Block the Blue – Twitter Verified Blocker
chrome.google.com
chrome.google.com
If I don't like particular twitter user, just unfollow or block that particular user.
If I don't like twitter as a platform, just quit using twitter.
I don't understand why one would block all blue user
I use this plugin and it rules, it’s purged thousands of the most annoying people from my feed without me having to lift a finger.
a) Twitter Blue comments are always placed ahead of everyone else but yet their quality is almost always poor. Many popular threads will have nothing but emojis for the first few pages.
b) Alternatives like Threads don't yet have all of the features that Twitter has e.g. hashtags. This is preventing many users from migrating.
Blocking all of them feels heavy handed but honestly would make the site a lot better.
can we also for a second talk about how much of a racket this is? "Give me 8 dollars so I can pay you more back" is a business model on the level of a Nigerian email scam, clearly for this to even make sense for Twitter the vast majority will never get any money out of this
Also, from what I have seen, a large majority of the top Twitter Blue replies are trashier than the unverified replies below, and the OP is not syndicated on Mastadon or whatever.
Have you seen the kinds of posts those people, as a class, are leaving there?
I don't know why that is the case, and my "study" only was on about 20 accounts, but I get fash vibes from blue people more often than not.
Edit: and Elon Musk is a pseudo-fascist and a coward and if I can do anything to get a nicer day AND piss him off it is really a win-win.
Ok, I guess I’ll give one example: Musk’s attacks on the ADL.
Want more examples? Try this: go to twitter and look for some of the big name blue checks. You’ll see plenty of Nazi things in those accounts.
Would you mind quoting? I'm trying to get an example.
If you’ve paid for Twitter I don’t care what you have to say.
I feel like we often complain about companies making money via ads and that we should pay for what we use, and yet when a company tries to do exactly that we turn against it?
There is a lot to be said about Twitter and Musk and just how bad it has gotten. But to react in this manner seems... kinda elitist?
I agree that there are a lot of people who subscribe and seem to be those that want to spread certain opinions. But I don't know how much of this is really a hard rule or not. Why does this need a plugin to go this far when if you see it you can just block them yourself.
Edit: Also this is just going to further incentivize Twitter getting rid of a legitimate use of blocking, those that are actually sending you abuse. So I guess we have these campaigns to thank or that.
thinking about it, it seems like Musk switched from selling advertising to companies to selling advertising to users (promoting their posts)
> Why does this need a plugin to go this far when if you see it you can just block them yourself.
it's a lot of work, tbh. I tried it
To block a user? It really isn't, it's in the dropdown on a users profile. It takes a couple clicks. Unless you mean to block every blue checkmark which goes back to my question about why react in this manner.
Why make a judgement call based on something arbitrary instead of the actual content of what someone posts.
To be clear, I don't necessarily equate this with a political ideology. I personally have blocked a lot of republicans and transphobic people because I don't want to see that shit. Sure a lot of them have had the blue checkmark but not all of them and I just can't imagine actually saying let's block something that in reality has nothing to do with any of that.
except it isn't arbitrary - for the reasoning check out the replies to the following comment (to which I don't really feel like I have to add anything):
Paying for a subscription isn't like voting for a particular party or supporting a certain candidate.
Or are you going to tell me that Bill Gates and Barack Obama should be blocked?
This is trying to make a blanket statement that we don't know wether or not it is true.
We have limited information because we see the extremes when those could very well be in the minority of all of the subscribers.
Considering it is very easy to find 2 very high profile accounts that would fall outside of this narrative means this should be more objectively looked at instead of with a gut reaction to this.
Which again is why I go back to individual blocking (or maybe block lists based on actual bad behavior) but considering the easy to find examples of who would be caught up in this it makes no sense.
And again I will point out that all this is doing is incentivizing Twitter to get rid of the blocking capability which is just going to allow more actual abuse to happen on the platform from people that were actually blocked in the past. Elon has already tweeted about saying that blocking is not a good solution, so I would not be surprised if that is removed soon if these campaigns grow.
