I do not use The X Formerly Known As Twitter, but if I write a message that is intended to be public (regardless of what service it is on), I would intend that people I had blocked are still able to see the message (and make copies of it) if they wish; I would block them because I don't want to see their messages and I do not want to allow them to send messages to me. I would also not want the number of users who blocked someone to have an effect on moderation; if something is enough abuse to be reported that should be done separately than blocking, I think.
I've found in some communities the most caustic, snappy, and prolific commentors will block you the moment you disagree with them. The result is that everyone who disagrees with them is eventually blocked, and their snappy comments sit at the top of threads, uncontested.
Oooooooooooohhh. This is how they do that. This is absolutely rampant on Reddit and Twitter.
So many argumentative and divisive people who seem to get the last word all the time. Now I know what I'm looking at. They just answer and block. Makes me think even less of them.
It's the same on HN. If you say something controversial with a conclusion people dislike but debatable it will be disproven then downvoted. If the undesirable comment can be greyed out or the writer discredited they'll allow the comment to stand, smugly declaring a public victory.
However if it can't be disproven and you actually convince some people, it will be flagged. And maybe even some people stalk your account and bait you into getting frustrated and then getting your account nuked.
This is why 4chan etc are more intellectually honest imo as you can't nearly as easily censor or rule ban someone who makes a vile but persuasive argument.
Alone, it doesn't grant upvotes. What blocking does is silence anyone who would make a counterpoint. Sometimes a thoughtful response can clip the wings of a snappy but shallow comment. Blocking opposition prevents the interference of thoughtful comments.
i think there should be an option, where you automatically downvote a blocked user's post/comment, even without seeing it.
If that user doesn't have many people blocking them, then this will barely affect the votes. If they have tonnes of blockers, then would indicate that they probably deserved it, and the downvotes would make sense anyway.
On small sub-reddits even something like -5 votes will have a huge impact.
If you are on a bigger forum, block a few because you just don't want to see their posts. Or they are bots. Suddenly you have huge problems on small subreddits.
And I don't see a huge benefit to it. People clean up their block list maybe? But for what.
if the sub is small, then 5 blockers might be significant.
I suppose the arguments regarding the bot accounts are valid, as it allows for manipulation. Presumably reddit should be blocking bots, but of course that's wishful thinking.
How would that fix the problem ? Echo-Chambers such as Reddit exist because there is a single opinion coming out of it. It's a pool of people aligning with themselves and frying out anybody that is not following their opinion.
This would also create a tool to cast target people to oblivion.
The real question is to ask what is the real problem. I understand that an online places can be gritty because of incivilities, but a dogme is much more scarier to me than an online idiot.
Which sucks honestly. I don't have an account on Twitter and don't want to have one, but people ofter refer to Twitter threads, and it would be great to see them. Not to say about indexing
You can make alt accounts easily enough, there's no draconian "new internet" rules like forced SMS verification. I created a few for different reasons and haven't had trouble with them
> I would intend that people I had blocked are still able to see the message (and make copies of it) if they wish; I would block them because I don't want to see their messages and I do not want to allow them to send messages to me
I don't. There are different reasons to block and musk only sees the political one. On personal level I may want to have a public account for something but also don't want some person I know to see it and connect the dots that it is me. Maybe just because it's awkward or maybe be more than that
Imagine you are in an abusive relationship or just have a stalker. If you are the victim you want to escape and built relationships with other people. You create an alt with another name and block your abuser in advance so there is no way of finding out whose account it is unless you are betrayed by a friend. But now twitter will betray you. Unless you go private account and then no one talks to you.
They could use another account or no account. Remember your posts are public. If you are trying to hide from an ex or stalker posting your thoughts publicly will expose you by default. Trying to change names but keep a public friend list of contacts known to ex (and maybe stalker) is not going to turn out well.
It's true they could also create an alt, it's a weapons race
> but keep a public friend list of contacts known to ex
Well in my case I add almost no one from the other life, very selective. But me is not about abuse or anything, just trying a new thing. If I could not block certain people fully I would not use that platform for this.
I agree blocking can also be used in unseemly ways though
> On personal level I may want to have a public account for something but also don't want some person I know to see it and connect the dots that it is me.
Blocking them isn't going to help right? They might see they're blocked and wonder why and log out to see the posts. This doesn't make sense to me...
True but it's not always about personal stuff. Like if you start a new creative thing and don't want some particular friends (or whoever) to know about it.
And now imagine that you are small city governor or fire department, person who manages profile blocked certain individuals because of inappropriate messages, spam, whatever - now potentially important local news cannot be delivered to that person. Yeah, I know, I know public institutions shouldn't use and empower private platforms but this is reality we live in.
If proprietary platform like twitter being official channel for government is a dream of Musk he should give official accounts special status where blocking is disabled both ways but we know he'll never do that
Makes sense given the current financials. The way you make money in social media is to get people pissed off and arguing with each other. Preventing someone from seeing things that make them mad is just leaving money on the table that they can't afford anymore.
Going to have to agree with this. A semi-related anecdote- I spend an embarrassing amount of time on a music message board with a probably ~97% American user base. It's dedicated to a specific American band but is bizarrely active considering there has not been a UI update of note for maybe 20 years. Parts of the UI have always been frustrating but the culture within the community was palpable and a lot of people grew daily posting habits.
With the 2016 election came a ton of division. Trolls were allowed to run wild. This never really ended. Through the pandemic, insurrection and everything that's followed it's been utter and absolute chaos. Trolls with multiple handles everywhere trying to flood this clearly left-leaning board with far right ideals or purely create chaos.
The owner wasn't hearing the frustration expressed by users though, just the increased ad revenue from engagement largely driven by emotion and anger. Thus why he has let it fester. Twitter seems an extreme variation of this to me, and I foolishly thought Twitter with Elon would do something better with moderation initially
My stance on moderation is that if it is not illegal the user should block accounts posting things they don't want to see. The algorithm is designed to create an echo chamber for you and will eventually do so given the right signals.
Referring to my anecdote- how is that navigated when you have you have 100+ troll accounts with dozens handles though? User is left spending a significant portion of their time blocking accounts. On the board I mentioned there is the added issue of still being able to see blocked users get quoted by those who you don't block.
Also I understand Musk's position in spirit but, IME it isn't a sustainable or beneficial approach for society
Moderation is a double edged sword, I get Musk stance, he is just pro freedom.
Of course bots and state's funded campaigns on internet are to be hunted because they prevent everyone's freedom but beside that people should be free to say the dumbest possible things. Whatever it hurts someone else, that's the only way to make people change their mind.
I want you to read your post again, but keep in mind that the American population tends to vote around 50-50 Democrat-Republican in each election. Instead of simply assuming that you're reading posts from the other 50% who also want to have a voice, you're jumping into weird conspiracy theories.
Choose to believe what you'd like. Economist isn't reporting on this it's a silly little message board.
100% everyone should have a voice. That said, harassment and abuse shouldn't be tolerated on the internet if we don't tolerate it easily out in the real world. I don't use the word troll lightly, people were getting stalked and doxxed.
I left facebook because it became a cesspool of memes and toxic political opinions about 8 years ago, and so did everyone I know. I never used twitter but I can certainly attest that you will bleed users if you push that, and probably users with higher earning powers (more valuable to advertisers).
It looks like a reverse of a trend I have seen of people understading the details of selectively hiding information from others and using it for manipulation.
,,Show to group of people except X'' is manipulative behaviour (instead of kicking out the person from the group, or in this case not sharing publicly what's not public).
On instagram I have seen a lot of these things, for example posts, stories, archived stories all have different very strange behaviours that only people to take the time to understand (more manipulative people) use, which makes people more manipulative in itself.
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.
It says that the HN community is more rational than most? It's not about empathy, it's about common sense - you can't prevent someone from seeing your PUBLIC posts just by blocking their account... at most you can make it slightly more inconvenient.
A block function is the online equivalent of a restraining order. Imagine telling a victim of abuse that restraining orders aren’t rational. It doesn’t have to be foolproof to provide a real benefit.
In what world is reading someone's public posts online equivalent to abuse worthy of a restraining order?
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.
This just feels like a statement made without empathy for why people might seek a restraining order (side note: I hate that empathize/emphasize auto correct in my first comment, but it is too late to edit it). If they truly did more harm than good from the perspective of the people seeking the restraining order, people obviously wouldn’t pursue them. So your opinion seems to be from the perspective of the target of the restraining order.
The people seeking the restraining order are victims as well, sold a lie by the justice system and lawyers.
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.
I see what you are suggesting here, I see the same trend but I think the reason why is not the one you are implying.
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
I do not side with the person who has been blocked, but it is very obvious to me that nothing in the world would prevent them from seeing my public posts
Why? For me it's the opposite. "Public" is a label for a specific type of audience - everyone with access to my feed/timeline (as opposed to a subset like friends, followers etc). If I block someone, they no longer have access to my timeline.
In twitter "public" is not a label for a specific type of audience, it's the name of common use of a work being public/generally shared with the world. The feed/timeline you are referring sounds awfully similar to Facebook/Instagram/etc which are notorious for being walled gardens where what you say it's true.
I wasn't thinking of Meta's products, just how social networks are supposed to work. Leon trying to tweak things is just not acceptable (not to mention dangerous... blocking is there for a reason).
Who is Leon? Twitter was from the beginning a "micro-publishing platform", more akin to a newspapper with subscribers than to other social networks like Facebook.
Indeed, blocking means blocking and the person posting content must have the tools to curate who can access their content.
This is not just me saying it because it sounds logical, it's also a requirement for platforms with user generated content for various app stores, the DSA in the EU etc.
Yes, and yet it's surprising because blocked people can trigger or contribute to the harassment of a Twitter user.
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.
This is a bit like people complaining that creeps are looking at them at the gym while they are filming for their public IG. Either it's public or it's not.
I have literally never encountered this. If people (plural) are calling you a creep for what you do in the gym you might want to do some reflection on whether you're actually the one in the wrong
It's this whole weird tiktok meme. The tiktokers are the bad guys. They just go in the gym record themselves posing and to complain about anyone walking in to their shot.
I mean if sschueler wants to chime in to clarify they can. But idk if it's worth taking seriously something that is obviously some social media bait. It sounded to me like they were genuinely aggrieved by getting accused of "looking at" someone but ok.
