Elon Musk said on Friday that users of the site formerly known as Twitter will no longer be able to block unwanted followers from responding to their posts.
Not an Elon fan, but he’s not removing the mute feature… Which makes a bad headline but is accurate.
There was this whole debate with Mastodon because at least it didn’t originally have a block button either and a bunch of the Twitter converted were outraged.
The thing is, blocking is pretty meaningless when you have a public profile. In a sense it’s a false sense of security, because if someone is really trying to stalk you, all they have to do is open another browser, open your profile, and not login to the site or just create another account…
Edit: The one thing of value I forgot about is that blocking does stop someone from commenting on your posts, which in theory lets you cater your community/content a bit better. Though, part of why I always forget this use case is that it never really seemed to work. The small people don’t have trolls and the big people (understandably) aren’t taking the time to block all the trolls.
Idk, there’s definitely cases were blocking is super important. For example, small/ish institutions that attract a disproportionate amount of hate online but still serve important functions. One that comes to mind is @auschwitzmuseum… like it’s always gonna attract holocaust deniers, and not blocking them just exposes people who want to support it to antisemitism all the time.
This is just one example I’ve witnessed, but there must be many many more. Planned Parenthood…Charities that help people that are considered undesirables. Generally any institution dealing with “controversial” fields. I could go on.
Yeah, when I remembered that sort of stuff I added the edit… I guess personally, I think that’s better handled at the site wide moderation lvl vs leaving accounts to deal with that and just “block” people… but it’s Musk so I don’t see that kind of moderation happening anytime soon.
The whole “one person vs all the trolls” issue is part of why the reddit/community style format (where at least a team of volunteers can handle the issues) won me over vs the twitter/microblogging format for social media.
Not an Elon fan, but he’s not removing the mute feature… Which makes a bad headline but is accurate.
There was this whole debate with Mastodon because at least it didn’t originally have a block button either and a bunch of the Twitter converted were outraged.
The thing is, blocking is pretty meaningless when you have a public profile. In a sense it’s a false sense of security, because if someone is really trying to stalk you, all they have to do is open another browser, open your profile, and not login to the site or just create another account…
Edit: The one thing of value I forgot about is that blocking does stop someone from commenting on your posts, which in theory lets you cater your community/content a bit better. Though, part of why I always forget this use case is that it never really seemed to work. The small people don’t have trolls and the big people (understandably) aren’t taking the time to block all the trolls.
Idk, there’s definitely cases were blocking is super important. For example, small/ish institutions that attract a disproportionate amount of hate online but still serve important functions. One that comes to mind is @auschwitzmuseum… like it’s always gonna attract holocaust deniers, and not blocking them just exposes people who want to support it to antisemitism all the time.
This is just one example I’ve witnessed, but there must be many many more. Planned Parenthood…Charities that help people that are considered undesirables. Generally any institution dealing with “controversial” fields. I could go on.
Yeah, when I remembered that sort of stuff I added the edit… I guess personally, I think that’s better handled at the site wide moderation lvl vs leaving accounts to deal with that and just “block” people… but it’s Musk so I don’t see that kind of moderation happening anytime soon.
The whole “one person vs all the trolls” issue is part of why the reddit/community style format (where at least a team of volunteers can handle the issues) won me over vs the twitter/microblogging format for social media.