I feel like you overestimate the risk of false positives for me, and put too much weight on bad behavior only. Just having their post being shoved into me, because they paid for that, is enough for me.
btw. people with blue checkmarks which I follow aren't blocked
I don't have a Twitter account, but it seems very reasonable that for some people blue checkmark could have the same problem, blocking them all might mean missing out on some good content, but not enough to make it worth shifting through the garbage, especially since Twitter will happily promote any paying user's post. If someone has to block hundreds of people to let the good one or two through, it probably makes more sense to just give up on the few good ones or make exceptions for them.
You could make the same argument for blocking people without checkmarks. With the checkmarked people also blocked, there's nobody left.
It's not arbitrary, arbitrary would be on whether the checksum of their last n posts was odd or even. Twitter Blue membership is a social and economic signal, and for people who want to use this extension the signal carries more weight than the content of the posts. Many perceive Twitter Blue users as being primarily motivated by marketing, scamming, trolling, or fanboyism, and paying money for the service to increase reach and influence for social activity that would otherwise languish in obscurity because it is low in quality.
In general one would like to judge social media posts by content, but that assumes a base standard of good faith and neutral market conditions. In a corrupted market, it's unwise to rely on such assumptions and rational to be distrustful of behavioral signals that correlate with previous negative experience.
Privacy from the ads has largely become a privilege that either those that can afford it or those with the knowledge and skills can achieve.
I use it myself, but I don't think it is the same as this. One is something you can turn on and off and one is something that once done it's done unless you go in and unblock every account.
Personally I've always been on the side of ads over subscriptions, but it's not like Twitter has stopped trying to do ads. I think their paid users probably don't account for that much revenue.
The blue users being on top of replies really does make the site a lot worse experience for anyone who isn't in that version of the world
Under any post with a moderate amount of attention, the blue posts that always seem to get filtered to the top are hypebeasts, hustlebros, cryptobros and blatant sycophants. Pages and pages of them.
The majority of blue posters are probably not a problem, but whatever algorithms twitter has for sorting them are the opposite of what they need to be. So auto blocking, auto-muting or even just auto-hiding the div is kind of a necessity to see any useful responses.
I don’t see how, anymore than using an ad blocker is. These are people who are paying to have their (generally low-quality, irritating) content pushed in your face.
Then we will have a more friendly social network that can still access the more technical audience of Mastodon.
If it ends up being successful you could see governments e.g. EU using it as a showcase of the type of integration they want to see between platforms. So maybe Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky etc end up being forced to support it. And then a similar model proposed for messaging.
"Hey, you want to run or pay for your OWN twitter-like thing -- outside of Elon or whoever's control; kind of like you do email and your website? This is that! No more Eli-Lilly situations for you!"
(I like Mastodon's model, but I gotta say I'm kind of meh on the actual people who are there now; many can't seem to distinguish between extreme capitalism and mere commerce)
And yes, I think those people are doing it wrong too. Not paying 5 bucks a month for email if it's part of your business is absolute madness to me. Who do you call and yell at if something breaks?
I can safely say that 'Use Mastodon.world' because they have a top team of volunteers, moderators and trustworthy admins. With a $150ish/month server, Cloudflare CDN and other such features, it's a secure and fast over provisioned server with a good community vibe.
Mastodon.world is one of the most popular Mastodon instances. An act of registration innately means trusting the admin team. You gotta characterize and 'sell' the admin/mod team because that's the main differentiator from servers (including Twitter and Threads).
it's like asking "is the sky blue?"
Maybe you don’t agree and that’s fine. I suspect we have different values and that is reflected in my lack of tolerance for the blue checks.
It's self described as a campaign? What are the goals?
99% of users don't care and won't even notice
It's not a made-up narrative. It's something that individual Twitter users can see for themselves just by reading Twitter.
That depends on your definition of "just fine" I guess.