[MichaelGG]

Splitting users sucks, but it is what people are asking for. Indeed there are blocklists that are shared to help people ignore groups, so users are already doing it in a hacky way. A kudos/vouch system might work fine. They've got thousands of employees -- certainly they can figure something out better than what they're doing. Right now it's just random-nuke-if-it-gets-attention. And it certainly feels like Twitter has a political bias.

>"full free speech" like reddit

Reddit went sorta censorious didn't they? Decided any sub that made fun of fat people was not allowed and applied that sitewide (killed new subreddits with different people, if they shared the same topic). Created a system that requires signing up and verifying email just to get a read-only view of certain subreddits? (For instance, r/blackfathers, a subreddit which had _no_ content, was quarantined, so you can't even see that it has no content unless you verify and login.) There's no justification for requiring a verified email account to view content, except to serve as a chilling effect.

It's totally their right, just they shouldn't be held up as a bastion of free speech. Even 4chan surpasses them on that account.

[donatj]

The block lists, especially the non-publicly published ones, are awful.

I got in a well mannered Twitter argument - as a pacifist I was arguing that violence is never the answer, against a tweet promoting violence by a fairly popular Twitter user. They thew some foul language my way before blocking me. Fine, they don't want to talk to me. I can live with that.

The kicker though was I subsequently found a number of other completely unrelated things like @PicardTips blocking me as well. It took me a while to understand what had happened. I tried emailing @PicardTips to no avail. Sigh.

A world where expressing an opinion any other person finds offensive leads to blacklisting isn't a world I want to live in.

[selllikesybok]

Had a hunch you weren't blocked for promoting peaceful behavior. Reviewed your tweets. Was not surprised to confirm my hunch. FYI, since it occurs to me you may not understand: they reacted based on what they perceived as lack of compassion, obliviousness, and other cues which indicates you would contribute nothing positive to their experience of the platform.

[donatj]

If they very strictly only wanted compassion, they shouldn't have wrapped their argument in a political subtext. Saying inflammatory things and then expecting people not to disagree but instead to shower you in compassion is ridiculous.

You had to have dug through thousands of tweets to find it. As I said, fine, they can block me, for in your opinion being logical and analytical, which is very strongly connected to nearly all my views.

That causing me to be blocked from other things that don't even have a direct beef me though is plainly unjustified.

[selllikesybok]

You're putting words in my mouth - I don't think I called you logical or analytical. :)

Maybe I'm atypical, but that was like 30 seconds of lookup time. Profile has Twitter link. Twitter search https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adonatj%20violence&src=ty... turns up, what, seven results? Including https://twitter.com/donatj/status/441687625154691072, the tweet from two years ago you mentioned upthread.

Since you were responding to this tweet, https://twitter.com/christinelove/status/441680446150041600, wherein someone is trying to help their friend beg for money in order to try to avoid dying from cancer, I'm not clear why you felt it was appropriate to shoehorn in your own political commentary?

To put a fine point on it, they very strictly only wanted $$$, or failing that, retweet/like activity which would boost their signal to get the message to someone more likely to give them $$$.

That's as logical and analytical read of the message as I can come up with.

Consider the options - do you really, in your heart of hearts, think this tweet - is a call to reasonable debate on the topic of healthcare reform, taxation, etc? Like, seriously, did you think that? Real question, no sarcasm.

The lady with the friend with cancer, who you engaged in a way that she (and I, for that matter, and I have reason to suspect the two of us are not unique in our reading of your actions) considered inappropriate, seems likely to have a similar enough set of experiences to mine that she formed the same opinion as I did.

Given that, to anyone with this set of experiences and way of reading the situation, you give the impression of being an insensitive blowhard (not namecalling, just trying to explain the reaction), it would make sense for people who have a low threshhold for dealing with people like the type of person you appear to be, to have nothing to do with you. Again, rational actors making rational decisions about how to improve their lives and spend their time.

If sharing blocklists is an effective way for likeminded people to create a shared experience on a platform that they prefer to have, it seems like a course of action with very few downsides.

