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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit torn on this.

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.

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> 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?

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

> 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.

> Why make a judgement call based on something arbitrary instead of the actual content of what someone posts.

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):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37448531

ok so there are bad actors, that doesn't mean all of them are.

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?

I am not saying that all of them are bad actors, but most of them aren't good enough to be worth an exception respectively accepting the trade-off, could probably count them with my fingers

That's the thing, that's basically what this plugin and people here seem to be saying.

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 have done manual blocking, but it turned out, I'd pretty much block pretty much everyone anyways and since manual blocking consumes a lot of time, I use this plug in.

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

Not every user of Quora or Slashdot post trash, but the signal to noise ratio is high enough I don't use either of those sites. Yes it means I undoubtedly miss out on some really informative content, but it's not worth the work of sifting through the trash to find it.

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.

By that metric, the vast majority of non-checkmark comments are also garbage.

You could make the same argument for blocking people without checkmarks. With the checkmarked people also blocked, there's nobody left.

Why make a judgement call based on something arbitrary instead of the actual content of what someone posts.

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.

Any popular post will have _hundreds_ of inane responses from blueticks, all shoved to the top. Blocking them individually is hardly realistic.

> 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?

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

> Why does this need a plugin to go this far when if you see it you can just block them yourself.

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.

> But to react in this manner seems... kinda elitist?

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.

Do you consider using Ublock or AdGuard to be equally as elitist?

In a way? Sure. I feel like ad blocking still remains largely in a more technical realm for most people.

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.

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