Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts
theverge.com
theverge.com
if Referer != ''Xitter for short.
> I would intend that people I had blocked are still able to see the message (and make copies of it) if they wish; I would block them because I don't want to see their messages and I do not want to allow them to send messages to me
I don't. There are different reasons to block and musk only sees the political one. On personal level I may want to have a public account for something but also don't want some person I know to see it and connect the dots that it is me. Maybe just because it's awkward or maybe be more than that
Imagine you are in an abusive relationship or just have a stalker. If you are the victim you want to escape and built relationships with other people. You create an alt with another name and block your abuser in advance so there is no way of finding out whose account it is unless you are betrayed by a friend. But now twitter will betray you. Unless you go private account and then no one talks to you.
It's true they could also create an alt, it's a weapons race
> but keep a public friend list of contacts known to ex
Well in my case I add almost no one from the other life, very selective. But me is not about abuse or anything, just trying a new thing. If I could not block certain people fully I would not use that platform for this.
I agree blocking can also be used in unseemly ways though
Blocking them isn't going to help right? They might see they're blocked and wonder why and log out to see the posts. This doesn't make sense to me...
For example if you would block someone, they could not reply on this/my post here, because it's based on yours.
Helps things from escalating I guess.
If that user doesn't have many people blocking them, then this will barely affect the votes. If they have tonnes of blockers, then would indicate that they probably deserved it, and the downvotes would make sense anyway.
It would prevent echo chambers from forming.
If you are on a bigger forum, block a few because you just don't want to see their posts. Or they are bots. Suddenly you have huge problems on small subreddits.
And I don't see a huge benefit to it. People clean up their block list maybe? But for what.
if the sub is small, then 5 blockers might be significant.
I suppose the arguments regarding the bot accounts are valid, as it allows for manipulation. Presumably reddit should be blocking bots, but of course that's wishful thinking.
This would also create a tool to cast target people to oblivion.
The real question is to ask what is the real problem. I understand that an online places can be gritty because of incivilities, but a dogme is much more scarier to me than an online idiot.
However if it can't be disproven and you actually convince some people, it will be flagged. And maybe even some people stalk your account and bait you into getting frustrated and then getting your account nuked.
This is why 4chan etc are more intellectually honest imo as you can't nearly as easily censor or rule ban someone who makes a vile but persuasive argument.
So many argumentative and divisive people who seem to get the last word all the time. Now I know what I'm looking at. They just answer and block. Makes me think even less of them.
Or was last I used it. Maybe that has changed.
Edit parent comment to indicate the block. Add it to a few for bonus points.
Rage blocking. Is deffo a thing!
I imagine its to stop someone from stalking the list of recent comments the person made, and immediately reply to every one.
You can use it as a way to evict people from the discussion.
that person no longer exists to me, their opinion of me doesn't exist, whether non-person reads my posts or not is uninteresting to me
Sigh.
With the 2016 election came a ton of division. Trolls were allowed to run wild. This never really ended. Through the pandemic, insurrection and everything that's followed it's been utter and absolute chaos. Trolls with multiple handles everywhere trying to flood this clearly left-leaning board with far right ideals or purely create chaos.
The owner wasn't hearing the frustration expressed by users though, just the increased ad revenue from engagement largely driven by emotion and anger. Thus why he has let it fester. Twitter seems an extreme variation of this to me, and I foolishly thought Twitter with Elon would do something better with moderation initially
Of course bots and state's funded campaigns on internet are to be hunted because they prevent everyone's freedom but beside that people should be free to say the dumbest possible things. Whatever it hurts someone else, that's the only way to make people change their mind.
Does not apply in India, Turkey, Brazil..
Also I understand Musk's position in spirit but, IME it isn't a sustainable or beneficial approach for society
The problem is even worse than in twitter. So now the group admin isforced to close groups by requiring group admin approval.
This is clearly the best type of moderation: localized and user-driven. It is not top down.
100% everyone should have a voice. That said, harassment and abuse shouldn't be tolerated on the internet if we don't tolerate it easily out in the real world. I don't use the word troll lightly, people were getting stalked and doxxed.
,,Show to group of people except X'' is manipulative behaviour (instead of kicking out the person from the group, or in this case not sharing publicly what's not public).
On instagram I have seen a lot of these things, for example posts, stories, archived stories all have different very strange behaviours that only people to take the time to understand (more manipulative people) use, which makes people more manipulative in itself.
What you want is a list of friends that you share your posts too, but then you wouldn't need social media if you weren't talking to strangers.
> If I block someone, they no longer have access to my timeline.
Yeah and I instantly think "what if they create a new account" and your whole protection instantly fails.
Blocking is barely good enough so famous accounts dont publicly mock you with all of their followers.
Almost anything bad a restraining order seeker is trying to prevent is already illegal. Meanwhile loads of innocent people have their civil rights stripped such as right to bear arms without even a jury trial, and often after same order evicts them from their own house.
Prosecutors will sometimes force such order agreement to drop or plead charges, even when the 'victim' believes the perp is innocent and wants to be with them. There are also all the de facto orders via cps 'safety plans' that separate parents under threat of taking the children. In many case no one wants that but the often wrong cps official.
That's what the hangup is with respect to twitter's implementation of blocking, and others like it. Denying specific people read access to your otherwise public content is a bad feature, and conflating this with blocking unsolicited communications from said people (an actually good feature) is worse.
The frequently opposed argument, including by Elon Musk himself, that a user can see posts in private browsing, doesn't hold water in my opinion. 1- Because not displaying them in the newsfeed or replies statistically reduces the chances of knowing that the post exists. 2- Because one would really have to be determined to look up a person who has blocked them on Twitter and regularly check their posts. 3- Because Twitter GREATLY limits the number of tweets visible in private browsing (without being logged in), displaying the most viewed posts first, not the most recent ones. This makes it almost impossible for a blocked user to actually view the latest tweets of their blocker.
I'm not so sure that Elon Musk made the right decision.
The HN community, in most topics, is against censoring, echo chambers and that free speech doesn't mean you can say anything without being called out.
IMHO there are two impacted groups here: a) the ones who block everything and everyone that doesn't agree with them (on a public platform) b) the ones who are harassed and stalked and need to use the block as a defense
the change is bad for people in group b) - which most people can agree on. The problem with blocking is, it doesn't solve the problem (it's the equivalent of the EU's great idea of DNS blocking). There should be a system in place that actual (online) harassment can be legally pursued and prevented.
against group a), I think the change is a net-positive
You’re right it doesn’t solve the problem, but the people who experience this problem say it helps and now those people are losing that help.
> damn that's crazy. Anyway on bluesky, users have named the blocking function "the nuclear block" because it's such a powerful tool to reduce harassment and dogpiling. You should have control over your experience online.
