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

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

#241

Post by smeej »

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.

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

#242

Post by JoshTriplett »

hakanderyal wrote: post #232
CydeWeys wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can open more than 1 account with a single phone number.

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).

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

#243

Post by AlienRobot »

celdon25 wrote: post #171
viraptor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#245

Post by setgree »

jprd wrote: post #244

I haven't seen any official reasoning for this. Does anyone have a link to the explanation for this change occurring to begin with? I would like if there was some technical or biz reasoning behind it, maybe I've just not seen it?

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?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/opinion/trump-elon-musk-t...

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

#250

Post by nokcha »

mwfogleman wrote: post #130
greatgib wrote: post #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.

More simply: people are increasingly blocking advertisers to hide their advertisements. This would prevent you from shielding yourself from ads.

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.
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