But I guess the rules are different for Big Companies, coz for example, none of us can have a single letter for an app name, like X.
And AFAIK this update is already how other social media platforms like Tumblr function.
Blocks should prevent people from engaging with you by replying to your posts or messaging you directly.
The fact that social media decided to utterly change what it means was just making echo chambers worse.
If you want to shout out to people who agree with you already just send it to them directly.
But afaik it's just right click -> open in private window to see the profile as the open internet would see it. Takes a second.
It's the same on reddit. If someone replies to you and immediately blocks you (which is a bit of a funny pattern lately), you'd normally switch to logged out mode to read it.
Mobile takes this into account as well: In RedReader (for reddit), you can just use the three dot menu to view it as a not registered user.
I feel that giving users the ability to play around with this kind of hoops and tricks stirs up emotions instead of calming them down.
In general: I don't know of a single scenario where it would be wise to create a situation where logging in on a platform reduces access to its content.
Twitter allows you to send messages to your followers specifically, Facebook allows you to send it to your friends etc.
Social media is bad enough already for public discourse and the way blocks work on it just made things worse.
Reddit is arguably even worse, block is basically used to have the last word and the entire chain of comments is deleted only for you as others can continue to comment in it.
The reason why social media did this is because they were lazy and didn’t want to take responsibility for policing their userbase. But this doesn’t make a better product.
Places like Reddit shouldn’t allow you to block users at all other than from directly PMing you.
If you don’t want to participate in a public debate don’t. There shouldn’t be a tool that would allow you to decide who else participates in it.
I really don’t understand why this concept is so confusing to people this days.
They changed the rules for public accounts, so that if you block somebody they can still see your posts just not interact with them. That’s no different than somebody being able to create a second account to get past your block anyway.
Previously, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, Y can't see X's posts.
Now, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, but Y can see X's posts.
The new system changes nothing in terms of what the person doing the blocking experiences. It fixes abuses of the previous block system, where scammers, grifters and impersonators hide behind blocks to reduce the chances of being caught. It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target on a platform that has free accounts and the ability to easily switch between multiple accounts.
Apple's policy is that apps must have "The ability to block abusive users from the service." They don't say that users should be able to block other users from seeing their posts. In fact, this is also how blocks work on other platforms like Discord. If I block a user, I don't see their posts unless I click on them, they can see mine, but they can't directly ping or reply to me. Similarly with Reddit, being blocked from a subreddit makes me unable to interact with it, but lets me continue to view it.
I would have made the opposite move, adding an option for paying customers to be invisible to logged out users.
We will see how it goes, but unless you add a rule to prevent people to screenshot tweets from people who blocked them and sharing that picture to their followers, I don't see how the changes are more improvements than regression.
And to be honest, I'm not sure I really care about this change, the two person I know that were harassed on Twitter aren't using it anymore, so :/
Hopefully the platform improve thanks to this change :D
More generally, though, I agree. Twitter’s aggressive spamming of nearly every page with irrelevant posts (for example, the replies page) is a better reason to switch.
It's about adding enough friction to discourage the behavior. Human problems don't always need mathematically-perfect solutions.