Block a tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it(megablock.xyz)
megablock.xyz
Block a tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it
https://megablock.xyz/
473 comments
The little heart button isn’t endorsement though. Lots of people use it as a bookmarking tool, or as a stochastic retweet button.
Some people will block accounts that follow accounts they don't like. I specifically follow people I don't agree with so I am exposed to the dumb things they are saying. I'm not sure how many people have blocked me even though I barely tweet much.
I'm pretty sure social media is simply a system to reinforce echo chambers and tribalism.
I'm pretty sure social media is simply a system to reinforce echo chambers and tribalism.
I guess one could use an alt account for that.
Why's this getting downvoted?
Having multiple persona's as a way to hack around the typical omnibus recommendation of content is a pretty good solution. Obviously it would be better if social media sites gave us a little more control.
Firefox containers could make this process pretty easy, actually. Go to twitter, right click on twitters tab, "open in container". It will switch you to your alt, just like that.
I use this for separating personal youtube from work youtube.
Having multiple persona's as a way to hack around the typical omnibus recommendation of content is a pretty good solution. Obviously it would be better if social media sites gave us a little more control.
Firefox containers could make this process pretty easy, actually. Go to twitter, right click on twitters tab, "open in container". It will switch you to your alt, just like that.
I use this for separating personal youtube from work youtube.
The solution to Twitter is more Twitter?
Twitter was nearly dead pre Trump. They really need to retrospect the correlation between how toxic communication has become over the period of their return to relevancy.
Twitter was nearly dead pre Trump. They really need to retrospect the correlation between how toxic communication has become over the period of their return to relevancy.
I don't use Twitter and sparsely use Facebook.
The feature to switch accounts without logging out had existed in many social services for a while now.
On a service having toxic elements; like, HN is toxic, to a lesser degree obv., and no I don't have the energy to actually expound on that.
One direct example though is that I got a downvote for noting the reality of the situation;
The problem was someone wanting to follow voices on Twitter they wouldn't normally follow but avoid being caught in an automated system like the one linked. Using another account is something people do for this.
IDK, is this something where noting a fact is taken by another party as a demand (to use the platform and engage in this way of using it), let alone a suggestion?
The feature to switch accounts without logging out had existed in many social services for a while now.
On a service having toxic elements; like, HN is toxic, to a lesser degree obv., and no I don't have the energy to actually expound on that.
One direct example though is that I got a downvote for noting the reality of the situation;
The problem was someone wanting to follow voices on Twitter they wouldn't normally follow but avoid being caught in an automated system like the one linked. Using another account is something people do for this.
IDK, is this something where noting a fact is taken by another party as a demand (to use the platform and engage in this way of using it), let alone a suggestion?
Yes. I see a lot of down votes on HN on perfectly reasonable, to myself, comments. People are up/down voting too much as a “like button”.
HN is still far better since you really need to be down voted for the moment to get hidden.
But I’m inclined to think that more accounts is ultimately a bad solution since you’re forced to pretend you’re part of the in group.
HN is still far better since you really need to be down voted for the moment to get hidden.
But I’m inclined to think that more accounts is ultimately a bad solution since you’re forced to pretend you’re part of the in group.
Endorsement/support/agreement. When applied on a tweet I consider to be vile, to me it means that the person retweeting/sharing it is amplifying that vile message.
There's already a dedicated bookmark button.
There's already a dedicated bookmark button.
There is no dedicated bookmark button. The Bookmark functionality is hidden under the share button.
The Like-button maybe is one of the most misused features of twitter. People don't always use software the way some developers think it should be.
The Like-button maybe is one of the most misused features of twitter. People don't always use software the way some developers think it should be.
The like-button was the "favorite" button, they only changed it trying to imitate Facebook in 2015. Your favorites (as in your browser) were your tweets you liked to store because you enjoyed them.
So no, the misuse doesn't come from the people but the forced/intended change by the devs.
So no, the misuse doesn't come from the people but the forced/intended change by the devs.
There is no such thing as a dedicated bookmark button on twitter. At least not on my client. Twitter on the web or with their app is unusable for me. The only thing I have to find a tweet again is the star / heart button.
You can bookmark in your browser. Each tweet has unique link. Advantage is that you can also organize bookmarks in browser .
Like I said, their website has become just unusable to me. I'd rather quit Twitter than use that.
You can press share, then share to bookmarks.
Then the problem is with your client, not with Twitter, because Twitter offers a way to save tweets.
Is that part of the official app? There isn't a way on their mobile site, except using browser bookmarks (of course).
Edit: nevermind, I see it hidden in the site's share menu.
Edit: nevermind, I see it hidden in the site's share menu.
Yeah I had no idea until now that was even an option. TIL.
I have for years been using the like button as a bookmark tool, and I probably will keep doing so. Old habits are hard to break.
I have for years been using the like button as a bookmark tool, and I probably will keep doing so. Old habits are hard to break.
Most people don't know that you can bookmark a tweet. Besides the like button is more convenient
Having the bookmark button under share is possibly one of the most prominent UX abuses of modern times.
It is also sometimes (probably quite rarely) an unintended misclick.
I have found that my right thumb, when scrolling, will be directly over top of the vertical space that the like buttons move through. As such, accidental likes have been much more common for me than when I had a smaller device.
I’m actually afraid I’m going to click like on something and it’s going to come back and haunt my career for some god awful reason. So much so that I use a script to “unlike” everything after a few weeks.
Until Twitter has an API to get the tweets I bookmark, this is exactly how I use the like button.
The heart button means you liked that specific tweet, the follow button means you track that account. They shouldn't be treated as implicit endorsement. Endorsement of a specific tweet comes from a retweet; endorsement of an account comes from a tweet/retweet of yourself that explicitly states such endorsement.
Why do people have to radicalize everything?
Changing topics, megablocking seems like a really good idea to mass block bots manipulating trending topics, since Twitter won't do anything significant about them on its own.
Why do people have to radicalize everything?
Changing topics, megablocking seems like a really good idea to mass block bots manipulating trending topics, since Twitter won't do anything significant about them on its own.
It's endorsement as much RT is, as Twitter puts tweets liked by people you follow on your timeline. It serves as an amplification tool, not just personal interaction.
Not all people use the Twitter interface. I used Tweetbot for years and "like" has no effect in that app, as it has no algorithmic feed. Since there is no way to bookmark a tweet from that app, that's what I used the "like" button for.
I'm not the only one either. Lots of people use Twitter this way, whether the Twitter devs intended for it to be used this way or not.
I'm not the only one either. Lots of people use Twitter this way, whether the Twitter devs intended for it to be used this way or not.
> Not all people use the Twitter interface
If I had to make a guess, I'd say the overwhelming majority does, and the number of third-party client users is negligible.
If I had to make a guess, I'd say the overwhelming majority does, and the number of third-party client users is negligible.
> stochastic retweet button.
One of twitter's terrible design decisions.
Because the "like" button causes a tweet to appear in the feeds of your followers who don't religiously use "home timeline" despite twitter's efforts to switch them to "top tweets", it is an endorsement and an amplification. It doesn't matter what your intent is, the effect is to put it in front of other people who don't want to see it.
One of twitter's terrible design decisions.
Because the "like" button causes a tweet to appear in the feeds of your followers who don't religiously use "home timeline" despite twitter's efforts to switch them to "top tweets", it is an endorsement and an amplification. It doesn't matter what your intent is, the effect is to put it in front of other people who don't want to see it.
Where can you view a list of the tweets you've liked?
Go to the desired Twitter profile, then switch to the Likes tab. Its URL will be something like https://twitter.com/{user}/likes.
It's not petty, it's just controlling your inputs.
It's creating your own bubble. Not really a good thing for anyone who values a broad perspective of the world.
You can value a broad perspective of the world, and follow high-quality feeds of many perspectives.
But when you find a low-quality feed, blocking the author and their entire ecosystem of promoters and sycophants is an effective method to increase your signal-to-noise ratio.
But when you find a low-quality feed, blocking the author and their entire ecosystem of promoters and sycophants is an effective method to increase your signal-to-noise ratio.
The people who provide high-quality feeds will invariably be caught up in your block spree.
[deleted]
If you want a broad perspective of the world, reading negative bullshit from angry twitter trolls is not going to help. It's just going to make you angry too.
Hence... the blocking?
It’s just a spam filter, homes. You telling me you don’t block spam? Bullshit.
[deleted]
We should probably spend more time controlling our outputs than our inputs
I think blocking anyone who liked it also may be a bit harsh. Maybe "mute" them for a few days instead and if they're repeat bad actors then block.
One question: does it monitors the Tweet and keeps banning new likers?
I found that most people in my block list were fans of few propaganda accounts. It could be a nice addition if the service can monitor those accounts, and keep banning people who liked any Tweet posted by those accounts.
I know there are side effects for doing that, but I have other ways to gather valid information and opinions so I don't really care. I rather save my time from useless and baseless online arguments (a lot of those were sent by bots), and focus on things that are really important.
I found that most people in my block list were fans of few propaganda accounts. It could be a nice addition if the service can monitor those accounts, and keep banning people who liked any Tweet posted by those accounts.
I know there are side effects for doing that, but I have other ways to gather valid information and opinions so I don't really care. I rather save my time from useless and baseless online arguments (a lot of those were sent by bots), and focus on things that are really important.
Unfortunately, no. Not yet.
But this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??
But this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??
>But this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??
A lot of people are about to have very quiet, very calm, very rational feeds, and this isn't good for engagement metrics.
I still wouldn't go near Twitter if my life depended on it, but it will certainly help people who are already hooked.
A lot of people are about to have very quiet, very calm, very rational feeds, and this isn't good for engagement metrics.
I still wouldn't go near Twitter if my life depended on it, but it will certainly help people who are already hooked.
I’m glad it isn’t built in. Twitter is already enough of an echo chamber.
Not all echo chamber are bad.
It's like religions. Somebody who lives deep in the religion that they believing in might deny all other beliefs, and almost all religions were created from adult fairy tales (in another word, lies). But what if a religion makes people peaceful, kind, productive and healthy while strongly rejects the idea of harming the others? Is that religion bad?
Contrary to what people might think, more information does not necessarily make you more rational and reasonable. It can be the opposite, sometimes information makes you anger and hatred, while ignorance gives you the power of justice and forgiveness. That's why sometimes those who made improvement to the world were doing so from their own veil of ignorance. Nobody tell them to hate, so they helped instead.
Echo chamber is an overly stigmatize word. It's true that some people handled it poorly, thus sadly created a spiral that dragged them all the way down. But on the other hand, echo chamber can also be a useful moderate tool to keep yourself out of those harmful ideas online too. It depends on how you craft the chamber, how you use it, and whether you left the door unlocked.
I would rather use my ignorance as a vault to keep my humanity.
It's like religions. Somebody who lives deep in the religion that they believing in might deny all other beliefs, and almost all religions were created from adult fairy tales (in another word, lies). But what if a religion makes people peaceful, kind, productive and healthy while strongly rejects the idea of harming the others? Is that religion bad?
Contrary to what people might think, more information does not necessarily make you more rational and reasonable. It can be the opposite, sometimes information makes you anger and hatred, while ignorance gives you the power of justice and forgiveness. That's why sometimes those who made improvement to the world were doing so from their own veil of ignorance. Nobody tell them to hate, so they helped instead.
Echo chamber is an overly stigmatize word. It's true that some people handled it poorly, thus sadly created a spiral that dragged them all the way down. But on the other hand, echo chamber can also be a useful moderate tool to keep yourself out of those harmful ideas online too. It depends on how you craft the chamber, how you use it, and whether you left the door unlocked.
I would rather use my ignorance as a vault to keep my humanity.
Reddit has a similar feature built in. How is it used? Trolls post something inflammatory and then block people that post dissenting opinions. In the end all that’s left is a comment chain normalizing whatever hate or drivel got posted.
If I block a person how does that affect your ability to see that person's dissenting opinions?
See the comments in this thread [1]. If I make a post and then block you, you can’t reply to anyone else in my thread, not just me. You can’t even participate in my discussion thread, even if you aren’t directly replying to me.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blo...
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/s71g03/announcing_blo...
> anyone have suggestions for my next career move?
Because it works against the viral rage amplifying feedback loops that the advertisers and shareholders demand...
Because it works against the viral rage amplifying feedback loops that the advertisers and shareholders demand...
> > anyone have suggestions for my next career move?
Guessing you forgot to hit 'copy' before you pasted that quote? Looks like you've re-pasted the same quote from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30839804) :D
Guessing you forgot to hit 'copy' before you pasted that quote? Looks like you've re-pasted the same quote from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30839804) :D
Yup. Ooops, sorry...
I'd _intended_ to quote:
> this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??
I'd _intended_ to quote:
> this service makes Twitter soo much more useful I wonder why it is not a standard built in option??
It would result in less "engagement". (And a better "filter bubble". At this point, I don't know which is worse.)
I expect it's about farming hate engagement.
Not that Twitter would openly say it.
Not that Twitter would openly say it.
This may seem a bit crass, but I mean it honestly. Why not just leave twitter?
I assure you, you will quickly realise you miss nothing.
I assure you, you will quickly realise you miss nothing.
Parts of Twitter are great. Endless US culture wars, not so much.
Because Twitter is one of the important way to get informed in near realtime on what's happening around the world, simply due to the size of it's user base. And this makes it useful ...before bots and mobs catches the wind too of course.
That's a generous way of describing anonymous 'rumours'.
My parents grew up, just as people started to get TV in their homes. Mostly, when very very young, they only had radio.
And as they matured, so did TV. Became larger, colour emerged, audio improved, and the wonder of viewing events live, in real time, from around the world was fascinating to them.
Soon, cable TV, and eventually 24 hour news appeared.
I watched the news morph from a 30 minute nightly summary, to a relentless repeat of the same news over, and over again. And talking heads, opinions relentlessly speed forth, by "experts" and "analysts", just droning on, hour after hour. All basically gossiping, rehashing the same info endlessly.
You, instead, have twitter. You, are in the same trap.
There is nothing of value there. No in depth news. No thoughtful information.
Just a relentless spew of opinion, talking heads...
Decades ago, magazines abounded. What does celebrity $x think of politics today? Or, what does the CEO of Ford, think about this and that?
This is the level of most of Twitter, the rest being people working (eg, fully biased) to amass follower. Once gained, via fraud, or being trendy (same thing really), they then sell their output to the highest bidder.
This can be political, or commercial.
Twitter makes my parents addiction to 24 news, alway on at home when I visited, seem trivial in comparison.
You have been tricked, had manipulated. There is nothing of value on twitter. Nothing.
If something is important, it will only be a mess of tangled garbage on twitter.
You know this. You already work against twitter's addictive, and useless properties, for you attempt to remake it into something sane, and useful.
But you cannot. It is designed to prevent this, designed to pull you in to the absurdities.
Get out. Follow what you secretly want.
Abandon twitter completely.
And as they matured, so did TV. Became larger, colour emerged, audio improved, and the wonder of viewing events live, in real time, from around the world was fascinating to them.
Soon, cable TV, and eventually 24 hour news appeared.
I watched the news morph from a 30 minute nightly summary, to a relentless repeat of the same news over, and over again. And talking heads, opinions relentlessly speed forth, by "experts" and "analysts", just droning on, hour after hour. All basically gossiping, rehashing the same info endlessly.
You, instead, have twitter. You, are in the same trap.
There is nothing of value there. No in depth news. No thoughtful information.
Just a relentless spew of opinion, talking heads...
Decades ago, magazines abounded. What does celebrity $x think of politics today? Or, what does the CEO of Ford, think about this and that?
This is the level of most of Twitter, the rest being people working (eg, fully biased) to amass follower. Once gained, via fraud, or being trendy (same thing really), they then sell their output to the highest bidder.
This can be political, or commercial.
Twitter makes my parents addiction to 24 news, alway on at home when I visited, seem trivial in comparison.
You have been tricked, had manipulated. There is nothing of value on twitter. Nothing.
If something is important, it will only be a mess of tangled garbage on twitter.
You know this. You already work against twitter's addictive, and useless properties, for you attempt to remake it into something sane, and useful.
But you cannot. It is designed to prevent this, designed to pull you in to the absurdities.
Get out. Follow what you secretly want.
Abandon twitter completely.