> damn that's crazy. Anyway on bluesky, users have named the blocking function "the nuclear block" because it's such a powerful tool to reduce harassment and dogpiling. You should have control over your experience online.
There seems to be an extreme obsession with blocking, banning, censoring, demonetizing, deplatforming, firing, unbanking, un-personing. And this is from people whose opininions already completely dominate mainstream media and all of public life. This is not healthy.
There is no site more perfectly suited to turning people off the fundamental democratic value of free speech than Elon Musk's Twitter, circa 2024.
The front page is just brazen anti-Semitism and racism at this point. And no, I am not referring to some reasoned debate of the Gaza War or social issues, I mean literal memes with hook-nosed men, their captions explicitly referring to the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. I mean photos of black children with captions about low IQs. It's truly abhorrent. Open a no-follows, no-cookies Twitter account right now, and see how long it takes you to get something like this on the front page of Twitter. It won't be more than 30 seconds.
I have truly never seen anything like it. Perhaps it's old hat for some of you 4Chan types, but it's profoundly shocking to the average person. If Gen Z or their successors kill the First Amendment, it will be because Elon groomed them to think that this deluge of darkness is what free speech is all about. It is not.
Twitter is an echo chamber that offers direct financial incentives for being the most vociferous hater, the most demented racist, the most extremist politician. That's a thumb on the scales, which kills off any notion that what emerges out of Twitter is the product of open and free discourse.
>If Gen Z or their successors kill the First Amendment, it will be because Elon groomed them to think that this deluge of darkness is what free speech is all about. It is not.
Cut the melodrama. This isn’t the first time there has been racism on the Internet. MySpace and then Facebook were both loaded with it and 4chan has been there all along. The Internet in the late 2000s was far less filtered than X today.
You’re just dealing with coming down from a massive swing to extreme censorship in the 2010s so it seems scary.
Bull. You can't lie to me about ordinary Internet in the 2000s, because I was there.
For context, this is a sampling of literal front page content from Twitter, on an new account with no cookies or follows, via a VPN, from a day in late August when I ran this little experiment:
- A meme of a dark-skinned man saying 'You never wuz been judged by yo skeen cola' and a white man replying 'How are you in college?'
- 'The Mirror Test: White Babies Recognize Themselves at 15 Months, Black Children Not Until 6 Years (Science Video)', with the caption: 'I'm guessing this is what a 30 point higher IQ average does'
- A still from a Hilter speech, Nazi flag visisble in the background, caption 'the world owes this man an apology'
- An image of "Fr. Leonard Feeny" with the quote 'Having a television in your home is like having a Jew in your living room'.
- A meme of Sully from Monsters Inc. smiling, with the caption 'Mfs entering heaven when they see Adolf'
Again, I want to stress this, this is the Twitter front page. To suggest that Facebook and MySpace were suggesting content anywhere near this revolting to average accounts on Facebook or MySpace is just a lie. They were not. Did racist content exist somewhere in the dark recesses of those websites? Probably. Was it being suggested to the average person within thirty seconds of opening the equivalent to the front page? Absolutely not.
Convincing the average American that ordinary moderation of content like the above is 'extreme censorship' is how you get Americans who decide they're actually OK with that.
>Bull. You can't lie to me about ordinary Internet in the 2000s, because I was there.
So was I, sites were filled with racist shit it took a lot of work to filter out. You’re just getting hung up on the idea of a Twitter front page. If Facebook had a front page of virally shared stuff, it would have been filled with racism, conspiracies, and whatnot.
Companies usually curated their front page to avoid that kind of stuff, but nobody looks at the front page so it doesn’t really matter. The content you were exposed to as a user was filled with racism.
I take it you didn’t play video games because online gaming was also absolutely packed with people yelling and typing racist and homophobic shit. It wasn’t until many years into Xbox live that they figured out to put the people with each other based on shit talking. It wasn’t until Rocket League brought in the other platforms that they enforced people personally attacking each other.
>Convincing the average American that ordinary moderation of content like the above is 'extreme censorship' is how you get Americans who decide they're actually OK with that.
You’re trying to rewrite history. What you’re calling “ordinary” is very new. Setting aside what the “right amount” is for moderation, it’s indisputable that moderation at scale is a very recent invention. The job of “internet moderator” in 2005 didn’t exist. Now Facebook employs thousands of them and uses AI and crowdsourcing to do it at immense scale.
Before Twitter the nazis would go to the town square of Jew filled towns and march. Americans have been dealing with this for ages and found it legally tolerable.
You have the right to say all kinds of horrible things without fear of arrest and imprisonment. This is good. The First Amendment rocks. Skokie is good precedent.
There is no logical follow-on from that that would require me to listen to, or publicise, or give equal airtime to, or care about the stupid things you say. None of that has anything to do with free speech.
Most people don't go to Twitter for racism, and yet they're getting their faces rubbed in racism every time they go, and being told that's just free speech, get used to it. The natural consequence of this is the turning of people against free speech, with deeply deleterious effects for the republic.
What am I conflating? No one is required to go to Twitter. They are occasionally required to go near the town square, and they tolerate Nazis in their face even there.
Bluesky is fortunately a honeypot where crazy people all flocked to so that they could post predictions on when Twitter would collapse (highest option: 2 weeks). I think the most effective tool on bluesky is being on bluesky so no one can read what one says because you’re constantly blocking each other even though everyone’s got the same views.
Bluesky is the weirdest echo chamber of white liberal queer Americans, it feels like entering a museum or a theme park where everyone is the same, posts the same things, and agrees with each other to demonise the same things.
With Twitter being the cesspool of humanity—but with a ton of variety and opinions—I don't know which is worse, so I use neither.
That's a little unfair of a description. It comes down to who you're following, I guess. For example, something like 70% of Bluesky's content is in Portuguese.
Last I tried it, I wasn't following anyone so was sampling the public feed, and most posts were about identity politics or how bad Twitter is compared to BlueSky. An echo chamber, certainly you wouldn't find anything about Arstotzka nor Cobrastan on there right now.
Some kind of "brilliant" billionaire had put his clown shoe down and blocked Twitter's 5th largest, and conveniently predominantly Portuguese speaking population
Elon actually did everything to keep X online in Brazil, even to the point of recommending people to use VPN's after the authoritarian-seeming regime in the country forcibly blocked it, and going as far as to bully SpaceX which is an entirely separate company from X.
But of course someone will say "he blocked it" the same way they say he's actually on the side of Russia in the Ukro-Russian war even with his massive out-of-pocket Starlink donations to Ukraine. War is peace, truth doesn't matter to these people I guess.
How you think that the whole world would be fine just lying through their teeth just because some people don't like the guy for petty reasons, makes me think you really have little respect for the whole world, or little respect for being honest and truthful.
I don't care about your pots or kettles. Me and the guy are autistic enough to not really be capable of intentional lying. Which pretty much encompasses the term.
You lie all you want. It won't make you liked among good people. Like here, you just look like someone trying to win internet points from other dishonest people on the back of actual efforts toward freedom of speech. I don't even want to think how shit the world would be with the old Twitter still around, with their way of "steering" conversation (hard banning speak they don't like)
> Some kind of "brilliant" billionaire had put his clown shoe down and blocked Twitter's 5th largest, and conveniently predominantly Portuguese speaking population
Is the supreme federal court's judge of the country with said population a billionaire? I had no idea.
(You wouldn't argue that Zuckerberg forced Facebook or Instagram to break Russian laws, or that Sundar Pichai forced Youtube to do the same, would you?)
X actually has both. But I've seen people call places "cesspools" even if one from a thousand members is considered "undesirable".
You probably should recalibrate your senses here, or you'll never find anything "balanced".
And just stating the obvious but your feed is built by the algorithm and the defaults which it shows have little weight after you find relevant people to you to follow
Well that's a subjective statement if there ever was. Steering in to polarizing and insulating people from actual honest public discourse isn't progress.
I'm not on Twitter but in its current form, wouldn't a blocked user be able to see the blocker's posts just by using an incognito window or logging in as a different account?
With Twitter you would have been able to just do incognito mode. In the "X" era, following someone's posts when not logged in is pretty difficult as the profiles don't actually show their current tweets but rather a sort of random pile, maybe popular ones?, and that's only when you don't just get directed to sign in. You can see a particular message if you have a direct link to it, but you can't see or follow any threads, etc...
Using a different account would work, sure, though that of course evades the block entirely, in both directions.
The point was probably moreso that the posts wouldn't show up in the blocked person's feed, they'd have to actively seek them out. That probably does make a real difference.
The point of blocking is to prevent harassment, no? Hiding the blocker's posts from the blockee puts up an additional barrier to interaction. Even if it can be circumvented, it still requires some effort and may dissuade the person from continuing the harassment. There is a reason why this is the standard implementation for almost every social media site, and petulance has nothing to do with it.
> To stop harassment, reach out to the platform, assuming it cares about harassment, and if it doesn't, contact law enforcement, or file a lawsuit
Your wording suggests that you seem to be aware that none of these avenues actually work in the real world, which is precisely why platforms have the ability to block.
> Your wording suggests that you seem to be aware that none of these avenues actually work in the real world, which is precisely why platforms have the ability to block.
You may personally infer that, but the precise reason platforms have the ability to block someone is, "I don't like this person for whatever reason so I don't want to see their posts or replies". Maybe you don't want to see their posts or replies because you feel they are harassing. Blocking/ignoring them stops you from seeing them. It shouldn't affect anyone else's ability to see their posts or replies to you.
Honestly, in what other public, online discussion forum can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts?
Having worked at a fairly prominent social media company, that is not why social media platforms have block functionality. Mute, functionality, yes, absolutely.
Blocking is typically a much stronger remedy, aimed at curtailing targeted harassment.
Having worked with multiple online public discussion forums / media over the decades, that is precisely what blocking / muting / ignoring is for: the digital equivalent of plugging your ears. Don't want to hear an account you feel is harassing you? Good news: you don't need to! The functionality you're describing, on the other hand, opens the door to trollish abuse like reply-and-ban-responses.
In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, and live in whatever bubble you wish, but not to control others' public speech. The platform has admins who can theoretically deal with law-breaking behavior like harassment or threats or CSAM, and if they choose not to, the platform sucks and I recommend you ditch it. coughtwittercough.