Compare and contrast that method (quietly ignoring/blocking someone you and/or your peer group and extended networks), with, for example, sending thousands of explicitly and enthusiastically racist, sexist, and frankly tasteless messages at someone to drive them off the platform.

In your logical and analytical read of the situation, doesn't it make sense to do the least harmful, least energy-intensive thing that achieves your desired result? In this case, not dealing with someone on Twitter whom you don't want to deal with?

I mean, it sucks that you can't read your preferred source of Picard memes (or whatever) without opening up your browser / changing your twitter name / or taking some other slightly-greater-than-normal-effort to do so. I totally emphasize with the enormity of that inconvenience, and really, perhaps more importantly, the indignity of suffering semi-public consequences for your previous statements.

But I'm having trouble agreeing that it's worse than, say, having some random dude pop up on the interwebs and try to school you on why crowdfunding is, in fact, exactly how healthcare should be paid for, when your friend is dying of cancer.

----

ETA - Okay, I take some of that back. Friend was not dying. Friend had received successful treatment for cancer, and was being stuck with the full medical bills due to denial of claims for all related treatment by the provider of his medical insurance plan. Friend was attempting to avoid imminent bankruptcy and credit ruination, not death, at the time of your comments.

That's what I get for skimming the Evite!

[donatj]

Your thesis is simply incorrect.

The original tweet is as follows:

> Man, y'all, American health care is some fucked up shit

I don't see how anyoe could possibly infer any of your comments below from that.

> Since you were responding to this tweet [^ above ^] wherein someone is trying to help their friend beg for money in order to try to avoid dying from cancer, I'm not clear why you felt it was appropriate to shoehorn in your own political commentary?

No part of that implies a single word of what you said. No one would ever interpret that from that text, ever. The original tweet is PURELY political commentary. If you post political commentary on the internet, expect that someone to disagree with you. I feel like I was polite about my disagreement, expecially so as far as Twitter goes.

There is no mention of it being a friend. Period. There is no mention of "hey help this guy". There is zero of the context you imply. The context you are adding is purely from her later defense of her profane attacks against me.

Without the non-existant context, it is a political Tweet with a link of an example. An example that I thought was a cool idea, essentially kickstarting your cancer treatment. I was arguing that what this guy was doing was actually a great idea.

So to answer your question "Like, seriously, did you think that? Real question, no sarcasm." As none of the context you implied was actually there, yes, absolutely. I still do. You post a political tweet, expect a political response.

[donatj]

> If sharing blocklists is an effective way for likeminded people to create a shared experience on a platform that they prefer to have, it seems like a course of action with very few downsides.

It encourages shallow mindedness, ignorance and echo chambers - where you only hear only ever what you want to hear. It literally 'Fox News's Twitter.

Surely, it's great for the bottom line of the company; people hate to be told they're wrong, even when they absolutely are. It's honestly this kind of thinking though that's lead to the strong polarization of the country.

I'd much rather have people yelling at me non-stop that I'm wrong, and take the time to rationally consider their positions. I'm assuredly in the minority.

Are blocklists good for Twitters bottom line? Undoubtably. Is it good for the overall health of society, never having to hear that you're wrong? No way.

[selllikesybok]

Oooh... appropos of nothing, but it would really tickle me if someone developed "Blockchains", a service for maintaining global social media account blocklists with a cryptographically verifiable record of the transgressions which got someone added to the list in the first place.

Or has that idea been done before?

[gakada]

Twitter, as a platform, is not geared towards discussions. It's impossible to have any sort of debate in 140 characters, it forces all arguments to be reductive.

So I think they did you a favour.

[viraptor]

> Splitting users sucks, but it is what people are asking for.

[citation needed] I see how some users could want some filtering or limited groups. That's fine. But what I responded to is "some system to hide new/anonymous/unvouched users from messaging more popular users". That's literally a "you're not popular enough for us to care about harassment" situation.

[MichaelGG]

I'm not sure it's a popularity thing. Verifying ID with Twitter should be enough to get rid of a lot of trolls. Or having another user vouch - most people know someone.