With Twitter being the cesspool of humanity—but with a ton of variety and opinions—I don't know which is worse, so I use neither.
Is the supreme federal court's judge of the country with said population a billionaire? I had no idea.
(You wouldn't argue that Zuckerberg forced Facebook or Instagram to break Russian laws, or that Sundar Pichai forced Youtube to do the same, would you?)
But of course someone will say "he blocked it" the same way they say he's actually on the side of Russia in the Ukro-Russian war even with his massive out-of-pocket Starlink donations to Ukraine. War is peace, truth doesn't matter to these people I guess.
You lie all you want. It won't make you liked among good people. Like here, you just look like someone trying to win internet points from other dishonest people on the back of actual efforts toward freedom of speech. I don't even want to think how shit the world would be with the old Twitter still around, with their way of "steering" conversation (hard banning speak they don't like)
That they only make to „educate“ X people, but bsky followers should really see their good work.
I mean, just be on X if most of your bsky posts are really X posts.
I don't want to be abused. I just want to discuss my hobbies in peace without alt-right people showing up and telling me to kill myself.
You probably should recalibrate your senses here, or you'll never find anything "balanced".
And just stating the obvious but your feed is built by the algorithm and the defaults which it shows have little weight after you find relevant people to you to follow
How do they completely dominate mainstream media? Twitter is mainstream.
The front page is just brazen anti-Semitism and racism at this point. And no, I am not referring to some reasoned debate of the Gaza War or social issues, I mean literal memes with hook-nosed men, their captions explicitly referring to the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. I mean photos of black children with captions about low IQs. It's truly abhorrent. Open a no-follows, no-cookies Twitter account right now, and see how long it takes you to get something like this on the front page of Twitter. It won't be more than 30 seconds.
I have truly never seen anything like it. Perhaps it's old hat for some of you 4Chan types, but it's profoundly shocking to the average person. If Gen Z or their successors kill the First Amendment, it will be because Elon groomed them to think that this deluge of darkness is what free speech is all about. It is not.
Twitter is an echo chamber that offers direct financial incentives for being the most vociferous hater, the most demented racist, the most extremist politician. That's a thumb on the scales, which kills off any notion that what emerges out of Twitter is the product of open and free discourse.
Cut the melodrama. This isn’t the first time there has been racism on the Internet. MySpace and then Facebook were both loaded with it and 4chan has been there all along. The Internet in the late 2000s was far less filtered than X today.
You’re just dealing with coming down from a massive swing to extreme censorship in the 2010s so it seems scary.
For context, this is a sampling of literal front page content from Twitter, on an new account with no cookies or follows, via a VPN, from a day in late August when I ran this little experiment:
- A meme of a dark-skinned man saying 'You never wuz been judged by yo skeen cola' and a white man replying 'How are you in college?'
- 'The Mirror Test: White Babies Recognize Themselves at 15 Months, Black Children Not Until 6 Years (Science Video)', with the caption: 'I'm guessing this is what a 30 point higher IQ average does'
- A still from a Hilter speech, Nazi flag visisble in the background, caption 'the world owes this man an apology'
- An image of "Fr. Leonard Feeny" with the quote 'Having a television in your home is like having a Jew in your living room'.
- A meme of Sully from Monsters Inc. smiling, with the caption 'Mfs entering heaven when they see Adolf'
Again, I want to stress this, this is the Twitter front page. To suggest that Facebook and MySpace were suggesting content anywhere near this revolting to average accounts on Facebook or MySpace is just a lie. They were not. Did racist content exist somewhere in the dark recesses of those websites? Probably. Was it being suggested to the average person within thirty seconds of opening the equivalent to the front page? Absolutely not.
Convincing the average American that ordinary moderation of content like the above is 'extreme censorship' is how you get Americans who decide they're actually OK with that.
You have the right to say all kinds of horrible things without fear of arrest and imprisonment. This is good. The First Amendment rocks. Skokie is good precedent.
There is no logical follow-on from that that would require me to listen to, or publicise, or give equal airtime to, or care about the stupid things you say. None of that has anything to do with free speech.
Most people don't go to Twitter for racism, and yet they're getting their faces rubbed in racism every time they go, and being told that's just free speech, get used to it. The natural consequence of this is the turning of people against free speech, with deeply deleterious effects for the republic.
I don't see something particularly novel here.
So was I, sites were filled with racist shit it took a lot of work to filter out. You’re just getting hung up on the idea of a Twitter front page. If Facebook had a front page of virally shared stuff, it would have been filled with racism, conspiracies, and whatnot.
Companies usually curated their front page to avoid that kind of stuff, but nobody looks at the front page so it doesn’t really matter. The content you were exposed to as a user was filled with racism.
I take it you didn’t play video games because online gaming was also absolutely packed with people yelling and typing racist and homophobic shit. It wasn’t until many years into Xbox live that they figured out to put the people with each other based on shit talking. It wasn’t until Rocket League brought in the other platforms that they enforced people personally attacking each other.
>Convincing the average American that ordinary moderation of content like the above is 'extreme censorship' is how you get Americans who decide they're actually OK with that.
You’re trying to rewrite history. What you’re calling “ordinary” is very new. Setting aside what the “right amount” is for moderation, it’s indisputable that moderation at scale is a very recent invention. The job of “internet moderator” in 2005 didn’t exist. Now Facebook employs thousands of them and uses AI and crowdsourcing to do it at immense scale.
We have plenty of that here. A year ago I would have mailed dang, he used to block „Elders of Zion“ posters quickly.
Today it‘s clear that antisemitism that doesn‘t literally post Elders stuff is welcome on HN, and there‘s no reason to report it anymore.
Which people and which opinions? Be specific here.
Well that's a subjective statement if there ever was. Steering in to polarizing and insulating people from actual honest public discourse isn't progress.
Of course it could be bypassed but it requires effort and most harassers are in fact pretty stupid people who just happen to have an influence over a group of people as stupid as them.
No, the point is "I don't like this person for whatever reason so I don't want to see their posts".
"I don't want this person to see my public posts" can be done by making an account private, or not posting the posts publicly.
Otherwise it opens the door to trollish behavior like reply-and-block-to-prevent-retort.
To stop harassment, reach out to the platform, assuming it cares about harassment, and if it doesn't, contact law enforcement, or file a lawsuit.
but not the criteria where you _want_ other people to see your posts publicly.
aka, the ask is to allow individuals to "excommunicate" a particular user, not just blocking.
I'm glad, tho, that twitter does not allow this. I think having this feature allows for echo chambers...(tho, this is currently already true so may be it's moot...?)
It does though? That is exactly what blocking does both before and after this change.
