• alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    125
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    it’s unavoidable to center Elon here but can we just take a step back and appreciate how stupid, bad, and completely antithetical to a usable website this idea is? blocking has been a feature on like everything since phpBB forums because it literally just works. it’s an easy way to curate your experience without escalating and it’s a logical imitation of being able to simply avoid a person in real life. the idea of removing this in favor of nothing but mutes is just goofy as fuck (and if you make muting the new “block”, what’s even the difference between them? people will just use them basically the same way!).

    • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      61
      ·
      1 year ago

      Muting means other people can still comment on your stuff, and everyone else but you can see it.

      Its so transphobes and homophobes can continue commenting on LGBT people’s content.

        • witchonabike@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          18
          ·
          1 year ago

          I wasn’t aware he had more children than the one with the weird-ass name. The private life section on wikipedia is a ride…

          • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            13
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            He ascribes to Longtermism and like his associate Jeffery Epstein, he thinks his genes are magically special, and so he wants as many offspring as humanly possible: while not actually giving one shit about the quality of life for any of them.

            It’s really interesting, because he fucking hates his own father (Errol is also a creep who fathered a child with his step-daughter, who he raised from childhood), but can’t put together that he is exactly the fuck the same as his creep ass father.

            • fubo@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Longtermism doesn’t have to do with one’s own personal genetics or lineage, though, and it certainly doesn’t belong to Elon.

              Longtermism is a notion coming out of population ethics, that since there will be more people in the future than there are today, that we should take the well-being of all those future people into account when making decisions today.

              This can be taken in lots of different directions — ranging from humanist environmentalism, to space migration, to concern about exotic existential risks.

              But a fixation on one’s own personal DNA is not really related to it at all. That’s more of a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology.

      • DarraignTheSane@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Lemmy’s “block” is essentially a “mute” function, too. It makes it so that you don’t see any more content from a user, but they can still make comments on your stuff.

        • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          17
          ·
          1 year ago

          lemmy, at least, would have the excuse of being constantly a work in progress and i guess that not having such a large community that hard blocking is necessary. but twitter would be appallingly bad without blocks–it already is with them!

          • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Also, Lemmy has the bonus of federation allowing instances to defederate entirely from abuse and spam-happy instances.

            • Meldroc@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              IIRC from reading about Bluesky, its strategy for dealing with spammer, trolls, hate speech, etc., was to have various servers in the Federation tag posts, users & servers with a “Spam” tag or “Hate speech” tag, and server admins can set their servers to not display posts so tagged, and to not pass them on to other servers.

        • Derproid@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          I hope it stays this way. It would suck being excluded from unrelated content on Lemmy just because I had a disagreement with someone at some point in the past (depending on how block happy people are of course).

    • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      34
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s interesting to me that they made the argument that blocking is increasing server costs.

      1. How is that even possible, on a technical level?
      2. If true, how is changing to a “stronger mute” going to reduce said costs?

      I mean, it’s plainly clear that Musk has no idea what is going on at any of his companies and the narrative of him being a genius of some kind was simply that: a narrative.

      • Redex@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        In a way, I could imagine it increasing server costs by like 0.001%, if even that, because if the algorithm finds a post to recommend but then realises it’s from a blocked account, it would have to search again (ofc it’s probably optimised so that it realises that at an earlier stage).

        But we’re talking about such small details it literally doesn’t matter and is outweighed by the functionality lost one hundredfold.

      • 777@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        I expect it’s accurate to say; their architecture is not like a database where you can add an index on a blocked state and then join against it. You have to get a list of potential posts that the user might want to see and then eliminate any in the block list. There will be a few edge case users who have thousands of block entries and a multithreading strategy is likely required to swiftly filter it in a reasonable timeframe.

        However, an architecture I’ve seen that works around this is to build this timeline in the background and present it to the user from a cache, I don’t know if this is what Twitter does as I never worked on that. However, if you want to not have a block feature but have some kind of mute feature anyway I don’t see how there is a meaningful difference.

        • 2deck@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, sounds like that’s the case. Funny how flaws in system architecture gets exposed to the public through vapid excuses these days.

