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Elon Musk Says Twitter Is Going To Get Rid Of The Block Feature, Enabling Greater Harassment

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/09/elon-musk-says-twitter-is-going-to-get-rid-of-the-block-feature-enabling-greater-harassment/

One of the most important tools for trust and safety efforts is the “block” feature, allowing a user to entirely block someone else from following them. Yes, on Twitter you can get around this by g…

People really really really need to leave Twitter already.

30 comments

foxy

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free speech is when anyone can walk into my house because they want to argue with me

Lockely

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My avatar was one of the ones included on the Furry College NFT that became a huge thing, and I got thousands of trolls harassing me because I stood up against their most recent tech-based grift. My blocklist is massive because of it. They remove that, I literally cannot use the platform anymore.

mdwalters

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why did he even buy twitter in the first place? all he's doing is just making it a lot more worse.

Wander

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@mdwalters @Wander@yiffit.net because he's got a huge ego

ace

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I mean, he did try to back out on the purchase, so I guess he might be still throwing his tantrum in being forced to go through with it.

zun1

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to which benefit? i hope that platform goes to shit

Infinifox

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I'm sure this has nothing to do with millions of people blocking Elon after he added the "boost everything posted by Elon" feature.

Null

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News like this is the reason news aggregators like here has become my only social network.

Milez_W

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Reddit was good for this stuff. Notice how I said Was. It used to report the headlines, now the headlines are reporting on it.

ngoomie

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Time to further pester my friends who "can't leave" because they, in essence, can't be assed to try anything else

It's like this whole nasty ass self-perpetuating cycle with social media, people will complain about not liking Twitter/etc, you show them tons of alternatives, and then they back up and go "no, no. I like Twitter just fine" or will refuse to even attempt anything else because it's not 1:1 the perfect image of their ideal service they pictured in their mind. So things get worse because they don't leave, but their refusal to try, to even merely attempt using something else alongside Twitter and reminding their followers that they're there too, it entrenches them further

I think I remember Elon saying he wanted to turn Twitter into "the everything website", but frankly that's just putting words to what Twitter already has been for years now. It's been pushed to be the "everything website" for so long now that people convinced themselves and thus others that there's little use to using something else. I remember on multiple occasions being told directly that if I want to post my art online but don't want to use Twitter, that I should just not even bother because nobody uses anything else, at least not for the initial content discovery, which genuinely discouraged me initially and I think that cloud is still hanging over my head somewhat.

awooo

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In general I hate how the dynamics of social media crises like this always go, or be it any other platform where there are strong personal connections. People are like "Yes! Let's go!" and then some of them freeze up and wait for what others do, people who went first eventually come back because nobody followed them to the new place.

I guess the issue with Twitter is people have no option to organize and make decisions as a whole, except for relying on the algorithm designed to promote rage and novelty promoting a consensus for a day or two before it goes away.

I guess we'll see how the reddit thing goes and if it's any different, we'll have two data points to compare.

ngoomie

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The Reddit thing thus far seems many times more fervent than anything that happened to Twitter (I've been on and off fedi since 2017 and saw tons of migration waves from Twitter and other corpo sites), so hopefully it'll be different? Definitely seems to at least in part be because of the stark cultural difference between Twitter and Reddit at least in terms of how people directly interact with the service itself, like the whole thing with it being common to delete your old Reddit acc and start again every so often, or having multiple Reddit accounts to segment things off also being more common than on Twitter (I think I have/had like 4 Reddit accounts I hop onto every so often, personally?), but on Twitter your account is treated as more of a "permanent" and unmoving thing instead.

awooo

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I guess the latest twitter wave is sort of relevant to me since a decent number of furries moved over, though I still feel like some more popular members of the community failed us there, because I haven't seen any of them trying to use their influence to do anything, and I feel like they should put in at least some effort to research that.

I also haven't seen anyone really promote their fedi accounts on other places even if they got one, but every YouTube video out there has a mention of twitter and other mainstream sites.

You're right about the culture, redditors have more agency, and it feels like twitter has turned people into zombies who don't think anything except what their timeline (if you can really still call it a timeline) feeds them, the moment it disappears from there it's as if it doesn't exist.

Really makes me wonder what platforms like tiktok where the user agency is maximally removed must be doing to people's brains, I've never used it so I can't tell exactly, but the 100% passive attitude of my younger siblings to it, social media and what happens within it gives me a hint.

darq

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Seems like an eventuality, given that people have been blocking the BlueTickBrigade on-sight.

zleap

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@Wander

What needs to happen is that the people who run internet filtering services need to add Twitter to the list of sites that are blocked by public services, e.g schools, libraries etc.

FlowerTree

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Not gonna happen when so many public services use twitter. They won't even leave, let alone block...

FlowerTree

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Not gonna happen when so many people use twitter anyway, which is a shame because of how much influence twitter has to the world. Maybe there will be mass exodus one day like what happened to Reddit. What a shame, though, one of the most popular social media site is also the one of the most broken one...

Stellario

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Man, F*ck Elon and Twitter.

Milez_W

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Y*ff Steve Huffman (u/spez) and Reddit, every social media giant is slowly starting to break down and Twitter and Reddit prove this. Facebook's basically deserted, YouTube has its capabilities but lots are ditching it for TikTok because why pay attention to a 1 hour video essay when you can ruin your attention span watching girls doing cringe dances in their bedrooms? I haven't even heard of Instagram in a while, and Twitch isn't suffering but it ain't doing great either. I'm predicting a lot of people are gonna join the fediverse 2023-2030.

Mrdab

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I left Twitter for about 3 weeks, and I don't even miss it. Removing the blocking feature could incentivise people to continue harrasing and to spread more misinformation among harassment to vulnerable people and communities. What did Elon do? Remove their trust and safety team and also incentivise people to harass transgendered people by removing that one part of the content guideline (or ToS, I forgot) that protects them. It's already 2023, and yet some people don't care about peoples safety (let alone, have a human heart) when they should care about everyone (not just themselves), and letting it just go rampant onto the platform will cause some issues. I hope this platform goes offline someday...

Cyanicalarts

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Twitter is most of my income atm, so unless that changes I'm kinda stuck with it

Wander

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Fair enough. Would it make sense to start publishing some exclusive content elsewhere to see if your fans have an incentive to move?

Or maybe have some discounts only for requests via Mastodon. People still using Twitter would be paying a Twitter tax effectively.

Cyanicalarts

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Not a bad idea tbh. I'll give that some thought

liam

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I can see that helping, the last thing I did on Twitter was to make my profile private and block the owner and I have no intention of going back

Lilith

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Removing the block feature just seems like a great way to annoy the hell out of people.

Anomalocarididae

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Enron Crust is such a stuck up, egotistical prick!

Revali

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Eventually, it'll be only DM to and from Musk.