Your wording suggests that you seem to be aware that none of these avenues actually work in the real world, which is precisely why platforms have the ability to block.
You may personally infer that, but the precise reason platforms have the ability to block someone is, "I don't like this person for whatever reason so I don't want to see their posts or replies". Maybe you don't want to see their posts or replies because you feel they are harassing. Blocking/ignoring them stops you from seeing them. It shouldn't affect anyone else's ability to see their posts or replies to you.
Honestly, in what other public, online discussion forum can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts?
Blocking is typically a much stronger remedy, aimed at curtailing targeted harassment.
In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, and live in whatever bubble you wish, but not to control others' public speech. The platform has admins who can theoretically deal with law-breaking behavior like harassment or threats or CSAM, and if they choose not to, the platform sucks and I recommend you ditch it. coughtwittercough.
I mean, Facebook and Twitter have both worked this way for years. Arguably that constitutes most of social media for the last decade.
Regardless of all your other arguments here, the change being made to twitter here does nothing to prevent that. Blocking a user still prevents them from interacting with your posts in any way. Now they can just see the post without being able to reply to it. So I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
Using a different account would work, sure, though that of course evades the block entirely, in both directions.
The point was probably moreso that the posts wouldn't show up in the blocked person's feed, they'd have to actively seek them out. That probably does make a real difference.
I rely solely on accessing the page without logging in in incognito mode. Or people screenshot/forwarding relevant links and announcements.
This and the fact that your likes are now hidden are great product changes IMO.
Sounds like they're catering to the kinds of people who would normally have gotten around blocks by using private browsing.
Hold up, how does the blocked person even know about the tweet? That should be an indication that we're not talking about reality any more.
The purpose of the block button, which Elon still doesn't understand, is to remove your posts from that person's algorithmic feed. Make it so that they don't get exposed to or notifications about your content, at least without creating a new account (not much you can do about that).
Why does that matter? Harassment. There are tons of people on Twitter, with large followings, that dunk-tweet or otherwise harass people, and in doing so end up triggering a brigade. If you've ever had the misfortune of being the victim of one of these negative engagements, you would understand how much this sucks. It destroys usability of the app as you have to wade through literally hundreds of cheap variation of middle school insults just to find any legitimate content.
You can't block the hordes of marauding masses, but if you block the key instigators, the problem goes away. They can't interact with you or subtweet you, yes, but they ALSO aren't notified of the things you say, and therefore aren't likely to spread links to your content in private group chats where this trolling behavior is organized.
You can autistically insist that akshully the block feature doesn't prevent someone from jumping through some hoops to view your tweets, but that's missing the point. It still solves a real world problem in its current form.
That would be weird, the block is there so you don't see their posts & replies, but your block shouldn't affect what they can do. Maybe other people want to see their replies, why should a third party block them from this?
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, but not to control their public speech.
Once again, Elon utterly fails to understand the service he bought.
You also can't view replies or context for individual tweets, which makes seeing one tweet next to useless.
Even if it doesn't fully block, it makes stalking etc. more annoying.
Twitter may be doing something like that already, where some old links will result in "Hmm...this page doesn't exist. Try searching for something else.", even though the same link is visible via a Nitter proxy.
This was around 50k people (it did make a noticeable difference). The unblock is broken though - I was able to unblock maybe 1k, but now it lists nothing and it's impossible to unblock any others.
As is I just do it occasionally when I see a blocked account appear in a reply.
it's optimized for engagement, so what you "like," and what keeps you there are probably not the same things. we complain about slop now, but the algos were the original slop, the future was here it just wasn't evenly distributed.
It does require some effort to curate a worthwhile feed though (and you have to be mindful to not get sucked into junk/avoid the for you tab).
I would like more controls to require unverified accounts to need approval before they can follow me (there's some low hanging fruit leveraging this sort of thing to fight back against the bots)
I would like if there was some technical or biz reasoning behind it, maybe I've just not seen it?
We know that Elon once demanded, on superbowl Sunday, "demanded that his engineers find out why" a tweet of his was underperforming relative to a tweet from Biden, and then had the algorithm modified to boost his content [0]. Would unblocking the (presumably) most blocked person on twitter be such a leap?
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/opinion/trump-elon-musk-t...
He may also want the ability to reply to things they tweet without being accused of giving himself special access.
I think they are trying to address the concerns of advertisers about constantly getting blocked causing their reach to diminish. Twitter revenue has gone down 80+% since Musk’s takeover. I don’t know, maybe, not saying “go fuck yourselves” to the advertisers might have helped more, but he do him.
In that case, i could imagine for example that this can be something done to ease a further AI feature. it is almost impossible to train an AI for content with individual customization. So if Y is blocked to see your content, that is impossible to have AI trained on your tweets and still be sure that Y can't get the content of your tweets.
What kind of decisions? Why?
The motivation seems simple: increase engagement by broadening the amount of content someone can see / be shown.
You will see what will come next and it will be clear.
If not for AI indexation, another hypothesis is something like removing the paywall needing an account to access user content or something like that.
Engagement scales with outrage. If there is a singular marker of outrage, it's in blocking.
> not for AI indexation
Why would Twitter want to help third parties train their AI on its data? Musk already has an AI venture. If there were a secret agenda around AI, it would be in reducing visibility. Not increasing it.
> removing the paywall needing an account to access user content
What paywall? The sign-in wall? Again, why would Twitter have a hidden agenda to undermine something Twitter is doing to boost user numbers?
These hypotheses are incoherent because they don't stem from any observations, but are trying to work backwards to justify the existence of a hidden agenda.
Regarding the other hypothesis related to the "sign in" wall, based on number it looks like that this wall is not working anymore to boost users as the number of users is collapsing. So there might be a plan to enlarge "page views" and so user engagement by reopening the Public view of tweets.
It's his site, they would code up whatever he asked, X is no longer design by committee. Remember when the Reddit CEO/owner/whatever was hand editing the database to alter users' comments to make it look like they posted something they hadn't?
Maybe they want to keep the code simple or ready for immediate open sourcing if desired.
It wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't so many bots.
Was he complaining about bots before he signed? Genuinely can't remember.
I can't google it for you, so from my memory , he complained that he was tricked by Twitter because a large number of users are bots , and then he promised that he will fix this issue after he get's the control. Probably bots and trolls are good for business since other social media like reddit are also making super easy to create tons of bot/troll accounts and spam the network.
How making a noise about it after the price is agreed be “an attempt to get a discount”? If anything, it was an attempt to get out of the deal.
(And if I remember correctly, the argument failed because he had been complaining about bots prior to signing. Either way, has nothing to do with discounts.)