> In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
Regardless of all your other arguments here, the change being made to twitter here does nothing to prevent that. Blocking a user still prevents them from interacting with your posts in any way. Now they can just see the post without being able to reply to it. So I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
> In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
I mean, Facebook and Twitter have both worked this way for years. Arguably that constitutes most of social media for the last decade.
> can be done by making an account private, or not posting the posts publicly
but not the criteria where you _want_ other people to see your posts publicly.
aka, the ask is to allow individuals to "excommunicate" a particular user, not just blocking.
I'm glad, tho, that twitter does not allow this. I think having this feature allows for echo chambers...(tho, this is currently already true so may be it's moot...?)
The point is that contacting you isn’t always needed to harass you if the opponent have enough influence (or bots under his control) to harass you with its minions.
Of course it could be bypassed but it requires effort and most harassers are in fact pretty stupid people who just happen to have an influence over a group of people as stupid as them.
I think this sounds reasonable. This is based on an anecdotal where my university page blocked me on Facebook. And for some reason everything is posted there, schedules, announcements, exam schedules, important sign-up procedures...
I rely solely on accessing the page without logging in in incognito mode. Or people screenshot/forwarding relevant links and announcements.
I commented asking them politely to rephrase in better English since it was uncomprehensible, or at least append what they intended to say in their preferred language. They didn't like it...
This is great. Some people blocked me for whatever reason but keep commenting on my posts or to responses to my post. It's so annoying to have missing messages in the middle.
This and the fact that your likes are now hidden are great product changes IMO.
About time. It was always the weirdest "block" considering you could just log out and see the posts, even giving the wrong image of the posts being publicly hidden because no other platform did that
Sure it does. Very few people are going to obsessively look over every person's twitter account using multiple logins to check and see if that account maybe posted something that is being hidden from them.
I assume it still blocks actions when someone tries to interact with the user, so the fact that they're blocked isn't a secret. It seems like more of a convenience feature for the person who got blocked (since they would otherwise need to log out), which is an odd direction to push a product.
So since abusers, stalkers, and harassers can't just log out to view the blocker's posts, X is making it so that they can view those posts without logging out or changing to an alt account. That makes it a lot more convenient for people who were already blocked for bad behavior to get mad at what someone posted.
Sounds like they're catering to the kinds of people who would normally have gotten around blocks by using private browsing.
Sure. But let's look at where we are now. If you're blocked from viewing an account, you need to switch to a different account (possibly in an incognito window rather than adding the account?) and explicitly load the tweet in question.
Hold up, how does the blocked person even know about the tweet? That should be an indication that we're not talking about reality any more.
The purpose of the block button, which Elon still doesn't understand, is to remove your posts from that person's algorithmic feed. Make it so that they don't get exposed to or notifications about your content, at least without creating a new account (not much you can do about that).
Why does that matter? Harassment. There are tons of people on Twitter, with large followings, that dunk-tweet or otherwise harass people, and in doing so end up triggering a brigade. If you've ever had the misfortune of being the victim of one of these negative engagements, you would understand how much this sucks. It destroys usability of the app as you have to wade through literally hundreds of cheap variation of middle school insults just to find any legitimate content.
You can't block the hordes of marauding masses, but if you block the key instigators, the problem goes away. They can't interact with you or subtweet you, yes, but they ALSO aren't notified of the things you say, and therefore aren't likely to spread links to your content in private group chats where this trolling behavior is organized.
You can autistically insist that akshully the block feature doesn't prevent someone from jumping through some hoops to view your tweets, but that's missing the point. It still solves a real world problem in its current form.
> I assume it still blocks actions when someone tries to interact with the user
That would be weird, the block is there so you don't see their posts & replies, but your block shouldn't affect what they can do. Maybe other people want to see their replies, why should a third party block them from this?
It would be like if IRC's /ignore function prevented someone from sending messages containing your name – weird. You should be able to block yourself off from anybody you wish, but not to control their public speech.
An alternative is to present a never ending loading screen to users who got blocked, making "access denied because someone blocked you" indistinguishable from regular infrastructure failures.
Twitter may be doing something like that already, where some old links will result in "Hmm...this page doesn't exist. Try searching for something else.", even though the same link is visible via a Nitter proxy.
Given that I can't easily the post (and certainly can't follow a thread) without a login, is it really public? It's deliberately obfuscated at the very least.
You know to look because you see a QT or reply and where the original tweet would be, there's a message about how you can't see the tweet. It's been like that forever.
In some cases yes you do. It depends on how the account is flagged, I'm not sure what the flag is, but valid links can and do return a 404 if you're not logged in.
You also can't view replies or context for individual tweets, which makes seeing one tweet next to useless.
It has. I speak from personal experience. I have multiple times experienced massive brigading from certain accounts. I blocked them and it stopped. Sure they could still find my tweets and try to instigate something, but in practice they don't. They just whine once about being blocked and move on to some other target.
I'd like to be able to unblock people. An unblock all would be nice to get back to baseline. A while back I blocked everyone that followed a specific user that kept appearing in my feed (this was prior to the musk acquisition where you can view accounts you follow explicitly which is nice).
This was around 50k people (it did make a noticeable difference). The unblock is broken though - I was able to unblock maybe 1k, but now it lists nothing and it's impossible to unblock any others.
As is I just do it occasionally when I see a blocked account appear in a reply.
Your unblocking is rate limited, just as blocking is now. They keep changing the rate limit, but at one point it was 100/day. Unblocking en masse is possible with a chrome extension but you'll have to run it multiple times over days.
when I used it instead of block lists I filtered based on emojis and that got rid of most of the noise. I left X because either I couldn't escape my filter bubble in spite of following some very diverse accounts, or people on it were really just that mid.
it's optimized for engagement, so what you "like," and what keeps you there are probably not the same things. we complain about slop now, but the algos were the original slop, the future was here it just wasn't evenly distributed.
I think X is still really great and it's even better now that you can finally pay to have no ads (and verified means verified instead of 'friends of a twitter employee'.
It does require some effort to curate a worthwhile feed though (and you have to be mindful to not get sucked into junk/avoid the for you tab).
The option to not have ads seems strictly better to me.
I would like more controls to require unverified accounts to need approval before they can follow me (there's some low hanging fruit leveraging this sort of thing to fight back against the bots)
My totally unspported hypothesis is that many, many people have blocked Elon -- I have -- and he knows that and hates it.
We know that Elon once demanded, on superbowl Sunday, "demanded that his engineers find out why" a tweet of his was underperforming relative to a tweet from Biden, and then had the algorithm modified to boost his content [0]. Would unblocking the (presumably) most blocked person on twitter be such a leap?
He may not care about the average Twitter user who blocks him. But there are likely many influential people who have blocked him (but may also be tweeting about him) and he may want to see their posts.
He may also want the ability to reply to things they tweet without being accused of giving himself special access.
I started blocking advertisers on Twitter whenever I saw an ad since Musk took over. They gradually made the blocking experience related to advertiser accounts harder. First, they started showing “upgrade to ad-free” popups when you blocked an advertiser through an ad’s context menu. Then, they removed block option from the context menu of tweets. (They later put it back under a sub menu). And finally now, they’re getting rid of the feature.
I think they are trying to address the concerns of advertisers about constantly getting blocked causing their reach to diminish. Twitter revenue has gone down 80+% since Musk’s takeover. I don’t know, maybe, not saying “go fuck yourselves” to the advertisers might have helped more, but he do him.
The closest I've seen is a single tweet from Musk that says "High time this happened." So I guess the reason is that Elon Musk wanted it to change. I kind of wonder how many accounts Musk follows that have blocked Elon Musk.
With that kind of decisions, always assume that there is a hidden agenda.
In that case, i could imagine for example that this can be something done to ease a further AI feature. it is almost impossible to train an AI for content with individual customization. So if Y is blocked to see your content, that is impossible to have AI trained on your tweets and still be sure that Y can't get the content of your tweets.
If the previous Elon/X rumors are true(a big if, perhaps), I feel like the hidden agenda here is more likely that someone blocked Musk and Musk is upset that he can no longer see the posts.
It's quite foolish to assume that they couldn't quietly code up a "God mode" for Elon's account, or assume that isn't already in place, and instead had to create a feature to roll out to 350M users where Elon had an account no different than the unwashed masses.
It's his site, they would code up whatever he asked, X is no longer design by committee. Remember when the Reddit CEO/owner/whatever was hand editing the database to alter users' comments to make it look like they posted something they hadn't?
> It's quite foolish to assume that they couldn't quietly code up a "God mode" for Elon's account, or assume that isn't already in place, and instead had to create a feature to roll out to 350M users where Elon had an account no different than the unwashed masses.
Maybe they want to keep the code simple or ready for immediate open sourcing if desired.
Idk he has at least three alts (the weird baby role play one, Adrian Dittmann, DogeDesigner). Though maybe the people who have blocked him who he wants to see also know to block those to be fair
Honestly I don't think that the few "blocked" tweets where you still can't interact with is making a real difference in term of ad monetizable engagement.
You will see what will come next and it will be clear.
If not for AI indexation, another hypothesis is something like removing the paywall needing an account to access user content or something like that.
> don't think that the few "blocked" tweets where you still can't interact with is making a real difference in term of ad monetizable engagement
Engagement scales with outrage. If there is a singular marker of outrage, it's in blocking.
> not for AI indexation
Why would Twitter want to help third parties train their AI on its data? Musk already has an AI venture. If there were a secret agenda around AI, it would be in reducing visibility. Not increasing it.
> removing the paywall needing an account to access user content
What paywall? The sign-in wall? Again, why would Twitter have a hidden agenda to undermine something Twitter is doing to boost user numbers?
These hypotheses are incoherent because they don't stem from any observations, but are trying to work backwards to justify the existence of a hidden agenda.
For the AI indexation I didn't mean to help third parties read messages, more that for Musk own AI agent to be usable by the Public and able to use or reference tweets, he wouldn't need a shit storm where you use Groq to browse content that is normally blocked to you.
Regarding the other hypothesis related to the "sign in" wall, based on number it looks like that this wall is not working anymore to boost users as the number of users is collapsing. So there might be a plan to enlarge "page views" and so user engagement by reopening the Public view of tweets.
It's the other way around: with the new change, the blockee will be able to see (but not reply to) the blocker's posts, but the blockee's posts will still be hidden from the blocker.
