Twitter Tried Removing The Block Feature Before. It Didn’t Go Well. Elon’s Doing It Again Anyway
from the block-me-bro dept
Elon Musk’s superpower does not appear to be rocket science or electric cars—it’s an uncanny ability to misunderstand why ExTwitter’s features exist.
The clear takeaway from the book “Character Limit” about his Twitter takeover was that he only views the platform’s features through the lens of whether or not he, the richest man in the world, finds them useful or not, and never considers that not everyone else on the platform has the same experience he does.
He made that clear from Day One, when he decided to give anyone a bluecheck if they paid $8/month (without any corresponding verification). That was based on a misunderstanding of how verification works and why it’s important.
Similarly, Elon cannot wrap his head around the reasons why the “block” feature works the way it does. He cannot comprehend how block is often used as a tool to prevent harassment, especially of marginalized individuals, because that kind of harassment is not a problem to the richest dude on the planet.
Instead, he thinks it’s because people don’t want certain voices to hear what they have to say. So, as he’s done before, Elon is back to saying he’s getting rid of the block function.
As he says, “the block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing” public posts. While some people insist that this makes sense given that many people will switch to incognito mode to see content from accounts that blocked them, it ignores the reality (and years of evidence) of how block is an effective tool to stop harassment.
Elon not only misunderstands why block exists, but it also (yet again) highlights his near total lack of intellectual curiosity to understand why things are done the way they’re done.
Because Twitter tried this before. Eleven years ago. Twitter rolled out almost exactly this. Then everyone hated it and the company reverted just hours later. Apparently Elon is unaware of all of that because he got rid of anyone who might have told him about that history.
The replies to Elon’s post, which, of course, show all the suckers paying Elon money to get an anti-signal blue check, show that even his most loyal followers absolutely hate this idea. These are just the top set of replies to Elon’s post that I’m seeing, all of which are from bluecheck accounts, all of which are trashing his idea:
Of course, in Elon-land, no one in the company feels comfortable challenging Elon’s ideas, because the most likely result is a quick firing. Thus, he moves forward with the dumbest ideas imaginable, ones that have already been shown to be stupid.
There were so many ways that Elon could have made Twitter better. He chose none of them.
Filed Under: abuse, block, elon musk, harassment, trust & safety
Companies: twitter, x
Comments on “Twitter Tried Removing The Block Feature Before. It Didn’t Go Well. Elon’s Doing It Again Anyway”
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block is an effective tool to stop harassment
Yet you insist some people shouldn’t be allowed to post and I have said all along that they can be blocked.
Why block when you can silence them by de-platforming them?
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You have clearly never been harassed, stalked, or any number of other things in your entire life, this is clear. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need to say such asinine things.
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When have Mike insisted that some people shouldn’t be allowed to post? I can’t remember he ever insisting that, perhaps you could link to were Mike said that and if you can’t I’ll just assume that you are a liar.
You don’t understand how this works it seems, plus you conflate 2 different things. People can choose to block other people. If someone is being kicked off a platform it’s because they can’t adhere to the rules, not because someone blocked them.
When discussing social media it always comes back to: If you use someone else’s service, follow their rules or stop using the service. Any arguments against that is always pure entitlement.
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I have never insisted that at all because I don’t believe it. I have said that every platform should have the freedom to determine how they want to handle things, and others should be free to determine if those decisions mean that platform is worth using, or not.
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Rambling disorganised speech is a sign of an intracranial bleed.
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What the hell are you going on about? Blocking and bans for TOS violations are not the interchangeable and serve diffent purposes.
Not a big fan of the concept of 'I don't want anything to do with you' apparently
Elon likely cannot even comprehend the idea that anyone wouldn’t want to listen to or be around him and/or the toxic people he’s such a fan of, and as such considers the idea of anyone being able to completely block him/those people absolutely unacceptable.
Re: Not a big fan of the concept of 'I don't want anything to do with you' apparently
Yeah, there seems to be a big disconnect there somewhere.
I mean the guy has more security than an ex-President; so, obviously, he knows that there are people out there that he needs to be protected from. The people that most want to follow you are often the people that you most want to prevent from following you. He obviously understands the concept IRL, but somehow he doesn’t get how that applies to social media.
Apparently he is a real genius about some things. And other things he just doesn’t get, even if they’re starting him right in the face.
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He exhibits all the telltales of suffering from a savior complex, which is especially bad when he also is incredible socially inept. And when he doesn’t get the recognition he thinks he is due we get the stupid tantrums.