The bot stuff was pretty transparently not a good faith argument from Musk; the real issue likely being more that the markets had gone down since the offer and what was already an overpay on day 1 was now a big overpay. The same dynamic made Twitter determined to keep the original offer: shareholders had basically demanded to take the offer to begin with, and with the down market (not to mention Musk himself publicly running the company down during his efforts to escape the deal) it was just that much more of a better deal than they could otherwise hope to get.
He signed the world's most iron-clad corporate acquisition contract you could for a price far above market rate right before the tech crash, and waived every single right to due-diligence which normal investors include, specifically for things like "oh what if the financials/users aren't what they seem?" or "what if the stock price substantially changes".
It was an utterly ludicrous agreement to sign (though far eclipsed by the the number of financial institutions which agreed to put up the money for it and are basically never going to get it back - though a bunch of the managers and executives losing their bonuses for it is kind of funny).
Citations: "Elon Musk says Twitter deal 'cannot move forward' until he has clarity on fake account numbers" [1]
"Musk was seeking information on essentially all of Twitter's account reviews and actions. Judge McCormick dubbed that request "absurdly broad," noting Twitter has already agreed to produce a "tremendous amount information.""[2]
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/17/elo...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-scores-half-win-ab...
I guarantee this move is because too many people blocked Elon.
I primarily follow entrepreneurial & fitness accounts.
Honestly X, youtube and HN satisfy just about everything I need for user generated content.
That’s some of the most disingenuous shit I’ve seen in a while.
Maybe you don’t realise they are bots?
He sees this as an antidote to cancel culture; he's allowing people to support things they agree with without society's repercussions.
He's been unblocking himself over the years, and this feels like the next logical step for him.
I think its simple... a lot of people have blocked Elon, so Elon thinks blocking is bad.
The guy has been forcing his accounts and shit takes onto everyone's timelines.
Accounts have mysteriously started following his account when they never manually did it.
Muting his account hasn't properly worked since he bought twitter.
It's literally what he's been doing it since day 1 of purchase.
Sorry if that sounds a bit rude, but I'm just baffled by people literally denying reality when it smacks them in the face repeatedly.
If you blocked Elon's account, you'll still see it on your timeline.
Not that many important people block Elon, but even if they did, Elon could just ask the team to adjust his client / account accordingly especially if it doesn't give him any special (non-public) rights
He’s missing the ability to think about his own self in context of others. So he thinks that if he’s blocked, that’s a real problem facing everyone, so it must be fixed in the name of free speech.
I do like tech platforms where the decisionmakers and stakeholders actually know and use the product. Elon candidly streaming Diablo, even for some long sessions, once a while on X is a great thing to see and I hope it is putting pressure on the team to improve streaming there even more, given the latency and layout are still a bit behind the bigger players on that even though improvements like the stream chat have been added.
- Someone that I violate my rights, attack me can block me too. - I need to sue them to stop this. - Yet I can't see the tweets that violate my rights.
If the "public" can see something, no one should be able to block some people personally.
On the other hand there are options that allow users to force the `follow` to see user's posts. Which would re-allow verification from user's perspective.
What it would do is allow Elon’s feed to show everyone, and not have holes in it from people who have blocked him.
X has two user feeds controlled by tabs at the top of the screen. The "For You" feed is the algorithm recommending high engagement posts to you. This is mostly accounts you follow but it's also highly interacted with posts. Love him or hate him, Elon's posts get massive engagement so naturally it gets recommended a lot.
Even if you have never personally engaged Elon's account, if the algorithm sees the people you follow have engaged with a post, it will be put into your "For You" feed. Same is true of posts from any user. This is not something specific to Elon.
The other feed, the "Following" tab contains content from only the people you follow. The "Following" feed is also chronological which is super nice and a rarity in today's algorithm driven social media world.
So if you're seeing random posts, chances are you're reading the algorithm feed, not your Following feed.
But not all blockees are trolls, and not all blockers are using the block to fight trolls. Some may even be using it as a form of trolling themselves.
There isn't an easy way to differentiate an abusive blockee from an abusive blocker. If there were, it would make sense to provide additional incentivize against both anti-social behaviors. But there isn't.
Invisible posts are not a good thing for the health of the platform. It's not just blocker and blockee—everything is connected.
Say you have a very large account that blocks on a whim, accumulating many thousands of blocks, and regularly interacts with posts from other large accounts. That account has hurt the capacity to have meaningful interactions, not with it but with other accounts it interacts with, by eliding chunks of context from conversations for some portion of the community that was blocked on a whim.
Obviously, if that sort of attitude were to spread wide enough, then eventually having posts hidden would make the platform become noticeably worse.
It seems that some of the most vocal opponents of post visibility for blockees are precisely from accounts that block maliciously.
Worth mentioning that having a hair trigger is not necessarily malicious. But if a hair trigger blocker really cares that their posts are hidden, then they are most likely a malicious actor—Why else would they care if their posts are visible to the non-trolls they've blocked?
I cannot think of a case where an entity decides they don’t want someone to see their tweets “maliciously”.
The ability to control who does and does not see your content seems like the bare minimum for a social media platform.
Malicious blocking is blocking a non-troll as an anti-social form of aggression.
It could be:
"I block people who disagree with me because I know it makes them angry."
or
"I block people because I get a lot of interaction, and not being able to see my posts in those interactions so that they are missing context or are forced to log into an alt will worsen people's experience, and knowing that makes me happy."
Imagine how terrible X could become if Musk had the motivation above. He would be able to significantly impact not just your interactions with him, but with a large chunk of the largest and most important accounts—because all roads lead to Musk.
Just blocking with a hair trigger, even blocking non-trolls, is not necessarily malicious. It's malicious if harm is the point of the block and not just a side-effect.
Is it really better if you are able to continue viewing “conversation” from someone who is acting maliciously towards you?
Social media is like a relationship. If either person decides they don’t want to be in the relationship, the healthiest thing is for both to leave the relationship.
It doesn’t make sense for one person to leave but the other person to stay
And there's a significant power imbalance between large and small accounts. A small account blocking a large account doesn't impart any noticeable second order effects on the large account. But a large account blocking a small account absolutely can impart negative second order effects on the small account.
(And large accounts can certainly develop a sense of self importance or arrogance that leads to liberal blocking behavior)
The problem is that it isn't just two accounts interacting. The blocker may interact with someone else you follow, or who follows you, which then elides context from conversations.
Hypothetical:
Let's say John Carmack starts a discussion about Voxel Octrees, and Jonathan Blow comments on that. And Carmack comments back, and this goes on once or twice. You also have something to say on Voxel Octrees, maybe you're working with them in your project, so you want to join the conversation.
