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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

they can now retweet your stuff and get their followers to mob you

Exactly so. They're now allowing the harassment to continue but unseen. I don't think people here have a thorough understanding of the naked hatred some people espouse on Twitter towards individuals. I'm constantly shocked at the abuse women I Follow get that they then RT to display it for others to see. Why don't some of you who don't think this is a big deal set up an account as a woman and start doing some pro-women tweeting? Your eyes might be opened very quickly. I'm a guy and I've had people -- OK, mainly other guys -- display sick stalking and Blocking was the way to put a stop to that. They didn't have the time or energy to manually copy/paste my tweets to keep it going. Now they don't even have that friction to deal with. They can harass people behind their back. Protecting an account has a penalty -- your tweets can't be RTed by Followers. This is the punishment of the innocent and the liberation of the guilty.

They could still post a link before. Or, IIRC (may be wrong), RT from another account and RT that.

yes, but the more tedious the ux made it to do so, the fewer people would do it

I'm skeptical of this claim. I don't think that someone bound and determined to be this kind of an asshole would really be stopped by that.

(edit: I want to stress that I'm not saying it's wrong, just that it seems rather counter-intuitive.)

think of it as a set of effort versus determination curves. every time you shift the effort curve a bunch of less-determined jerks give up. on the other hand if you shift the curve the other way and jerkery becomes as easy as pressing a button, a lot more people will give in to the casual impulse to do son.

Yeah, I get that. I'm just skeptical that it moves it much.

Personally, I liked the change; I'd like to be able to block annoying people who nevertheless RT my stuff.

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