> You, instead, have twitter. You, are in the same trap.
> There is nothing of value there. No in depth news. No thoughtful information.
I think you're not aware of how much in depth, very specific information, and thoughtful analysis your can find on Twitter. Sure, there's going to be lots of crap, but you don't have to watch it.
> There is nothing of value there. No in depth news. No thoughtful information.
I think you're not aware of how much in depth, very specific information, and thoughtful analysis your can find on Twitter. Sure, there's going to be lots of crap, but you don't have to watch it.
For the average person that information is pretty much useless, it's just another type of entertainment.
The more real-time it is, the more likely it is misinformation.
Some of us have gained work from Twitter. I can assure you, we would have missed something.
i need metablock.xyz, a tool that blocks all the people who use this tool
And then I’d love a game-of-life style visual simulation of the effect of both kinds of blocks.
Will the Twitterverse split in two? Into n?
Will everyone end up in their own Twitterverse of 1?
Will Twitter implode with blocking taking all the resources away from tweeting?
Will the Twitterverse split in two? Into n?
Will everyone end up in their own Twitterverse of 1?
Will Twitter implode with blocking taking all the resources away from tweeting?
> Will the Twitterverse split in two? Into n?
This happens periodically with things like "menshn", "gab", "truth social". The problem is that Twitter functions as a PVP MMO: the wolves want prey, but nobody wants to be prey, so when they get isolated off into a hardcore PVP server it stops being fun for them.
This happens periodically with things like "menshn", "gab", "truth social". The problem is that Twitter functions as a PVP MMO: the wolves want prey, but nobody wants to be prey, so when they get isolated off into a hardcore PVP server it stops being fun for them.
What if I’m not shadowbanned but the only person who isn’t?!?
that game of life thing sounds pretty good, I'd like to watch any type of internet virality, ratio-ing, cancellation, etc. that way
I know this is a (sort of) joke but does any know if it is technically possible?
[deleted]
next step: the metametablock, a tool that blocks all the people who block the people who use this tool.
Eagerly waiting for the LinkedIn version to clean up my timeline.
I have already given up on LinkedIn as a social network. My profile only exists as a public resume for recruiters and peers to see, I never interact with anything on the site except to update my profile and check my privacy settings.
Based on my 0.5 days as a CyberIndustry specialist I want to send out a message to everyone:
* Half the teams waste collaborative potential by not having a second standup around 2PM.
* We do things DIFFERENTLY from all others; watch our funny PR video.
* Why waste time inside when you can code on your iPad in the sun?
<super clever algorithm hack>
* What do you think 1 + 4 =?
Heart for 5, Like for Five or Comment your answer!
</super clever algorithm hack>
<insert meaningless picture of author>
* Half the teams waste collaborative potential by not having a second standup around 2PM.
* We do things DIFFERENTLY from all others; watch our funny PR video.
* Why waste time inside when you can code on your iPad in the sun?
<super clever algorithm hack>
* What do you think 1 + 4 =?
Heart for 5, Like for Five or Comment your answer!
</super clever algorithm hack>
<insert meaningless picture of author>
I've been actively removing connections who comment or like posts that add no value to me. But LinkedIn is rapidly going downhill - some days my feed is just full of rubbish.
I honestly don’t know that many people that still use LinkedIn. I have an account, and most people I know have an account, but I’m not aware of any of them actively using it.
Seems like it’s mostly there for when you need to reach out to folks if you’re looking for a job.
I actually stopped logging in and sending/accepting connections not long after I started my current job (8 years ago).
Seems like it’s mostly there for when you need to reach out to folks if you’re looking for a job.
I actually stopped logging in and sending/accepting connections not long after I started my current job (8 years ago).
I use it strictly for job hunting. I receive a lot of offers there and it's a great way to contact recruiters. That was its premise, but they've been working hard to turn it into a social platform.
It’s used pretty commonly if you’re a hiring manager or if you regularly interview people. It’s much more convenient than looking at resumes because of its standardized format.
Why is it that when you reply to recruiters their first request is to send them a copy of your resume?
It took a while, but unfollowing anyone who produced low quality content did eventually result in an interesting LinkedIn feed. I wish I had started doing it sooner.
Twitter is a place where my blocklist length far exceeds my follow or following list. I use it only for the academic chatter. It is unfortunate that ML/Systems research has major presence on Twitter & thats happening to be high SNR.
Same here. Besides author wise block I desperately need topic wise block. For instance this Will Smith slapgate has totally screwed up my carefully curated timeline. My only option is to take a two week Twitter sabbatical and hope it dies down.
This is the social graph vs interest graph problem. With an interest graph you should only see content on topics you’re interested in. With Twitter’s social graph however, which is only a poor approximation of an interest graph, once you follow someone you also get all of their political hot takes, sports and other shit you don’t care about.
That's a great framing of it. I'm a good example, interested in many things so my tweets are about multiple topics. It must drive my followers nuts. And the accounts I like to follow are focused on a single topic.
I've thought about running half a dozen accounts with a focus on each, but be far easier if I could curate my output by topic and people can subscribe to only those they want (religion, ML, funny, politics, arty photography, steam trains)
I've thought about running half a dozen accounts with a focus on each, but be far easier if I could curate my output by topic and people can subscribe to only those they want (religion, ML, funny, politics, arty photography, steam trains)
Indeed! My purpose to follow someone is to get their insights into a specific topic. If they go off topic beyond my acceptable threshold (which is set to very low) I just unfollow them; the noise isn't worth it. However once in a while stuff like slap gate happens to mess up with my timeline. So sabbatical it is.
You can already hide tweets containing phrases in your Twitter settings.
Might be a bit of a challenge with two generic names such as 'Will' and 'Smith'. Even in combination these offer a good chance of occurring in non-actor related phrases (e.g., “Will Smith's new paper offer valuable insights into ML-research applied to Twitter threads?”).
If one's ready to take a two weeks sabbatical, hiding tweets with common words for 7/30 days is probably an acceptable compromise anyway.
Third party clients are a must if you are going to screw with Twitter. You can filter out all the noise and topics that aren't of interest.
That people use the native Twitter interface at all constantly amazes me.
That people use the native Twitter interface at all constantly amazes me.
The ML community has been so focused on recommender systems, maybe what we need is un-recommender systems.
(I'm joking, it obviously has very similar perverse results)
(I'm joking, it obviously has very similar perverse results)
After reading this comment, now I wish there was a way to create something analogous to Pandora or Spotify channels for Twitter. If you want to view news on ML research, change to your ML channel where you've followed relevant researchers and used this blocking tool for all else. Want to follow certain artists, change to your art station. Same for politics, sports, animals, etc.
I'm sure the way to do this for someone who wanted to is just to have multiple profiles but it'd be cool to have Twitter with a Spotify-like interface to use the site through different contexts with a single click.
I'm sure the way to do this for someone who wanted to is just to have multiple profiles but it'd be cool to have Twitter with a Spotify-like interface to use the site through different contexts with a single click.
For some reason, this worked brilliantly and organically on Google plus. I easily built circles of photographers, astronomers, computer geeks, artists, etc. Got interests based suggestions that made sense. I felt I had curated, high quality content lists. Compared to my google plus experience, Facebook and Twitter are just so much crap crap crap.
Therefore It only makes sense Google plus is the one that died - I'm pretty much the universal negative focus group :)
Therefore It only makes sense Google plus is the one that died - I'm pretty much the universal negative focus group :)
Twitter has lists for exactly this purpose
I often wonder how valuable a public block list might be and even if more valuable than a follower/following list. In this case as in many other cases there is probably more insight to be gained in silent evidence than in positive evidence.
[deleted]
A lot of people seem to "like" tweets for reasons other than liking the tweet.
Like what? It's become a semi-public endorsement in some ways, at this point -- Twitter frequently recommends tweets in the feed because someone you follow liked it.
If you use Twitter, you probably know that. So, liking a tweet is not very similar to up-or down-voting on Reddit or HN, which is private.
If you use Twitter, you probably know that. So, liking a tweet is not very similar to up-or down-voting on Reddit or HN, which is private.
Bookmarking for another platform or another time. Some twitter interfaces have a bookmark affordance and some do not (the web doesn't, at least in my cohort).
These alternative uses is why people say often in their bio that "likes" do not imply endorsement, but it's so common to say that that I didn't even mention it on my bio, though of course it's still the case.
These alternative uses is why people say often in their bio that "likes" do not imply endorsement, but it's so common to say that that I didn't even mention it on my bio, though of course it's still the case.
I very often like/share/upvote comments just to promote stupidity of the author. My followers are fully aware that I like something stupid for the lulz, not to promote it. If author of a stupid comment thinks they're being liked, that's even better for the lulz.
[deleted]
I don't use twitter, but on both reddit and here I'd estimate around ten percent of my voting is misclicking. Phones make it too easy to accidentally press a button.
If you can't avoid social media entirely, avoid using it on a touchscreen device. A accidental fat-fingered like/retweet on the wrong post isn't just embarassing, these days it has the potential to have serious consequences.
Very similar to upvoting on reddit.
Quitting Twitter is very easy and one of the best things I ever did. And I thought it would be hard! It really isn't.
I wonder at what point the blocklist would surpass twitters storage mechanism for it.
Can you block every single Twitter account?
Can you block every single Twitter account?
I’ve seen people on Twitter brag about having 6 figures blocked. So it at least works for that many. I know Marc Andreessen notoriously has a lot of people blocked. I wonder if it’s in the millions.
If someone spent 5 hours a day on twitter, and blocked a new person every 5 minutes... then after 4.5 years of doing this every single day, they would reach 100,000 people blocked.
Once every five minutes feels quite low in this situation. I don't really block, just mute for the most part. But I can go in and mute a dozen accounts in a minute in the comments on someone big's tweets. If you are someone with a high engagement rate, and actually want to curate the comments, you could easily end up blocking a hundred in a couple minutes.
Gotcha, makes sense. I'm not on twitter so I wasn't actually sure what to put for that.
As evidenced by this post, people use automated tooling that can easily make that number balloon.
Block lists. They exist, and there are tools to implement them.
Which is why you have a block-chain browser extension do it recursively.
[deleted]
Whenever I see this I wonder how much overhead blocking as a feature generates for twitter.
As a programmer I’d be more worried about the lookup cost. There are efficient ways to lookup a name in a list and very inefficient ways that would be fine for small lists, but struggle with large lists.
Maybe this is an ideal use case for a bloom filter. The answer to the question "is user X blocked?" is almost always going to be "no". And the "maybe" cases can consult the actual block list.
How exciting. I've waited my whole career for a bloom filter use case. Please no one tell me that there's a much more obvious solution.
How exciting. I've waited my whole career for a bloom filter use case. Please no one tell me that there's a much more obvious solution.
This made me curious and I wondered how it might work...
The simplest approach would be to start from user id 1 and increment up blocking each one but then you'd block millions of inactive, dead, or suspended accounts which would probably get you suspended.
A better approach may be to choose a "recent" tweet id, block the author, count up from there, checking if each author is blocked and blocking if they're not. The best part is that you don't even need to know the author when you make a request. For example, tweet id 1508540042817376256 is Elon's and it resolves to him whether you use https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1508540042817376256 or https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1508540042817376256
This is no longer blocking "every single Twitter account" but blocking "every single active Twitter account" but may still be able to trigger whatever limits.
The simplest approach would be to start from user id 1 and increment up blocking each one but then you'd block millions of inactive, dead, or suspended accounts which would probably get you suspended.
A better approach may be to choose a "recent" tweet id, block the author, count up from there, checking if each author is blocked and blocking if they're not. The best part is that you don't even need to know the author when you make a request. For example, tweet id 1508540042817376256 is Elon's and it resolves to him whether you use https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1508540042817376256 or https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1508540042817376256
This is no longer blocking "every single Twitter account" but blocking "every single active Twitter account" but may still be able to trigger whatever limits.
Compressed bitmap indexes are the way to do this in theory. Very efficient storage.
People lamenting this tool for making echo chambers don't really grasp that in practice people already actively filter out what they don't agree with. This just makes that process explicit. If you think for example someone who's an ardent Catholic is going to listen or even accept my views as a Valentinian Gnostic as valid then you really don't know how folks work. Heck, there's people will argue blue in the face a given sports team is the best even if they've never made it to their conference's playoffs in five years. To twist the phrase from Ben Shapiro (whom I find to be repugnant but that's neither here or there): feelings (or sentiments) don't care about your facts.
The act of filtering still exposes you a little. Using tech to wholesale blackhole "wrongthink" is probably one of the worst aspects of social media. Frankly I think terms like "bubble" dramatically trivialize just how dangerous this kind of myopia is.
The Network Effect, except, in reverse. Pretty soon, six degrees of kevin bacon means you'll see nothing.
Why stop there though? For every person that liked it, it should also block anyone that follows them, or has ever liked one of their tweets.
Why stop there though…
Why stop there though…
Blocking those who like a tweet seems excessive. Plenty of bad hits — people who use likes as bookmarks, etc. What would be really nice is to be able to group block by profile content, or if they were simultaneously followed by five accounts of your choosing. Some fine-grained blocking like that would be nice; it would also be nice if muted words & phrases would also apply to search results — I've seen too many sneak through, especially when attached to hashtags.
Nah. The SnR of Twitter is absolutely abysmal. The only way you can possibly use it effectively is to accept that there will be false positives caused by your filtering heuristics.
Prune the people you follow and don’t use the algo feed. My Twitter feed is very high SNR.
I too disabled the default "Recommended by Twitter" feed and instead chose to view only tweets by accounts I follow in a chronological order. Absolutely no political stuff. This resulted in a very pleasant twitter experience.
Yeah, mass blocking people only creates more isolated filter bubbles for everyone involved. Seems like a great way to create an echo chamber though.
Edit: wait, why the downvotes?
Edit: wait, why the downvotes?
Depends on who you are blocking. If it's anyone who slightly disagrees with you and anyone who likes them, then you'll probably quickly end up blocking literally everyone. But if it's people who are off-topic replying that Bill Gates is inserting microchips in vaccines, flat earther, or other Qanon style posts and those who upvote them, I don't really personally mind the loss.
Sounds like a good way to be in an echo chamber really quickly.
This isn't a bad thing if you're use of Twitter is not to get life critical news and political debates.
I don't think getting isolated from Rabbit breeders to dwelve in a lazy cat pictures bubble is something to lament about.
I don't think getting isolated from Rabbit breeders to dwelve in a lazy cat pictures bubble is something to lament about.
Yeah, can we get the corollary that follows the people who disagree with the blocked parties but that has the same political alignment as the blocked party?
I don't think getting rid of the Russian bot accounts will meaningfully degrade the discourse on Twitter.
I'm certain I'll be fine, and survive without flat Earthers, 5G-causes-COVID, and similar ilk. That's a critical lack of, ironically, critical thinking skills in windmill-type people that this Don Quixote instance considers not worth time nor nerves fighting with nor for.
And on the flip side, those same deplorables are saying the exact same thing about you.
At least everyone is happy.
At least everyone is happy.
Out of curiosity, how would you be seeing that on Twitter in the first place? The blocking need seems more like addressing a symptom, where the root problem is whatever system or algorithm showed you that stuff at all.
Right? I always hear this type of whining but every time I use Twitter I find cool projects and interesting discussion. The more mainstream threads are mostly noise and I don't pay a lot of mind to them. Many of the political shitposts are funny even if I disagree.
The flat earthers will also be fine, I guess...
But think of them
Or the Covid lab leak, or Biden’s son laptop.
That would be amazing if it was true.
How great would it be to separate off the mediocrity who think every conversation has to be about their amazing take on CO2 and their envro cult links on Wikipedia to Jevons paradox and the precautionary principle.
Why would I want their take on the latest version of PHP? It'd be great to be in a chamber of accelerated ideas where they stick. Nothing echoes on HN for instance.
It's an interesting experiment, if people used it.
I think the unforgiveness is the problem. People should be able to make some mistakes. This might output middle ground ideas or might create a 'like'-less subculture.
How great would it be to separate off the mediocrity who think every conversation has to be about their amazing take on CO2 and their envro cult links on Wikipedia to Jevons paradox and the precautionary principle.
Why would I want their take on the latest version of PHP? It'd be great to be in a chamber of accelerated ideas where they stick. Nothing echoes on HN for instance.
