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 oc

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.