Unfortunately, Jonathan Blow has blocked you. You don't have any desire to interact with him. You would comment on Voxel Octrees even if Blow wasn't involved. But he has inserted himself into a conversation that you want to be a part of so now parts of that conversation are missing to you, and you have to log into an alt to get the full context of what is being discussed.
Hiding the blocker's posts from the blockee doesn't just damage the ability of the blockee to interact with the blocker, but also to interact with accounts that the blocker interacts with... and accounts that interact with that interaction, and so on.
That's clearly damaging the blockee's user experience. And there's a contingent of pro-block users who want to make the block even more repressive, such as hiding content with an IP ban.
What sane subreddits have you found?
I've stayed clear from CS/IT subreddits for a long while now though.
You seem like one of these people.
You ONYL used twitter? You didnt use Reddit or Youtube? I am baffled but this makes the upset people make a bit more sense. Twitter was "theirs" so nobody else dare come in. They are the ones complaining about gatekeeping etc but treat Twitter like a chatroom and become offended when someone calls them out.
For the record, I do not have a Twitter account/phone banned. I am not in the USA. If I could vote in your elections I would vote Kamala. Just to be clear and to calm your blood pressue.
>Threads seems to be full of positivity right now.
Toxic positivity sure. ♥‿♥ YOU GO QUEEN!! SLAY!!! ♥‿♥
I may be completely off, of course, but whenever I look at Twitter (without owing an account, so can't do it properly), I see people engaged in heated cross-wing arguments. If Twitter were so right-wing, wouldn't you expect far less arguments as there wouldn't be so many people voicing the opposite viewpoint? For comparison, how many users argue left-wing opinions on TruthSocial?
Since it’s only ragebait accounts now, sometimes they falsely post that someone has deleted their account in response to the ragebaiters post about them
Its just a UX problem, rage baiters actually believe it because X makes it look like the account is gone
Just inaccurate UX
The other feature was mute. I guess that is not necessary anymore.
But then they complain that some such people might say negative things about the thing they've shouted into the void. Not csay negative things to them. That can already be prevented. Say negative things to other people.
If you're going to say something publicly, you don't get to complain about who can hear/read/see it. If you want to control your audience, speak privately.
One can create a new account anyways.
So it's never been hidden from them...
It's just a feature to reduce interactions, not keep things secret
If you don't want someone to point out your stupid takes don't make them in public.
It's usually the other way around for me. I'd rather not have every post about some game I like devolve into a culture war.
Then you should probably stop using X altogether.
I find that Twitter users somehow misunderstand this. Especially small ones that only interact with themselves, posting misinformation. See a lot of the Palestine Twitter. Then a bigger account comes and comments/corrects or spreads their OWN PUBLIC POST. Then it's an "attack". Its baffling.
Why not just "expectation that it's less convenient for other party to see your stuff"?
Are you just being ironic for the feels?
Only for prolific twitter users and only a random mishmash of 2+ year old tweets. Usually it just asks you to sign up
So what harassment are you referring to?
Also, most of the time blocking is being done by people who spew hateful or misinforming content and then immediately go private the moment they get called out. This happens every day.
This is a good change
If I genuinely don’t want someone to see my posts, I just can’t put it on Twitter/X unless I have a private profile (is that still a thing?).
Otherwise, it’s a public platform, in that anyone can register with little more than an email address and see my posts. Claiming to block someone from seeing them seems like it provides a false sense of security to users.
The things I say to a room or to people at a table are not meant for everyone at the event. The phrase context collapse came about and persists for a reason. A blocked person has been kicked out of the public local to the poster and their followers. It doesn't make sense for them to be able to continue to act like they're in the space, but just not speaking.
The fact that someone can violate the rules and norms of a space doesn't mean you don't have rules and norms.
Super low-effort harassment, where the harasser can't bother creating a new Twitter account.
The harasser can view from their new accounts and respond on their main account. Unless someone is very tightly curating their follower list, at which point it doesn't make sense for them to be publicly tweeting, there would be no indication which account was responsible.
The problem in harassment is the harassment. Not the harasser's access to the public domain.
In America we have case law that prohibits public officials from blocking their constituents from their official accounts [1]. Not every country does.
Also, that ruling doesn't cover material edge cases. Should a public figure be able to block journalists they don't like? Oil companies anyone with an environmental leaning to avoid tipping them off on something they weren't searching for?
We have a media-bubble problem in America that is increasingly defined by partisan lines. From a social utility position, clarifying that public means public strikes me as more important than edge-case harassment concerns. Particularly when the stakes are so low on both sides of the scale (due to the ease with which blocks can be circumvented and the fact that we're dealing with content the speaker has explicilty chosen to make public).
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-611_ap6c.pdf
Can’t they just make a new account to see the posts? Are you stating that you think this is the reason this is being implemented? As for the rest of your post, your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this thread.
Sure. But they may not know they've been blocked.
> you think this is the reason this is being implented?
No. I think it's being done to increase engagement. Engagement scales with outrage, and a pretty simple way to boost outrage would be by showing people stuff they've been blocked from.
> your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this argument
Not really. Blocking users from seeing your public content degrades weak relationships. My interest in what my state Senator is doing is a weak relationship; I don't think I'd be able to tell if they stopped e-mailing me for at least a full election cycle. Harassment, on the other hand, is a strong relationship. That provides circumvention motivation.
My argument is that there appear to be marginal benefits to this policy. If the cost is making unmotivated harassers' jobs a little easier, inasmuch as it pertains to them viewing (not responding to) public content, that seems to be worth it.
If someone is harassing you on twitter, then blocking them still stops that, modulo them making a new account. Stalking, in the sense of looking at your public posts, can't be stopped, because it's trivial for them to open your posts in a private window, or create a new account just for stalking (which of course they wouldn't tell you about, hence you couldn't block it). So in fact the only option you have to avoid such stalking is to make your account private, period.
But that's not what Twitter/X is, it's more akin to standing in an open access field with a megaphone. You have no right to say who should be in the field or not, and if you don't want someone to hear something, the best thing to do is not say it in the field in the first place.
Good user interfaces don't tell users things that are far from true. Even if we all wish the things could be true.
Not what Twitter was or is? You have misunderstood the site like a Facebook timeline boomer poster. "uuoooh people can see this!!!" Yes. Twitter is not your own IRC server. But seeing as it started with MacBook Starbucks hipsters, I am not surprised they just made something up in their minds and rolled with it.
I think that's the real motivation, actually.
However, if I create a list and someone on that list retweets the blocker's post, I can see it.
Clearly Twitter can't be bothered to implement blocking properly, so they've taken this step to "unblock" all content.
At least it is consistent.
Just a shoot from the hip theory based on him stooping to new lows.
Why does it matter?