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Hell, he has personal experience in unwittingly sharing his ‘personal’ data with people he doesn’t want to from when he banned the Elon jet twitter account(after saying he wouldn’t of course), so he should be really familiar with the concept of not wanting any information to be handed out to people you don’t want to associate with.
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I’ve yet to see evidence that he’s a genius of any stripe.
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Turns out when you can’t just brute-force your way to a solution by throwing piles of money at a problem you have to fall back on actual intelligence, either yours or that of others, and if that’s not your strong suit and your ego prevents you from admitting that anyone could possibly be smarter than you are… well, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly.
So, like one or two people can deplatform anyonewho is harassing them? Why are you such a tool?
Any evidence that Mike says that some people just shouldn’t be allowed to post would be strictly bonus.
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Weird, sorry. This belonged under that initial flagged comment. Definitely not a comment on the article.
Not nearly all accounts have a blue check think now? You mean even “Gays For Trump” account is really paying for this?
To be honest, the block functionality has always been difficult to grasp to anyone that don’t use it on daily basis. It’s also not very effective since it only blocks some followers from receiving new post/tweet (so they re-post/tweet less often).
…But, since maybe half the users are bots (sorry Elon, but it is), and it doesn’t seem that this will be virtually replaced with anything, this will just contribute to even more spam/scam.
Now, worse than that? Making everybody following everybody. But I’m sure Elon has already planned that.
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Maybe I’m more cynical, but I suspect something more along the lines of “making everyone follow the interesting people” (no reward for guessing who defines interesting)
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If you apply for the twitter fund that pays you to tweet, the program verifies you while you are in the program.
Re: Re: I don't understand
If logged out users can see your posts, what is the point of the block feature?
I don’t sympathize with this buffoon in any way, but I fail to see how blocks are truly useful.
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In order to respond to a comment, one has to be signed in. If one is blocked, one is prevented from posting stuff the blocker doesn’t want to read. Simple enough for you?
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The most important point is that it keeps problem users from interacting with your posts.
On top of that; When you’re blocked you’re not notified of it, so the person receiving the block may not immediately know to pursue workarounds. Then since you cannot follow someone if you’re blocked, once you do realize their posts aren’t showing up in your feed anymore and it’s not just the algorithm, you have to sign out and manually navigate to their page to check if they’ve tweeted anything, which adds friction. And Twitter has been hiding replies unless you’re signed in, so while you can see some stuff logged out you can’t see everything.
It won’t prevent a dedicated bad actor from stalking or harassment, but it makes it much harder for casual trolls to get the reaction they’re looking for.
It is possible (though not guaranteed) That Musk has reduced Twitters carbon footprint. However, if that is true, it’s certainly entirely accidental. So still not something he chose.
Well, maybe this change will be the impetus a few more people need to just stop using Twitter/X?
I just wish there was a solid alternative these days where I could find out about unexpected local events.
I think it's a great idea...
…for hastening the demise of Twitter.
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Thank you
Elon is REALLY driving the ship into an iceberg.
It seems like he is TRYING to make people not want to continue using the platform. He already have scared a bunch of advertisers, now he’s doing the same to users.
Already the site is unsuitable for content creators to free-advertise their content (such as an art or an indie game) when he decided to put viewing a thread and seeing a certain number of posts behind a login wall- an ongoing trend I do not like that’s happening on the net (which already art sites are placing full resolution and downloads behind a registration).
The trapping move to ban links to other social media sites like Mastodon is reminiscent to when Photobucket tries to prevent people from migrating their images off the site – They introduced limits that weren’t there before, such as the 250 image limit, any more are not shown and you have to delete the older ones so that 251st and later will appear at the end of the list (I would think it does that). I suspect that this is part of a switching cost they are trying to do.
This is another reason why decentralized services (not just social media) exists, it makes it harder to do asshole moves like these. If you can migrate emails to another service, why can’t the same be done on social media? You may trust whatever platform right now, but not so in the future, but in a protocol-based world, you shouldn’t have to worry about losing trust on the current instance you are on.
Anyways, who’s in 1st place in the enshittification race? Reddit or X?
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Thing is a still still alot of art on Twitter, most are not leaving yet.
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Network Effect is a hell of a thing.
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Yes, but it works both ways. Once users start leaving the platform in significant numbers, the ones that remain have less and less reason to stay.
Ah, but he DID choose the ways that make Twitter better for the only person that matters…
Well, matters to him, anyway.
