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!).
Muting 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.
Seriously good on his daughter for dropping his scumbag ass. She deserves far better from a parent.
I 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 fathered a child with 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.
Lemmy’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.
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).
It’s interesting to me that they made the argument that blocking is increasing server costs.
- How is that even possible, on a technical level?
- If true, how is changing to a “stronger mute” going to reduce said 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.
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.
logical
Stop right there. This is Elon Musk we are talking about
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.
Im honestly surprised twitter is still standing. Like how. How is it still going.
Yeah! I’m a little sad how resilient these toxic media companies are. Meta, twitter, Reddit, etc are really not good for humanity. But I guess humanity has always been toxic to itself.
I think a large part of this is just users being complacent. As long as the platform doesn’t completely change, most users will typically just keep trudging along.
For example if you remember the whole WhatsApp controversy from a little while ago. Pretty much my entire extended family communicated solely through WhatsApp, and they all were promising change, moving to signal, deleting fb and so forth. When the time actually came, everyone made signal accounts, and a few really switched, but to this day everyone still uses WhatsApp.
I’d guess that as long as people’s “interests” are on the platform, they will continue to use it.
Hard pass. If I cannot block someone harassing me that’s it. Thank God I already don’t have the problem of using Twitter to begin with
Elon Musk is a gaping, farting anus. I pay as much attention to the sounds from a gaping, farting anus, as I do from him.
Kind of rude. Farts can be funny, and they don’t deserve to be disparaged like this.
Very true. I take back the bit about the farting anus.
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 sure how many coffin nails that Elon may have left, but this is a big one.
Fun fact: a block feature is required to be accepted by the Apple AppStore review process. So Twitter will disappear from Apple devices with this change.
Hmm. Hate to be a downer, but that sounds like there needs to be a way for the service itself to block (ban) users and material, not for users to be able to block other users. So I wouldn’t be too optimistic about Apple’s response…
Apple’s review process is inconsistent at best. I used to work for an iOS app and it took several years before they blocked our release for not having a report feature on products. Never had the ability to block users, despite the ability to DM people.
Plus, for an app the size of Twitter, Apple will likely ignore most rules that doesn’t lose them money.
So he’s run out of engineers that know how to maintain the block feature?
QA: “I’m clicking the block button but it isn’t doing anything anymore!”
Twitter mgmt: “That’s ok, instead of fixing it we’ll just remove the button.”
It would be hilarious if when he is out at twitter we got a twitter files dump that showed the devs that maintained block really are all gone and he’s playing it off like this is some new big idea twitter came up with to make money🤣
Watching major social media websites actively kill themselves has been nothing if not an experience
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Awww Musky’s feelings got hurt that so many people have blocked him on twitter lol
He’s the only person I’ve blocked. I went on the other day and saw a tweet was hidden, clicked to view it, and when I saw it was him, I immediately closed the tab. Twitter is really good at providing me content that makes me want to leave 😆
He’s the first person I blocked. Felt good, now I’m blocking a whole bunch of other people. Cleans the feed(s) quite alot.
So what you’re saying is, if I have a Twitter account and I start blocking many MANY people it costs Elon money? Interesting.
Musk and his backers (various authoritarian regimes) probably intended only to amplify the voices of the far right and other loonies, not to kill the platform itself. But that was always going to be difficult to thread that needle, made impossible by Musk’s absolute lack of self awareness or self control. The fact that not only Musk is going to lose a lot of money when Twitter dies fills me with joy.
I wonder if this is because many people on Twitter just automatically block anyone with a blue checkmark (paid) when they see a response and the trolls have their feelings hurt so they run to Musk shouting about how they paid to be heard so he should force people to unblock them. That’s the kind of childish argument I would expect.
This is cause people blocked him isnt it or was it simply Biden got more attention then the poor musky boi
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On one hand, Twitter lost 5% of its user base. It’s not a ton. On the other, it’s 15 million people give or take. That 5% is probably the sort I want to hang out with the most. Likewise for Reddit. 5% of Redditors are awesome and likely now Lemmy/KBin users. Those are the people I care about. It also allows for more quality connections when you have fewer people in your circle. Close connections are more valuable than more connections.
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5% of the mdau. So it’s not a soft hit.
The Mastodon culture just isn’t there yet. And it’s a bit of work to actually use. Plus “toots” sounds even more stupid than “tweets” and I’m not sure it will ever really take off.
I’ve built up a community of folk on there, not all of whom have moved to Mastodon. They’re the only people keeping me on there to be honest. I crosspost between the two for the time being
95% of the people or groups I would want to follow are not on Mastodon.
And frankly, the Fediverse isn’t as user-friendly. It is a but tougher when you have to choose an instance, as well as learn how to follow from other instances.