I am not an X user, I remember Elon making a lot of noise about bots, did Elon fixed the bot issues? Or all that noise was an attempt to get a discount.
>Was he complaining about bots before he signed? Genuinely can't remember.
I can't google it for you, so from my memory , he complained that he was tricked by Twitter because a large number of users are bots , and then he promised that he will fix this issue after he get's the control. Probably bots and trolls are good for business since other social media like reddit are also making super easy to create tons of bot/troll accounts and spam the network.
He signed the world's most iron-clad corporate acquisition contract you could for a price far above market rate right before the tech crash, and waived every single right to due-diligence which normal investors include, specifically for things like "oh what if the financials/users aren't what they seem?" or "what if the stock price substantially changes".
It was an utterly ludicrous agreement to sign (though far eclipsed by the the number of financial institutions which agreed to put up the money for it and are basically never going to get it back - though a bunch of the managers and executives losing their bonuses for it is kind of funny).
> he complained that he was tricked by Twitter because a large number of users are bots , and then he promised that he will fix this issue after he get's the control
How making a noise about it after the price is agreed be “an attempt to get a discount”? If anything, it was an attempt to get out of the deal.
(And if I remember correctly, the argument failed because he had been complaining about bots prior to signing. Either way, has nothing to do with discounts.)
Well, during that time he was trying to pull out of the deal, when he was citing the bots as an argument of why he should be able to, he was using that as leverage to try to get Twitter to agree to give him a discount: the idea being "I might be able to get out of this deal completely, but let me buy at a 20-30% discount instead and I'll go quietly." So it was kind of both an attempt to get out and an attempt to get a discount.
The bot stuff was pretty transparently not a good faith argument from Musk; the real issue likely being more that the markets had gone down since the offer and what was already an overpay on day 1 was now a big overpay. The same dynamic made Twitter determined to keep the original offer: shareholders had basically demanded to take the offer to begin with, and with the down market (not to mention Musk himself publicly running the company down during his efforts to escape the deal) it was just that much more of a better deal than they could otherwise hope to get.
IIRC he tried to back out of the deal under the premise that twitter over-represented its value by under-reporting bots. He stated something like he wanted proof of non-bot users before proceeding. When taken to court, the judge ruled he could get more info from twitter. I don't remember what came next, I think elon quietly dropped the point and the next set of rulings held him to the already signed purchase agreement.
Citations:
"Elon Musk says Twitter deal 'cannot move forward' until he has clarity on fake account numbers" [1]
"Musk was seeking information on essentially all of Twitter's account reviews and actions. Judge McCormick dubbed that request "absurdly broad," noting Twitter has already agreed to produce a "tremendous amount information.""[2]
Lots of speculation about the motive in here, but isn't the simplest answer (not necessarily the correct one) that it saves billions of DB joins per day? I don't think Elon has made a Twitter decision yet that would have made it more rather than less expensive to run.
The simplest answer is that Elon is blocked by a lot of people, as are many people whose voices he wants heard, and believes that it goes against his flavor of "free speech".
He's been unblocking himself over the years, and this feels like the next logical step for him.
I think its simple... a lot of people have blocked Elon, so Elon thinks blocking is bad.
I don't particularly care to argue about whether or not that's true, I'm just pointing out that it's not the change being discussed here, which works in the opposite direction.
That's such a silly take I can't know if you're even serious.
Not that many important people block Elon, but even if they did, Elon could just ask the team to adjust his client / account accordingly especially if it doesn't give him any special (non-public) rights
He’s missing the ability to think about his own self in context of others. So he thinks that if he’s blocked, that’s a real problem facing everyone, so it must be fixed in the name of free speech.
Even if he did ... which I don't think is true, if and when it produces positive and logical results like this, that's always good. How this worked before made little sense, and this could really as well have been fixed during the Twitter times without seeming any less on point.
I do like tech platforms where the decisionmakers and stakeholders actually know and use the product. Elon candidly streaming Diablo, even for some long sessions, once a while on X is a great thing to see and I hope it is putting pressure on the team to improve streaming there even more, given the latency and layout are still a bit behind the bigger players on that even though improvements like the stream chat have been added.
Well hang on I mean we're also excluding option 3 here: they just straight up broke the service which provided that feature somewhere between haphazardly decommissioning a data center without planning, and the mass layoffs based on code commit printouts, and now no one knows how to fix it.
On the flip side of this, they turned on the (at least at first, fictitious) view counts for the opposite reason - despite being costly to calculate accurately, they provide an ego boost.
- Someone that I violate my rights, attack me can block me too.
- I need to sue them to stop this.
- Yet I can't see the tweets that violate my rights.
If the "public" can see something, no one should be able to block some people personally.
It might be good idea for the reason that any stalker / harmful actor can already do such "espionage" - and that will more clearly align with what is physically possible to do - hence pushing the users to be more careful about their actions rather than hiding behind the tool that is only able to supposedly hide them.
On the other hand there are options that allow users to force the `follow` to see user's posts. Which would re-allow verification from user's perspective.
That's fantastic, Jason Calacanis blocked me, idk why, I think I said I didn't like one of the All In Podcasts and he didn't like that. But it's annoying because I like to see his posts.
My bet for the real reason for this is that it has been widely reported that Twitter artificially boosts Elon's account specifically. Many people noticed when they did this that his posts showed up in their feeds despite them not following his account. I bet this led to a massive wave of people blocking his account (it's as easy to block as it is to mute). And this population of users eventually got big enough for him to notice, and he wants his posts in everyone's feeds again.
Elon is not getting an artificial boost. The people reporting about Elon's posts being artificially boosted either don't know how X's features work or they are engagement-farming for clicks.
X has two user feeds controlled by tabs at the top of the screen. The "For You" feed is the algorithm recommending high engagement posts to you. This is mostly accounts you follow but it's also highly interacted with posts. Love him or hate him, Elon's posts get massive engagement so naturally it gets recommended a lot.
Even if you have never personally engaged Elon's account, if the algorithm sees the people you follow have engaged with a post, it will be put into your "For You" feed. Same is true of posts from any user. This is not something specific to Elon.
The other feed, the "Following" tab contains content from only the people you follow. The "Following" feed is also chronological which is super nice and a rarity in today's algorithm driven social media world.
So if you're seeing random posts, chances are you're reading the algorithm feed, not your Following feed.
That's false, Elon Musk is a "topic of interest" on Twitter, and he is added by default to all Twitter accounts. To remove the tweets boosted by Elon Musk's algorithm, I had to click "Not interested" and then "Not interested in the topic Elon Musk," knowing that the other topics are all much more general (politics, technology, sports, news, entertainment...).
For those who say it (doesn't) make(s) sense; in either case, bear in mind that if you log out or use a different account - you can see those Twitter posts anyways.
I think this keeps things open because if they can see your stuff but cannot comment or repost it served the purpose, in fact it will lessen the chance that person needs to switch accounts because they can already do half the things(see post) without switching. If they have to switch accounts to look at your posts, they will also surely be easy to comment and repost your tweets to their mobs. This is overall plus
I think it's getting lost that this isn't a one-way street. For trolls, putting additional barriers in their way is a good thing.
But not all blockees are trolls, and not all blockers are using the block to fight trolls. Some may even be using it as a form of trolling themselves.
There isn't an easy way to differentiate an abusive blockee from an abusive blocker. If there were, it would make sense to provide additional incentivize against both anti-social behaviors. But there isn't.
Invisible posts are not a good thing for the health of the platform. It's not just blocker and blockee—everything is connected.
Say you have a very large account that blocks on a whim, accumulating many thousands of blocks, and regularly interacts with posts from other large accounts. That account has hurt the capacity to have meaningful interactions, not with it but with other accounts it interacts with, by eliding chunks of context from conversations for some portion of the community that was blocked on a whim.
Obviously, if that sort of attitude were to spread wide enough, then eventually having posts hidden would make the platform become noticeably worse.
It seems that some of the most vocal opponents of post visibility for blockees are precisely from accounts that block maliciously.
Worth mentioning that having a hair trigger is not necessarily malicious. But if a hair trigger blocker really cares that their posts are hidden, then they are most likely a malicious actor—Why else would they care if their posts are visible to the non-trolls they've blocked?
You can precisely control "your content" with subscriptions. Otherwise, "your content" is intermingled with everyone else's. Content is probably the wrong word. Conversation is a better one.
Malicious blocking is blocking a non-troll as an anti-social form of aggression.
It could be:
"I block people who disagree with me because I know it makes them angry."
or
"I block people because I get a lot of interaction, and not being able to see my posts in those interactions so that they are missing context or are forced to log into an alt will worsen people's experience, and knowing that makes me happy."
Imagine how terrible X could become if Musk had the motivation above. He would be able to significantly impact not just your interactions with him, but with a large chunk of the largest and most important accounts—because all roads lead to Musk.
Just blocking with a hair trigger, even blocking non-trolls, is not necessarily malicious. It's malicious if harm is the point of the block and not just a side-effect.
So malicious blocking is when the one doing the blocking is trolling?
Is it really better if you are able to continue viewing “conversation” from someone who is acting maliciously towards you?
Social media is like a relationship. If either person decides they don’t want to be in the relationship, the healthiest thing is for both to leave the relationship.
It doesn’t make sense for one person to leave but the other person to stay
Well, I don't think it's a good analogy in a few ways. It's probably closer to a restraining order than a breakup, even though that analogy isn't perfect either.
And there's a significant power imbalance between large and small accounts. A small account blocking a large account doesn't impart any noticeable second order effects on the large account. But a large account blocking a small account absolutely can impart negative second order effects on the small account.
(And large accounts can certainly develop a sense of self importance or arrogance that leads to liberal blocking behavior)
The problem is that it isn't just two accounts interacting. The blocker may interact with someone else you follow, or who follows you, which then elides context from conversations.
Hypothetical:
Let's say John Carmack starts a discussion about Voxel Octrees, and Jonathan Blow comments on that. And Carmack comments back, and this goes on once or twice. You also have something to say on Voxel Octrees, maybe you're working with them in your project, so you want to join the conversation.
Unfortunately, Jonathan Blow has blocked you. You don't have any desire to interact with him. You would comment on Voxel Octrees even if Blow wasn't involved. But he has inserted himself into a conversation that you want to be a part of so now parts of that conversation are missing to you, and you have to log into an alt to get the full context of what is being discussed.