Let me guess: he recently threw a temper tantrum over someone blocking him on his own platform. He’s such a crybaby.
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An example of such a temper tantrum:
Which is why all Musk’s tweets were forced to the top of everyone’s feeds.
Re: Re: Temper tantrum
Leon’s tweets weren’t forced to the top of my feed, I’ve got him blocked. Must be a lot of other people on xitter do, too.
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Leon Kennedy would rather deal with an insane boulder-punching ex-cop forcing him to date said ex-cop’s sister than to be associated with an Apartheid Nazi Emerald Space Karen.
Musk and Ex-Twitter continues to serve as a brilliant example...
…of the pitfalls of monarchy.
Musk is not doing this stuff in an effort to build a better platform or to maximize profit to shareholders, rather he’s doing what he feels he wants, which has more to do with his personal needs for validation.
Musk wants everyone to hear him when he speaks, even when he doesn’t have anything valuable to say.
Aren’t public tweets public? Before the Musk takeover, you could browse Twitter, including specific posters’ tweet feed, while logged out. So why were people so opposed to this change the first time it was implemented back in the day? Maybe there should be a private tweet feature that posts only to your followers. But if you post to the general public, shouldn’t you be okay with anyone seeing what you post?
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Uh huh. And why cannot one block certainpeople from seeing and responding? What’s the problem with that.
Re: blocked buffoons
Can’t speak to the reasons others block, but I block ads and Leon. I don’t care if they can read my xweets, just don’t want to see theirs.
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No, Tweets aren’t public. Elmo had his engineers close down all of the holes in the API that allowed software like Nitter to function. So now the only way to read any Tweet is to be logged into the site, and if you’re logged into the site, then what you can read is determined by their API allows (which includes the blocking functionality).
The used-to-mean-verified blue toady checkmark really is a fantastic example of aposematism in the wild.
Ex-Twitter's block function harmful to online discourse
ExTwitter’s current approach is a weird combination of people’s posts being visible to all coupled with particular accounts being denied access to posts that literally everybody else can see, which has never made much sense to me.
Blocking on ExTwitter normally has more to do with personal disagreement and annoyance than real harassment, and there are legal tools available to people actually being harassed. I’m one of those people who believe social media has contributed significantly to the high degree of polarization we are now seeing, and I can’t support any feature that may contribute to extreme ideological fragmentation. I’ll be glad to see the block function modified in this fashion.
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What a dumb take. Harassment laws are so difficult to implement for the average user as to be virtually useless in most situations. Doubly so on the internet.
Also, for Twitter to continue to exist, it must be enjoyable for users and attack them so that advertisers can, you know….advertise to them. This is a much different bar than “real harassment”. Literally, annoyance level bar.
This implementation will make polarization worse, not better.
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I understand that harassment laws can be difficult to implement, and that changing the way the block function works may detract people from using ExTwitter. I doubt it would make polarization worse, but in the absence of evidence either way that’s just my opinion.
I do have a problem with the notion that the existence of harassment on the platform is enough to justify not relaxing how the block feature currently operates. What Musk is proposing is pretty much the way Twitter’s block function used to work: you can see people’s posts but you can’t follow them or reply to their posts if they’ve blocked you.
We’re not talking about private spaces, direct messages, or anything of the sort here. We’re talking about posts that are intentionally made available to everyone by default, as in online forums and websites that allow people to leave comments. These are posts that are intended for public consumption, and in that context I think the whole “but harassment” angle is disingenuous.
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What a mentally ill take – asserting that harrassment isn’t harrassment (You don’t get to decide that) and the delusion that “legal tools” are better than immediate relief.
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I have at no point argued that “harassment isn’t harassment,” or that somehow I get to decide what is or is not harassment. What I’ve said is that a majority of blocks are for reasons other than what reasonable people would call harassment.
Create your own Twitter block. Don’t use Twitter. Your life will likely improve.
Leon is simply tired of not seeing posts from many people who have blocked him personally. It takes significant effort for him to browse exTwitter using his alter-ego accounts, and he just wants to be able to see everything that is hidden when using his main account.
Someone showed him how many accounts blocked him.
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Why is this site still a thing, especially with more lefty leaning pundits and orgs.
Is popularity really an excuse to sell your integrity out?
Good god, deplorable covers all ends of the spectrum.
At this point, I simply don’t understand why anyone is still using Twitter at all.
Now for more of the Cancel Culture bullshit, simply because sane people don’t want to fucking read hate, bigotry and outright stupid.
Cancel the Right.