It's an interesting experiment, if people used it.
I think the unforgiveness is the problem. People should be able to make some mistakes. This might output middle ground ideas or might create a 'like'-less subculture.
> I think the unforgiveness is the problem. People should be able to make some mistakes.
Wholeheartedly agreed - the “Internet never forgets” is a related problem, although I've also seen some apparent “forgetting” over years.
Accordingly I liberally use a timed “ignore” function on some forums I participate in. So I can block people for a while, in the hope that their posting misbehaviour is lack of experience and/or just having a bad moment in life.
Wholeheartedly agreed - the “Internet never forgets” is a related problem, although I've also seen some apparent “forgetting” over years.
Accordingly I liberally use a timed “ignore” function on some forums I participate in. So I can block people for a while, in the hope that their posting misbehaviour is lack of experience and/or just having a bad moment in life.
It'd be great if there was a record of how/why people were blocked on twitter.
Fingering megablock & the originating tweet would be great context to know.
Personally I also think this kind of activity should itself be an optional part of our timelines, that we should be able to publicly or privately do these actions, as we see fit. Moderation is all individual right now, blocks are private activities, and starting to stake ourselves in, make our personal moderations part of the public discourse seems like a necessary next jump.
At this point I don't think anyone ever reviews their moderations, who they block. But I want to see a path for social media to eventually become a little more redemptive, where we a couple years down the road we might possibly be willing to try again. Structurally, right now, the whole moderation system is opaque as fuck, there's no real trace of what happened, there's no ability to reconsider at all. It's weird having a big log of shared internet history where the most important factors are not logged, have no record.
I don't think twitter is an echo chamber. I think it's badass & wide ranging & we engage in huge wild globe-spanning conversation in the exact opposite of echo chambers. But I do think it's cruel & merciless & that these proprietary social networks are cold & hard structurally, & that they refuse to allow a more real story & more real engagement & accounting to happen, systematically. They keep an amazing record, but also are radical extremists blowing up some of the most important parts of the record, deny much of the most core & vital history they create. Moderation should have the option to be part of the network: right now that is blanketly denied.
Fingering megablock & the originating tweet would be great context to know.
Personally I also think this kind of activity should itself be an optional part of our timelines, that we should be able to publicly or privately do these actions, as we see fit. Moderation is all individual right now, blocks are private activities, and starting to stake ourselves in, make our personal moderations part of the public discourse seems like a necessary next jump.
At this point I don't think anyone ever reviews their moderations, who they block. But I want to see a path for social media to eventually become a little more redemptive, where we a couple years down the road we might possibly be willing to try again. Structurally, right now, the whole moderation system is opaque as fuck, there's no real trace of what happened, there's no ability to reconsider at all. It's weird having a big log of shared internet history where the most important factors are not logged, have no record.
I don't think twitter is an echo chamber. I think it's badass & wide ranging & we engage in huge wild globe-spanning conversation in the exact opposite of echo chambers. But I do think it's cruel & merciless & that these proprietary social networks are cold & hard structurally, & that they refuse to allow a more real story & more real engagement & accounting to happen, systematically. They keep an amazing record, but also are radical extremists blowing up some of the most important parts of the record, deny much of the most core & vital history they create. Moderation should have the option to be part of the network: right now that is blanketly denied.
Its definitely interesting to consider something like that. Stats as to why might be cool, but odds are nothing is going to change my mind. I am actually more curious about how many users on my list end up getting banned for being bots eventually.
There used to be a tool I think called something like block with me, where you could follow other users block lists. Although I can't seem to find it any more. Options like that would certainly be interesting. But Twitter isn't incentivized to do something like that.
There used to be a tool I think called something like block with me, where you could follow other users block lists. Although I can't seem to find it any more. Options like that would certainly be interesting. But Twitter isn't incentivized to do something like that.
And 11 generations of ancestors
That must be the Spin̈al Tap version.
For others, nine was enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations
For others, nine was enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations
Not quite:
> A rare case was Fang Xiaoru (1357–1402), whose students and friends were also executed as the 10th family by the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402 – 1424), the only case where "ten exterminations" was officially sentenced and carried out.
> A rare case was Fang Xiaoru (1357–1402), whose students and friends were also executed as the 10th family by the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402 – 1424), the only case where "ten exterminations" was officially sentenced and carried out.
Can we get something like this that doesn't involve giving Twitter OAuth to some unknown third party?
It's either that or a browser extension which is even more dangerous.
At least with a browser extension you can audit the source code yourself (and know that the source is what you're installing) - with a 3rd party OAuth app you can never be sure.
That being said I don't think this app is going to do anything malicious.
That being said I don't think this app is going to do anything malicious.
>At least with a browser extension you can audit the source code yourself
Well, often this is not easy. I've tried to audit some extensions recently but a vast majority of non-open-source extensions are minified and heavily obfuscated. Unless you invest a lot of time, it's not easy to audit the code these days.
Well, often this is not easy. I've tried to audit some extensions recently but a vast majority of non-open-source extensions are minified and heavily obfuscated. Unless you invest a lot of time, it's not easy to audit the code these days.
I suppose there is a middle ground where it spits out a curl request (or something) that you could inspect and then insert your own API key into
I can't help but feel like this could really make a mess of things.
What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens" on platforms like Twitter, platforms that allowed us to better cultivate the topics we care about while allowing us to keep out some stray topic from someone who we otherwise follow because of something entirely different.
There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers, but for me the more pressing concern is preserving my mental health and disengaging entirely from the political conversation. Doesn't matter what side of the aisle they're on, Twitter pundits are unhinged and I want to stay out of the twisted world they inhabit. Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow. There are some powerful ideas if you know where to look.
Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.
What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens" on platforms like Twitter, platforms that allowed us to better cultivate the topics we care about while allowing us to keep out some stray topic from someone who we otherwise follow because of something entirely different.
There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers, but for me the more pressing concern is preserving my mental health and disengaging entirely from the political conversation. Doesn't matter what side of the aisle they're on, Twitter pundits are unhinged and I want to stay out of the twisted world they inhabit. Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow. There are some powerful ideas if you know where to look.
Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.
I agree.
A while ago a deleted an old profile I had that followed a number of political and/or hot-take types, which were addictive but never left me feeling happy. With my new account, I follow only makers, artists, engineers and software people.
I don't mind if those people very occasionally post something political, but if they do it too often I unfollow. Nothing personal, I just want my Twitter experience to be a happy and inspiring place.
Now, what if one of those people liked some post that I don't think people Ought to like? Should I ban them by association, even though I previously enjoyed their creative content?
(I guess this is moot -- a person who follows based on their interests rather than their political echo-chamber wouldn't use this tool.)
A while ago a deleted an old profile I had that followed a number of political and/or hot-take types, which were addictive but never left me feeling happy. With my new account, I follow only makers, artists, engineers and software people.
I don't mind if those people very occasionally post something political, but if they do it too often I unfollow. Nothing personal, I just want my Twitter experience to be a happy and inspiring place.
Now, what if one of those people liked some post that I don't think people Ought to like? Should I ban them by association, even though I previously enjoyed their creative content?
(I guess this is moot -- a person who follows based on their interests rather than their political echo-chamber wouldn't use this tool.)
You already likely have people in your life you just ignore the opinions of on certain subjects, or anything, because you know there's never going to be anything there. But there frequency and interjection is pretty well controlled by meatspace reality. Basic example: I will not watch any movie my brothers recommend. 10 years of trying and it turns out our tastes are pretty much exactly divergent.
This tool is basically a practical implementation of trust markets for a very large space. I'd say the one flaw in its implementation is that you might like to block only the intersecting set of users which liked 2 or more tweets - which would be a pretty good selector function in a lot of cases for "nuanced perspective or accident" versus "consistent pattern of behavior".
This tool is basically a practical implementation of trust markets for a very large space. I'd say the one flaw in its implementation is that you might like to block only the intersecting set of users which liked 2 or more tweets - which would be a pretty good selector function in a lot of cases for "nuanced perspective or accident" versus "consistent pattern of behavior".
I did that and made a point of following only people who tweet things that are interesting or funny. I would mute any account they posted something that made me feel bad. But Twitter kept finding ways to recommend tweets that would get under my skin in some way, no matter how many accounts I mute.
My biggest issue with Twitter these days is that my curated social garden keeps being invaded by engagement farmers who use the thread feature to post obnoxious listicles. I’m constantly being recommended tweets like these in my feed:
“I hunted, killed, and ate a wild baboon (brains and all)…Here are the 13 things I learned about human health along the way.”
“I read all 40,000 words from Jeff Bezos' Amazon shareholder letters. Here are 9 lessons worth your time:”
“We keep seeing the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. Time for a thread”
They remind me of Buzzfeed articles back in the early 2010s and there’s no way to turn it off besides muting the word thread and its emoji.
“I hunted, killed, and ate a wild baboon (brains and all)…Here are the 13 things I learned about human health along the way.”
“I read all 40,000 words from Jeff Bezos' Amazon shareholder letters. Here are 9 lessons worth your time:”
“We keep seeing the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is a feature of the system, not a bug. Time for a thread”
They remind me of Buzzfeed articles back in the early 2010s and there’s no way to turn it off besides muting the word thread and its emoji.
I'm always amazed by the number of people who use the native Twitter interface. I started with third party clients pretty early and never regretted it. Being able to see a natural, unmolested timeline + the advanced filtering tools most third party clients provide make them essential (for me anyway) if you are going to screw with twitter at all.
Despite having used the megablock tool in the past when I was on twitter (no longer active on there), I completely agree with your idea of social gardens. It's a large part of why I moved from there and tumblr to dreamwidth which has attracted a significantly more laid back and nuanced collection of people than the other two platforms. It's nice because you can subscribe to people's journals who have a very different collection of hobbies, and yet it doesn't feel forced for engagement or anything - it's their whimsies and thoughts, hollistically, and under various privacy filters if it's a delicate topic.
The main reason I used megablock on twitter was to reduce harassment from younger folks who send death threats for the sole perceived crime of creating NSFW art. I wish I were joking. Didn't follow anybody, it was already too toxic with those messages alone ... and why post if you can't create?
The main reason I used megablock on twitter was to reduce harassment from younger folks who send death threats for the sole perceived crime of creating NSFW art. I wish I were joking. Didn't follow anybody, it was already too toxic with those messages alone ... and why post if you can't create?
I think that would be conflating Twitter with a different type of social tool. Because Twitter has such a critical mass of users it's not surprising that they're hitting some fundamental issues with internet communities, and users want to solve them on twitter instead of using a tool or platform better suited to the task of having a tightnit community or a space for discrete topic matters.
> There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers
I think it's chasing a red herring to think we can harmonize such broad points of view in the same room, so treating Twitter like a discussion platform while also trying to think of it as a broadcasted social network, you just get a lot of yelling and extremely shallow discussions. If you want in depth discussions, more than a few people is usually too many, let alone tens to hundreds to thousands. I've seen some entirely novel conversations come out of twitter, but I've seen far, far, far more shallow bullshit. It's the wrong tool.
> Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.
I think you're very right here, people are afraid of not being part of the bigger conversation, and so they hesitate to find places to start their more discrete conversations elsewhere. I think that's made people forget how to have in depth discussions online, instead most topics circle around the same more broadcasted points as to not stray too far from the consensus, and accidentally disagree with their peers on the finer details.
> There is of course the argument that this could lead to even worse echo chambers
I think it's chasing a red herring to think we can harmonize such broad points of view in the same room, so treating Twitter like a discussion platform while also trying to think of it as a broadcasted social network, you just get a lot of yelling and extremely shallow discussions. If you want in depth discussions, more than a few people is usually too many, let alone tens to hundreds to thousands. I've seen some entirely novel conversations come out of twitter, but I've seen far, far, far more shallow bullshit. It's the wrong tool.
> Ah, but who am I kidding, people would much rather possess a nuke than a garden.
I think you're very right here, people are afraid of not being part of the bigger conversation, and so they hesitate to find places to start their more discrete conversations elsewhere. I think that's made people forget how to have in depth discussions online, instead most topics circle around the same more broadcasted points as to not stray too far from the consensus, and accidentally disagree with their peers on the finer details.
> Meanwhile, I find that Twitter is actually a really useful platform if you carefully curate the people you follow.
Exactly this. If you put some effort into following and unfollowing people regularly and you're the type of person who can resist engaging with inflammatory content, Twitter can actually be quite nice.
But for the people who just can't scroll past ragebait or inflammatory Tweets, Twitter is not a good place to be. People who can't exercise self-restraint or shrug things off seem to get pulled into angry, combative bubbles. It's basically the old mailing list flamewars but with shorter content and faster pace. These people are better off staying clear of Twitter entirely.
Exactly this. If you put some effort into following and unfollowing people regularly and you're the type of person who can resist engaging with inflammatory content, Twitter can actually be quite nice.
But for the people who just can't scroll past ragebait or inflammatory Tweets, Twitter is not a good place to be. People who can't exercise self-restraint or shrug things off seem to get pulled into angry, combative bubbles. It's basically the old mailing list flamewars but with shorter content and faster pace. These people are better off staying clear of Twitter entirely.
> What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens"
You can already make Twitter work this way: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
I mostly see relevant information and never anything promoted by Twitter, because I never look at my timeline.
You can already make Twitter work this way: https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
I mostly see relevant information and never anything promoted by Twitter, because I never look at my timeline.
> What I think would be nice is if there we tools that better allowed us to create "social gardens" on platforms like Twitter, platforms that allowed us to better cultivate the topics we care about while allowing us to keep out some stray topic from someone who we otherwise follow because of something entirely different.
isn't this essentially what mastodon is?
isn't this essentially what mastodon is?
All the garden-tenders are happily reading their RSS feed-readers in peace.
Sounds like you're describing federated microblogging. There's mastodon or pleroma that you could check out.
social gardens, like what google+ could have been.
but greed and internal team politics led to the demise of the project. and this is an outsider's remark by the way. greed because google+ was chasing after an ever increasing monthly active users. internal team politics because of spamming. it made no sense, to me at least, that the same company that gave us gmail could not deal with spamming on google+. spamming has also become rampant on youtube as well.
so yeah, google has been there and abandoned the idea.
but greed and internal team politics led to the demise of the project. and this is an outsider's remark by the way. greed because google+ was chasing after an ever increasing monthly active users. internal team politics because of spamming. it made no sense, to me at least, that the same company that gave us gmail could not deal with spamming on google+. spamming has also become rampant on youtube as well.
so yeah, google has been there and abandoned the idea.
These gardens sound like federated social networks, like mastodon or pleroma hosts in the Fediverse.
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Another good option: https://secateur.app/
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This will a good way to avoid reading tweets from those "communities" that are kinda .
This does not seem like it will end well.
I agree, but this isn't exactly a novel concept. Mass block lists have received media coverage in the past: https://slate.com/technology/2015/08/twitter-blocklists-they...
What does this even mean? Are you responding to the link?
I use a mobile phone and sometimes find that I have inadvertently Liked a tweet. But I guess such errors are moot, since anyone who is that blocky would likely end up blocking me anyway.
As for who is using Twitter [1]:
> the Twitterverse tends to skew younger and more Democratic than the general public. It also notes that the activity on Twitter is dominated by a small percentage — most users rarely tweet, while the most prolific 10 percent are responsible for 80 percent of tweets from U.S. adults.
> Pew says only around 22 percent of American adults today use Twitter, and they are representative of the broader population in some ways, but not in others.
Of an estimated 22% of US adults, 10% of those are generating 80% of the content. You're in a bubble of 2.2% of US adults (biased towards young Democrats), and then you want to block a significant number of those people too.
I suggest bursting this bubble. It's giving you a highly warped and unhealthy perspective of the world.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/pew-u-s-adult-twitter-user...
> the Twitterverse tends to skew younger and more Democratic than the general public. It also notes that the activity on Twitter is dominated by a small percentage — most users rarely tweet, while the most prolific 10 percent are responsible for 80 percent of tweets from U.S. adults.
> Pew says only around 22 percent of American adults today use Twitter, and they are representative of the broader population in some ways, but not in others.
Of an estimated 22% of US adults, 10% of those are generating 80% of the content. You're in a bubble of 2.2% of US adults (biased towards young Democrats), and then you want to block a significant number of those people too.