          My guess is muting would likely result in a decrease of overall visibility. Every account gets a mute score.

      • pumpsnabben@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        As I understand it it’s because of block lists making large queries as soon as someone subscribes to it. I don’t condone the removal of the block feature, just trying to answer your question to the best of my knowledge.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I would assume that blocking is one of the few features that change what each user sees so it could reduce cache hit rates significantly.

    • lemme@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      26
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      logical

      Stop right there. This is Elon Musk we are talking about

    • 777@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      1 year ago

      Haha, that’s a throwback to the days when I helped to manage a phpBB board and there were a few members that would just continuously get into arguments so I edited the database so both of them had each other on their block list. It was very telling when I discovered they unblocked each other a few weeks later and got back to arguing and derailing thread topics.

  • NoxiousPluK@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    53
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Fun fact: a block feature is required to be accepted by the Apple AppStore review process. So Twitter will disappear from Apple devices with this change.

    Since this got some votes and became visible, here’s the source:

    Apps with user-generated content present particular challenges, ranging from intellectual property infringement to anonymous bullying. To prevent abuse, apps with user-generated content or social networking services must include:

    - A method for filtering objectionable material from being posted to the app

    - A mechanism to report offensive content and timely responses to concerns

    - The ability to block abusive users from the service

    - Published contact information so users can easily reach you

    https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#user-generated-content

    • StrayCatFrump@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Hmm. Hate to be a downer, but that sounds like there needs to be a way for the service itself to block (ban) users and material, not for users to be able to block other users. So I wouldn’t be too optimistic about Apple’s response…

    • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Apple’s review process is inconsistent at best. I used to work for an iOS app and it took several years before they blocked our release for not having a report feature on products. Never had the ability to block users, despite the ability to DM people.

      Plus, for an app the size of Twitter, Apple will likely ignore most rules that doesn’t lose them money.

    • vinniep@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      26
      ·
      1 year ago

      Money. Tech was hot and trendy, so VCs were willing to continue pouring cash into a bottomless pit of unprofitable tech platforms, and now they’re not so everyone has to figure out how to make money off of the community. In a surprise to absolutely no one that’s been paying attention, companies filled with people that have never had to be profitable before are really bad at turning their company profitable and instead only manage to light large sections of it on fire. 🤷

    • Sploosh the Water@vlemmy.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      1 year ago

      At the top levels, they are rich and well-connected enough that they don’t have to worry about failing like regular people.

      They can burn millions, billions of dollars and still get out with a fat paycheck, a pat on the back, and another CEO/exec job lined up by one of their many wealthy friends. Either that, or they are “forced” into retirement where they live large for their remaining lives.

      I wish somebody would force me into a wealthy retirement…

    • hglman@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      1 year ago

      Conservative money thinks that they can keep there opposition off balance by smashing social networks . Musk did not launch desatitis campaign out of nowhere.

  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    1 year ago

    Wow…

    Is there some kind of tech CEO competition running or something?

    “Who can alienate their user base the fastest”

  • Butterbee (She/Her)@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    40
    ·
    1 year ago

    So what you’re saying is, if I have a Twitter account and I start blocking many MANY people it costs Elon money? Interesting.

  • breadsmasher@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    40
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Elongated Muskrat has discovered just how many accounts are blocking him. His ego can’t take that. His FrEeSpEeCh must be heard

      • Sam
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        Nothing makes me cringe harder than the childish nicknames everybody keeps coming up with. Elongated Muskrat isn’t funny or offensive.

    • Wrena of Delpan@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m skeptical of this, maybe it’s because he’s worried his fascist followers are slowly falling into an echo chamber cause anyone with more than a few braincells blocks them

  • probodyne@feddit.uk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    1 year ago

    Damnit, I knew I shouldn’t have blocked him. Sorry guys this is my fault, I only had him muted before.

    • androogee (they/she)@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      1 year ago

      Maybe we can convince him that the chain of events that lead to so many people blocking him is actually what Blockchain means and get him to ban all crypto. This would obviously piss off his cryptobro fans, leading them to mint an NFT of a screenshot of the front page of Twitter and claim that no one else is allowed to use it.

