• egg1918 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    Musk spent the entire Super Bowl this year on his phone on Twitter. When he saw that Joe Biden’s (the fucking president) tweet got more views than his, he went back to Twitter HQ, called in a team of engineers on a Sunday night, and made them change the algorithm right then and there to boost Musk’s tweets even more.

    This is entirely because he is the most blocked user on his own shitty website.

    • Taster_Of_Treats [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      WRT Melon’s posts, this would only change things for users who Melon blocked, not users who blocked Melon. And I guess Melon would be able to see the posts of those who blocked him (and he and others like him could sic their followers on vulnerable users without using an alt).

      You already still see his posts in the feed if you block him. And he still can’t reply to you after the change if you have him blocked.

      I’m still against the change, mind you, because blocking somebody should block them from seeing what you post in case of a stalker/harasser that isn’t dedicated enough to make an alt account, which is most of them.

  • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    People are gonna start going private in large numbers and it’s gonna cause interaction numbers to plummet even more. He’s so cool dude. Somehow got a net worth of $200 billion despite having maybe the worst business instincts ever.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      Somehow got a net worth of $200 billion despite having maybe the worst business instincts ever.

      He promises to make the hopes and dreams of credulous computer touchers come true. He’s got fantastic carnival barker instincts that reach all the way to government subsidy access.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    Neat. Blocking is now as useless as it was on freeze-gamergate-era reddit-logo where baby nazis were (CW: suicide)

    spoiler

    stalking people and trying to bully them into ending their lives under pretenses of “lolcows” and general irony poisoning.

    • ziggurter [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      Blocking is still really bad on reddit-logo, TBH. If someone blocks you, you can’t reply to anything anywhere underneath one of their comments. But other people still can. So it’s a fabulous way to 1. get the last word, and 2. have all your brigading allies gang up on someone without them having any chance to respond unless they bring a brigade of their own.

      It was a really shit idea. I think the only form of blocking that might actually make sense on Reddit is as a 100% voluntary “I don’t want to see things this user posts; hide it from me (by default) by collapsing comments and removing posts from my front page (and maybe multis), and never give me a new-message alert if a reply or DM goes to my inbox (DMs could also just be prevented as they are private and can’t be used to encourage others to harass you).” Anything else invites abuse in one way or another. Including not having the option to go back and see if the user is still stalking/defaming you at times and do something about it without unblocking them (with a timeout before you can re-institute the block).

      In fact, (just) graying out (and collapsing) posts/comments by users you’ve blocked under a “post/comment by blocked user” heading so they tend to fade into the background and you know why you’d have to expand/visit them to see more would probably be ideal on Reddit. I don’t know about other sites like Twitter, but pretending the behavior of others can’t affect you in a public forum so you can just ignore them by poking your head in the sand doesn’t seem like a great idea. Effectively having opt-in content warnings, on the other hand, is awesome.

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    frothingfash: “It’s not violating free speech as long as censorship is enforced by mob rule!”

    Ironic. Blocking is super important for free speech because it minimizes the very real consequences that come with holding less than popular opinions. Even non-politically.

    I can’t wait until someone legally gets away with lynching me because I said I prefer Blastoise over Charizard or something like that.

  • edge [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    How does that make it “effectively useless”? That was the most useless and nonsensical part of the block feature. Blocking is about you not seeing their posts (including them not being able to reply to you), not the other way around.

    • PigPoopBallsDotJPG [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      Yeah, I don’t get it either, everybody seems to think that this change makes it impossible to hide posts from blocked users. But this just gets rid of the weird quirk where if you called JK Rowling a terfy ghoul and she blocked you, you had to log out to hate-watch her shitty tweets.

      Joke’s on them, I never had an account in the first place.

  • TheLepidopterists [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    Genuine question, I don’t really use Twitter at all outside of reading threads someone posts through xcancel occasionally:

    Does this actually change anything? You could just log into a burner account or use xcancel to see these posts already right? Without a whitelist function (which actually would be good for people who need more privacy) this information was already available to anyone who wanted it anyways right?

    Just to be clear, fuck Elon Musk both for making social media more pleasant for Nazis and for every other dumb thing he’s done but this particular change doesn’t feel like it accomplishes anything?

    Is it just the fact that it makes it easier and therefore signals solidarity with stalkers?