I suggest bursting this bubble. It's giving you a highly warped and unhealthy perspective of the world.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/pew-u-s-adult-twitter-user...
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This is something that you should not be able to do
How about a version that has certain flags in bios or names? And no I don’t mean Ukraine flags but other, toxic, culture ones.
And like nukes, make sure you know what using it does, and where to use it. There may be cases for this, but it's really easy to end up in one giant echo chamber if this is used overzealously.
I want my personal account to be an "echo chamber" (or rather, devoid of the culture war I have been conscribed to the front of), simply because I don't go on Twitter to argue.
Being trans sometimes also turns these tools into safety mechanisms to combat harassment.
Being trans sometimes also turns these tools into safety mechanisms to combat harassment.
Indeed. It's not an "echo chamber" if it's just the set of people who don't think you shouldn't exist.
(I see this has attracted a downvote from someone trying to make their own echo chamber)
(I see this has attracted a downvote from someone trying to make their own echo chamber)
Humans are a species of violent predators (that can occasionally even kill for fun or get sexual pleasure from torture) and have been so for thousands of years. There's always the possibility of encountering groups of people who "think you shouldn't exist" for multiple reasons (ethnicity, religion, sexual preferences etc.), it's just unfortunate that some otherwise inconsequential and quite benign and harmless psychological or biological features disproportionately amplify this probability for you...
Sure we need to work harder to fix discrimination etc. But in the end just as people exist people who think they shouldn't exist also exist. Fortunately reality doesn't always match what people think "should be", for both sides.
The normal pattern of behavior on social media just as in real life is to "leave the room" when the room if full of s*t / toxic people: if the room is Twitter and enough people leave it, it will cease to be a meaningful social media platform as more people move elsewhere. If you stubbornly sit in a room while ignoring other people that don't ignore you, sooner or later they'll punch you in the face regardless of who's right or wrong because people's right to not be ignored is more powerful than people's right to ignore others (eg. "let see how you ignore a punch? how about a tank? how about a missile?" it just is, people don't start wars attacking other people because they're not allowed to ignore something, but they really do so for being ignored too much).
P.S. just upvoted you ;)
Sure we need to work harder to fix discrimination etc. But in the end just as people exist people who think they shouldn't exist also exist. Fortunately reality doesn't always match what people think "should be", for both sides.
The normal pattern of behavior on social media just as in real life is to "leave the room" when the room if full of s*t / toxic people: if the room is Twitter and enough people leave it, it will cease to be a meaningful social media platform as more people move elsewhere. If you stubbornly sit in a room while ignoring other people that don't ignore you, sooner or later they'll punch you in the face regardless of who's right or wrong because people's right to not be ignored is more powerful than people's right to ignore others (eg. "let see how you ignore a punch? how about a tank? how about a missile?" it just is, people don't start wars attacking other people because they're not allowed to ignore something, but they really do so for being ignored too much).
P.S. just upvoted you ;)
> The normal pattern of behavior on social media just as in real life is to "leave the room": if the room is Twitter and enough people leave it, it will cease to be a meaningful social media platform as more people move elsewhere. If you stubbornly sit in a room while ignoring other people that don't ignore you, sooner or later they'll punch you in the face regardless of who's right or wrong because people's right to not be ignored is more powerful than people's right to ignore others (it just is, people don't start wars attacking other people because they're not allowed to ignore something, but they really do so for being ignored too much).
There are so many double negatives in this pair of sentences that I can't work out what you mean or are advocating?
There are so many double negatives in this pair of sentences that I can't work out what you mean or are advocating?
Sometimes people are not "advocating" anything just saying what we think and sometimes what we think is complex and nuanced requires effort to understand.
And that's another argument against such social media "carpet blocking" features, people will just block whatever is "too difficult to understand" because they'll probably identify it as "malicious" and lock themselves into simplified "cartoon reality" bubbles where everything is simplified and ADHD-friendly and easy-to-digest.
Then people outside the bubble trying to transmit complex messages would just give up communicating, then you get two groups of people not communicating and this sooner or later leads to violent conflict.
And that's another argument against such social media "carpet blocking" features, people will just block whatever is "too difficult to understand" because they'll probably identify it as "malicious" and lock themselves into simplified "cartoon reality" bubbles where everything is simplified and ADHD-friendly and easy-to-digest.
Then people outside the bubble trying to transmit complex messages would just give up communicating, then you get two groups of people not communicating and this sooner or later leads to violent conflict.
I would summarise their contrived stance as “Don’t use Twitter if other users are trying to harm you”.
Which is all well and fine, but on the other hand, I don’t have any problem with blocking malicious people and continuing to use Twitter. I don’t see why I should yield to the bad actors.
Which is all well and fine, but on the other hand, I don’t have any problem with blocking malicious people and continuing to use Twitter. I don’t see why I should yield to the bad actors.
As a white, heterosexual male I'm here to read reactions like this one. Thanx for the perspective, my first thought was that this tool can only be bad, and now I changed my mind.
easy solution: Don't click on trends, read only tweets from the people you follow.
Back when I was actually using it, this wasn’t possible with the official app or website: if one of the people I followed retweeted or liked something, it would appear on my… what’s the terminology here? Timeline? View?
My memory is a bit hazy but I think I could hide retweets from specific people one at a time, but not everyone all at once, and not favourites at all.
Have these things changed?
My memory is a bit hazy but I think I could hide retweets from specific people one at a time, but not everyone all at once, and not favourites at all.
Have these things changed?
Twitter has two kinds of experience: "Home" and "Latest". "Latest" is only people that you follow, their tweets and retweets in chronological order. "Home" is generated feed of tweets from people you follow, sometimes tweets that they just liked, trends and random bullshit. Needles to say that "Home" is Twitter's default mode and you'll get occasionally switched to it even if you choose "Latest".
Top right of the app or timeline : the "stars" icon. Switch from "top tweets" to "home timeline".
Like old.reddit, Twitter kind of hate it but realise that if they kill it they'll lose a lot of old users.
Like old.reddit, Twitter kind of hate it but realise that if they kill it they'll lose a lot of old users.
This is a good way to put it. Twitter has a nasty habit of pushing politics on your feed no matter how many times you tell it not to. Digital nukes to clean up silicon valley's BS seems appropiate to wrest back some control.
I can think and discuss politics on better platforms where the conversation works better. Twitter is too brief, useful for bird pics and science annoucements. Not for nuanced political essays.
I can think and discuss politics on better platforms where the conversation works better. Twitter is too brief, useful for bird pics and science annoucements. Not for nuanced political essays.
"Twitter" doesn't do that, that's what Twitter is. It's become a platform for elites to virtue signal and everyone else will rally around that, be it virtue signaling from the left of the political spectrum, or the right.
It stopped being about whatever it was supposed to be used for once journalists at so-called "elite" institutions swarmed to the platform.
It stopped being about whatever it was supposed to be used for once journalists at so-called "elite" institutions swarmed to the platform.
Elinvynia(4)
The other day, someone told me that believing in the Holodomor made me a Holocaust denier, and ten people favorited it.
If I had had this tool, I would have used it.
Twitter is entertaining but can be noxious.
If I had had this tool, I would have used it.
Twitter is entertaining but can be noxious.
Seems like the people commenting on HN overwhelmingly aren’t active on Twitter for various reasons. That’s fine. If you’re not active on Twitter it might not occur to you the various reasons why this tool exists.
HN is, itself, a garden. Twitter is more than three orders of magnitude larger, just going by user count. The comments on HN are kind of safe and predictable most of the time. Shitty comments on HN get downvoted, flagged, or just left at the bottom of the pile, because everyone on HN sees the same version of HN (mostly).
On Twitter, if someone is shitty, they can still rack up a massive follower count of similarly shitty followers. Just imagine some dumb [flagged] [dead] comment on HN, and then imagine that the author has 800,000 followers who just love the dumb shit that this author writes. That’s Twitter for you.
Hacker News is curated by the community and voting. Twitter is curated partly by that but also by following, blocking, and muting. Muting silences somebody so you don’t see their tweets any more. Blocking is stronger—it blocks them from seeing your tweets too, unless they sign out. The point is to make it so that the aforementioned jerk with 800k followers is much less likely to see your tweets, much less likely to harass you. You can’t use “the community” to curate Twitter because Twitter is too large. By necessity, it comprises many communities.
There are people on Twitter who have built a following of rowdy users and egg them on. Sometimes it crosses a line and they get banned, but if you have 800k rowdy jerks following you, you don’t need to do much more than disagree with someone on Twitter to sic your fanbase against them. Blocking the entire group means they don’t see your tweets, they don’t forward your tweets to their friends and tag that walking timebomb with 800k followers.
There are a few topics that attract the most abuse, and if you don’t follow those topics on Twitter or if they’re not a big part of your life, you won’t see some of the worst parts of Twitter that this is designed to address. Think politics, trans issues / terfs, race, Marvel movies, feminism, etc. Better that you have the tools to control your own interaction on Twitter than these tools are centralized.
HN is, itself, a garden. Twitter is more than three orders of magnitude larger, just going by user count. The comments on HN are kind of safe and predictable most of the time. Shitty comments on HN get downvoted, flagged, or just left at the bottom of the pile, because everyone on HN sees the same version of HN (mostly).
On Twitter, if someone is shitty, they can still rack up a massive follower count of similarly shitty followers. Just imagine some dumb [flagged] [dead] comment on HN, and then imagine that the author has 800,000 followers who just love the dumb shit that this author writes. That’s Twitter for you.
Hacker News is curated by the community and voting. Twitter is curated partly by that but also by following, blocking, and muting. Muting silences somebody so you don’t see their tweets any more. Blocking is stronger—it blocks them from seeing your tweets too, unless they sign out. The point is to make it so that the aforementioned jerk with 800k followers is much less likely to see your tweets, much less likely to harass you. You can’t use “the community” to curate Twitter because Twitter is too large. By necessity, it comprises many communities.
There are people on Twitter who have built a following of rowdy users and egg them on. Sometimes it crosses a line and they get banned, but if you have 800k rowdy jerks following you, you don’t need to do much more than disagree with someone on Twitter to sic your fanbase against them. Blocking the entire group means they don’t see your tweets, they don’t forward your tweets to their friends and tag that walking timebomb with 800k followers.
There are a few topics that attract the most abuse, and if you don’t follow those topics on Twitter or if they’re not a big part of your life, you won’t see some of the worst parts of Twitter that this is designed to address. Think politics, trans issues / terfs, race, Marvel movies, feminism, etc. Better that you have the tools to control your own interaction on Twitter than these tools are centralized.
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Even better: block Twitter itself.
Filter bubble in 8 clicks or less.
The only time I visit twitter is when a link to something there is posted from elsewhere. That level of focused twitter activity is just about right. Hanging out there I think I'd quickly drown in the noise.
Or instead of blocking you could give each person a strike, repeat for a sample of 100 hated tweets, and then block the people with more than N strikes.
Basically put the power of The Algorithm into the hands of the people.
Basically put the power of The Algorithm into the hands of the people.
I do like that idea. Less false positives on the real people, and more likely to find those bot armies.
Spicy take: lots of folks use it once, on a tweet from Elon Musk.
Twitter would explode. Either from the blocklist explosion, or the outrage whiplash.
Twitter would explode. Either from the blocklist explosion, or the outrage whiplash.
Twitter is an outrage factory; almost everything about its design lends itself towards engagement via accelerating conflict.
I foresee that this sort of tool would encourage conflict within smaller communities that adopt its use, or cause them to evaporate in a flurry of mass blocking.
I foresee that this sort of tool would encourage conflict within smaller communities that adopt its use, or cause them to evaporate in a flurry of mass blocking.
Blocking people is a great way to avoid conflict. It's much better than the platform kicking people off.
> Blocking people is a great way to avoid conflict.
Until you get subtweeted by people who see you blocked them.
Until you get subtweeted by people who see you blocked them.
I don't really understand what's so terrible about that. You could always block them too? It doesn't go on infinitely.
What’s the difference of people behind your back in real life? Either way you aren’t going to immediately know.
I don't see how it could.
If you use this in a community, on a post that lots of people liked, you've essentially booted yourself.
If enough people boot themselves from a community that it becomes too small to be viable... I dunno, maybe the world is better off without that community.
If you use this in a community, on a post that lots of people liked, you've essentially booted yourself.
If enough people boot themselves from a community that it becomes too small to be viable... I dunno, maybe the world is better off without that community.
eh twitter is fine if you're careful about who you follow
...set their house of fire and salt the earth.
Joke aside, I can see where this project come from. So, as others have suggested, I don't have a Twitter account anymore.
Joke aside, I can see where this project come from. So, as others have suggested, I don't have a Twitter account anymore.
Is this going to work on a Tweet with 1 million likes?
Isn't it a cancel culture in it's essence?
Step #1, sign up for twitter.
Step #2, get offended...
whoops. took care of this at step #0. Have a nice night, y'all. Problem solved.
whoops. took care of this at step #0. Have a nice night, y'all. Problem solved.
I was on Twitter for about 3 weeks and then I just so exhausted from it I just deleted it. I feel so much better for it.
There have been tools like this in the past (e.g, ggautoblocker). All they do is make a social network even more broken.
Private/local alternatives: Twitter lists, mute and bookmarks.
Client-side kill switches have existed since Usenet, if not earlier.
Client-side kill switches have existed since Usenet, if not earlier.
This is way cooler than the ‘famous person I don’t know’ sarcastic blog post I was expecting from the headline!
I think there’s value to extract that data and then send drones to kill every single one.
Maybe an enterprise feature where our big data cluster is mined by AI that finds any siblings, offspring etc and based on their score either terminates them or sends them to our re-education island.
An extra revenue stream could be to film the whole thing and sell it to Netflix.
Maybe an enterprise feature where our big data cluster is mined by AI that finds any siblings, offspring etc and based on their score either terminates them or sends them to our re-education island.
An extra revenue stream could be to film the whole thing and sell it to Netflix.
Kill drones? Social credit scores? Re-education island?
What are you crazy?
The status quo works fine. People you don't like (and, bonus, the ones you do, too) stay indoors addicted to bad dopamine cycles. You don't sell footage of their incarceration to netflix - their incarceration is _watching_ netflix. It's also their re-education. It's robotic enough, it (eventually) kills them off, it's already here, and it's already profitable. You don't have to bother processing their next of kin's data either, because by and large they won't be having any, sitting alone, at home, for all their free time. For the foreseeable future, efforts should be focused on improving the efficiency of systems that already exist, not building solutions in search of a problem.
Sakes alive, you people are clueless. Leave depop to the professionals.
What are you crazy?
The status quo works fine. People you don't like (and, bonus, the ones you do, too) stay indoors addicted to bad dopamine cycles. You don't sell footage of their incarceration to netflix - their incarceration is _watching_ netflix. It's also their re-education. It's robotic enough, it (eventually) kills them off, it's already here, and it's already profitable. You don't have to bother processing their next of kin's data either, because by and large they won't be having any, sitting alone, at home, for all their free time. For the foreseeable future, efforts should be focused on improving the efficiency of systems that already exist, not building solutions in search of a problem.
Sakes alive, you people are clueless. Leave depop to the professionals.
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I don't see a privacy policy anywhere on the website. Please add one.
What a fantastic way to turbo-charge confirmation bias.
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Mutual assured social media destruction ICBM.
Just in time for the culture wars!
Imposing one's own hellban...
Except it's only for you.
Certainly. But once you block enough of the people that you interact with, your bubble gets pretty small.
Not passing judgement on the project. I, like others here, just think there are limited benefits at that level.
Not passing judgement on the project. I, like others here, just think there are limited benefits at that level.
Sure; I'm not offering any value judgement or commenting on bubbling, I'm only pointing out that it cannot by definition be a "hellban" when it only prevents one person from seeing the blocked thing(s).
It's a little bit different, but you see what I'm saying, right? If you block scads of people by network association, you're going to stop seeing replies. You'll be shouting into the void, unable to see any response associated with your actions. That is, effectively, a hellban.
Maybe some people want a one-way street; that's fine.
Maybe some people want a one-way street; that's fine.
As somebody who doesn't use Twitter actively, I don't understand why you would ever want to block someone. If you're sick of someone, why not just mute them? Blocking seems to be kind of a childish option because you want the other person to know that they are blocked. The idea that you want to actively disable someone from reading your tweets seems absolutely bananas to me.