Hiding the blocker's posts from the blockee doesn't just damage the ability of the blockee to interact with the blocker, but also to interact with accounts that the blocker interacts with... and accounts that interact with that interaction, and so on.
That's clearly damaging the blockee's user experience. And there's a contingent of pro-block users who want to make the block even more repressive, such as hiding content with an IP ban.
I have no idea who that is, but Twitter/X increasingly sounds like it's degenerated into a schoolyard (where the richest kid asked his dad to buy the land next to the school building and put up a private playground for him).
This whole X debacle has fragmented the microblogging universe which is actually a good thing. TruthSocial and X have become right-wing staples. Threads seems to be full of positivity right now. Mastodon for the techies and niche communities. I've actually started exploring other sane places of community gathering like Reddit and oddly enough YouTube comments. As Karpathy recently commented, the YouTube comments section somehow became non-toxic overnight.
I think most people commenting on YT have realized that only positivity gets visibility. Pick any video that has decent view count and you will see the first few comments saying "I just want to say, this video is so amazing" or "Wow you have put in so much work in making this video". Then the creator would like those comments and they stay at the top.
A lot of the time those look like bot comments that don't really say anything and could work for any video. Still much better than the bots that just copy a comment from someone else.
My local city's subreddit is just full of people sharing interesting things. It's the first thing I actually look forward to reading. I'm in a number of tech subreddits and personal hobby ones that are all just full of signal vs. noise/toxicity
I have really come to understand that some Twitter users see Twitter as their own private garden somehow and do not realize that anyone can see your posts... So somehow it becomes uncomfortable when they are reminded of this fact.
You seem like one of these people.
You ONYL used twitter? You didnt use Reddit or Youtube? I am baffled but this makes the upset people make a bit more sense. Twitter was "theirs" so nobody else dare come in. They are the ones complaining about gatekeeping etc but treat Twitter like a chatroom and become offended when someone calls them out.
For the record, I do not have a Twitter account/phone banned. I am not in the USA. If I could vote in your elections I would vote Kamala. Just to be clear and to calm your blood pressue.
>Threads seems to be full of positivity right now.
Toxic positivity sure. ♥‿♥ YOU GO QUEEN!! SLAY!!! ♥‿♥
And would you care to document for posterity when was that last time? I think the change in YouTube comments happened some 7-8 years ago, so 2017 or so.
Ironically the current spam trend is for bots to post very vague and effusive positive comments "Wow, you're such an inspiration" to try to get clicks on their profiles. I think the only real hateful bot trend was lengthy religious screeds maybe 2-3 years ago. Nowadays the religious spam is either more positive or apocalyptic I would say. There's plenty of people who post lots of hateful material, but since it's generally at least germane I assume it's at most trivially automated?
For me, the last time I saw it was last week. Prior to that, probably the week before. It's definitely gotten better over the last 2-3 years, but it's certainly not perfect.
> TruthSocial and X have become right-wing staples.
I may be completely off, of course, but whenever I look at Twitter (without owing an account, so can't do it properly), I see people engaged in heated cross-wing arguments. If Twitter were so right-wing, wouldn't you expect far less arguments as there wouldn't be so many people voicing the opposite viewpoint? For comparison, how many users argue left-wing opinions on TruthSocial?
Since it’s only ragebait accounts now, sometimes they falsely post that someone has deleted their account in response to the ragebaiters post about them
Its just a UX problem, rage baiters actually believe it because X makes it look like the account is gone
I was always surprised why it isn't the case. I mean, if I can see the messages without login, why "blocking" would suddenly hide them with the login? That makes zero sense.
Good. They can see them anyways by logging out. I can understand blocking their ability to post on your post but I think they should be able to see your posts and quote them on their own profile.
That should be OK so long as they don't get to respond to those posts or link to them, and that should include posts they are referenced in or embedded in.
Retweeted posts also seems too far. That person could be agreeing or criticizing them, but you can't comment on it? That means any dissenters can just not comment on your posts.
People like X because they can just start shouting into the void and people who care what they have to say might hear it and actually start listening to them on purpose.
But then they complain that some such people might say negative things about the thing they've shouted into the void. Not csay negative things to them. That can already be prevented. Say negative things to other people.
If you're going to say something publicly, you don't get to complain about who can hear/read/see it. If you want to control your audience, speak privately.
Sounds entirely reasonable. You post something in public it is public. Blocking direct interaction is fine, but any expectation that other party cannot see your stuff is just insane. Only absolutely clueless or stupid should have believed that.
If you don't want someone to point out your stupid takes don't make them in public.
Oh don't worry, I never commented on the platform. But when it's still the most popular place for indie devs to talk about their stuff I'm still reluctantly forced to at browse around.
I find that Twitter users somehow misunderstand this. Especially small ones that only interact with themselves, posting misinformation. See a lot of the Palestine Twitter. Then a bigger account comes and comments/corrects or spreads their OWN PUBLIC POST. Then it's an "attack". Its baffling.
Hiding your posts from abusers is a legitimate use case because most people (emphasis on most) won't bother to go on private browsing every day just to be annoying.
There's an argument here that the previous blocking behavior might give users a false sense of security. In reality, you should not post any information publicly that you wouldn't want someone in particular to read, even if you've blocked that person.
I don't think anyone was ever confused about that. It's about choosing who you interact with and who interacts with you, same in many other areas in life.
Private browsing doesn't work because Twitter basically requires users to be logged in to see anything. So it really requires having a separate burner Twitter account you'd use to follow people who've blocked you on your main. It's a decent bit of extra effort that also requires a second phone number at this point.
Ideally blocking an account should block every account sharing that phone number (though it shouldn't tell you about the other accounts being blocked, since that would deanonymize which accounts share a phone number).
I don't understand. Having someone blocked prevents them from interacting with you, no?
So what harassment are you referring to?
Also, most of the time blocking is being done by people who spew hateful or misinforming content and then immediately go private the moment they get called out. This happens every day.
Musk is right on this one. It wasn’t serving any real purpose to let me selectively block other people from _seeing_ my posts (but _interacting_ does make sense).
If I genuinely don’t want someone to see my posts, I just can’t put it on Twitter/X unless I have a private profile (is that still a thing?).
Otherwise, it’s a public platform, in that anyone can register with little more than an email address and see my posts. Claiming to block someone from seeing them seems like it provides a false sense of security to users.
Twitter itself recognized there are levels of public early on. The original site was every post in one timeline.
The things I say to a room or to people at a table are not meant for everyone at the event. The phrase context collapse came about and persists for a reason. A blocked person has been kicked out of the public local to the poster and their followers. It doesn't make sense for them to be able to continue to act like they're in the space, but just not speaking.
The fact that someone can violate the rules and norms of a space doesn't mean you don't have rules and norms.
I agree if getting a seat at the table requires some vetting, but if something is being shouted publicly into a megaphone your analogy doesn't work. If something is so public that a logged out user can see it, it's weird of a logged in account to not see it.
"Can be seen by anyone in the world except for tom because fuck tom" isn't a different "level of public", it's just caprice. As the GP mentioned, if you want to restrict who can see your tweets, set your account to private.
Maybe caprice except in the exceedingly common instances where someone is the target of harassment. I mean this is the obvious example, there are others. In that case "make your profile private if you dont want to be harassed/stalked" is not really that palatable.
> In that case "make your profile private if you don't want to be harassed/stalked" is not really that palatable.
If someone is harassing you on twitter, then blocking them still stops that, modulo them making a new account. Stalking, in the sense of looking at your public posts, can't be stopped, because it's trivial for them to open your posts in a private window, or create a new account just for stalking (which of course they wouldn't tell you about, hence you couldn't block it). So in fact the only option you have to avoid such stalking is to make your account private, period.
It’s an additional barrier. It also provides the blocking user the ability to block the new account. This isn’t very difficult to think through. And if it’s so easy, why the need for this new “feature” to begin with?
> also provides the blocking user the ability to block the new account. This isn’t very difficult to think through
The harasser can view from their new accounts and respond on their main account. Unless someone is very tightly curating their follower list, at which point it doesn't make sense for them to be publicly tweeting, there would be no indication which account was responsible.
The problem in harassment is the harassment. Not the harasser's access to the public domain.
Again, then why the need for this feature if it is so easy to get around a block? A harasser can do many things, but removing a barrier for the person being harassed to mitigate it because… reasons feels very odd to me. Can you explain what this new feature provides legitimate users that doesn’t already exist?
> Can you explain what this new feature provides legitimate users that doesn’t already exist?
In America we have case law that prohibits public officials from blocking their constituents from their official accounts [1]. Not every country does.
Also, that ruling doesn't cover material edge cases. Should a public figure be able to block journalists they don't like? Oil companies anyone with an environmental leaning to avoid tipping them off on something they weren't searching for?
We have a media-bubble problem in America that is increasingly defined by partisan lines. From a social utility position, clarifying that public means public strikes me as more important than edge-case harassment concerns. Particularly when the stakes are so low on both sides of the scale (due to the ease with which blocks can be circumvented and the fact that we're dealing with content the speaker has explicilty chosen to make public).
> In America we have case law that prohibits public officials from blocking their constituents from their official accounts [1].
Can’t they just make a new account to see the posts? Are you stating that you think this is the reason this is being implemented? As for the rest of your post, your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this thread.
> Can’t they just make a new account to see the posts?
Sure. But they may not know they've been blocked.
> you think this is the reason this is being implented?
No. I think it's being done to increase engagement. Engagement scales with outrage, and a pretty simple way to boost outrage would be by showing people stuff they've been blocked from.
> your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this argument
Not really. Blocking users from seeing your public content degrades weak relationships. My interest in what my state Senator is doing is a weak relationship; I don't think I'd be able to tell if they stopped e-mailing me for at least a full election cycle. Harassment, on the other hand, is a strong relationship. That provides circumvention motivation.
My argument is that there appear to be marginal benefits to this policy. If the cost is making unmotivated harassers' jobs a little easier, inasmuch as it pertains to them viewing (not responding to) public content, that seems to be worth it.
> The things I say to a room or to people at a table are not meant for everyone at the event.
But that's not what Twitter/X is, it's more akin to standing in an open access field with a megaphone. You have no right to say who should be in the field or not, and if you don't want someone to hear something, the best thing to do is not say it in the field in the first place.