      Thus would ignite the Great Flame War of 2023.

  • UngodlyAudrey🏳️‍⚧️@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    36
    ·
    1 year ago

    As a member of a rather vulnerable minority, I had made pretty liberal use of the block feature on Twitter. Of course, I left when Musk took over and switched to Mastodon, but my account’s still there. I didn’t delete it or anything. Might have to now.

    • Rick@thesimplecorner.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I deleted mine the day Elon bought it… Lol. I honestly never cared for Twitter too much but I admit I get a lot of news from it (specifically bfollowingecause I am following the ukrainian situation pretty closely).

    • howmanytacos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m not part of any minority, but sympathize and will be deleting my account now. However, I’m wondering if I should block everything I see first the refresh several times. Knowing that 1 cent came out of their wallet because of me sounds pretty enticing nbl

  • Talmir@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    1 year ago

    So he’s run out of engineers that know how to maintain the block feature?

    • Gork@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 year ago

      QA: “I’m clicking the block button but it isn’t doing anything anymore!”

      Twitter mgmt: “That’s ok, instead of fixing it we’ll just remove the button.”

    • The dogspaw @midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      It would be hilarious if when he is out at twitter we got a twitter files dump that showed the devs that maintained block really are all gone and he’s playing it off like this is some new big idea twitter came up with to make money🤣

  • hddsx@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    “Hang on, Steve. Reddit can not and will not beat Twitter.” -Elon

    “Hold my beer, Elon! I’m probably going to shutdown the mobile reddit website.” -Steve

  • bizzwell@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    1 year ago

    I really hope platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon take off. Just the idea of no single person with control over how we all communicate and share ideas gives me hope for the future.

    • Helix@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 year ago

      sadly, Mastodon currently still is pretty centralised around a few very big instances. I hope the Fediverse gets more decentralised…

      • bizzwell@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        What does it take to facilitate this? Do individuals have the ability to help it along, or does it take more resources? I’m new to this but would like to learn.

        • Helix@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          You just have to (encourage others to) register on an instance with less than, say, 1000 active users. I think that’s already taking care of most of the issue.

          • SuitedUpDev@feddit.nl
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            You just have to (encourage others to) register on an instance with less than, say, 2000 active users. I think that’s already taking care of most of the issue.

            Yes and another thing that also doesn’t help is that Mastodon currently does not (yet) support migrating over previously posted content. So if you migrate from one server to another, your old profile does show “user migrated to X”, but I think people are a bit afraid to leave their old posts behind.

      • Pigeon@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I think if one of them goes sour it’ll be easier for people migrate to another mastodon instance, and for that instance to grow. When Twitter goes bad, there’s not just a convenient alternative exactly-Twitter-but-run-by-different-people around the corner. But those small Mastodon instances could grow if they had an influx (to a point, and probably better so if the influx was gradual).

        Edit: especially because federation means that the people who move to the new instance can still see and interact with everyone on the old instance, so they can’t be held to the old instance merely by the presence of their friends on that instance. Unless the old instance blocks federation with wherever people start moving to, but still.

      • Chewy12@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        In the process of taking off at best. That’s nothing compared to Twitter right now.

    • SynapticOddity@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah! I’m a little sad how resilient these toxic media companies are. Meta, twitter, Reddit, etc are really not good for humanity. But I guess humanity has always been toxic to itself.

      • eccentricengineer@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        I think a large part of this is just users being complacent. As long as the platform doesn’t completely change, most users will typically just keep trudging along.

        For example if you remember the whole WhatsApp controversy from a little while ago. Pretty much my entire extended family communicated solely through WhatsApp, and they all were promising change, moving to signal, deleting fb and so forth. When the time actually came, everyone made signal accounts, and a few really switched, but to this day everyone still uses WhatsApp.

        I’d guess that as long as people’s “interests” are on the platform, they will continue to use it.