If someone is harassing you on Twitter, muting them doesn't stop them from interacting with your tweets. You don't see it anymore, but people looking at your tweets still do, so now people see things attached to your tweets you have no idea about.
Some also argue that its better someone is explicitly told "you can't interact with this person" vs them trying and it getting hidden silently and them having no idea they can't reach you that way, and thus suggest blocking over mute also for people who didn't attack you. (A "don't show this person unless they directly talk to me" would be nice to have instead)
Some also argue that its better someone is explicitly told "you can't interact with this person" vs them trying and it getting hidden silently and them having no idea they can't reach you that way, and thus suggest blocking over mute also for people who didn't attack you. (A "don't show this person unless they directly talk to me" would be nice to have instead)
This is something that took me years to grok about Twitter. Each tweet creates a forum that is solely moderated by the tweeter. Mod powers include blocking people (which removes all their replies from the forum and from any other forum you create in future, as well as blocks them from seeing your tweets), and locking the whole forum (making it read-only except for named people).
Blocking somebody who is harassing you seems to be a very bad idea. You're actively telling them that they're blocked. They can create a new account to work around this. Muting is much more efficient because it does not give any feedback and thus does not provoke any further escalation.
Depends on the situation. E.g. many probably rather know if lies are spread about them in the replies, even if it means dealing with new accounts popping up.
In addition to detaro's comment, it also stops them from retweeting you from their high-profile account in order to cause a "pileon" of abusive messages to you.
Of course people routinely work around blocks, mutes, and account suspensions by posting screenshots of tweets, but there the interactions are de-automated - you can't reply to the screenshot, you'd have to dig up the original tweet author.
Of course people routinely work around blocks, mutes, and account suspensions by posting screenshots of tweets, but there the interactions are de-automated - you can't reply to the screenshot, you'd have to dig up the original tweet author.
"Build your own ideological bubble! Don't let anyone tell you radicalization is wrong!"
It’s a good point. That anyone intentionally moving to block all dissenting voices always considers the other people to be the radical ones.
i am sure this can be done client side such as with redblock extension
Hurray for open dialog!!!
this kind of junk is why I find myself blocked by random people I've never had any sort of interaction with.
It's at best unhealthy for you, democracy, and human understanding and at worst full on hateful.
It's at best unhealthy for you, democracy, and human understanding and at worst full on hateful.
The name of the project is all wrong, it should be called Megabubble.
You'll always get voices from outside the bubble... even if they come in the form of people in your bubble dunking on the dumbest takes from outside it.
I'm not a Twitter user but it's bizarre that it doesn't have even the most rudimentary form of proactive user control. Why is there no settings page where I can punch in a bunch of words or phrases to blacklist?
[deleted]
Why even bother using Twitter at that point? This seems wrong somehow. Turn off the computer and go outside.
Usually I don't make comments like this but come on. Seriously?
If one genuinely feels as though they need this level of advanced machinery to survive the apparently harrowing experience of using Twitter, they may choose to reevaluate their habits.
Usually I don't make comments like this but come on. Seriously?
If one genuinely feels as though they need this level of advanced machinery to survive the apparently harrowing experience of using Twitter, they may choose to reevaluate their habits.
It's a natural tool in a digital world. IRL you can literally walk away from a conversation to express your disgust and disinterest in argument in a low-effort manner. On Twitter you can't make the same gesture, so an analogous low-effort measure is to stop listening. It would not be nice to block people like that IRL, but it's a different thing on the internet where millions of people and their cats can easily waste your time.
The actual analogous action would be to keep scrolling. This does nothing to show disgust as no one else knows that you blocked them.
You can keep scrolling, but the other side keeps posting, and that gets put into your feed nevertheless.
You're implying Twitter is worth using at *this* point. Removing the irredeemable 20% from our collective feeds might actually make a Twitter a more positive place and worth using again.
There's a lot of creatives that need twitter in order to make their second income viable (promotion for their patreon/etsy/gumroad stores, etc).
... and there's a lot of those artists who get sent death threats for the sheer crime of drawing NSFW art or even milder LGBT+ works.
I used to be on that track of indie artist promotion but swore off twitter after repeatedly seeing that level of harassment. Why post? While I was on there, this was an enormously helpful tool that at least cut down on the level of toxic messages seen.
... and there's a lot of those artists who get sent death threats for the sheer crime of drawing NSFW art or even milder LGBT+ works.
I used to be on that track of indie artist promotion but swore off twitter after repeatedly seeing that level of harassment. Why post? While I was on there, this was an enormously helpful tool that at least cut down on the level of toxic messages seen.
I don't see an issue with it, it's a decent tool for curating who you see and interact with on the already-toxic platform.
Twitter has its purpose, deep deep below the miles of garbage.
Twitter has its purpose, deep deep below the miles of garbage.
You can't think of a single good use case for a tool like this? Consider receiving a bunch of hate-tweets based on some physical aspect of your appearance.
[deleted]
There's a number of people who pretty much have to use Twitter for their job. Writers, pundits, journalists, etc.
Twitter doesn't have good platform-wide moderation. By default, you get all the notifications about people talking to you in one place. You can't see comments from friends or business contacts without wading through the strangers demanding your attention and death threats too.
I disagree , Twitter has phenomenal platform wide moderation for the mute feature Alone.
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Silicon Valley elite VCs (like Mike Solana - the guy who requested this feature) are terminally online. They have opulent wealth, but spend their day glued to a phone. I suppose that’s a sign of a true addiction. When you could be doing almost anything else, and yet you spend time on an app that embodies pure hell.
This is great for people who hate free speech
Do you feel similarly about spam filters?
I don’t think everyone needs the full spectrum of opinions being played at them 24/7, sometimes it’s nice just to use a platform like Twitter to converse with friends.
I don’t think everyone needs the full spectrum of opinions being played at them 24/7, sometimes it’s nice just to use a platform like Twitter to converse with friends.
That sounds very much like an echo chamber, you know.
If someone wants to use Twitter to have purely technical/academic related discussions but gets attacked periodically by a few people strangely fascinated by the British royal family, I don’t think they need to justify wanting a little respite.
Does that make it an echo chamber? Maybe depending on someone’s definition it does, but then I would argue an echo chamber isn’t always bad and can sometimes be good.
Does that make it an echo chamber? Maybe depending on someone’s definition it does, but then I would argue an echo chamber isn’t always bad and can sometimes be good.
Twitter is just a nasty place.
At first I thought I would just ignore people who made me want to argue.
But then twitter had to remind me what the trending hashtags were, and they were enough to make me facepalm.
It's a shame, because there's quite a few technologists who do cool shit that talk on twitter. But I'm just over being in an environment where overly sensitive people vomit their ill thought out political opinions at me.
At first I thought I would just ignore people who made me want to argue.
But then twitter had to remind me what the trending hashtags were, and they were enough to make me facepalm.
It's a shame, because there's quite a few technologists who do cool shit that talk on twitter. But I'm just over being in an environment where overly sensitive people vomit their ill thought out political opinions at me.
I have similar thoughts...
Not long after twitter started showing me algorithmic recommendations, it decided to show me some comments that were so vile I couldn't help but call them out. The person responded by asking "Who are you and what are you doing in my replies?". Which was a valid question. Why was I there? I didn't want to be talking to that person. Why did I even see that content? Was I rewarding the algorithm's choice by responding? Gross.
Is that the new normal for twitter? Do I have to wade through enraging AI content as payment for following the creators I love?
No. If thats the trade, its a bad trade to make. I deleted twitter and I haven't looked back. There's some fantastic creators on twitter doing cool things. But there's too many interesting ways I could be spending my time to waste time dealing with that.
Not long after twitter started showing me algorithmic recommendations, it decided to show me some comments that were so vile I couldn't help but call them out. The person responded by asking "Who are you and what are you doing in my replies?". Which was a valid question. Why was I there? I didn't want to be talking to that person. Why did I even see that content? Was I rewarding the algorithm's choice by responding? Gross.
Is that the new normal for twitter? Do I have to wade through enraging AI content as payment for following the creators I love?
No. If thats the trade, its a bad trade to make. I deleted twitter and I haven't looked back. There's some fantastic creators on twitter doing cool things. But there's too many interesting ways I could be spending my time to waste time dealing with that.
> I couldn't help but call them out.
Rule #1 of any algorithmic feed is that you get more of what you interact with.
If you're the type of person who can't resist engaging with things that make you angry, algorithmic feed websites are not for you.
For people who have no problem scrolling past dumb comments and pressing the like button on things they actually want to see (a lot of people refuse to "like" on principle, to their own detriment) then Twitter is actually not a bad place.
But if you're easily triggered and you gravitate toward the things that make you angry, it's best to just stay away.
Rule #1 of any algorithmic feed is that you get more of what you interact with.
If you're the type of person who can't resist engaging with things that make you angry, algorithmic feed websites are not for you.
For people who have no problem scrolling past dumb comments and pressing the like button on things they actually want to see (a lot of people refuse to "like" on principle, to their own detriment) then Twitter is actually not a bad place.
But if you're easily triggered and you gravitate toward the things that make you angry, it's best to just stay away.
> If you're the type of person who can't resist engaging with things that make you angry, algorithmic feed websites are not for you.
I think I am that kind of guy, to an extent. I don't always indulge - but it is always a constant temptation.
Probably why I exiled myself from FB and Twitter.
I think I am that kind of guy, to an extent. I don't always indulge - but it is always a constant temptation.
Probably why I exiled myself from FB and Twitter.
Twitter made me so angry I just stopped going there for my own mental health. The other day my partner linked me to a well liked thread featuring two people on Twitter arguing why it was or was not ethical to travel to Hawaii now given the oil spill in the aquifer by the Navy. One was arguing that visiting Hawaii in light of the spill would be unethically affecting hard-working everyday Hawaiians. The other argued that tourism dollars buoy the economy. After first 5 hot takes by both with many likes, you get to the bottom of the thread and realize than one of them is a European teenager and the other an Australian, neither having ever even visited Hawaii in their lives let alone lived there.
I changed my Explore location to Japan. I don't read Japanese so it is easy to ignore.
Nitter is everything I wished Twitter was. Well except the upcoming support for following folks. Viewing the same profile in each is like viewing 2 completely different platforms with how different the displayed content is.
nitter is just the same censorship and rage. you still have to click Load More 100 times to read the full 3% of opinions that were not completely censored. it’s a place for stupid people to go and say things like “I support Will Smith” and pretend they are an internet celebrity
Nitter has an autoload option, it's not enabled by default because it requires JS and it doesn't want to assume JS but once ticked it works fine.
In regards to celebrity gossip and such I guess it depends who you follow. With Nitter if you only associate with people that simply don't partake in those kind of discussions you won't see such discussions. On Twitter it's hell bent on trying to show you what is popular instead of what you asked to see so the same is not true.
In regards to celebrity gossip and such I guess it depends who you follow. With Nitter if you only associate with people that simply don't partake in those kind of discussions you won't see such discussions. On Twitter it's hell bent on trying to show you what is popular instead of what you asked to see so the same is not true.
> But then twitter had to remind me what the trending hashtags were
I use Adblock Plus to block Twitter's trending topics and it is a huge improvement; the topics are just annoying things that get engagement. Another thing that makes Twitter tolerable is to mute words with abandon, e.g. everything from "supreme court" to "wordle". Finally, I block anyone who tweets something stupid.
I use Adblock Plus to block Twitter's trending topics and it is a huge improvement; the topics are just annoying things that get engagement. Another thing that makes Twitter tolerable is to mute words with abandon, e.g. everything from "supreme court" to "wordle". Finally, I block anyone who tweets something stupid.
Do not engage at all.
The only way to win is to not play the game in the first place.
Let them fight it out in their echo-chambers. They will get bored really soon and realize that there is more to life than screaming and banning each other in the blue bird site.
Some things just need to be ignored and left alone. The outrage that is happening on the blue bird site is one of them. It is not worth it.
The only way to win is to not play the game in the first place.
Let them fight it out in their echo-chambers. They will get bored really soon and realize that there is more to life than screaming and banning each other in the blue bird site.
Some things just need to be ignored and left alone. The outrage that is happening on the blue bird site is one of them. It is not worth it.
One thing I find weird is that what seem to be prevailing ideas on Twitter are nonexistent in the real world. Did sane people just give up on the site? Or does Twitter just promote the crazies?
There was an interesting point in a different post [1] in this topic.
Essentially Twitter not only has a largely biased sample in terms of who uses it, but there's also an extreme bias in terms of who actually posts on it. About 22% of Americans (2019) use Twitter and, of that 22%, 10% are generating 80% of the posts. So Twitter is primarily driven by a bubble of 2.2% of Americans who skew younger and more liberal than the average. I would hypothesize (though it was not stated by the sources given) that the 2.2% who are posting like crazy also likely skew more radical than average as well.
It's quite dangerous because sites like Twitter can give people the imaginary perspective that they're interacting with hundreds of millions of people, when in reality they're generally communicating with an extremely unrepresentative and small sample of the world, or even of the "Western world". And now factor in the growth of tools, such as this, that add wide-range and spider-style ban/censor/muting of anybody who expresses a view you really dislike.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838517
Essentially Twitter not only has a largely biased sample in terms of who uses it, but there's also an extreme bias in terms of who actually posts on it. About 22% of Americans (2019) use Twitter and, of that 22%, 10% are generating 80% of the posts. So Twitter is primarily driven by a bubble of 2.2% of Americans who skew younger and more liberal than the average. I would hypothesize (though it was not stated by the sources given) that the 2.2% who are posting like crazy also likely skew more radical than average as well.
It's quite dangerous because sites like Twitter can give people the imaginary perspective that they're interacting with hundreds of millions of people, when in reality they're generally communicating with an extremely unrepresentative and small sample of the world, or even of the "Western world". And now factor in the growth of tools, such as this, that add wide-range and spider-style ban/censor/muting of anybody who expresses a view you really dislike.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838517
Social platforms seem to be largely segregated by social class. Children and young people have their own stuff, likewise different generations and socioeconomic groups have their own fora. Twitter is something like the urban-cosmopolitan-progressive-educated-professional-30+ forum, and the politics reflect that.
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I haven't found any technologists on Twitter who avoid posting or interacting with political or social-issues stuff.
Everybody has an opinion on Trump, Biden, BLM, Trans Rights, Free Speech, racism, sexism, religion, immigration, abortion, war... the list goes on.
I'd actually pay money to follow technologists whose opinions on anything outside the tech in question I have no good guesses about.
The standard refrain is "well all tech is political". Well no: it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from when you're talking about a quirk of CSS or a cool e-ink project... or at least it doesn't interest me who you are or where you come from: I'm interested in what you're learning/teaching/doing with the tech.
Everybody has an opinion on Trump, Biden, BLM, Trans Rights, Free Speech, racism, sexism, religion, immigration, abortion, war... the list goes on.
I'd actually pay money to follow technologists whose opinions on anything outside the tech in question I have no good guesses about.
The standard refrain is "well all tech is political". Well no: it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from when you're talking about a quirk of CSS or a cool e-ink project... or at least it doesn't interest me who you are or where you come from: I'm interested in what you're learning/teaching/doing with the tech.
The thing that I dislike the most on twitter are the posts where so many people liked it twitter decides to show it to me even though I am not following the person who wrote it.
I understand why they are doing this, but most of it is noise. I feel like if I had a way to browse twitter without any posts with more than 1,000 likes, it would be a much better experience.
I understand why they are doing this, but most of it is noise. I feel like if I had a way to browse twitter without any posts with more than 1,000 likes, it would be a much better experience.
Use an App that only gives you a timeline of people you follow, and their retweets (if you haven’t turned off retweets for that person).
Sounds like the fediverse. Most posts don't get a lot of interaction there.
No this is different. The issue is not that posts get more interaction on twitter. The issue is that twitter's algorithm shows me posts by people I am not following if the post is popular. But the kind of tweets that get 50k likes are just hot one liners that I don't care about. If twitter just showed me tweets only from my friends, this would not happen. I am also on the fediverse but I want twitter to behave differently because I like the people I am following on twitter, not all the random popular tweets by people I don't follow.
Twemex replaces the useless trending panel with more useful context.
