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Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

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11–20 of 506 posts

Re: Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

#11

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 po…

How can I keep Musk's posts from showing up in my feed if blocking doesn't hide them?

I think that's the real motivation, actually.

Re: Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

#12
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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.

Re: Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

#15

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.

Referenced in? That is waaaay too far. That means if the person blocked you, you essentially can't talk about them.

Re: Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

#16
post #9

Every change breaks someone's workflow ... 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, t…

> The only effective way I've found to stop seeing stuff from people I dgaf in my feed was to block them. Do you see people's posts even if you don't follow them?

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.

Re: Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

#17

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 po…

How can I keep Musk's posts from showing up in my feed if blocking doesn't hide them? I think that's the real motivation, actually.

[dead]

Re: Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

#18
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.

Re: Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> except in the exceedingly common instances where someone is the target of harassment

Super low-effort harassment, where the harasser can't bother creating a new Twitter account.

Re: Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts

#20

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.

> With that kind of decisions, always assume that there is a hidden agenda

What kind of decisions? Why?

The motivation seems simple: increase engagement by broadening the amount of content someone can see / be shown.

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