dirtmayorElon Musk Says Twitter Is Going To Get Rid Of The Block Feature, Enabling Greater Harassment
Butterbee (She/Her)So what you're saying is, if I have a Twitter account and I start blocking many MANY people it costs Elon money? Interesting.
Alternatively, Elon just found out how many people are blocking him.
I think this is what really happened. Hurt his ego.
literallyacatAwww Musky’s feelings got hurt that so many people have blocked him on twitter lol
prestonI'd wager this is in response to the campaign going around to block every blue checkmark. Elon can't let his crowd of sycophants feel like they're being ignored.
WilshireThat's not a shortsighted profit decision-making at all.
/s
InstantnudelnI smile every time when I see that Musky did some more stupid shit, because I know that every time he does shit like that, Mastodon grows more. And with that, the entire Fediverse gets stronger.
Go on Elon! Don't Stop please! Kill Twitter!
alyaza [they/she]it's unavoidable to center Elon here but can we just take a step back and appreciate how stupid, bad, and completely antithetical to a usable website this idea is? blocking has been a feature on like everything since phpBB forums because it literally just works. it's an easy way to curate your experience without escalating and it's a logical imitation of being able to simply avoid a person in real life. the idea of removing this in favor of nothing but mutes is just goofy as fuck (and if you make muting the new "block", what's even the difference between them? people will just use them basically the same way!).
logical
Hot SaucermanIt's interesting to me that they made the argument that blocking is increasing server costs.
I mean, it's plainly clear that Musk has no idea what is going on at any of his companies and the narrative of him being a genius of some kind was simply that: a narrative.
I expect it's accurate to say; their architecture is not like a database where you can add an index on a blocked state and then join against it. You have to get a list of potential posts that the user might want to see and then eliminate any in the block list. There will be a few edge case users who have thousands of block entries and a multithreading strategy is likely required to swiftly filter it in a reasonable timeframe.
However, an architecture I've seen that works around this is to build this timeline in the background and present it to the user from a cache, I don't know if this is what Twitter does as I never worked on that. However, if you want to not have a block feature but have some kind of mute feature anyway I don't see how there is a meaningful difference.
Yeah, sounds like that's the case. Funny how flaws in system architecture gets exposed to the public through vapid excuses these days.
My guess is muting would likely result in a decrease of overall visibility. Every account gets a mute score.
I would assume that blocking is one of the few features that change what each user sees so it could reduce cache hit rates significantly.
LadyAutumnMuting means other people can still comment on your stuff, and everyone else but you can see it.
Its so transphobes and homophobes can continue commenting on LGBT people's content.
Elon Musk really fucking hates his trans daughter. Dad of the century, right here.
witchonabikeI wasn't aware he had more children than the one with the weird-ass name. The private life section on wikipedia is a ride...
He ascribes to Longtermism and like his associate Jeffery Epstein, he thinks his genes are magically special, and so he wants as many offspring as humanly possible: while not actually giving one shit about the quality of life for any of them.
It's really interesting, because he fucking hates his own father (Errol is also a creep who married his step-daughter, who he raised from childhood), but can't put together that he is exactly the fuck the same as his creep ass father.
Longtermism doesn't have to do with one's own personal genetics or lineage, though, and it certainly doesn't belong to Elon.
Longtermism is a notion coming out of population ethics, that since there will be more people in the future than there are today, that we should take the well-being of all those future people into account when making decisions today.
This can be taken in lots of different directions — ranging from humanist environmentalism, to space migration, to concern about exotic existential risks.
But a fixation on one's own personal DNA is not really related to it at all. That's more of a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology.
DarraignTheSaneLemmy's "block" is essentially a "mute" function, too. It makes it so that you don't see any more content from a user, but they can still make comments on your stuff.
lemmy, at least, would have the excuse of being constantly a work in progress and i guess that not having such a large community that hard blocking is necessary. but twitter would be appallingly bad without blocks--it already is with them!
Also, Lemmy has the bonus of federation allowing instances to defederate entirely from abuse and spam-happy instances.
IIRC from reading about Bluesky, its strategy for dealing with spammer, trolls, hate speech, etc., was to have various servers in the Federation tag posts, users & servers with a "Spam" tag or "Hate speech" tag, and server admins can set their servers to not display posts so tagged, and to not pass them on to other servers.
I hope it stays this way. It would suck being excluded from unrelated content on Lemmy just because I had a disagreement with someone at some point in the past (depending on how block happy people are of course).
A worrying trend in recent social software platforms is that you can't block people. Slack, Teams, Discord (not really, it still shows you that people you block say things, which defeats the point), so many of these garbage social platforms (... all Electron-based) don't let you block people. Even Discourse doesn't have a block feature. They all just assume that everyone gets along.