It's a cesspool for sure. Depending on your interest in Twitter, the crack down on BS from Russia and related areas has made some of it more tolerable.
Use Tweetdeck. Using Twitter's homepage or mobile app is just a complete shitshow.
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This is very apt coming from Mike Solana.
I quite like him but he blocked me for some reason. I'm a literal nobody with 5 followers.
I never flame and I discuss in good faith. My guess is he's too trigger happy with blocking. I'm sure it works well for him, but blocking people strongly enforces your own echo chamber.
This makes you weaker to critiques, which is an incredibly valuable form of feedback.
I quite like him but he blocked me for some reason. I'm a literal nobody with 5 followers.
I never flame and I discuss in good faith. My guess is he's too trigger happy with blocking. I'm sure it works well for him, but blocking people strongly enforces your own echo chamber.
This makes you weaker to critiques, which is an incredibly valuable form of feedback.
Critiques are nice, critiques from complete strangers on the internet are rarely helpful and often unwanted.
Hmm sure, if this is the intent one could disable or not read the comments. Blocking people seems like an emotional response.
It’s a mistake to think of it as an emotional response.
I looked at Mike Solana’s timeline. He’s got nearly 100k followers and tweets about topics like the RNC, mask mandates, NFTs, international politics, housing, and religion. You can bet your ass his tweets attract a ton of weirdos in the replies.
I’m guessing he takes five seconds to figure out whether or not to block you, because he has to make these decisions multiple times each day, and he has better things to do.
It does feel like a big deal the first time you block someone. I remember the first time I blocked someone on Twitter. I was so sick of seeing their tweets in my feed. After I blocked them, I just kinda forgot about them, and my brain is free to do other stuff. Blocking is not a big deal.
I looked at Mike Solana’s timeline. He’s got nearly 100k followers and tweets about topics like the RNC, mask mandates, NFTs, international politics, housing, and religion. You can bet your ass his tweets attract a ton of weirdos in the replies.
I’m guessing he takes five seconds to figure out whether or not to block you, because he has to make these decisions multiple times each day, and he has better things to do.
It does feel like a big deal the first time you block someone. I remember the first time I blocked someone on Twitter. I was so sick of seeing their tweets in my feed. After I blocked them, I just kinda forgot about them, and my brain is free to do other stuff. Blocking is not a big deal.
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consider that Twitter is not an appropriate platform to receive critique. many people might simply not want to use it that way.
I don't know who Mike Solana is, maybe he's also bad at taking feedback in real life, but still.
I don't know who Mike Solana is, maybe he's also bad at taking feedback in real life, but still.
While you may be right that Twitter is not an appropriate platform to receive critique, consider that it might be unhealthy if we build a major avenue of society-level communication that is not an appropriate place for critique.
> consider that Twitter is not an appropriate platform to receive critique. many people might simply not want to use it that way
What makes this forum appropriate?
What makes this forum appropriate?
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An alternative solution might be to leave Twitter. Talk to ppl irl. Read the news paper and I mean the paper (digital edition is acceptable too) not the website/app.
Yes. And to go further, discuss what you read with your friends and family: "Hey, did you hear about X? What did you think of it?". There is a high chance that at least some of these people have a different perspective, and there's a high chance some can bring a new perspective.
Disagreement is fundamentally healthy, as long as all parties hold their beliefs in good faith. It's much easier to hold a bad faith discussion on the internet than in person.
Disagreement is fundamentally healthy, as long as all parties hold their beliefs in good faith. It's much easier to hold a bad faith discussion on the internet than in person.
This seems to be a prevailing view of Twitter as a newpaper replacement or for political discourse.
For the sake of it, Twitter as a tool has many other uses:
There's a ton of illustrators and photographers that post their work on Twitter, it's an excellent alternative to Instagram in that respect, in particular for those who don't want to deal with Facebook/Meta.
Blocking an artist who's work you don't like isn't creating any nocive filter bubble, you get in exchange a timeline of nice pics that make you happy.
I think a lot of people want to have political discourse and interact with the news events of the world, and desperately look for a place to do it. I'd wager any tool/platform that is chosen for that will very fast look like a cesspool of nastiness. People who feel Twitter is crushing their life should rethink what they're looking for in Twitter, and follow, I don't know, @hourlywolvesbot ?
For the sake of it, Twitter as a tool has many other uses:
There's a ton of illustrators and photographers that post their work on Twitter, it's an excellent alternative to Instagram in that respect, in particular for those who don't want to deal with Facebook/Meta.
Blocking an artist who's work you don't like isn't creating any nocive filter bubble, you get in exchange a timeline of nice pics that make you happy.
I think a lot of people want to have political discourse and interact with the news events of the world, and desperately look for a place to do it. I'd wager any tool/platform that is chosen for that will very fast look like a cesspool of nastiness. People who feel Twitter is crushing their life should rethink what they're looking for in Twitter, and follow, I don't know, @hourlywolvesbot ?
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Please don't read the news paper; it's editorialized thought vomit without a shred of skeptical empiricism. The news industry might just be the most potent industry for willfully manufacturing confirmation bias among the masses.
I think journalists would beg to differ. I believe that journalism is a good thing. Humans aren’t equipped to process all of Twitter effectively. Use Twitter for getting a signal of what’s happening or what interests you. To gain better information that’s been processed, digested, and summarized for you then I think journalism is great.
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Then it turns out you were wrong but you never know because you were stuck inside your cope bubble like some Japanese soldier in a remote island bunker thinking WWII was still going 30 years after it finished.
You block me because I block you and next thing you know pacifists are cheering on neo nazis and greenies are begging for cheaper gas and oil.
Free speech is important because true speech stands up to scrutiny and lies do not. Therefore only liars want to curtail free speech.
You block me because I block you and next thing you know pacifists are cheering on neo nazis and greenies are begging for cheaper gas and oil.
Free speech is important because true speech stands up to scrutiny and lies do not. Therefore only liars want to curtail free speech.
Free speech is important. It also has nothing to do with me letting other people take up screen space on my monitor.
Blocking people from my Twitter account isn’t curtailing their free speech.
Blocking people from my Twitter account isn’t curtailing their free speech.
Block nasty people. Blocking other people prevents you from exposure to other ideas than your own. The only person that loses is you.
Probably feels good and comfy in nicely resonant echo chamber though.
I block nasty people regardless of which echo chamber they belong to.
Probably feels good and comfy in nicely resonant echo chamber though.
I block nasty people regardless of which echo chamber they belong to.
I’m happy to engage in discussion with people whose opinions differ from my own. I’m also happy to carve out portions of my time and interaction where I’m not doing that. It’s totally possible and healthy to not always invite the full firehose of possible human discourse into my brain.
And there’s always the part where Twitter is actively a horrible place for any kind of constructive conversation due to the character limit and the overwhelming desire of most participants to generate the most clicks/outrage possible.
And there’s always the part where Twitter is actively a horrible place for any kind of constructive conversation due to the character limit and the overwhelming desire of most participants to generate the most clicks/outrage possible.
Yeah I mean it is natural to hang with your gang. We do that in real life, outside of the internet.
But, the premise of this post is to nuke a tweet which is rather a good name for it. It would end up creating a worse exposure for the person blocking. They'll be left with the most perfect resonant chamber - this is how conspiracy theories and lies spread. Mentally conditioned to ignore facts and diverging opinions.
Sure, go ahead and form a band with people you love to hang out with. Play music, enjoy life.
But, the premise of this post is to nuke a tweet which is rather a good name for it. It would end up creating a worse exposure for the person blocking. They'll be left with the most perfect resonant chamber - this is how conspiracy theories and lies spread. Mentally conditioned to ignore facts and diverging opinions.
Sure, go ahead and form a band with people you love to hang out with. Play music, enjoy life.
The principle of free speech is important because it allows those who have an open mind to take in any and all ideas. So if you choose to have a closed-mind, you're in principle going against the ideals of free speech and what it allows people to benefit from.
Oh. Well then I guess I’m against free speech as you’re defining it.
I’m in favor of everyone being free to speak their mind and share the opinions, without the government punishing them. I’m also in favor of individuals’ ability to absorb, ignore, retort, react, etc based on their own opinions of what people say. This includes both your ability to listen to any and all opinions at all times, and my ability to say I don’t want to have some content in my Twitter feed.
Thankfully the law where I live (the US) defines free speech as aligning with my definition.
I’m in favor of everyone being free to speak their mind and share the opinions, without the government punishing them. I’m also in favor of individuals’ ability to absorb, ignore, retort, react, etc based on their own opinions of what people say. This includes both your ability to listen to any and all opinions at all times, and my ability to say I don’t want to have some content in my Twitter feed.
Thankfully the law where I live (the US) defines free speech as aligning with my definition.
I didn’t define free speech as forcing the absorption of all speech.
Take this hypothetical: imagine a world where everyone blocked all speech they disagreed with. Would there still be a point to free speech (in practice)? What’s the point of being able to say what you want when anyone who could be potentially affected by it in practice can easily ignore you? If technology heads towards that direction then it can indeed create a world where speech is free in theory, but closed in practice.
My point is that the spirit of free speech goes hand in hand with open mindedness. Without open mindedness (which means absorbing information even if you seem to initially disagree with it) free speech is moot.
The reality is most disagreements and turnarounds in opinions do not happen easily because we think we are right, and that the opposing speech is automatically wrong. If it were so easy to filter out valid vs invalid speech we wouldn’t have disagreements of opinions.
Take this hypothetical: imagine a world where everyone blocked all speech they disagreed with. Would there still be a point to free speech (in practice)? What’s the point of being able to say what you want when anyone who could be potentially affected by it in practice can easily ignore you? If technology heads towards that direction then it can indeed create a world where speech is free in theory, but closed in practice.
My point is that the spirit of free speech goes hand in hand with open mindedness. Without open mindedness (which means absorbing information even if you seem to initially disagree with it) free speech is moot.
The reality is most disagreements and turnarounds in opinions do not happen easily because we think we are right, and that the opposing speech is automatically wrong. If it were so easy to filter out valid vs invalid speech we wouldn’t have disagreements of opinions.
There’s plenty of value in the government not jailing people for saying something even if nobody else on the planet listens to them.
Similarly, freedom of religion and assembly (and the press!) do not require an audience. The right protects your ability to act without being harmed by the government. If nobody reads your newspaper, you still were able to exercise your right.
Similarly, freedom of religion and assembly (and the press!) do not require an audience. The right protects your ability to act without being harmed by the government. If nobody reads your newspaper, you still were able to exercise your right.
Being able to write a newspaper that no one can practically (or want to) read is just a more insidious form of censorship.
In 1984 (the book), one of the tools of censorship was to actually remove words that were unfavorable from the vocabulary. In practice, while it may still be possible to express certain thoughts, if it was made impractically cumbersome to do so it has the same effect as censorship.
In 1984 (the book), one of the tools of censorship was to actually remove words that were unfavorable from the vocabulary. In practice, while it may still be possible to express certain thoughts, if it was made impractically cumbersome to do so it has the same effect as censorship.
Is that happening somewhere?
My blocking someone on Twitter (or Twitter banning someone) doesn’t mean that “no one can practically read their newspaper”. It means myself or Twitter have decided we don’t want to listen to or host their newspaper.
They’re welcome to continue writing their newspaper and seeking an audience. This is, in fact, the way that speech worked for the first significant percentage of time between the creation of the Bill of Rights and the current moment in time. Most people for most of that time didn’t have the ability to smash their hands on a keyboard and have the entire internet read whatever thoughts popped into their head. Attempting to retcon “free speech” to include the reach provided by commercial sites on the internet doesn’t have any grounding in reality, and being blocked or banned on those platforms is neither “insidious” nor “censorship”.
My blocking someone on Twitter (or Twitter banning someone) doesn’t mean that “no one can practically read their newspaper”. It means myself or Twitter have decided we don’t want to listen to or host their newspaper.
They’re welcome to continue writing their newspaper and seeking an audience. This is, in fact, the way that speech worked for the first significant percentage of time between the creation of the Bill of Rights and the current moment in time. Most people for most of that time didn’t have the ability to smash their hands on a keyboard and have the entire internet read whatever thoughts popped into their head. Attempting to retcon “free speech” to include the reach provided by commercial sites on the internet doesn’t have any grounding in reality, and being blocked or banned on those platforms is neither “insidious” nor “censorship”.
If twitter has a de-facto monopoly, and deploys a feature that makes it easy block people, then there is de-facto censorship.
Even if twitter is not technically a monopoly, it only takes a small concentration of power in these tech platforms to practice de-facto censorship.
If I point a gun to your head and tell you to denounce Biden or be shot, you’re “welcome” to take the bullet and preserve your freedom of expression, but for most people they may not be willing to make that sacrifice. Sub out bullet with some other form of de-facto removing of agency and you’ll see that just theoretically being free isn’t enough.
In China there are token parties but 1 party has de-facto control. So what does it matter if only in theory the system is multi-party? What does it matter if our system of free speech only in theory promotes free speech?
If one ideology takes hold then it can always abuse its power using de-facto censorship to suppress competing ideologies and ideas.
In an authoritarian system in China one must first overthrow the party in power to practice de-facto free speech. In our capitalist system you are suggesting one must overthrow the corporate authorities first before practicing free speech. Then impediments to free speech in both systems are the same: the people in power.
If you somehow think a communist system where the government controlling companies restricting free speech is somehow different from a system where companies controlled by powerful entities (shareholders of varying sizes) are restricting free speech then you’ve been deluded by Western propaganda.
Both are the same, and the powerless will have no agency even if they can freely yell into a vacuum.
Even if twitter is not technically a monopoly, it only takes a small concentration of power in these tech platforms to practice de-facto censorship.
If I point a gun to your head and tell you to denounce Biden or be shot, you’re “welcome” to take the bullet and preserve your freedom of expression, but for most people they may not be willing to make that sacrifice. Sub out bullet with some other form of de-facto removing of agency and you’ll see that just theoretically being free isn’t enough.
In China there are token parties but 1 party has de-facto control. So what does it matter if only in theory the system is multi-party? What does it matter if our system of free speech only in theory promotes free speech?
If one ideology takes hold then it can always abuse its power using de-facto censorship to suppress competing ideologies and ideas.
In an authoritarian system in China one must first overthrow the party in power to practice de-facto free speech. In our capitalist system you are suggesting one must overthrow the corporate authorities first before practicing free speech. Then impediments to free speech in both systems are the same: the people in power.
If you somehow think a communist system where the government controlling companies restricting free speech is somehow different from a system where companies controlled by powerful entities (shareholders of varying sizes) are restricting free speech then you’ve been deluded by Western propaganda.
Both are the same, and the powerless will have no agency even if they can freely yell into a vacuum.
I feel like when you’re equating “me blocking your tweets from my timeline” to “me shooting you”, there’s clearly not any shared ground here. The two are clearly not comparable. Me blocking your tweets does not remove your agency, or your freedom of expression, and it doesn’t kill you.
China doesn’t have free speech, because in China the government will punish you for speaking against them. That’s not “de facto censorship”, it’s just censorship. Which is where the government punishes you for your speech.
There’s no such thing as a “corporate authority”. Twitter doesn’t send you to a reeducation camp if you tweet dumb things. They just don’t have to carry your content on their site. The analog would be if the Chinese government ran a big blog and they’d only let you blog there if you said stuff they agreed with.
China doesn’t have free speech, because in China the government will punish you for speaking against them. That’s not “de facto censorship”, it’s just censorship. Which is where the government punishes you for your speech.
There’s no such thing as a “corporate authority”. Twitter doesn’t send you to a reeducation camp if you tweet dumb things. They just don’t have to carry your content on their site. The analog would be if the Chinese government ran a big blog and they’d only let you blog there if you said stuff they agreed with.
No, the gun is equated with the tools and platforms that help people become "silenced."
> Take this hypothetical: imagine a world where everyone blocked all speech they disagreed with. Would there still be a point to free speech (in practice)? What’s the point of being able to say what you want when anyone who could be potentially affected by it in practice can easily ignore you?
Holy fallacy of the excluded middle, Batman.
(The people you can sway with speech are mostly not the people that disagree to start with, but the people that neither agree nor disagree.)
Holy fallacy of the excluded middle, Batman.
(The people you can sway with speech are mostly not the people that disagree to start with, but the people that neither agree nor disagree.)
