So if Musk is being blocked all the time, he wouldn't be able to see posts from the randos who blocked him. His posts presumably would still be hidden by those who blocked him?
"Following" is invariably better anyway, because then you're seeing the things you want to instead of the things that the algorithm suggests.
Yeah, because it didn't make any sense. All you had to do to see blocked content was to log out of Twitter.
I guarantee you that they knew this. Everyone doing anything social knows it. It's an industry standard because it's extremely effective.
It became even more difficult to see blocked content after Twitter nerfed the logged-out view of the site so you couldn't even see comment-threads.
It wasn't a perfect solution obviously but it helped. Helping is good.
I guess they could hide quote-tweets from people you follow if they responded to someone who blocked you but that has major drawbacks and is weirdly heavy handed. (Why should someone blocking me prevent me from seeing tweets from people I follow?)
I think Elon's change to the block system has the most sensible trade-offs in this example. If someone blocks you, their tweets don't show up on your feed, but you can still see them when they interact with other tweets and when people quote-tweet them. It should really just prevent interaction.
E.g. I’ve noticed cases where user A replies to user B, writes something pretending to carry on a conversation, then immediately after tweeting goes to block user B such that it looks like, to passing readers, that user B made a decision to stop responding.
Which of course, in addition to wrecking the credibility of user A and deceiving user B, slightly reduces the credibility of every other conversation chain on the site and the site itself, every time that is discovered.
Imho the right answer is just to
a) Hide the blocker's replies to the blockee in an expand-to-view mode (like Twitter's View Hidden Replies feature) so that in a large conversation the non-blocking parties are the emphasized ones.
and
b) When shown explain that the reply was hidden because the reply-er has blocked the reply-ee.
I assume they want to make blocking semi-secret so it's not showing dirty laundry all over twitter to people who aren't involved in the feud, but either way if party A and B had an argument and then one side unilaterally prevents the other from continuing it, that should made visible to the reader.
*yeah, 20 years on the internet and I still have that dog in me
Edit: And probably via other ways I haven’t heard of.
So much so, and considering it has gone uncorrected for many years, that it seems likely that’s the intended purpose of the system, to dupe naive teenagers and other susceptible groups.