If I block people in a Discord server THEY can still see what I type. Why does it matter? I have really come to understand that some Twitter users see Twitter as their own private garden somehow and do not realize that anyone can see your posts... So somehow it becomes uncomfortable when they are reminded of this fact.
An example of blockers losing value: Tesla bears were chronic blockers, even passing around blocklists. Nowadays Tesla bears seem to have lost all relevance.
People get blocked for all kinds of reasons, most of them relatively innocent.
Now I love the fediverse. Local instances mean more local news/gossip, but at the same time I can follow global interests (just saw a post from Brian Krebs, for instance) just as easily. Hashtags let me follow my interests, and comments are more constructive and perceptive because there is no reward for provoking people. I don't doom-scroll any more and I don't have to filter out advertising - I'm much more efficiently informed.
Imagine if TV or radio or newspapers could do this because they didn't like something you said or did.
This is touched on in the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas". It's just creepy and an abuse of technology.
If you want to communicate privately, then do so.
If you blocked elon's twitter, you will not see his tweets in your timeline.
But elon can still see your tweets.
I.e. of course it's possible to login with another user, find the one who blocked you, make a screenshot or something and then quote it or perform any other interaction in your main account. But it's obviously not very easy.
So I'm sure it worked as a solution to reduce negative interactions on the platform. However, Musk doesn't want reducing these, his goal is spreading chaos and forcing his narratives, so the decision totally makes sense for him.
It may be as simple as revealing blocked content is a short path to increasing outrage and thus engagement. Like, I could see Facebook doing this on Threads.
But IME, the kind of people I want to block are the exact kinds of people that would go through all that effort to keep trying to cause drama.
It shouldn't be that hard to check if an image looks like a tweet and, if it does, find out the exact match.
This is valid. I don't think it rises to the level of preventing them from seeing my public content. But perhaps a brake on their ability to repost it would be courteous.
What if you're a holocaust denier? What are you going to do? Somehow not share your belief with the world? Yes! Either that or accept the hateful responses you're bound to get if you do share it.
Don't forget this is all about public posts. Not anyone's private life or stuff they only share with people they trust. There's always going to be a Muslim somewhere who wants to kill you for being a practicing gay, or a holocaust believer who wants to punish you for disagreeing with their it-did-happen belief.
What about an ashiest who ties their belief to rejecting the identities of Christians? There's no end to what people vehemently disagree on.
By the way, you can always change your identity if you really want to. Just because you're gay doesn't mean that has to be your identity. You might primarily see yourself as a citizen of your country or what your job defines you as or your personality or religion or just simply yourself if you don't want to be part of a bigger group.
Society does not have to just let the worst people in it be as they are. Neither do platforms. Bullying and hateful abuse hurt the platform - users don't want to be subjected to it, advertisers don't want their name next to it. Blocking and other tools to reduce this vile garbage are positive things.
Communities have given death threats to college students who made bad plays in sports games. https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/ncaa-1-3-star-athletes-receive...
There's a long-established pattern linking bullying and suicide, and huge amounts of tougher-to-quantify lesser damage done. Giving people mechanisms to slow and reduce bullying makes perfect sense.
Not saying the people making death threats are innocent and of course the law should try to stop them, but often it's not powerful enough so people who don't want that unfortunately have to keep quiet or be anonymous when they want to step on the toes of death-threat-happy communities.
Again, it's not just bullying. Real world example:
* The quarterback (QB) for Miskatonic University throws an interception on the last play of the game.
* Internet members (trolls) find their Twitter handle. Trolls harass QB, insult QB, and make QB's lives miserable. They publish QB's handle on their forums where other trolls also harass QB.
* QB blocks the trolls
Which scenario is better for QB, non-trolling users, advertisers, and the world?
1. The trolls still see can follow QB and respond to everything they do. Maybe QB can't see their messages, but the trolls are free to harass QB's followers, the staff of any location QB posts to being at, and so on. They continue harassing over and over. For years and years they can see QB's posts and continue engaging.
2. The trolls cannot see QB's posts, follower lists, or engage with them. A few particularly dedicated trolls may use alt accounts but it's a tiny percentage of the original trolling and much easier to manage. They eventually get distracted with some other player who made a newer mistake and leave QB alone.
I've heard celebrities say they don't read what anyone says about them on social media. That sounds like a good idea because there's always going to be haters to any popular public figure. Just ignore them and you're fine.
3rd parties being affected? Well stop associating with the widely-hated public figre if you can't handle the heat of celebrities.
Blocking mainly prevents regular normal users from seeing tweets. Best example is Lex Fridman who's blocked a million people for no apparent reason. Say something he doesn't like: You're blocked. Never even interacted with him but commented on a topic he doesn't approve of: Blocked. You under-cook fish: Believe it or not, he blocks you.
Most X users will just post a screenshot of the tweet, breaking accessibility in the process and disassociating the original author from the thread against their will.
This isn't always a good thing, as it leads to people being surprised by crowds of strangers suddenly screaming at them and not being able to see the source of their anger.
Some people do this as a "preventative measure", so that their post still makes sense when the original tweet is deleted.
Automated blocking absolutely solved most of the problem. In the late 2010s it was common for political accounts to use scripts that went through follower graphs for their worst repliers and blocked everyone, or went through the list of people liking a certain tweet and blocked all those accounts.
They were quite fond of that approach and were happy with the outcome pre-Elon. Even if someone in the "bad group" screenshotted a tweet from their target to make fun of it, the target didn't really get bothered by it because they walled themselves well enough. The screenshotter is incentivized to not interact with their target so they don't get blocked again, and no one excited by all the dunking cared enough to go harass the target anyway.
Now as someone who found themselves in a few blockchains during peak Bernie-mania, I like the proposed change. I've been blocked by several popular accounts because of who I followed, and I will enjoy being able to reliably read someone's content even if I'm not allowed to interact.
But that means the blocking worked. Another person will now have to go to the extra effort of either finding that tweet or going directly to the profile to interact with them. And those extra steps were exactly the feature the blocking provided. It changes "click reply, type 'kill yourself you <slur> <slur>'" into "login into non-blocked account, retype part of the text from the screenshot, search, find the matching tweet, reply, type". And that's a lot of work for a quick response.
Sure, it won't stop everyone. It reduces the effects though.
I'm surprised that the platform does not do ORC on text images by default.
And it wouldn't be hard to check if a particular image looks like a tweet and, if it does, find out the exact match.
I saw someone once post about their outrage over the practice of criticizing someone on Twitter without tagging the person you're criticizing in your tweet. ("Subtweeting.") Apparently the thinking goes that if anyone anywhere says something about you, you have the right to be notified.