I think most people have given "we should kill everyone like you" and other quality contributions all due consideration the first time they encountered it and asking them to absorb it again and again isn't doing much for overall open mindedness. Blocking such people is totally valid.
Yes, but the problem is when you make it so easy to censor people, every statement can be treated as "we should kill everyone like you" without an afterthought. A controversial statement will always evoke such strong counter-opinions, until it is one day right.
An environment that encourages easy blocking will encourage easy blocking of controversial ideas.
Sometimes the truth is hard to hear, so if you make it easy for people to block things that are hard to hear you'll inevitably make it easy for people to block the truth. It's called an inconvenient truth for a reason. The convenience of blocking comes at a cost. We all think we are right and know exactly what to filter out and what not to, but that is definitely not generalizable across the population.
An environment that encourages easy blocking will encourage easy blocking of controversial ideas.
Sometimes the truth is hard to hear, so if you make it easy for people to block things that are hard to hear you'll inevitably make it easy for people to block the truth. It's called an inconvenient truth for a reason. The convenience of blocking comes at a cost. We all think we are right and know exactly what to filter out and what not to, but that is definitely not generalizable across the population.
Sidestepping for a second that my blocking you on Twitter doesn’t censor you, how hard does blocking someone on Twitter need to be before it’s not a free speech issue, in your perspective?
If you look at the facebook newsfeed algorithm—a technology widely regarded as evil—then it can be considered a form of automated AI-based blocking. While the mechanism to create an echo chamber of only things you agree with is different, it achieves that same end result.
I think everyone should have the right to block whomever they want, and utilize whatever tools that make it easy for them to do so. However, just like with a gun, you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with this. Twitter here would be like the gun manufacturer, except instead of guns, they are making user features that make it easy for people to shoot themselves in the foot.
If I were the one making the tool, I would feel morally responsible for providing such an evil tool. Because at the end of the day Twitter is like Youtube which is like TikTok which is like Fox News. They show their respective users exactly what they want to see and it increases their bottom line, even if there are negative long term repercussions to society or to the users.
My goal would be to carefully design a product that engages people with their peers, even when it's unpleasant, while moderating away true harassment in a separate fashion.
While easier said than done, I do not believe the tools designed to remove spam or harassment should be the same tools to silence dissenting voices. My main contention is not that people should not be able to block spammers and harassment, but that such an easy and indiscriminate application of some tool like this has long term negative repercussions for society, as well as one person's mental health and development.
Hacker News used to have downvotes for posts. They removed that after some discussions around it here, and I applaud that. I think having a flagging feature to indicate spam and up-vote only is a good implementation. Unpopular ideas at best disappear (to be resubmitted again), but they cannot be actively buried like they used to be.
How do you think cults, or regimes like North Korea, work? They block out outside influences.
I think everyone should have the right to block whomever they want, and utilize whatever tools that make it easy for them to do so. However, just like with a gun, you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with this. Twitter here would be like the gun manufacturer, except instead of guns, they are making user features that make it easy for people to shoot themselves in the foot.
If I were the one making the tool, I would feel morally responsible for providing such an evil tool. Because at the end of the day Twitter is like Youtube which is like TikTok which is like Fox News. They show their respective users exactly what they want to see and it increases their bottom line, even if there are negative long term repercussions to society or to the users.
My goal would be to carefully design a product that engages people with their peers, even when it's unpleasant, while moderating away true harassment in a separate fashion.
While easier said than done, I do not believe the tools designed to remove spam or harassment should be the same tools to silence dissenting voices. My main contention is not that people should not be able to block spammers and harassment, but that such an easy and indiscriminate application of some tool like this has long term negative repercussions for society, as well as one person's mental health and development.
Hacker News used to have downvotes for posts. They removed that after some discussions around it here, and I applaud that. I think having a flagging feature to indicate spam and up-vote only is a good implementation. Unpopular ideas at best disappear (to be resubmitted again), but they cannot be actively buried like they used to be.
How do you think cults, or regimes like North Korea, work? They block out outside influences.
There is certainly truth to this, but surely there is some middle ground where I don't need to invite constant commentary about pop culture and events I don't have control over.
I could delete twitter, but that's essentially like blocking everyone on it.
I do agree though. I don't want to be in an echo chamber where only opinions I like are validated, that's bad for me even if I like it.
Maybe this is untrue, but surely there is a difference between blocking all opinions you don't like vs not wanting to see any opinions at all because it affects your mood and mental health.
I could delete twitter, but that's essentially like blocking everyone on it.
I do agree though. I don't want to be in an echo chamber where only opinions I like are validated, that's bad for me even if I like it.
Maybe this is untrue, but surely there is a difference between blocking all opinions you don't like vs not wanting to see any opinions at all because it affects your mood and mental health.
Blanket sweeping blocks is exactly the opposite of a middle ground.
Might be misunderstanding you, but a middle ground is any compromise. Rather than choose an echo chamber, I'll chose to have no opinions instead. That way I am not having only my opinions validated, I am not allowing any influence at all.
That would be like not consuming any social media at all, not just a tool to help create your own echo chamber.
> I could delete twitter, but that's essentially like blocking everyone on it.
Yeah, it's great. Twitter has nothing to do with reality, it's a shared delusion between a bunch of people that hate each other. You won't miss a thing.
Yeah, it's great. Twitter has nothing to do with reality, it's a shared delusion between a bunch of people that hate each other. You won't miss a thing.
Good news, you now have to read every tweet made on Twitter or you're against free speech!
Scrutiny doesn't seem to have eradicated "the 2020 election was stolen", or "the coronavirus vaccines don't work".
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I would say this is an anti-pattern: building false communication and a bubble around you, assuming people liking or keeping track of a tweet or even the writers of a disliked tweet have nothing to offer you.
"If you do not understand why your neighbour is upset, how are you to notice the neighbourhood fire?"
That is the antithesis of dialogue, freedom of speech, a disservice to yourself and democracy.
P.S. If someone is harassing you or disturbs you take appropriate steps (per case) -- this path is a long-term disservice to everyone.
"If you do not understand why your neighbour is upset, how are you to notice the neighbourhood fire?"
That is the antithesis of dialogue, freedom of speech, a disservice to yourself and democracy.
P.S. If someone is harassing you or disturbs you take appropriate steps (per case) -- this path is a long-term disservice to everyone.
This is always going to be the argument against anything like this, and of course it should be used with caution. Then again, my life is too short to be dealing with (say) bots, literal nazis etc. While their opinions may be interesting occasionally, it's not always worth the energy expended on some people.
> the antithesis of dialogue
Yes, perhaps
> , freedom of speech,
No absolutely not. Not in any interpretation of "freedom of speech" is individuals choosing not to listen to other indivuduals the antithesis of freedom of speech.
> the antithesis of dialogue
Yes, perhaps
> , freedom of speech,
No absolutely not. Not in any interpretation of "freedom of speech" is individuals choosing not to listen to other indivuduals the antithesis of freedom of speech.
>> , freedom of speech,
> No absolutely not. Not in any interpretation of "freedom of speech" is individuals choosing not to listen to other indivuduals the antithesis of freedom of speech.
How long do you think it will take for shared block lists to appear or for people to block people of other parties (e.g. Republicans blocking Democrats and vice-versa)? A bubble then or an algorithm has effectively banned a set of people from reaching another set of people. I agree in the U.S. legal sense, the liberty of freedom of speech is not applicable, as it is a negative right, a liberty that is, that is to not be infringed solely by the government. Twitter or people are not involved parties.
However: a) It is against the whole goal of free speech for me to decide that e.g. a friend of mine or a stranger should not listen to this "noise." (It could be in fact noise, the quotes are here as it is regardless a subjective claim.)
b) And a level further, using this tool, we are banning someone that might have partially agreed with some disliked news or statement but never heard their position. The whole point of freedom of speech is to allow dialogue. Our future selves never have the chance to write to the people we just blocked. (Or hear them.) Your past self just self censored your future self.
> No absolutely not. Not in any interpretation of "freedom of speech" is individuals choosing not to listen to other indivuduals the antithesis of freedom of speech.
How long do you think it will take for shared block lists to appear or for people to block people of other parties (e.g. Republicans blocking Democrats and vice-versa)? A bubble then or an algorithm has effectively banned a set of people from reaching another set of people. I agree in the U.S. legal sense, the liberty of freedom of speech is not applicable, as it is a negative right, a liberty that is, that is to not be infringed solely by the government. Twitter or people are not involved parties.
However: a) It is against the whole goal of free speech for me to decide that e.g. a friend of mine or a stranger should not listen to this "noise." (It could be in fact noise, the quotes are here as it is regardless a subjective claim.)
b) And a level further, using this tool, we are banning someone that might have partially agreed with some disliked news or statement but never heard their position. The whole point of freedom of speech is to allow dialogue. Our future selves never have the chance to write to the people we just blocked. (Or hear them.) Your past self just self censored your future self.
Not everyone uses social media to watch anonymous users screeching their opinions at each other. It is a nice tool to cut down on encountering content you don't necessarily care for.
Loud Twitter voices are hardly "neighbors".
What if you find that your lawn is on fire because there is a burning cross on it and your neighbor standing next to it in a hood and robe?
You might think I'm being alarmist, but for a lot of people that use these tools this is what they are blocking from their timeline - hatred, anger, and vitriol to the very fibre of their being and existence.
What to you is a dialogue, and democratic expression of freedom of speech, is to another person a threat on their very life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
Not every position is worth engaging in "dialogue" about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
P.S. We're not talking about "harassment" here by the way - not the way you think it is - where you could report someone to Twitter, or any authorities. We're talking about politicians, celebrities, and news media with an audience who can abstractly debate someone's right to existence or happiness without overtly attacking any one specific person.
What if you find that your lawn is on fire because there is a burning cross on it and your neighbor standing next to it in a hood and robe?
You might think I'm being alarmist, but for a lot of people that use these tools this is what they are blocking from their timeline - hatred, anger, and vitriol to the very fibre of their being and existence.
What to you is a dialogue, and democratic expression of freedom of speech, is to another person a threat on their very life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
Not every position is worth engaging in "dialogue" about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
P.S. We're not talking about "harassment" here by the way - not the way you think it is - where you could report someone to Twitter, or any authorities. We're talking about politicians, celebrities, and news media with an audience who can abstractly debate someone's right to existence or happiness without overtly attacking any one specific person.
> What if you find that your lawn is on fire because there is a burning cross on it and your neighbor standing next to it in a hood and robe?
Jokingly: Then I would want to know that to get them to fix the rest of my lawn. (Seriously: I would definitely prefer to know who might want to stab me in the back or face: keep your enemies close. I prefer life that ignorance; keeps you alive longer.)
I 10^10% agree with you about the paradox of tolerance; my 2c is that mass banning ends up causing more damage. Please read below.
> What to you is a dialogue, and democratic expression of freedom of speech, is to another person a threat on their very life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
Unfortunately, history has shown that not listening to dissenting opinions damages a society by forcing the dissenters to clique together leading to more extreme views and peer pressuring rational out of the window. Essentially, if you want to stay apart of the community and you want as they are the only that listened you on A, you have to agree on B and C. That is what keeps e.g. flat earthers or e.g. political extremist movements alive and growing. You just force them underground and trying harder and in violent ways to be heard.
Showing that you are ignoring some opinion can be more powerful tool, as you are broadcasting a message. (Of course you could try to de-escalate actively, but that is a whole science and needs energy.)
To sum up, the biggest disservice to yourself only is simply escalating on the anger that is now hidden away from you.
#harassment: I understand that is why I added the per case clause.
P.S. We are a large world and by the pigeonhole principle we are going to disagree on some stuff. Also we have a pretty pretty bleak historical record, that makes twitter trolling and bullying sound like paradise.
Jokingly: Then I would want to know that to get them to fix the rest of my lawn. (Seriously: I would definitely prefer to know who might want to stab me in the back or face: keep your enemies close. I prefer life that ignorance; keeps you alive longer.)
I 10^10% agree with you about the paradox of tolerance; my 2c is that mass banning ends up causing more damage. Please read below.
> What to you is a dialogue, and democratic expression of freedom of speech, is to another person a threat on their very life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
Unfortunately, history has shown that not listening to dissenting opinions damages a society by forcing the dissenters to clique together leading to more extreme views and peer pressuring rational out of the window. Essentially, if you want to stay apart of the community and you want as they are the only that listened you on A, you have to agree on B and C. That is what keeps e.g. flat earthers or e.g. political extremist movements alive and growing. You just force them underground and trying harder and in violent ways to be heard.
Showing that you are ignoring some opinion can be more powerful tool, as you are broadcasting a message. (Of course you could try to de-escalate actively, but that is a whole science and needs energy.)
To sum up, the biggest disservice to yourself only is simply escalating on the anger that is now hidden away from you.
#harassment: I understand that is why I added the per case clause.
P.S. We are a large world and by the pigeonhole principle we are going to disagree on some stuff. Also we have a pretty pretty bleak historical record, that makes twitter trolling and bullying sound like paradise.
In a world awash with information and everyone optimizing to keep you and me engaged, aggressive defense of time and attention becomes a necessity to maintain sanity. No one deserves to gain your attention by default. If a tweet has > 50% chance to enrage me, I'd rather not see it. Important news and information will find a way to reach me.
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I found much better solution. I just reset my twitter password to a random string and threw it away. And never go to that site again. And voila - no bad tweets!
My wife's Twitter 2FA is on my phone and she has to ask me for it whenever she wants in. By her own choice.
Actually, she only gets notifications from mutual follows and she mutes threads that get aggressive or overlong, so if someone were to instigate a pile on, they might as well be behind soundproof glass.
Actually, she only gets notifications from mutual follows and she mutes threads that get aggressive or overlong, so if someone were to instigate a pile on, they might as well be behind soundproof glass.
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If you need to use this type of tool, perhaps just don't use twitter at all.
Strict curation is the key to Twitter usage. Otherwise it's just an avalanche of crap.
Even then, Twitter is finding more ways to shove "More Tweets" at you.
I remember back in the day you'd expand a tweet and just see it and the responses, but now you immediately get "more tweets" below it that have nothing to do with what you're reading.
I remember back in the day you'd expand a tweet and just see it and the responses, but now you immediately get "more tweets" below it that have nothing to do with what you're reading.
ha! I was going to say the same thing, in fact I think that blocking people just ends up giving them the satisfaction that they had this power over you but also could serve as a powerful signal to twitter users with lot of followers.
Twitter does to a certain degree do a good job of hiding replies under 'show more replies' I get the feeling that people with 5 digit and up followers do not click it, if they do, most do not go out of their way to block people.
Twitter does to a certain degree do a good job of hiding replies under 'show more replies' I get the feeling that people with 5 digit and up followers do not click it, if they do, most do not go out of their way to block people.
> I think that blocking people just ends up giving them the satisfaction that they had this power over you
I think you're overthinking it. Unless you're a known person who interacted with them meaningfully before, they won't even know you blocked them. If you're just blocking to clean your timeline, you're the only one who will see the effects.
I think you're overthinking it. Unless you're a known person who interacted with them meaningfully before, they won't even know you blocked them. If you're just blocking to clean your timeline, you're the only one who will see the effects.
This is the correct approach.
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What's next, a HackerNews browser extension that makes it appear (to you) that all of your comments and submissions are always upvoted to the top?
My posts only get greyed out when people can't handle the truth!
Absolutely!
Furthermore, when this happens, you must always edit your comment to complain about downvotes! It's tradition.
Furthermore, when this happens, you must always edit your comment to complain about downvotes! It's tradition.
I prefer to edit my comments to be far more reasonable after being down voted in ways that make the replies look unhinged
/S
/S
HNs down-voting mechanism has definitely trained me - pavlov dogs style - to only write things that people here will like most of the time.
Working as intended?
Working as intended?
Just need to train your brain to get that dopamine hit from the down votes... Let their anger and displeasure fuel your happiness :)
Hmm I wonder if that is healthy....
Hmm I wonder if that is healthy....
“Listen to the fool's reproach! It is a kingly title!” — William Blake
Tempting... but then you go too far in the opposite direction and assume people only disagree with you because they're just too dumb.
I think the ideal is to take the feedback, consider it, but feel free to discard it. But at least consider that you said something dumb or didn't express it as well as you could have.