        • SynapticOddity@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Spot on analysis. The convenience of staying must be beat out by the new tool. I remember when myspace was killed when facebook came. The annoyance of everything being customized was beat by facebooks neatness. Finally all my relatives could find the buttons. Apollo was soooo convenient on reddit. I’m hoping he’ll port it to the fediverse, that would be the killer app for me.

        • Spellblade@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I’m not sure what happened with WhatsApp, but I think the key is if the platform still mostly works as intended people will stay. I follow some artists on Twitter and my feed is mostly their content. I don’t see the trash from other parts unless I specifically go looking for it or on rare occasions. So for the most part twitter still functions the same for me and the artists I follow. Now, if say my feed was filled with bigots complaining or people harassing the artists I follow cause they draw NSFW lesbian art or the site was SO filled with bigots that it ruined your reputation just by being there then yeah I’d leave. We are approaching this point but I don’t think we are in a Voat or Ruqqus like situation. When I look at instances of games or social media platforms having a mass exodus, that seems to be the common theme, making a change that directly interferes with its core function.

      • zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        With Twitter, situation is different since most celebs are still on it and people generally use it just to see what the popular people are saying. Once (and if) these celebrities join Mastodon, Twitter would start to finall fall.

  • DJDarren@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Elon Musk is a gaping, farting anus. I pay as much attention to the sounds from a gaping, farting anus, as I do from him.

  • J_C___ (lemmy.place)@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    1 year ago

    Let’s be real, he’s doing this because he’s upset about people blocking Twitter blue accounts, this in no way increases server costs or any bull shit like that

    • jonne@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Blocking Twitter Blue users is the only way to make threads make sense again after he decided to weight them higher. Any time you open a tweet there’s like 10 Twitter Blue trolls with 3 followers that are sorted above the good comments.

    • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Elon, for all of his smarts, seems to not understand the game theory behind social networks. I get it, we have had the status quo for over a decade, but the fundamental rules are still the same.

      Frankly I’m happy to seem them falling apart and a return to how social was meant to be on the internet.

      • smokinjoecalculus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        That doesn’t make sense. Social media rules aren’t written in stone.

        All forms of communication/media/technology evolve over time. Going backwards is regressive.

        • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Depends on what going backwards means, from a technical perspective this is fine and more forward than the centralized providers would have you believe. The only step back im seeing is mainly UI and tooling. The bones here are fine and the UX im seeing on Lemmy and Kbin are inline with reddit just a few years ago.

          If having to deal with UX issues is a huge problem the just wait and come back when its more developed, most of what you use in your day-to-day computing is OSS code, if its good enough for your daily work, its good enough for socials.

          • smokinjoecalculus@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            You know, maybe I didn’t understand the full meaning of your comment - I assumed you were referring to not having the ability to block a user as a “return to how social was meant to be on the internet”

            • manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              why would I not be able to block a user on the internet? I was able to block them on every system from the beginning. Centralized services will have you think you need thier magic code to do that but we used to do it with clients all the time.

              I still run IMAP email clients with a boat load of personal rules, though I did move the blocks to my server for efficiency. Still its MY server, like im posting to you now from my fediverse instance. If i wanted to block someone here they can be annoying sure but at the end of the day I have many of the same tools i had before, though there might be more cat and mouse. That said nothing stops you from having entirely private instances and since we technically can completely control our servers and clients its entirely possible to have things like one-way servers and nodes that are more picky about what they forward. If the network grows you will see an increased sophistication in management tools.

              • smokinjoecalculus@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                ·
                1 year ago

                But we were talking about Twitter specifically, not any sort of self-hosted platform or personal site.

                I don’t disagree with you, I’m just confused when the discussion moved from Twitter to an anecdote about one’s IMAP email client

              • hyazinthe@feddit.de
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                1 year ago

                Recently, here on lemmy, someone explained Usenet in its days, and said that you yourself couldn’t block others, but only ask the ISPs to. Isn’t that “social” without being able to block others?

                Besides, I feel like @[email protected] didn’t want to suggest that you were not able to block others in the past, just stating what he assumed you meant, without evaluating.