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Comment by crystaln | Hacker News Reader

If someone is stalking or harassing, they can just set up another account - blocking has no affect but to antagonize.

If someone is being stalked or harassed, they need to decide whether they should be posting publicly on twitter, because no amount of blocking will prevent a stalker from seeing what they post.

The only thing the victim can do with regard to twitter is:

- Stop posting publicly (post privately or don't post)

- Stop themselves from seeing the harassing messages, which this new block functionality does.

The change makes complete sense, as it doesn't deceive users into thinking blocking makes something private.

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Harassers can set up another account, but they generally don't. And not seeing the harasser's messages is not the only goal - when you force the harasser to unfollow, they don't see and harass your retweets either.

The goal isn't not to be seen - people already know about protected accounts. The goal is not to be harassed.

That's one answer, but it's not a very good one. Can we think of no better option than for people who are being harassed to 'decide whether they should be posting publicly'?

If the goal is to post publicly, but not have the harasser see those messages, then no - that's not rationally possible.

Ah, but to hell with rationality! You think it's rational for someone to reply to all of your tweets with mindless abuse, and to encourage other people to do the same?

For better or worse (I think it's for worse, which is why I don't tweet all that much), Twitter encourages rapid-fire think-before-speaking responses to things. You see something you don't like, you hit reply and boom, you've just told that person to die in a fire. Or you've just retweeted it to your small but equally annoying group of friends. The purpose of the old blocking system, in a way, was to prevent trolls[1] from seeing things that might provoke them into action.

The goal is not actually to prevent someone from seeing your messages, but to prevent someone who is logged in to an active twitter account with a >0 number of followers from seeing your tweet. That's a non-trivial difference. I started out (in my other comments) thinking that the difference really was trivial, but you actually have to think like a troll in order to understand why it isn't. Unless they really cared about harassing someone, the old-style block would probably be enough to stop most people from tweeting an insult, if only because it forces them to 'cool off' by logging out, finding the person they want to harass, and logging back in again in order to reply.

I can't shake the feeling that neither policy is really right, and there must be a more elegant solution. But, it's 1am here and I should probably get some sleep before trying to find the solution that has evaded the entire internet for 20 years.

[1] I don't use the term 'trolls' lightly. Lots of things get called 'trolling' which really aren't, but in this case I think it's valid.

That's a reasonable distinction you make. At least with the new system, the victim will not see and hopefully never know about the troll responses, perhaps discouraging the troll...

What you are missing here is that the trolls friends still show up in the original persons mentions. So rather than the troll disappearing and interacting stopping it allows the abuse to spread.

The new system put the onus on the person being abused to keep blocking, whereas the old one general just stopped it.

>>>Stop posting publicly

In other words, get off the Internet. Do you recall a fracas from several years ago when several well-known (on the Net) people harassed Scoble's wife, Kathy Sierra, and some others? Kathy was basically driven off the Net. She's only recently come back to Twitter and now this happens.

Unfortunately, getting off the internet publicly is the only choice for someone who is being harassed to that degree. That's just reality - there is nothing Twitter nor anyone else can do about it short of gestapo censorship.

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