I think tagging someone when you're accusing them of wrongdoing is the fair thing to do, considering how quickly that sort of thing can whip others into a frenzy. I see a lot of this sort of thing, where someone will accuse someone of heinous things like pedophilia from behind a block, and by the time the person being accused understands what's going on, they're being hounded by people who get off to drama about why they haven't denied the accusations yet.
On the other hand, tagging when simply criticizing someone often feels like attention-seeking to me. I see this a lot with space stuff, where someone will offer (often completely ignorant) criticism, while pinging Musk, Bezos and/or other figures in the space discussion community.
"You can talk to me, but it's unethical to talk about me."
Either your posts are public or they're not. There's a pretty clear distinction between the two, and anyone who thinks otherwise is sorely mistaken. The risk of people re-posting your content is a natural consequence of your aspirations to be popular on social media, and we shouldn't be giving people a false sense of security.
It might have not been ideologically consistent but it was effective.
No and nobody claimed it does. Making it just a bit harder and making the other party jump through an extra hoop reduces it though. The extra friction has been implemented on many platforms and it works. Instagram adds friction in a different way, but also claims it has a positive result: https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/key-be...
You can also see people migrating to other platforms who raise the lack of search / being easily found as a feature. It's not black and white and it's not public or not. There's a whole range of how accessible your content is to parties who will attack you.
You don't want to interact with me? Fine. Then why should I still see your posts? Yes, some crazy people will go to lengths to see it anyway, but most don't and will take the hint, shrug, and go away.
Feel free to steel man and tell me why you think it's useful. I think the friction it causes is cancelled out by the effect of annoying the mostly well-meaning portion of the people who are blocked while not annoying the truly toxic users who will quickly and easily bypass it at all.
I don't tend to participate in twitter fights. A type of twitter fight that comes to mind is people who work at FAANGs being annoyed that people are criticizing their employer's agenda. I saw this against Google with AMP and with Chrome hiding the path from the address bar in a dev channel release. That isn't really coming out of a place of toxicity. The complainer doesn't really deserve to be blocked, but the FAANG employee has a right to keep their mentions and reply threads clean. For minor scuffles like these, a lighter form of blocking is nice.
If you're blocked by prolific reply guys in your circle, you regularly have to not just scroll past their censored replies at the top of the reply section, but you see other people's replies to them which compels you to switch accounts to see what dumb thing they said this time. And now you can simply reply to them on your other account.
Twitter ossified their feature set a long time ago, which is not surprising because "stick with what made us big" is a reasonable course of action. In that sense great diversity and more experimentation in different approached with Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon is generally a good thing (even though I don't really use any of them, mostly out of laziness).
> No it doesn't.
There's really no use in continuing this discussion when one party is unable/unwilling to use precise language to discuss marginal effects. Obviously I presume what you mean is that the marginal effect is too small to be relevant, but discussions with people who round that off to "No it doesn't" rarely go anywhere productive.
For example, if all they know is the app, they may even think you NEED the app to see posts, or that you CAN'T create multiple accounts on the same app because they signed up with their phone number instead of e-mail.
Just like the smallest UI hurdle blocks onboarding users, the smallest UI hurdle also stop malicious behavior.
Not every malicious user is the hacker type. Sometimes it's just someone stalking their ex-partner. The malicious user could be an elder, could be a teenager, they could be from the U.S. but they could also be from Africa.
When you consider non-English speaking countries, expertise drops tremendously because any high level information is kept behind a language barrier.
Something that less aggravates people prone to bad behavior is the right move.
Same. I’ve accidentally made it 18 years without creating a Twitter account and there’s no content compelling enough for me to want to break my streak.
You can view a single tweet, but it won't display a thread for you unless you log in.
I clicked a link to NYPDs twitter and didn’t have to AuthN. Makes sense too; every org who wanted their content to be fully available to anyone would leave if twitter mandated login
(Although they still use Facebook)
Every single public account I've visited still has the feed in non-chronological order which instantly makes it useless to me. I don't care about a post from my city government in 2019.
But everybody still calls them "tweets" because it was an amazing bit of branding.
Someone needs to analyze this as game theory and write a paper on it. It is so poorly thought out and implemented that it would be funny if reddit didn't have a monopoly on long form written discussions on a lot of topics.
BTW, you can block users that have blocked you: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/sp0zdb/how_do_i_block...
And you wouldn't notice if anyone blocked you -- that's the whole point -- but entire posts and threads could be right under your nose and hidden.
Regardless of whether it affects you or not -- it is ill conceived, does not accomplish its stated goal, and is easily abused by bad actors and thus should be heavily revised or removed.
https://help.x.com/en/safety-and-security/public-and-protect...
https://help.x.com/en/safety-and-security/how-to-make-x-priv...
(Note that, because it's always possible to create new Twitter accounts, a whitelist is the only way to prevent someone from seeing your posts.)
As per the article (emphasis mine):
> While a source at X told The Verge that the platform is making this change because people can already view posts from users who’ve blocked them when using another account or when logged out, several of us at The Verge (myself included) have noticed that X actually prevents you from viewing someone’s profile if you’re logged out.
For my part, I can see some accounts but not others, though the “rule” is not clear. Even then, on the accounts I can see they only show a dumb disjointed list of tweets ordered by popularity regardless of post date.
That being said, the shadow pool is a lot more effective at soft banning people than the block feature. I chuckle when people complain about toxicity on Twitter. You're in the shadow pool buddy.
The hatred for Elon and Twitter/X, etc took me completely off guard the same way "Kids in Cages" did. I thought, "Where is all this spitting rage for Elon coming from? I thought he was the green energy guy, SpaceX is so cool."
I'd love to know where the "Kids in Cages" OP got started and where the evacuate to Mastadon movement was popularized. I feel like it's somewhere on Reddit.
Things are 10x worse for kids at the border today, but my friend is oblivious to it since Biden came to power. I've been patiently waiting for the rage and concern to resurface.
Similarly the escape to Mastadon was like a herd thing that I had no exposure to, and I was interested in what influencer or subreddit got that ball rolling. I'd like to lurk and learn, and I feel like not knowing is a huge blind spot for me.
It was a humanitarian crisis in itself.
Is the adminstration inviting more migration or is it saying "don't come"? It's a disorganized human disaster.
Also, immigration is as low as when Trump was botching covid because Harris improved root causes in Central and South America. She helped negotiate a bill endorsed by Border Patrol that would have put 1500 more agents at the border which very much would have helped. Trump called his buddies in Congress and killed it so he could run on it instead of fixing it. He actively chose more human trafficking for his own political benefit.
Trump is a fraud.
Like I said before, I was frustrated about how things are worse NOW for kids than when the "Kids in Cages" meme was coined. Kids in Cages drove people I know nuts. I couldn't understand what they were experiencing since it wasn't in my feed. I have since been cynical about it, assuming it was an election season media stunt. I marveled at how incredibly animated people got.