Maybe nows the time to advertise Mastodon some more. What's he gonna do, block us?
Haha, that's a throwback to the days when I helped to manage a phpBB board and there were a few members that would just continuously get into arguments so I edited the database so both of them had each other on their block list. It was very telling when I discovered they unblocked each other a few weeks later and got back to arguing and derailing thread topics.
You took away their hobby.
RIP Twitter
cablepickI've blocked every ad I've ever seen on the app. I haven't used it in a while and I doubt I'll ever go back now.
The only thing left that I use it for is getting alerts about live police chases so I can tune in. Ill leave that going until those people move to other platforms.
shanghaibebopSo…. You just get hit with ad bots all day long?
UngodlyAudrey🏳️⚧️As a member of a rather vulnerable minority, I had made pretty liberal use of the block feature on Twitter. Of course, I left when Musk took over and switched to Mastodon, but my account's still there. I didn't delete it or anything. Might have to now.
I'm not part of any minority, but sympathize and will be deleting my account now. However, I'm wondering if I should block everything I see first the refresh several times. Knowing that 1 cent came out of their wallet because of me sounds pretty enticing nbl
RickI deleted mine the day Elon bought it... Lol. I honestly never cared for Twitter too much but I admit I get a lot of news from it (following the Ukrainian situation pretty closely).
silly lil jesterHow do you use Mastodon, if I may ask? I briefly registered and tried using it but it came off as highly populated with conservatives so I promptly left. :/
The mastodon instance hosted by the same people as this lemmy instance is nice.
Braddleton BracensonYou could see this coming the moment we started blocking blue checkmarks.
SkelectusThis has to be his worst decision at twitter so far.
Drew Got No Clueemphasis on "so far"
Added that there very intentionally :D
I wonder what he'll come up with to top this one. Blocking is such a fundamental function that I couldn't have thought of removing it if I purposefully tried to destroy the site.
While absolutely not important in the grand scheme of things, that day I opened the Twitter app and saw that fucking dogecoin icon as the splash screen, taking up all the screen real estate for a second or so, I was like: what am I even doing in this clownery of a platform??
QuentinCallaghanTwitter's fundamental model of user interaction is said to be broken, and lots of things have been made to mitigate it. And now everything goes into the shitter because of Elon's hurt feelings.
LOL, WHAT?! That's absolutely stupid.
CrylosWait. Is twitter still a thing? 😉
MarsI think I get were the “server costs” come from. The twitter algorithm they pushed to GitHub FIRST gets a set of like a thousand tweets to show you, then filters them, getting rid of blocked accounts for example. If you use one of the large block lists, you know, to bypass the lack of moderation, there is the “risk” that they neeed to do another request to get enough content to fill your front page of irrelevant stuff you don’t want to see.
IntrovertedEOWouldn't this open Twitter up to harassment charges? I mean, it's Musk so it is obviously an ego thing and not a well thought out idea, but couldn't someone sue because they can no longer block someone tweeting hateful things to them?
magnetosphere This reminds me of how foie gras is made.
I hate Elon as much as the next guy but from reading the article he talks about stopping the blockage of public posts. Doesn't this make sense? You can just go into incognito mode and look at their account anyway. As far as I can tell, you still won't be able to interact with the user.
It's like when the whole Trump blocking people was being talked about as not allowing citizens to see public information that the president tweeted. I know that ordinary citizens is totally different, but again, if your account is public people that you block will find a way to look at your posts if they want to.
Poof Birbhe's pissed because people started installing browser extensions like Block The Blue
Yeah, totally expecting that.
His aim of buying twitter, is to prop up a republican presidential candidate / authoritarians in other countries that can help him evade taxes and get more subsidies.
birdLet’s not forget it started as a meme and his hand was forced.
ElyssaI didn't know Elon joined Mastodon's marketing team!
First thing I did after he bought Twitter is block him. Did I hurt his feelings?
(Not that I follow what's going on with Twitter anymore since I found Mastodon.)
MrMagnesium12You can't block Elon Musk on Twitter. Tried it. If you reload the page, he is magically unblocked.
Tony_PepperoniHe's blocked for me just fine. I never have to see any of his posts.
It used to work. I'm not surprised he found someone to disable it. He seems determined to make the place as painful as he can.
GhostalmediaWTF is “a stronger form of mute?”
It probably means you can’t prevent someone with Twitter Blue to show up in your timeline.
Moneymunkie
jherazobHere's the context, bigots complaining about being blocked
a stronger form of mute
Yeah, Muskrat. You know what that's called? BLOCKING.