It's bad UX. Telling people that blocked users can't see your posts mislead them, because all that's needed for as blocked user is to open a window in incognito mode.
Good user interfaces don't tell users things that are far from true. Even if we all wish the things could be true.
>The things I say to a room or to people at a table are not meant for everyone at the event.
Not what Twitter was or is? You have misunderstood the site like a Facebook timeline boomer poster. "uuoooh people can see this!!!" Yes. Twitter is not your own IRC server. But seeing as it started with MacBook Starbucks hipsters, I am not surprised they just made something up in their minds and rolled with it.
This is just one more example of Twitter going out of their way to work against the best interests of their users. As twitter continues to treat its userbase like a controlling/abusive spouse I hope more and more people realize that they deserve better and leave.
I moved to the fediverse (a Mastodon instance) over a year ago. I found it less exciting at first, before realising that Twitter was only exciting because I could get outraged at the a*holes it insisted on exposing me to.
Now I love the fediverse. Local instances mean more local news/gossip, but at the same time I can follow global interests (just saw a post from Brian Krebs, for instance) just as easily. Hashtags let me follow my interests, and comments are more constructive and perceptive because there is no reward for provoking people. I don't doom-scroll any more and I don't have to filter out advertising - I'm much more efficiently informed.
>This is just one more example of Twitter going out of their way to work against the best interests of their users.
Why does it matter?
If I block people in a Discord server THEY can still see what I type. Why does it matter? I have really come to understand that some Twitter users see Twitter as their own private garden somehow and do not realize that anyone can see your posts... So somehow it becomes uncomfortable when they are reminded of this fact.
If I had a Twitter account and blocked someone, it would be with the intention of devaluing the service for them. Someone who was awful enough that I bothered blocking them would devalue my service if they could keep annoying me.
An example of blockers losing value: Tesla bears were chronic blockers, even passing around blocklists. Nowadays Tesla bears seem to have lost all relevance.
I also thought that it was weird but I still remain neutral about it. Pros could be that it helps to psychologically dislodge toxic people from you if you can make them unable to read your replies. It also moves the power a bit more to the content writer versus the reader, suddenly the reader has an extra incentive not to spam or annoy the writer. On the other hand it seems like a lot of people used this feature mostly just on people they personally disagree with and this might have been a huge reason why people became so isolated in their social bubbles.
We do have a real problem in our society which is that we increasingly have differing morals and ignoring those differences isn't really a good thing, it's more like a ceasefire situation.
It provides friction for further misbehaving. Imagine you blocked someone who has serious issues with people who #foobar. It's better for you if they can't easily find you and repost your content to their community who also hate #foobar. It's not perfect, but the friction helps prevent drive-by bad behaviour.
No it doesn't. The people who are malicious about it will be using multiple accounts. The block button doesn't stop them. If anything, it provides them ammunition to go "See, this person is a sensitive one, let's add them to the list".
Either your posts are public or they're not. There's a pretty clear distinction between the two, and anyone who thinks otherwise is sorely mistaken. The risk of people re-posting your content is a natural consequence of your aspirations to be popular on social media, and we shouldn't be giving people a false sense of security.
This is the old "it's not perfect, therefore, it's useless" type of argument. No one claimed it's perfect, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
You don't want to interact with me? Fine. Then why should I still see your posts? Yes, some crazy people will go to lengths to see it anyway, but most don't and will take the hint, shrug, and go away.
Well, Twitter's implementation is more provocative than it needs to be. It leaves "This tweet is hidden because the person blocked you" tombstones everywhere which is worse than just showing the tweet but gently disabling the reply button if you're blocked or even hiding their reply threads entirely.
If you're blocked by prolific reply guys in your circle, you regularly have to not just scroll past their censored replies at the top of the reply section, but you see other people's replies to them which compels you to switch accounts to see what dumb thing they said this time. And now you can simply reply to them on your other account.
Tons of stuff can be improved, sure. However, in general I think this is changing things in the wrong way – there should be more control over who you interact with, rather than less.
Twitter ossified their feature set a long time ago, which is not surprising because "stick with what made us big" is a reasonable course of action. In that sense great diversity and more experimentation in different approached with Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon is generally a good thing (even though I don't really use any of them, mostly out of laziness).
"It's not perfect, it's useless" sounds illogical, though I would first disagree with the characterization of saying that it's not perfect. You're putting words in the mouth of the opponent, straw manning, by having the opponent accept the characterization it's not perfect to be juxtaposed with the opinion that it's useless. I would say that it isn't only not perfect, it's useless.
Feel free to steel man and tell me why you think it's useful. I think the friction it causes is cancelled out by the effect of annoying the mostly well-meaning portion of the people who are blocked while not annoying the truly toxic users who will quickly and easily bypass it at all.
I don't tend to participate in twitter fights. A type of twitter fight that comes to mind is people who work at FAANGs being annoyed that people are criticizing their employer's agenda. I saw this against Google with AMP and with Chrome hiding the path from the address bar in a dev channel release. That isn't really coming out of a place of toxicity. The complainer doesn't really deserve to be blocked, but the FAANG employee has a right to keep their mentions and reply threads clean. For minor scuffles like these, a lighter form of blocking is nice.
Nah this is a classic case of the no true perfect double-edged slippery-sloped sword of damocles being the enemy of the good no true double-edged slippery-sloped sword of damocles that shouldn't be thrown in glass houses where the chickens have come to roost.
> It's not perfect, but the friction helps prevent drive-by bad behaviour.
> No it doesn't.
There's really no use in continuing this discussion when one party is unable/unwilling to use precise language to discuss marginal effects. Obviously I presume what you mean is that the marginal effect is too small to be relevant, but discussions with people who round that off to "No it doesn't" rarely go anywhere productive.
No and nobody claimed it does. Making it just a bit harder and making the other party jump through an extra hoop reduces it though. The extra friction has been implemented on many platforms and it works. Instagram adds friction in a different way, but also claims it has a positive result: https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/key-be...
You can also see people migrating to other platforms who raise the lack of search / being easily found as a feature. It's not black and white and it's not public or not. There's a whole range of how accessible your content is to parties who will attack you.
The way I think is this: there are infinite computer tricks you can use to do all sorts of things, but how many malicious people are also good enough with computers to know about them?
For example, if all they know is the app, they may even think you NEED the app to see posts, or that you CAN'T create multiple accounts on the same app because they signed up with their phone number instead of e-mail.
Just like the smallest UI hurdle blocks onboarding users, the smallest UI hurdle also stop malicious behavior.
Not every malicious user is the hacker type. Sometimes it's just someone stalking their ex-partner. The malicious user could be an elder, could be a teenager, they could be from the U.S. but they could also be from Africa.
When you consider non-English speaking countries, expertise drops tremendously because any high level information is kept behind a language barrier.
> repost your content to their community who also hate #foobar
This is valid. I don't think it rises to the level of preventing them from seeing my public content. But perhaps a brake on their ability to repost it would be courteous.
How about if you're publicly saying things that offend a whole community, take personal responsibility for that and accept whatever offensive things they say about you in response. People have this dumb idea that everyone else should respect them for what they say in public but they have the right to disrespect others. If you can't handle that, stop saying inflammatory things to the whole world.
There's a long-established pattern linking bullying and suicide, and huge amounts of tougher-to-quantify lesser damage done. Giving people mechanisms to slow and reduce bullying makes perfect sense.
I'm not talking about bullying, where the person being offended is the only one who suffers from it, but rather things like saying "X is false" which offends believers of X and they retaliate with insults. Yes, people get angry when you offend them or even just disagree with them. If you don't want to cause that, don't offend them. Unfortunately a lot of people are so arrogant about their own beliefs, they feel they have the right to both offend people who disagree and be protected from being offended in response.
Not saying the people making death threats are innocent and of course the law should try to stop them, but often it's not powerful enough so people who don't want that unfortunately have to keep quiet or be anonymous when they want to step on the toes of death-threat-happy communities.
This just means that the only people who will post on your platform are toxic. Users don't want that. Advertisers don't want that. Instead, we can build tools to make life harder for the toxic users to discourage them and reduce their impact.
Again, it's not just bullying. Real world example:
* The quarterback (QB) for Miskatonic University throws an interception on the last play of the game.
* Internet members (trolls) find their Twitter handle. Trolls harass QB, insult QB, and make QB's lives miserable. They publish QB's handle on their forums where other trolls also harass QB.
* QB blocks the trolls
Which scenario is better for QB, non-trolling users, advertisers, and the world?
1. The trolls still see can follow QB and respond to everything they do. Maybe QB can't see their messages, but the trolls are free to harass QB's followers, the staff of any location QB posts to being at, and so on. They continue harassing over and over. For years and years they can see QB's posts and continue engaging.
2. The trolls cannot see QB's posts, follower lists, or engage with them. A few particularly dedicated trolls may use alt accounts but it's a tiny percentage of the original trolling and much easier to manage. They eventually get distracted with some other player who made a newer mistake and leave QB alone.
1. is better because in general because nobody actually knows who's a all-bad troll and who's a worthwhile activist. Least of all the person being criticized. QB himself isn't hurt after he blocks them and can carry on with his life as if it's not happening.
I've heard celebrities say they don't read what anyone says about them on social media. That sounds like a good idea because there's always going to be haters to any popular public figure. Just ignore them and you're fine.
3rd parties being affected? Well stop associating with the widely-hated public figre if you can't handle the heat of celebrities.
Yes and yes. It's called picking your battles. If you're not equipped to stand up for yourself or have anyone else do that for you, you're going to get hurt when you insult someone else's beliefs they they've linked to their identity or even their purpose in life.
Stop publicizing it to the whole world, yes. The world is chock full of homophobic people and some of them are going to see it if you share it with all of them.
What if you're a holocaust denier? What are you going to do? Somehow not share your belief with the world? Yes! Either that or accept the hateful responses you're bound to get if you do share it.
Don't forget this is all about public posts. Not anyone's private life or stuff they only share with people they trust. There's always going to be a Muslim somewhere who wants to kill you for being a practicing gay, or a holocaust believer who wants to punish you for disagreeing with their it-did-happen belief.
What about an ashiest who ties their belief to rejecting the identities of Christians? There's no end to what people vehemently disagree on.
By the way, you can always change your identity if you really want to. Just because you're gay doesn't mean that has to be your identity. You might primarily see yourself as a citizen of your country or what your job defines you as or your personality or religion or just simply yourself if you don't want to be part of a bigger group.