The migration north to the border through central America and Mexico is itself a humanitarian disaster, right? And so of course the processing of those people at our border is going to be dehumanizing and awful. They don't book the trip for their families and let CBP know they are coming, they just show up.
The whole way the left thinks about the entire immigration subject seems mental. In my opinion, we should WANT to try to detain and separate and discover if kids are being trafficked, do some DNA tests, and not release them if they are being trafficked. Ideally, we could send them to their home country to get reunited with their families if they were taken. (That would be very expensive, I know...) If we screw up and the kids get released to traffickers or a corrupt NGO, those kids are GONE. Maybe used as slaves or chopped up for organs? Who knows? The unaccompanied minors situation is even more tragic. That is orphan train levels of tragic.
Remain in Mexico was perfect as a deterrent and worked well to curb numbers. It was awful for the migrants in-transit, which sucked. But, it was not humane for the Biden regime and NGO's to lure migrants to this country in the first place. The humane thing would be to discourage people from getting trafficked at all and stay in their home countries.
I just want to reiterate what a humanitarian disaster it was that Biden encouraged mass migration in his 2020 debates with Trump and in his campaign. That followed with all kinds of incentives and asylum guarantees once he assumed power. I find that really reprehensible, and I hope you do as well. Our globalist policies create such misery, we truly are the baddies. And the blowback to all this is mass deportation, probably just as tragic if not more so.
You brought up Covid. Covid and public health at the border was crazy. Why were we not force vaccinating migrants against covid before being released into the interior when we were simultaneously mandating vaccines for citizens? And what other diseases were we letting in, like drug-resistant tuberculosis?
Everyone of your peers gives a blank stare when I've confronted them about not vaxxing the migrants. Someone explain how that makes sense! The possible implications of those inconsistent vaxx policies just give me the willies.
So, covid and border crisis narratives don't quite gel. Clown world apparently has many managers who do not talk to one another or read each other's memos.
> Immigration is the lowest it's been since covid when no one wanted to come here.
It's an election year, silly. 1) I look askance at any stats reported in an election year, 2) OF COURSE they're going to try to make their border numbers look stellar, they own that small hell right now!
To quote our sharp-as-a-tack President whose 'gaffes' were so charming in 2019 and not senility, "C'mon man!"
> Trump called his buddies in Congress and killed it so he could run on it instead of fixing it.
Talking points, indeed! That border bill also had a $60 billion dollar poison pill for Ukraine among other turds. The D's win either way. The bill passes: they get $60 billion more death dollars for bombs for their corrupt kickback and land grab war that we're not actually the ones fighting and dying in. The bill fails: we can say the R's are against border security and reforms. The attempt was pathetic, and the outcome didn't move the needle with anyone but the base. You got snookered if you truly bought into that one.
You remind me that the D's are acting unserious and panicky this cycle. Obvious legislative stunts like that border bill. "The Switch" with Biden before the convention and him being soft coup'ed. Constantly repeating hoaxes like the "Fine People" hoax. The rehabilitation of Harris by the media, who they were dumping on a year ago, (and yet she's still somehow less popular than Biden was!) The outrageous Mar a Lago raid and all the lawfare that's backfiring. The sketchy political censorship/big tech bias firing up again. Feels bad, man.
If you're not a bot ... now you HAVE to tell me what or who first triggered you specifically with the "Kids in Cages" meme! Where did you first hear it? I need to sneak behind enemy lines to lurk and learn. Mwahahah! :D
I had fun writing all that! This is the most bonkers election season ever, very entertaining, much better than 2016.
I wonder what the D's October surprise is going to be? Better be good!
Is there any scenario where this is a good idea?
Or , they're trying to drive aways users.
Or both.
Elon has lost the thread.
Under Elon imo X has gotten a lot better, I see more content that relates to me and has since found myself using X more than all the other social media platforms combined.
Blocking content makes no sense on a platform like X, if you block me and I still want to read your posts all I have to do is to make another account and read them. This just gets rid of the friction. If I block someone I just don't want to interact with them, I still want them to see me and my friends have fun.
You do know that you shouldn't be looking at stuff it's recommending to you, right? Think of something you'd like to know more about and then look it up yourself.
that's the issue. Look at clickthrough rates and see how much one extra click can cut down on engagement. You want to de-escalate something, or at least try to.
> If I block someone I just don't want to interact with them, I still want them to see me and my friends have fun.
I agree they should have added an ignore feature as well as block. Different approaches for each individual.
Or stuff you interacted with in sort-of click bait way. That's why I'm using the block functionality so much on X. A couple of blocks a day keeps the rusobot content way. If only I could get rid of of OF girls following me or violent content in the same way, that would be great.
About $42B.
I don't think X has gotten any better, if anything it is overrun by bots and crazy conspiracy theorists now. In addition, Elon has been engaging in soft-censoring people he doesn't like while amplifying those he likes.
Indeed. According to the media and on Reddit, since Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads have collectively gained 70 bazillion users on seventeen different occasions, and have caused Twitter to collapse and disappear eleven times.
The only effective way I've found to stop seeing stuff from people I dgaf in my feed was to block them.
I was even considering creating a Github repo. with all the usernames I've been selecting out for years, so that people could easily de-shittify their Twitter feed.
The set includes (excludes?):
* the most prominent accounts that post political content; no partisan bias, they're all gone for me
* most major news accounts, including anyone that regularly posts any kind of content related to any side of any war, ever
* "science influencers" where the "science" are actually ads or some deranged guy screaming while wearing a lab coat
* Ian Miles Cheong and the Krassenstein Brothers
* hundreds of e-whores
* hundreds of "I made 1 million dollars last week" accounts
* ... and many more
gg to that
Do you see people's posts even if you don't follow them?
My "For you" page is ~95% the things described above and only ~5% things related to the accounts I follow.
This means that in the replies to a tweet, for example, they can now rank highly all the spam and culture war bullshit that people have previously blocked.
If I understood correctly, the change here is that now those hundreds of e-whores and Ian Miles Cheong will be able to see your posts. So blocking is still the right strategy for what you want (for now).
Reddit implements blocking as bidirectional, and even tells you (using coded language such as "deleted" and "unavailable") that there is a post in the thread from a person who has blocked you, and includes a permalink to that post. The permalink can be loaded in private browsing mode, and you can see the post from the person who has blocked you. (Make sure you load the Reddit front page first, otherwise Reddit assumes you're an AI harvesting spider and auto-blocks you from the site)
I agree, this is how Discord does it INSIDE SERVERS. Not sure why you are downvoted but like on Reddit and HN people just downvote what they do not like.