Twitter/X will let people you've blocked see your posts • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by EnigmaFlare » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:10 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #279

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some people tie their beliefs to rejecting your identity. What are you going to do in that case? Stop being gay? Not put pictures of yourself online?

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.

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

#282

Post by maxerickson » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:14 AM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #70

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.

Why does it have to be "expectation that other party cannot see your stuff"?

Why not just "expectation that it's less convenient for other party to see your stuff"?

Are you just being ironic for the feels?

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

#283

Post by arp242 » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:14 AM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #258

arp242 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rep…

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).

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

#284

Post by Nathanba » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:19 AM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #275

I've always fundamentally disagreed with the idea of being able to block individuals from seeing the things you broadcast to the world. Imagine if TV or radio or newspapers could do this because they didn't like something you said or did. This is touched on in the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas". It's just creepy and an abuse of technology. If you want to communicate privately, then do so.

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.

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

#285

Post by Arainach » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:28 AM UTC

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #281

saagarjha wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people tie their beliefs to rejecting your identity. What are you going to do in that case? Stop being gay? Not put pictures of yourself online?

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 priva…

Holy false equivalency, Batman!

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.

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

#286

Post by Arainach » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:29 AM UTC

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #274

Arainach wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Communities" are easy to offend, especially with bad actors lying and stoking flames. Communities have given death threats to college students who made bad plays in sports games. https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/ncaa-1-3-star-athletes-receive... 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 bullyin…

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…

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.

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

#287

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:34 AM UTC

fwip wrote: post #252

thaumasiotes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

What's Twitter call it?

It's called protecting your account. A protected account can only be viewed by followers, and followers have to be approved by the account.

https://help.x.com/en/safety-and-security/public-and-protect...

https://help.x.com/en/safety-and-security/how-to-make-x-priv...

(Note that, because it's always possible to create new Twitter accounts, a whitelist is the only way to prevent someone from seeing your posts.)

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

#288

Post by homefree » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:51 AM UTC

angry_octet wrote: post #262

homefree wrote: post #146

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,…

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.

My account doesn’t load any of the blocked people so I can’t. It shows 52k blocked but when I go into the page it’s blank.

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

#289

Post by foxylad » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:52 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #92

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.

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

#290

Post by mise_en_place » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 4:04 AM UTC

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.