[viraptor]

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.

[celdon25]

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 content is a natural consequence of your aspirations to be popular on social media, and we shouldn't be giving people a false sense of security.

[arp242]

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.

[hombre_fatal]

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 replies at the top of the reply section, but you see other people's replies to them which compels you to switch accounts to see what dumb thing they said this time. And now you can simply reply to them on your other account.

[arp242]

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).

[benatkin]

"It's not perfect, it's useless" sounds illogical, though I would first disagree with the characterization of saying that it's not perfect. You're putting words in the mouth of the opponent, straw manning, by having the opponent accept the characterization it's not perfect to be juxtaposed with the opinion that it's useless. I would say that it isn't only not perfect, it's useless.

Feel free to steel man and tell me why you think it's useful. I think the friction it causes is cancelled out by the effect of annoying the mostly well-meaning portion of the people who are blocked while not annoying the truly toxic users who will quickly and easily bypass it at all.

I don't tend to participate in twitter fights. A type of twitter fight that comes to mind is people who work at FAANGs being annoyed that people are criticizing their employer's agenda. I saw this against Google with AMP and with Chrome hiding the path from the address bar in a dev channel release. That isn't really coming out of a place of toxicity. The complainer doesn't really deserve to be blocked, but the FAANG employee has a right to keep their mentions and reply threads clean. For minor scuffles like these, a lighter form of blocking is nice.

[m3kw9]

I think is the old double edged sword instead.

[gotoeleven]

Nah this is a classic case of the no true perfect double-edged slippery-sloped sword of damocles being the enemy of the good no true double-edged slippery-sloped sword of damocles that shouldn't be thrown in glass houses where the chickens have come to roost.

[solveit]

> It's not perfect, but the friction helps prevent drive-by bad behaviour.

> No it doesn't.

There's really no use in continuing this discussion when one party is unable/unwilling to use precise language to discuss marginal effects. Obviously I presume what you mean is that the marginal effect is too small to be relevant, but discussions with people who round that off to "No it doesn't" rarely go anywhere productive.

[viraptor]

> The block button doesn't stop them.

No and nobody claimed it does. Making it just a bit harder and making the other party jump through an extra hoop reduces it though. The extra friction has been implemented on many platforms and it works. Instagram adds friction in a different way, but also claims it has a positive result: https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/key-be...

You can also see people migrating to other platforms who raise the lack of search / being easily found as a feature. It's not black and white and it's not public or not. There's a whole range of how accessible your content is to parties who will attack you.

[EricE]

Yes, because everyone knows that trolls just give up at the least amount of friction.

[felipeerias]

A large enough number of them do, which does not fix the problem completely but makes it more manageable through other strategies.

[m3kw9]

They can’t comment that’s the main point after blocking

[chomp]

Yes it does and I can tell that you have never been piled on by followers of large accounts. Blocks aren’t perfect but they make a huge difference.

[dtjb]

Blocks are (were) an easy line of defense for most of the lazy trolling. People could get around it but few bothered.

It might have not been ideologically consistent but it was effective.

[AlienRobot]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> repost your content to their community who also hate #foobar

This is valid. I don't think it rises to the level of preventing them from seeing my public content. But perhaps a brake on their ability to repost it would be courteous.

[EnigmaFlare]

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.

[Arainach]

"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 bullying makes perfect sense.

[EnigmaFlare]

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 have the right to both offend people who disagree and be protected from being offended in response.

Not saying the people making death threats are innocent and of course the law should try to stop them, but often it's not powerful enough so people who don't want that unfortunately have to keep quiet or be anonymous when they want to step on the toes of death-threat-happy communities.

[Arainach]

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.

[EnigmaFlare]

1. is better because in general because nobody actually knows who's a all-bad troll and who's a worthwhile activist. Least of all the person being criticized. QB himself isn't hurt after he blocks them and can carry on with his life as if it's not happening.

I've heard celebrities say they don't read what anyone says about them on social media. That sounds like a good idea because there's always going to be haters to any popular public figure. Just ignore them and you're fine.

3rd parties being affected? Well stop associating with the widely-hated public figre if you can't handle the heat of celebrities.

[saagarjha]

Have you ever dealt with harassment? Do you think someone should take responsibility for posts that cause them to be harassed?

[EnigmaFlare]

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.

[saagarjha]

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?

[EnigmaFlare]

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.

[trompetenaccoun]

It's the opposite. People with serious issues (i.e. stalkers, trolls etc.) will continue following on a second account or proxy. Meanwhile regular accounts with legitimate criticisms (for example pointing out misinformation, calling out bias, and so on) get blocked by bad actors and those will not find them anymore and repost because they don't invest time in it.

Blocking mainly prevents regular normal users from seeing tweets. Best example is Lex Fridman who's blocked a million people for no apparent reason. Say something he doesn't like: You're blocked. Never even interacted with him but commented on a topic he doesn't approve of: Blocked. You under-cook fish: Believe it or not, he blocks you.