I think the ideal is to take the feedback, consider it, but feel free to discard it. But at least consider that you said something dumb or didn't express it as well as you could have.
huh, that would be awesome, actually! would 100% improve everyone's experience of the site without any sort of collateral damage.
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Ah yes, to create the mother of all bubbles.
I get blocking authors, but likes seems overkill
I get blocking authors, but likes seems overkill
Precisely! Sure, block abrasive assholes, but blocking those who follow them or like their tweets will only serve to isolate YOU from those who might be able to present their view point in a more nuanced and respectable way. I think this can be a very harmful tool if misused.
I learned a lot of valuable things I wouldn't have otherwise had I used a tool like this.
I learned a lot of valuable things I wouldn't have otherwise had I used a tool like this.
You assume there is some interest in the viewpoint in any way whatsoever. There are vast subsets of humanity that I don’t want to hear anything from. Life is too short.
I agree that some very small subsets aren't worthy of attention, but I don't understand how any person would willingly isolate from the views of "vast subsets of humanity".
How can you be so sure you got it right? How do you check for blind spots if you don't regularly expose yourself to opposing viewpoints?
I ask this because some of the best decisions I ever made were only possible after I considered the "other" side. Most of the time their views fail apart when subjected to scrutiny, but sometimes my view is the one that is found lacking.
I think fuzzing viewpoints with honest dialog is crucial for a healthy society.
How can you be so sure you got it right? How do you check for blind spots if you don't regularly expose yourself to opposing viewpoints?
I ask this because some of the best decisions I ever made were only possible after I considered the "other" side. Most of the time their views fail apart when subjected to scrutiny, but sometimes my view is the one that is found lacking.
I think fuzzing viewpoints with honest dialog is crucial for a healthy society.
enneff has has ennuff.
The people we're talking about are degenerate reprobateſ who, without realizing it, have committed the unforgivable ſin of blasphemy againſt the Holy Spirit by liking such a poſt. They have denied their very laſt means of their repentance, by cloſing off their souls to the sight of the incorrectneſs and cruelty of the tweet in queſtion and rather caſting their lot in with the devil, as it were. But we, the enlightened, having been edified in grace and truth, exiſt in an exalted state. We are fit to judge them now, and at the time of their death. Amen. Amen. Amen.
The people we're talking about are degenerate reprobateſ who, without realizing it, have committed the unforgivable ſin of blasphemy againſt the Holy Spirit by liking such a poſt. They have denied their very laſt means of their repentance, by cloſing off their souls to the sight of the incorrectneſs and cruelty of the tweet in queſtion and rather caſting their lot in with the devil, as it were. But we, the enlightened, having been edified in grace and truth, exiſt in an exalted state. We are fit to judge them now, and at the time of their death. Amen. Amen. Amen.
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Imagine if there was an announcement of a new product that removes a small subset of all the unhealthy substances that are present in cigarettes. Wouldn't your first reaction be "maybe just quit smoking instead"?
And yet we almost never say that about social media, despite the fact that, like cigarettes, social media services are engineered to be addictive, while disregarding any health impact they may cause.
And yet we almost never say that about social media, despite the fact that, like cigarettes, social media services are engineered to be addictive, while disregarding any health impact they may cause.
Folks suggest quitting social media all the time, to the point it became part of a meme (quit Facebook join a gym etc).
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IMHO we could all use a little more humility, openness that our convictions may be wrong, openness to additional nuance in our positions, and sympathy for people with different opinions. Especially in online discourse.
We don’t need tools that catalyze groupthink stratification.
We don’t need tools that catalyze groupthink stratification.
I feel like the people who always use these features spend all day talking about how awful the divide in the world is growing and how there's not enough love, while in another tweet dehumanizing people for petty disagreements.
When (not if) the Black Mirror feature of blocking people irl becomes reality, I'm very sure people will be eagerly lining up to block people for having opinions that were somehow wrong, and they'll have no way to ever redeem themselves.
When (not if) the Black Mirror feature of blocking people irl becomes reality, I'm very sure people will be eagerly lining up to block people for having opinions that were somehow wrong, and they'll have no way to ever redeem themselves.
I think your feeling is wrong in this case. I think it is more aimed at the people who think neo-nazis, incels etc. are lost causes, or at the very least cannot be saved over the internet alone.
And by pure chance alone, every person such people disagree with happen to be 'neo-nazis, incels etc' right? Not that those labels are ever maliciously applied to shut down a debate and gain upper hand by vilifying the opposing party...
I don't think you can possibly aim this towards ideas, it's just a tool to develop an echo chamber.
You can use it to block neonazis, you can use it to block trans activists, it's about dismissing some kind of content either way.
You can use it to block neonazis, you can use it to block trans activists, it's about dismissing some kind of content either way.
Twitter is already a “tool that catalyzes groupthink stratification”, the problem is that you have some high-profile Twitter personalities that weaponize their fanbase against targets of opportunity on Twitter—sometimes unintentionally, other times maliciously.
The bad actors on Twitter sometimes get banned but that shouldn’t be the only solution. Blocking a tweet and everyone attached doesn’t just mean that you are removing them from your feed, it means that you are removing yourself from their feed. It means that your tweets won’t get retweeted, tagging the Twitter personality you think is a threat.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had something retweeted by a real Twitter personality that hates you. It can basically make the platform unusable for a period of time, or worse.
The bad actors on Twitter sometimes get banned but that shouldn’t be the only solution. Blocking a tweet and everyone attached doesn’t just mean that you are removing them from your feed, it means that you are removing yourself from their feed. It means that your tweets won’t get retweeted, tagging the Twitter personality you think is a threat.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had something retweeted by a real Twitter personality that hates you. It can basically make the platform unusable for a period of time, or worse.
I for one could use a little less madness such as QAnon. It used to amuse me from some theoretical viewpoint, but since it has penetrated mainstream it just drains me.
My approach was to block the tweet, the author, everyone who liked it and the whole platform on top of it, as it was a huge timesink with net negative, for me.
But my viewpoint might be too extreme.
Did the same, use Mastodon now. It cannot replace the good parts of Facebook or Twitter for me, but it’s interesting in its own way and it’s not poison.
Amateur. I had the sense not to join on the basis that Twitter is to full of the sort of people who like Twitter, preemptively blocking the whole lot!
[I jest, a little, I know some find it useful, but I don't feel I've missed anything of significance by staying away from that particular "information" channel]
[I jest, a little, I know some find it useful, but I don't feel I've missed anything of significance by staying away from that particular "information" channel]
I wonder what would happen if I literally block every username on Twitter... Their database will probably not like it.
isn't this a solved problem with usenet + filters?
Newsgroups were a solution before their time it turns out.
Newsgroups were a solution before their time it turns out.
We absolutely do. If you know some people are fundamentally wrong, it is absolute waste of time to entertain their world view. Can they still come up with something useful in the distant future? Sure! Can they change given enough time and information? Sure! Can what you think is fundamentally wrong change given enough time and information? Sure! So, you can prune your blocks every news cycle or every 2 years or 5 years or 10 years or whatever you are willing to tolerate.
Grouthinking is necessary to build a new ideology, which may sound wrong today but may be the ideology of the future. To build your own groupthink and allow for others to have theirs, it is necessary to have several different independent ones co-exist. While companies like Facebook has helped to some degree, companies like twitter rely on keeping the debate going at all costs which is why tools like this are great.
Grouthinking is necessary to build a new ideology, which may sound wrong today but may be the ideology of the future. To build your own groupthink and allow for others to have theirs, it is necessary to have several different independent ones co-exist. While companies like Facebook has helped to some degree, companies like twitter rely on keeping the debate going at all costs which is why tools like this are great.
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It doesn’t matter every time I block something on twitter they take it as an invite to throw every iteration of it in my suggested tweets…
YouTube is the worst offender. I block and thumbs down the author… which of course means please recommend me every video they ever made. Youtube seems ripe for someone else to come and take a large part of the market if video storage wasn’t so expensive to enter into.
On the recommendation (without clicking the video), click the 3 dots, click not interested, click the button to say why, click not interested in this channel.
This usually stops the channel from being recommended? You can also go into your viewing history and remove videos that you don’t want recommendations based on.
This usually stops the channel from being recommended? You can also go into your viewing history and remove videos that you don’t want recommendations based on.
Ive used dozens of times on video recommendations for Louis rossman, and Fox News, the “not interested in this channel” button, and I still get recommendations. I’m not convinced that button does anything.
> Louis rossman
Disappeared off my feed. No idea what he’s doing anymore, probably still using too much flux.
Disappeared off my feed. No idea what he’s doing anymore, probably still using too much flux.
The YouTube app on my Android has a straight up "Don't recommend this channel" button that does what it says on the tin. Honestly I use it pretty sparingly.
Im on iphone and use that all the time not that OS should matter. It doesn’t do anything. It will recommend the channel to me the next day half the time.
Weird. There are a couple channels I'm sure it would recommend to me incessantly if I hadn't blocked them.
Not all of the (official) youtube clients have this feature. The AppleTV client does not. And if I load the page on my desktop client (hopping to choose "don't recommend channel" there) the thing I want to block is not recommended on that platform...
This doesn't work for news channels. It is impossible to watch any non-MSM channel mentioning the news without the next recommended video being one of the major American news channels.
The only solution is to use browser extensions which can actually block channels properly.
The only solution is to use browser extensions which can actually block channels properly.
You don’t a tool for that. Just stick your index fingers in your ears, shake your head left to right and back and say “la la la la la”
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Public discourse is d-e-a-d. Whatever happened to just ignoring the things you disagreed with, or debating them?
I fear we live in the stupidest timeline of The Simulation.
I fear we live in the stupidest timeline of The Simulation.
I can’t speak for everyone who uses this or tools like it (in fact I don’t even use twitter, Facebook, mastodon, or any of the big social networks). However, I can understand the mentality. When the “public discourse” is crushing your mental health because it is just thinly veiled bigotry given only the slightest edge of legitimacy, I think you’re well within your rights to step away from the trolls. We shouldn’t criticize people for choosing to opt out of the hate that is thrown their way. Now, sure, some people might be overreacting in a way that undermines legitimate discourse, but it’s not fair to point at the existence of these tools as a sign of The Death Of Discourse.
Isn't that what this is...? Ignoring the person who said it
Exactly.
Though to be fair I see 3 escalating levels of reaction when you come across content you don't like:
- Level 1: Navigate/ignore away from the content.
- Level 2: Block the person/content on the platform so you never come across it again.
- Level 3: Have the person/content banned from the platform so no one ever comes across it again.
At least up to level 2 (which this is) you can't stop someone else from consuming that content.
Though to be fair I see 3 escalating levels of reaction when you come across content you don't like:
- Level 1: Navigate/ignore away from the content.
- Level 2: Block the person/content on the platform so you never come across it again.
- Level 3: Have the person/content banned from the platform so no one ever comes across it again.
At least up to level 2 (which this is) you can't stop someone else from consuming that content.
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I'm liberal with the block button but this is a bridge much too far for me. I don't want to entrench myself into an agreeable little bubble.
Can we get the opposite? Find what's been shadowbanned and blocked so we can see what's important enough to nullify.
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Twitter will suffer the same fate as Facebook i.e. the platform is so cancerous that younger or more intelligent people leave it.
Not sure where they'll go since Reddit is just as bad these days if not worse in many ways.
Not sure where they'll go since Reddit is just as bad these days if not worse in many ways.
Young people didn't leave Facebook because it was cancerous. They left it because it was boring. The "cancerousness" on Twitter isn't even skewed older: if anything it's skewed younger.
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Please shoot me if I ever become this shallow minded or tribalist.
Yet another way to suppress expression that one doesn't like. This is not how the world should be.
Surely there is a spectrum here. On one side is vaguely annoying expressions that are just... well, annoying. They're not the types of things that you'd say, and not the types of things you'd prefer others say, but you generally put up with them (i.e. ignore them) because that's the expected thing to do in polite society. On the far other side are things that you really find very distasteful or upsetting or offensive. Things that you would very much not like to see.
Everyone is going to have a different threshold within this spectrum regarding where they deploy a "megablock", and people are naturally going to disagree about if that was the right threshold to apply. I don't use twitter, but my first reaction is: it's plausible that I might find sufficiently disturbing things on twitter such that I would deploy such a tool.
Everyone is going to have a different threshold within this spectrum regarding where they deploy a "megablock", and people are naturally going to disagree about if that was the right threshold to apply. I don't use twitter, but my first reaction is: it's plausible that I might find sufficiently disturbing things on twitter such that I would deploy such a tool.
My original intent here was to point out an increasingly-common stance that many people -- particularly gen Z -- seem to take, which is essentially, "why should I expose myself to things I don't like?"
The problem is that it creates monocultures, and it helps the ignorant remain in a state of ignorance. We should always be striving to empower people, and we should aspire to building up their minds so that they can encounter expression they don't like without feeling the need to suppress or otherwise entertain it. We need to be showing the ugly realities of war, and we need to be shining light on the ugliest and most brutal expressions of our political enemies.
To say nothing of the fact that guilt-by-association is one of the cruelest punishments that can be inflicted on innocent bystanders, and the fact that allowing individual tools for censhorship suppresses the open exchange of ideas that make us all richer.
I am in favor of individuals suffering through unpleasant experiences because it enhances society overall, and it in line with the true spirit of free speech.
"I may not like what you have to say, but I will fight for your right to say it"
The problem is that it creates monocultures, and it helps the ignorant remain in a state of ignorance. We should always be striving to empower people, and we should aspire to building up their minds so that they can encounter expression they don't like without feeling the need to suppress or otherwise entertain it. We need to be showing the ugly realities of war, and we need to be shining light on the ugliest and most brutal expressions of our political enemies.
To say nothing of the fact that guilt-by-association is one of the cruelest punishments that can be inflicted on innocent bystanders, and the fact that allowing individual tools for censhorship suppresses the open exchange of ideas that make us all richer.
I am in favor of individuals suffering through unpleasant experiences because it enhances society overall, and it in line with the true spirit of free speech.
"I may not like what you have to say, but I will fight for your right to say it"
This is hardly increasingly common nor is it something gen-z is accelerating. It's been going on since well before our grandparents were born. You're just seeing it happen more publicly now that we're all on the Internet together.
Blocking someone on Twitter is not a tool for censorship, this is ridiculous. By that logic I'm censoring CNN if I never watch it, and my spam filter is censoring people sending e-mails?
People have very finite bandwidth. You already suppress voices by consciously deciding not to follow them. This tool just improves curation effectiveness.
How is your expression suppressed? Free speech doesn’t mean I’m obliged to listen to you.
This isn't about free speech. People NEED to hear, read, and see conflicting viewpoints and opinions they don't agree with. They NEED to see the ugly realities of life. The opposite is a culture of censorship, which is absolutely unacceptable.
[deleted]
you have a point, you don't appear to have read that you're a fucking idiot enough
Hey, can you please not post like this to HN? This is way, way beyond what's allowed here, no matter how bad someone's comment is or you feel it is.
Also, your account unfortunately has a history of posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments. We ban accounts that do that—we have to, because they destroy the curious conversation that HN is supposed to be for. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd appreciate it.
Also, your account unfortunately has a history of posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments. We ban accounts that do that—we have to, because they destroy the curious conversation that HN is supposed to be for. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd appreciate it.
What do you expect when dealing with an environment as deliberately toxic as Twitter, with millions of bots fake-networking all over the place to be later used to generate fake hype or fake support, and the engagement schemes optimized for three minute hates.
At times it goes beyond suppressing objectionable ideas and into the outright denial of reality.
If you silence all opposing ideas, you can start to believe things that appear quite ridiculous to those exposed to a wider spectrum of thought.
If you silence all opposing ideas, you can start to believe things that appear quite ridiculous to those exposed to a wider spectrum of thought.
So, if someone is celebrating Hitler, and 100,000 people "love" it, you don't think you should be allowed to block those toxic people? Hey, I get they need, help, but many of them, if not all, are too far gone.
The only thing that gives these people power is their voice.
The only thing that gives these people power is their voice.
Maybe other users get put in a queue or the service is close to Twitter limits. Probably still good to create my own block function (and hope Twitter doesn't ban the API use).
Reminder: Probably best to revoke the app's permission when done.