/28/trans-woman-...

(Just to avoid misunderstandings: Such events are of course very rare, the trans people I know are kind and lovely people)

I don’t quite understand how you’re able to acknowledge the rarity of such a sensationalised case as Isla Bryson’s, yet still use it to justify your support for policy that would hurt the trans people you know.

Acknowledge? It is unclear whether MtF transsexuals have an incidence of commiting rape more similar to biological males or to biological females. So whether it is in fact "rare" (relative to the male base rate) or "frequent" (relative to the female base rate) is not established here.

The data gathered so far shows that they have a pattern of criminality similar to other men, particularly regarding sex crimes:

https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-se...

More research is needed, but I think it's not an unexpected conclusion. I mean, the only difference between these men and other men is that they're calling themselves women. Most of them keep their genitals intact, and most are driven to identify as women due to a paraphilia.

The "community notes" on Elon's tweet says that would be against social media / user generated content app rules for both Apple and Google and could get the twitter app banned.

It’s false, at least for apple. The apple App Store rules require that the app can block bad users. It isn’t a requirement for a user block function

That said this is a dumb plan

Apple only says it requires "filtering". The mute function still filters.

What is his rationale for this? It seems insane to not allow blocking -- that's a fundamental and essential tool to keep things usable.

I don't understand the reasoning behind removing it at all.

Assuming he's serious and didn't just like drink a bottle of nyquil or something it's a couple things: 1) hate fueled engagement is still engagement, he's betting that statistically he'll generate more hate-reads than account-closures 2) the specific kind of shitheel that he reply-guys to don't like being blocked because it prevents them from directing harassment at users 3) The block-the-blue thing again. Can't sell subscriptions if subscribing makes you less visible.

> The block-the-blue thing again.

I didn't know this was a thing -- but that alone explains everything, I think.

When blue checks got sorted to the top of threads, I would block almost all of them. Elon created the problem. Of course his "solution" is even worse. I use Xitter as a write-only medium now.

Heh, I would hide their comments and ask them to donate $8 to my cause to be visible under my post.

You might be overthinking it. Its likely just that he's not happy people can block him.

Users can block ads, and after a few weeks of doing this casually you can block a large proportion of advertisers, because most sane businesses recognize twitter as the negative-reputation cesspool that it is.

He said earlier that blocking is like DDoS for the servers. The blocks are filtered as an additional step from the timeline lookups. So when there are lot of blocks, you multiply the requests to build enough tweets for display.

Because people on Twitter are polarized and constantly attacking and blocking each other, and Elon has no money for infrastructure, it has become a problem. And his solution is expectedly dumb.

Additionally it’s bad for business when people block advertisers and blue checks.

I’ve been getting really bad ads, so I’ve been blocking a set of advertisers.

This might be why he is doing it. Though really I’m just making up for bad ad targeting

Pure BS, takes same server CPU time as muting, exact same lookups must be performed.

Not the same. Mute is one sided 1:M. Block is bidirectional making it M:N.

Muting is people muting you, they don’t see you, but you see them, so it doesn’t affect your fetches. But a million people blocking you is also you unwittingly muting those people from your side. Meaning that if a million people have blocked you, those million block lists needs to apply when you read your timeline.

But this feature isn't new, right? If it was feasible ten years ago, CPUs/DBMSes of today surely don't have much of a problem with it.

Twitter is leaking money like a sieve, way, WAY faster than ever before in its existence, and they got rid of several of their data enters, all the while trying to increase engagement and users on the platform.

The feature is not new, but Twitter’s situation is new, and their management is new. Also they’re completely incompetent, which doesn’t help.

X has a "muting" feature which will remain. That means you don't have to see them -- that's how a lot of people understand "blocking" anyway. That's obviously essential.

The extra features of blocking are less obviously essential: people can still reply and you don't see it. But your followers still see it, and by following you they're exposed any harassment you receive.

That might not be quite as fundamental, but it's still pretty damn important. If people lose followers or their community is unable to talk over the noise, people will leave.

Muting is insufficient -- even counterproductive sometimes -- because it doesn't stop people from harassing your followers, but it does stop you from seeing when that's happening.

I think blocking is essential. Muting is nice to have.

It means your harassers can reply to your posts with all kinds of things meant to change other reader's perceptions of you, while you, the victim, are completely unaware of why your circle keeps shrinking.

Otherwise you could block the aggressor outright, which disallows this kind of activity.

Muting is not the same, even if some people mistakenly believe they are. Muting is what you do to annoying users that always try to be the center of attention, even though they are so extremely boring or whatever. They can still participate in threads... you just won't see their constant floods. They aren't harming you. They're just an eyesore.

Blocking is what you do to someone you don't want involved in any aspect of your life, and especially in your active conversations. Harassers, exes, etc.

Many (I actually think most) people use blocking not for harassment, but for blocking people whose opinions they don't like without being harassed in any way. Basically as a tool to keep their echo chamber echoey. So the possibility of blocking has both advantages and disadvantages. The question is which one dominates.

I've seen people on Mastodon be pretty eloquent about the advantages of blocking rather than muting, particularly blocking prevents people replying to your threads that your friends can see even if you can't. Things like this seem to cause some people a lot of stress.

Mastodon has other problems in the same vein, for instance, it is said that some people who are on servers that aren't good about blocking rouge servers get harassed by certain people and that other people don't see this because they are on servers that are tougher about rouge servers.

Servers blocking other servers is even worse than users blocking other users they want to block. It means you can get effectively blocked by countless people merely because some admin decided to block the entire server you are on. It's a barbarian form of sibling punishment.

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