It says a lot about the HN community that the overwhelming majority of people here seemingly emphasize with the person being blocked rather than the person doing the blocking.
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 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.
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.
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.