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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

#471
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly the blockee. Although I think it also devalues the service for some/many blockers.

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.

There's a lot of unnecessary blocking.

An example of blockers losing value: Tesla bears were chronic blockers, even passing around blocklists. Nowadays Tesla bears seem to have lost all relevance.

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

#472
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On reddit, people use it to pretend to "win" arguments by appearing to get the last word (post a reply then immediately block).

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.

Maybe it's just me, but I imagine most normal people stop replying if you get an aggressive/stupid comment, no blocking needed.

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

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 be…

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.

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

#474
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it's just me, but I imagine most normal people stop replying if you get an aggressive/stupid comment, no blocking needed.

A lot of people get baited. But it depends on if the comment is obviously unhinged or not.

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

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

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 pe…

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.

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

#476
post #423

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.

How did you get into that state, and how did negotiating with the university resolve it?

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...

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

#477
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of this is fake and scripted

That doesn't make them not the bad guy.

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

#478
post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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…

>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.

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

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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.

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

#480
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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