I always thought this was a stupid restriction.
You can't view the post while authenticated but you can view the post while unauthenticated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Something that less aggravates people prone to bad behavior is the right move.