Society does not have to just let the worst people in it be as they are. Neither do platforms. Bullying and hateful abuse hurt the platform - users don't want to be subjected to it, advertisers don't want their name next to it. Blocking and other tools to reduce this vile garbage are positive things.
Who are these worst people and who made you the judge? Is it holocaust deniers? Gays? Muslims? Christians? Vegans? Humans are diverse and contradictory in their deeply held beliefs about right and wrong. What about climate change deniers? They get blocked without saying anything vile - just disagreement.
Not at all. I do think people should share their beliefs even when other people don't like them, and other people should be tolerant of that. But the reality is some of those other people will try to hurt you for expressing a belief they don't agree with.
It's the opposite. People with serious issues (i.e. stalkers, trolls etc.) will continue following on a second account or proxy. Meanwhile regular accounts with legitimate criticisms (for example pointing out misinformation, calling out bias, and so on) get blocked by bad actors and those will not find them anymore and repost because they don't invest time in it.
Blocking mainly prevents regular normal users from seeing tweets. Best example is Lex Fridman who's blocked a million people for no apparent reason. Say something he doesn't like: You're blocked. Never even interacted with him but commented on a topic he doesn't approve of: Blocked. You under-cook fish: Believe it or not, he blocks you.
Not to mention people attempting to slander others behind a block (so the person being slandered has no idea until the damage is already done), or temporarily unblocking to say something to someone, and then blocking again.
> Not to mention people attempting to slander others behind a block (so the person being slandered has no idea until the damage is already done)
I saw someone once post about their outrage over the practice of criticizing someone on Twitter without tagging the person you're criticizing in your tweet. ("Subtweeting.") Apparently the thinking goes that if anyone anywhere says something about you, you have the right to be notified.
I'd argue that it really depends on the kind of criticism. What I had in mind was more along the lines of accusing someone of wrongdoing rather than just criticizing them.
I think tagging someone when you're accusing them of wrongdoing is the fair thing to do, considering how quickly that sort of thing can whip others into a frenzy. I see a lot of this sort of thing, where someone will accuse someone of heinous things like pedophilia from behind a block, and by the time the person being accused understands what's going on, they're being hounded by people who get off to drama about why they haven't denied the accusations yet.
On the other hand, tagging when simply criticizing someone often feels like attention-seeking to me. I see this a lot with space stuff, where someone will offer (often completely ignorant) criticism, while pinging Musk, Bezos and/or other figures in the space discussion community.
It's kind of the opposite of this quote from Christian Bale: If you have a problem with me, text me. And if you don't have my number, you don't know me well enough to have a problem with me.
If it's one tweet that's blocked, is there really much damage/slander? If people actually start talking about it then the affected person will get notified anyway from one of the non-blocked accounts responding.
Blocking doesn't really fix the brigading problem, regardless of whether people need to log out or not.
Most X users will just post a screenshot of the tweet, breaking accessibility in the process and disassociating the original author from the thread against their will.
This isn't always a good thing, as it leads to people being surprised by crowds of strangers suddenly screaming at them and not being able to see the source of their anger.
Some people do this as a "preventative measure", so that their post still makes sense when the original tweet is deleted.
> Blocking doesn't really fix the brigading problem
Automated blocking absolutely solved most of the problem. In the late 2010s it was common for political accounts to use scripts that went through follower graphs for their worst repliers and blocked everyone, or went through the list of people liking a certain tweet and blocked all those accounts.
They were quite fond of that approach and were happy with the outcome pre-Elon. Even if someone in the "bad group" screenshotted a tweet from their target to make fun of it, the target didn't really get bothered by it because they walled themselves well enough. The screenshotter is incentivized to not interact with their target so they don't get blocked again, and no one excited by all the dunking cared enough to go harass the target anyway.
Now as someone who found themselves in a few blockchains during peak Bernie-mania, I like the proposed change. I've been blocked by several popular accounts because of who I followed, and I will enjoy being able to reliably read someone's content even if I'm not allowed to interact.
> Most X users will just post a screenshot of the tweet, breaking accessibility in the process and disassociating the original author from the thread against their will.
But that means the blocking worked. Another person will now have to go to the extra effort of either finding that tweet or going directly to the profile to interact with them. And those extra steps were exactly the feature the blocking provided. It changes "click reply, type 'kill yourself you <slur> <slur>'" into "login into non-blocked account, retype part of the text from the screenshot, search, find the matching tweet, reply, type". And that's a lot of work for a quick response.
Sure, it won't stop everyone. It reduces the effects though.
You could design Twitter in a way where handles in quoted tweets aren't clickable if the quoter is blocked by the quotee, but the quotee can still be notified that they've been quoted by somebody they blocked, and optionally choose to see the post. Same for deletion, you could make quotes literally include the original post and preserve it forever, but notify viewers when the original is deleted.
Just to be clear they still won't be able to interact with you after they're blocked. The only change is they can keep seeing your tweets directly in their account, as opposed to having to log out.
This I think is good. I don't really care about what is shown, because in my opinion, twitter discussions are rarely worth anything, but I get the point of 'more visibility = good'. I just dislike brigading. And I don't follow anything political on Twitter, I used to follow cybersec and US sports, still there you had brigading (and sometimes attacks got _really_ personal, like a bunch of people making dogwhistle comments about someone who criticized their favorite basketball player because he looks ashkenaz. I think he's a tv personality now btw).
To be fair, you can barely view any post while unauthenticated these days. Sometimes I click on a link to a tweet on my work laptop (where I'm not authenticated) and I get immediately assaulted by several pop-ups and cookie bars and redirected to the landing page when try to dismiss them.
I have given up trying to view content unauthenticated
Same. I’ve accidentally made it 18 years without creating a Twitter account and there’s no content compelling enough for me to want to break my streak.
Reddit's implementation is even worse. It breaks all sorts of commenting/replying even down the comment chain, if anyone in the parent is blocked. And, the mobile app shows no usable errors. But, you can log out, or even make a second account, and see everything.
I block people on Twitter all the time, but I can't even remember the last time I had to block anyone on reddit (it was years ago). This speaks to the different models between the two -- on reddit I'm only interacting on specific subreddits, which because I've chosen them, have much nicer and more reasonable people than "all of Twitter". Twitter is always just nonstop fighting and yelling.
It has become weaponized. If someone blocks you, they can see your posts but you can't see theirs, and there is a good chance they will block you if you get into any kind of long argument where they feel personally insulted that they are being disagreed with. Once you are blocked you cannot block them, so they will always see your posts but you can't see their their posts and there is no recourse for this, it is just is, forever. So you end up proactively blocking people so that can't happen.
Someone needs to analyze this as game theory and write a paper on it. It is so poorly thought out and implemented that it would be funny if reddit didn't have a monopoly on long form written discussions on a lot of topics.
You can block users that block you -- if you know their username. But you don't know who has blocked you, and if they block you, you don't get to see their posts any more/
And you wouldn't notice if anyone blocked you -- that's the whole point -- but entire posts and threads could be right under your nose and hidden.
Regardless of whether it affects you or not -- it is ill conceived, does not accomplish its stated goal, and is easily abused by bad actors and thus should be heavily revised or removed.
> You can't view the post while authenticated but you can view the post while unauthenticated.
As per the article (emphasis mine):
> While a source at X told The Verge that the platform is making this change because people can already view posts from users who’ve blocked them when using another account or when logged out, several of us at The Verge (myself included) have noticed that X actually prevents you from viewing someone’s profile if you’re logged out.
For my part, I can see some accounts but not others, though the “rule” is not clear. Even then, on the accounts I can see they only show a dumb disjointed list of tweets ordered by popularity regardless of post date.
There does seem to be an exception for public outlets.
I clicked a link to NYPDs twitter and didn’t have to AuthN. Makes sense too; every org who wanted their content to be fully available to anyone would leave if twitter mandated login
> every org who wanted their content to be fully available...
Every single public account I've visited still has the feed in non-chronological order which instantly makes it useless to me. I don't care about a post from my city government in 2019.
I thought so too, but also fun to see people posting they've been blocked by person they're debating... well arguing with, whether the blocked deserved it because they're being an ass, or whether the blocker was simply thin skinned. I think the latter, seeing people rage quit because they can't rationalize their position, is actually pretty useful signal.
This is pure speculation. It's not implemented yet and there is no detailed explanation of how it will work. It could easily still prevent your posts from being algorithmically recommended.
The restriction isn't on them seeing your posts. It's on you seeing their posts. If you don't want them to see your posts, Twitter provides that functionality too. It just isn't called "blocking".
But the point is you can’t see these posts from a particular account. It makes interaction between the two accounts a bit more difficult and so a bit less likely.
The blocked person can obviously create a new account and bypass that block to some degree, but as other have mentioned it will prevent them from reposting on their main account
Yes, the article says “engagements are still not allowed under blocks”. Then again, interaction in the general sense can still happen (you can always take a screenshot and post that).
It might look like this, but thinking about it, I guess it's still useful in reducing unwanted interactions. People are lazy, and thus adding even a little friction can help a lot in preventing them from doing stalkering, spreading hate etc.
I.e. of course it's possible to login with another user, find the one who blocked you, make a screenshot or something and then quote it or perform any other interaction in your main account. But it's obviously not very easy.
So I'm sure it worked as a solution to reduce negative interactions on the platform. However, Musk doesn't want reducing these, his goal is spreading chaos and forcing his narratives, so the decision totally makes sense for him.
> his goal is spreading chaos and forcing his narratives
It may be as simple as revealing blocked content is a short path to increasing outrage and thus engagement. Like, I could see Facebook doing this on Threads.
I am actually very sure that Elon is an extremely smart person. I can also see that he amplifies and posts disinformation posts that spread hateful narratives. That's why I make a conclusion that his intentions are reaching his goals in this, quite evil and harmful for the society way.
Even if I liked him, this still would had hold true.
I've never once needed to block anyone on X, even when I had a bunch of mentally ill groypers reply to everything I posted.
That being said, the shadow pool is a lot more effective at soft banning people than the block feature. I chuckle when people complain about toxicity on Twitter. You're in the shadow pool buddy.
I wonder how long until X is profitable, and I worry my Elon-hating friend will lose his mind when it happens.