[dotnet00]

Not to mention people attempting to slander others behind a block (so the person being slandered has no idea until the damage is already done), or temporarily unblocking to say something to someone, and then blocking again.

[thaumasiotes]

> Not to mention people attempting to slander others behind a block (so the person being slandered has no idea until the damage is already done)

I saw someone once post about their outrage over the practice of criticizing someone on Twitter without tagging the person you're criticizing in your tweet. ("Subtweeting.") Apparently the thinking goes that if anyone anywhere says something about you, you have the right to be notified.

[dotnet00]

I'd argue that it really depends on the kind of criticism. What I had in mind was more along the lines of accusing someone of wrongdoing rather than just criticizing them.

I think tagging someone when you're accusing them of wrongdoing is the fair thing to do, considering how quickly that sort of thing can whip others into a frenzy. I see a lot of this sort of thing, where someone will accuse someone of heinous things like pedophilia from behind a block, and by the time the person being accused understands what's going on, they're being hounded by people who get off to drama about why they haven't denied the accusations yet.

On the other hand, tagging when simply criticizing someone often feels like attention-seeking to me. I see this a lot with space stuff, where someone will offer (often completely ignorant) criticism, while pinging Musk, Bezos and/or other figures in the space discussion community.

[thaumasiotes]

https://reason.com/volokh/2019/11/20/academic-subtweeting/

"You can talk to me, but it's unethical to talk about me."

[glandium]

It's kind of the opposite of this quote from Christian Bale: If you have a problem with me, text me. And if you don't have my number, you don't know me well enough to have a problem with me.

[viraptor]

If it's one tweet that's blocked, is there really much damage/slander? If people actually start talking about it then the affected person will get notified anyway from one of the non-blocked accounts responding.

[bragr]

Those are all issues as well, but brigading is absolutely a thing.

[miki123211]

Blocking doesn't really fix the brigading problem, regardless of whether people need to log out or not.

Most X users will just post a screenshot of the tweet, breaking accessibility in the process and disassociating the original author from the thread against their will.

This isn't always a good thing, as it leads to people being surprised by crowds of strangers suddenly screaming at them and not being able to see the source of their anger.

Some people do this as a "preventative measure", so that their post still makes sense when the original tweet is deleted.

[raydev]

> Blocking doesn't really fix the brigading problem

Automated blocking absolutely solved most of the problem. In the late 2010s it was common for political accounts to use scripts that went through follower graphs for their worst repliers and blocked everyone, or went through the list of people liking a certain tweet and blocked all those accounts.

They were quite fond of that approach and were happy with the outcome pre-Elon. Even if someone in the "bad group" screenshotted a tweet from their target to make fun of it, the target didn't really get bothered by it because they walled themselves well enough. The screenshotter is incentivized to not interact with their target so they don't get blocked again, and no one excited by all the dunking cared enough to go harass the target anyway.

Now as someone who found themselves in a few blockchains during peak Bernie-mania, I like the proposed change. I've been blocked by several popular accounts because of who I followed, and I will enjoy being able to reliably read someone's content even if I'm not allowed to interact.

[pyuser583]

I enjoy your irregular use of the word “blockchain.”

[viraptor]

> Most X users will just post a screenshot of the tweet, breaking accessibility in the process and disassociating the original author from the thread against their will.

But that means the blocking worked. Another person will now have to go to the extra effort of either finding that tweet or going directly to the profile to interact with them. And those extra steps were exactly the feature the blocking provided. It changes "click reply, type 'kill yourself you <slur> <slur>'" into "login into non-blocked account, retype part of the text from the screenshot, search, find the matching tweet, reply, type". And that's a lot of work for a quick response.

Sure, it won't stop everyone. It reduces the effects though.

[miki123211]

You could design Twitter in a way where handles in quoted tweets aren't clickable if the quoter is blocked by the quotee, but the quotee can still be notified that they've been quoted by somebody they blocked, and optionally choose to see the post. Same for deletion, you could make quotes literally include the original post and preserve it forever, but notify viewers when the original is deleted.

[felipeerias]

> post a screenshot of the tweet, breaking accessibility in the process and disassociating the original author from the thread against their will.

I'm surprised that the platform does not do ORC on text images by default.

And it wouldn't be hard to check if a particular image looks like a tweet and, if it does, find out the exact match.

[trompetenaccoun]

Just to be clear they still won't be able to interact with you after they're blocked. The only change is they can keep seeing your tweets directly in their account, as opposed to having to log out.

[orwin]

This I think is good. I don't really care about what is shown, because in my opinion, twitter discussions are rarely worth anything, but I get the point of 'more visibility = good'. I just dislike brigading. And I don't follow anything political on Twitter, I used to follow cybersec and US sports, still there you had brigading (and sometimes attacks got _really_ personal, like a bunch of people making dogwhistle comments about someone who criticized their favorite basketball player because he looks ashkenaz. I think he's a tv personality now btw).