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Comment by celdon25 | Hacker News Reader

No it doesn't. The people who are malicious about it will be using multiple accounts. The block button doesn't stop them. If anything, it provides them ammunition to go "See, this person is a sensitive one, let's add them to the list".

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.

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This is the old "it's not perfect, therefore, it's useless" type of argument. No one claimed it's perfect, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

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.

Well, Twitter's implementation is more provocative than it needs to be. It leaves "This tweet is hidden because the person blocked you" tombstones everywhere which is worse than just showing the tweet but gently disabling the reply button if you're blocked or even hiding their reply threads entirely.

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.

Tons of stuff can be improved, sure. However, in general I think this is changing things in the wrong way – there should be more control over who you interact with, rather than less.

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).

"It's not perfect, it's useless" sounds illogical, though I would first disagree with the characterization of saying that it's not perfect. You're putting words in the mouth of the opponent, straw manning, by having the opponent accept the characterization it's not perfect to be juxtaposed with the opinion that it's useless. I would say that it isn't only not perfect, it's useless.

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.

I think is the old double edged sword instead.

Nah this is a classic case of the no true perfect double-edged slippery-sloped sword of damocles being the enemy of the good no true double-edged slippery-sloped sword of damocles that shouldn't be thrown in glass houses where the chickens have come to roost.

> It's not perfect, but the friction helps prevent drive-by bad behaviour.

> 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.

> The block button doesn't stop them.

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.

Yes, because everyone knows that trolls just give up at the least amount of friction.

A large enough number of them do, which does not fix the problem completely but makes it more manageable through other strategies.

They can’t comment that’s the main point after blocking

Yes it does and I can tell that you have never been piled on by followers of large accounts. Blocks aren’t perfect but they make a huge difference.

Blocks are (were) an easy line of defense for most of the lazy trolling. People could get around it but few bothered.

It might have not been ideologically consistent but it was effective.

The way I think is this: there are infinite computer tricks you can use to do all sorts of things, but how many malicious people are also good enough with computers to know about them?

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.

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