Musk says X’s ‘block’ feature is going away | Hacker News Reader

Musk says X’s ‘block’ feature is going away

techcrunch.com

32 pointsjrflowers21 comments

This is a move from "free speech" to "forced audience."

The vast majority of my blocks are of bots. The ones he claimed he would make a specific point of dealing with, but never has.

There are so many reasons to block. There are people that are regularly harassed because of this that or the other thing. Free speech doesn't mean forced audience, except to Elon apparently.

> The ones he claimed he would make a specific point of dealing with, but never has.

If anything, the bots have only gotten worse since he took over, and the fault isn't just the rise of LLMs, it's his decisions to downsize, as well as every single other feature he has cut or changed, like the checkmark boosting comments.

> the bots have only gotten worse since he took over

I don’t know how widespread this is, but in my circles, most people get 2-3 extra likes by bots (nicknamed sexbots) with attractive looking avatars and some generic female name. I suspect these bots are an undocumented feature of new Twitter because blue checks were complaining about lack of engagement.

Exactly this.

I only had a few of them before Elon. Now there are all these waves of fake girls upvoting and following, or bitcoin accounts adding me to their "list". The infosec folk joke about how hawt our industry is becoming since we all get the sexy floods at relatively the same time.

If you block a bot (or a troll, etc), they can't reply to you publicly. If you can only ignore them, the trolls can do all kinds of things behind your back that may influence people in your circle, and bias them against you, the victim, but you don't even see it happen because of the ignore...

Blocking means something far more substantial than merely ignoring. These features do not replace each other.

I think the issue driving this for Musk is that there are increasingly popular blocklists of all "Blue Check" purchasers as well as "Gold Check" advertisers. Since blocking is reflected in the engagement metrics having the people who paid for an audience being blocked by that audience is probably untenable.

And in increasingly typical fashion his solution is what you expect he must have thought of first.

Probably more like too many people blocked Musk’s account, and he’s sick of it. It’s tough being one of the top blocked accounts on your own platform.

I doubt that, since he can just plug in a god mode that makes him (and whomever else he pleases) unblockable without removing features people actually rely on.

So, presumably he won't want to see all the crap that the rest of us block, and he'll make it so that only he has a block function.

Would the Apple App Store allow this? Blocking is a required feature for social networking App Store apps afaik. [1]

[1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#use...

>While Mute may still remain, the features are not the same. Block restricts fellow users from interacting with, viewing and following an account. Mute simply hides your posts from their stream. Users are not made aware that they have been muted. Musk adds that the block feature will remain for direct messages.

So if I understand correctly, if you mute someone you don't see their posts, but they can still reply to you, but you don't see it. Block entirely blocks that user from replying to your tweets. Forgive me if I'm wrong, I don't use Twitter.

Also, I can't see the part in App Store guidelines that forces devs to allow users block other users.

Oh, I bet this is a poor attempt at handling those messages that tell you that you're blocked and can't read them.

I can think of a better way to handle those - keep the block, but don't make a display about it, just like mute already does.

Otherwise people being harassed will be witnessed by everyone except the victim. That is quite bonkers. It just creates another way harassers can harass - by turning people against you without you ever knowing why it's happening.

It's a requirement for Google too I think?

Truly this is one of the moves from... X... that I find the most baffling. In terms of what would kill it the fastest, being driven off all app stores would have to be the quickest way.

Apple says it requires the possibility of "filtering". Mute filters.

The app is garbage. I deleted it. Anybody still using it is a fool. I had to routinely keep blocking far right content.

You can mute both far-right content just as much as far-left content.

Definitely seems weird to remove functionality that is not fully replaceable by the 'mute' feature. Maybe it's part of an engagement push?

That's my take too.

The mute feature still leaves open the possibility of reading posts from a user that has muted you. The net effect from the muting/blocking user's perspective is the same.

Besides, there are a ton of X users who openly have "alt" accounts in order to get around exactly this.

Is there a way to migrate a block list to a mute list? I used the block functionality for blocking promoted tweets.

For a minute there I thought it said X's bleak future is going away.

Not exactly.

[dupe]

Discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37177439

Reply on news.ycombinator.com