The hatred for Elon and Twitter/X, etc took me completely off guard the same way "Kids in Cages" did. I thought, "Where is all this spitting rage for Elon coming from? I thought he was the green energy guy, SpaceX is so cool."
I'd love to know where the "Kids in Cages" OP got started and where the evacuate to Mastadon movement was popularized. I feel like it's somewhere on Reddit.
That particular phrase is related to the separation of immigrant children from their families during the Trump administration. Previously children were only put in custody if they were unaccompanied. The Trump admin did it to all families crossing. In separating kids from parents they were also unable to reunite hundreds of families.
I only brought up the "Kids in Cages" meme thing because it was one of those stories my news feed did not feature at all. So I was interested in where people get those sorts of charged news items from because I'd like to learn how these operations unfold. My reaction once I understood the issue was, "what if the 'family members' of the kids were human traffickers? Maybe that was the reason for the policy change to allow border control to try and identify if they were really family?" That was extremely triggering and rage-inducing to my friend. I concluded there was more conditioning to that psyop that I wasn't privy to that I was tripping all over.
Things are 10x worse for kids at the border today, but my friend is oblivious to it since Biden came to power. I've been patiently waiting for the rage and concern to resurface.
Similarly the escape to Mastadon was like a herd thing that I had no exposure to, and I was interested in what influencer or subreddit got that ball rolling. I'd like to lurk and learn, and I feel like not knowing is a huge blind spot for me.
The point is they separated all kids from all families and did not track the families. Crossers suspected of human trafficking were always separated. This policy was based on the racist garbage assumption that most of the people filing through were criminals. Which is proven false.
Yet the human trafficking is worse now. The human suffering is worse now for policy and political reasons. AND, there are kids in cages now. AND, that policy started under Obama.
Is the adminstration inviting more migration or is it saying "don't come"? It's a disorganized human disaster.
What are you basing your talking point on? Immigration is the lowest it's been since covid when no one wanted to come here. I already explained, protective custody started only when children immigrated unaccompanied. So, every kid was put in a cage in Trump's plan -- ripped from their parents custody regardless, because of the racist premise that immigrants are evil. If you can't acknowledge the difference between an unaccompanied minor and a family immigrating, I'm beginning to think you are not discussing this in good faith.
Also, immigration is as low as when Trump was botching covid because Harris improved root causes in Central and South America. She helped negotiate a bill endorsed by Border Patrol that would have put 1500 more agents at the border which very much would have helped. Trump called his buddies in Congress and killed it so he could run on it instead of fixing it. He actively chose more human trafficking for his own political benefit.
I never said anything about Trump. You are obsessed. He's going to LOSE in a legitimate election anyhow, buck up. Harris will get her 81+ million lawful, American citizen votes just like Biden did.
Like I said before, I was frustrated about how things are worse NOW for kids than when the "Kids in Cages" meme was coined. Kids in Cages drove people I know nuts. I couldn't understand what they were experiencing since it wasn't in my feed. I have since been cynical about it, assuming it was an election season media stunt. I marveled at how incredibly animated people got.
The migration north to the border through central America and Mexico is itself a humanitarian disaster, right? And so of course the processing of those people at our border is going to be dehumanizing and awful. They don't book the trip for their families and let CBP know they are coming, they just show up.
The whole way the left thinks about the entire immigration subject seems mental. In my opinion, we should WANT to try to detain and separate and discover if kids are being trafficked, do some DNA tests, and not release them if they are being trafficked. Ideally, we could send them to their home country to get reunited with their families if they were taken. (That would be very expensive, I know...) If we screw up and the kids get released to traffickers or a corrupt NGO, those kids are GONE. Maybe used as slaves or chopped up for organs? Who knows? The unaccompanied minors situation is even more tragic. That is orphan train levels of tragic.
Remain in Mexico was perfect as a deterrent and worked well to curb numbers. It was awful for the migrants in-transit, which sucked. But, it was not humane for the Biden regime and NGO's to lure migrants to this country in the first place. The humane thing would be to discourage people from getting trafficked at all and stay in their home countries.
I just want to reiterate what a humanitarian disaster it was that Biden encouraged mass migration in his 2020 debates with Trump and in his campaign. That followed with all kinds of incentives and asylum guarantees once he assumed power. I find that really reprehensible, and I hope you do as well. Our globalist policies create such misery, we truly are the baddies. And the blowback to all this is mass deportation, probably just as tragic if not more so.
You brought up Covid. Covid and public health at the border was crazy. Why were we not force vaccinating migrants against covid before being released into the interior when we were simultaneously mandating vaccines for citizens? And what other diseases were we letting in, like drug-resistant tuberculosis?
Everyone of your peers gives a blank stare when I've confronted them about not vaxxing the migrants. Someone explain how that makes sense! The possible implications of those inconsistent vaxx policies just give me the willies.
So, covid and border crisis narratives don't quite gel. Clown world apparently has many managers who do not talk to one another or read each other's memos.
> Immigration is the lowest it's been since covid when no one wanted to come here.
It's an election year, silly. 1) I look askance at any stats reported in an election year, 2) OF COURSE they're going to try to make their border numbers look stellar, they own that small hell right now!
To quote our sharp-as-a-tack President whose 'gaffes' were so charming in 2019 and not senility, "C'mon man!"
> Trump called his buddies in Congress and killed it so he could run on it instead of fixing it.
Talking points, indeed! That border bill also had a $60 billion dollar poison pill for Ukraine among other turds. The D's win either way. The bill passes: they get $60 billion more death dollars for bombs for their corrupt kickback and land grab war that we're not actually the ones fighting and dying in. The bill fails: we can say the R's are against border security and reforms. The attempt was pathetic, and the outcome didn't move the needle with anyone but the base. You got snookered if you truly bought into that one.
You remind me that the D's are acting unserious and panicky this cycle. Obvious legislative stunts like that border bill. "The Switch" with Biden before the convention and him being soft coup'ed. Constantly repeating hoaxes like the "Fine People" hoax. The rehabilitation of Harris by the media, who they were dumping on a year ago, (and yet she's still somehow less popular than Biden was!) The outrageous Mar a Lago raid and all the lawfare that's backfiring. The sketchy political censorship/big tech bias firing up again. Feels bad, man.
If you're not a bot ... now you HAVE to tell me what or who first triggered you specifically with the "Kids in Cages" meme! Where did you first hear it? I need to sneak behind enemy lines to lurk and learn. Mwahahah! :D
Musk hobby: 101 about how to make a toxic site even more toxic while bearly not breaking law and making law makers wonder if they should make stricter laws
What thread has Elon lost really? When Elon bought twitter there was a huge wave of people and the media telling us it was over in 6 months, when Elon fired staff they told us X would go down forever in a few months.
Under Elon imo X has gotten a lot better, I see more content that relates to me and has since found myself using X more than all the other social media platforms combined.
Blocking content makes no sense on a platform like X, if you block me and I still want to read your posts all I have to do is to make another account and read them. This just gets rid of the friction. If I block someone I just don't want to interact with them, I still want them to see me and my friends have fun.
that's the issue. Look at clickthrough rates and see how much one extra click can cut down on engagement. You want to de-escalate something, or at least try to.
> If I block someone I just don't want to interact with them, I still want them to see me and my friends have fun.
I agree they should have added an ignore feature as well as block. Different approaches for each individual.
> I see more content that relates to me and has since found myself using X more than all the other social media platforms combined.
You do know that you shouldn't be looking at stuff it's recommending to you, right? Think of something you'd like to know more about and then look it up yourself.
And why not? What's your authority on the subject? From here, it looks like more internet arguments. I mean, I don't use twitter at all. I've never understood the UI. But if you like what it's recommending, why should I believe your assertion that I "shouldn't" be looking at it?
Or stuff you interacted with in sort-of click bait way. That's why I'm using the block functionality so much on X.
A couple of blocks a day keeps the rusobot content way.
If only I could get rid of of OF girls following me or violent content in the same way, that would be great.
>What thread has Elon lost really? When Elon bought twitter there was a huge wave of people and the media telling us it was over in 6 months, when Elon fired staff they told us X would go down forever in a few months.
Indeed. According to the media and on Reddit, since Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads have collectively gained 70 bazillion users on seventeen different occasions, and have caused Twitter to collapse and disappear eleven times.
I don't think X has gotten any better, if anything it is overrun by bots and crazy conspiracy theorists now. In addition, Elon has been engaging in soft-censoring people he doesn't like while amplifying those he likes.
The only effective way I've found to stop seeing stuff from people I dgaf in my feed was to block them.
I was even considering creating a Github repo. with all the usernames I've been selecting out for years, so that people could easily de-shittify their Twitter feed.
The set includes (excludes?):
* the most prominent accounts that post political content; no partisan bias, they're all gone for me
* most major news accounts, including anyone that regularly posts any kind of content related to any side of any war, ever
* "science influencers" where the "science" are actually ads or some deranged guy screaming while wearing a lab coat
* Ian Miles Cheong and the Krassenstein Brothers
* hundreds of e-whores
* hundreds of "I made 1 million dollars last week" accounts
If I understood correctly, the change here is that now those hundreds of e-whores and Ian Miles Cheong will be able to see your posts. So blocking is still the right strategy for what you want (for now).
Much of the worsening of Twitter is centered around them deciding what you should see in order to maximize outrage, engagement, revenue.
This means that in the replies to a tweet, for example, they can now rank highly all the spam and culture war bullshit that people have previously blocked.
Content moderation and visibility is a much more interesting question and space in BlueSky/ATmosphere. It's hard to care about the Twitter nonsense now.
Good. Blocking is unidirectional, you prevent yourself from seeing the other person's posts. It should not be bidirectional, as this informs the other person that you have blocked them.
Reddit implements blocking as bidirectional, and even tells you (using coded language such as "deleted" and "unavailable") that there is a post in the thread from a person who has blocked you, and includes a permalink to that post. The permalink can be loaded in private browsing mode, and you can see the post from the person who has blocked you. (Make sure you load the Reddit front page first, otherwise Reddit assumes you're an AI harvesting spider and auto-blocks you from the site)
> Blocking is unidirectional, you prevent yourself from seeing the other person's posts. It should not be bidirectional, as this informs the other person that you have blocked them.
I agree, this is how Discord does it INSIDE SERVERS. Not sure why you are downvoted but like on Reddit and HN people just downvote what they do not like.
