5 ms·
Bluesky gains 1.2M in 2 days, 12M total after X disables blocking
- TimCTRL 2y agoI'm really wondering how this change passed Apple's App Store review process. They can be strict on features like this. But I guess the rules are different for Big Companies, coz for example, none of us can have a single letter for an app name, like X.
- dotnet00 2y agoI don't get how this is so hard to understand (in general, so many people seem to be reading this completely backwards). Previously, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, Y can't see X's posts. Now, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, but Y can see X's posts. The new system changes nothing in terms of what the person doing the blocking experiences. It fixes abuses of the previous block system, where scammers, grifters and impersonators hide behind blocks to reduce the chances of being caught. It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target on a platform that has free accounts and the ability to easily switch between multiple accounts. Apple's policy is that apps must have "The ability to block abusive users from the service." They don't say that users should be able to block other users from seeing their posts. In fact, this is also how blocks work on other platforms like Discord. If I block a user, I don't see their posts unless I click on them, they can see mine, but they can't directly ping or reply to me. Similarly with Reddit, being blocked from a subreddit makes me unable to interact with it, but lets me continue to view it.
- skybrian 2y agoCan they subscribe to Y’s posts? (I mean, without creating another account.) More generally, though, I agree. Twitter’s aggressive spamming of nearly every page with irrelevant posts (for example, the replies page) is a better reason to switch.
- dotnet00 2y agoSeems to be unclear, apparently X doesn't do auto-unsubscribes, so you'd still be charged for the subscription. Previously it'd tell you that you can't access subscriber content anymore, but it isn't clear if that's still the case.
- orwin 2y ago> It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target. I would have made the opposite move, adding an option for paying customers to be invisible to logged out users. We will see how it goes, but unless you add a rule to prevent people to screenshot tweets from people who blocked them and sharing that picture to their followers, I don't see how the changes are more improvements than regression. And to be honest, I'm not sure I really care about this change, the two person I know that were harassed on Twitter aren't using it anymore, so :/ Hopefully the platform improve thanks to this change :D
- dotnet00 2y agoTo me, this is an improvement. I don't care about the thing about preventing people from screenshot-ing tweets, since the barrier was so low it was happening often anyway. But, I've seen many cases of accounts being impersonated and used for scams, where the impersonated user only finds out after the damage has already been done. E.g. you sell commissions for something, impersonator makes an account, blocks you so you can't see him, then tricks potential customers into sending him money. You only piece things together weeks later when those customers start calling you out for running off with their money. Another variation involves someone commissioning something, then blocking when their order is ready as a way to harass the creator.
- orwin 2y agoOk, i see. It isn't an issue here, i don't think i've ever saw twitter used for real businesses beside crypto and "coaching".
- bee_rider 2y agoReally mute would be a better word than block, right? I do agree that it seems like muting is a more sensible option than blocking though.
- dotnet00 2y agoThere is already a mute feature, when X mutes Y, X will no longer see Y's posts. Y will still be able to interact, but X won't see any of it.
- TimCTRL 2y agothank you for the explanation.
- mintplant 2y ago> It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target It's about adding enough friction to discourage the behavior. Human problems don't always need mathematically-perfect solutions.
- gitaarik 2y agoWait, if X blocks Y, I'm confused now, who is Y? (Just joking)
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoYou can still block people, the change just makes it so that the blocked party can still see the blocking party's posts. If your account is public, it has always been possible to look at the posts by using an alt or incognito. And AFAIK this update is already how other social media platforms like Tumblr function.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoI think people enjoyed making others know that they blocked them, for some reason?
- dogma1138 2y agoBeing able to block people from seeing publicly posted content was always stupid. Blocks should prevent people from engaging with you by replying to your posts or messaging you directly. The fact that social media decided to utterly change what it means was just making echo chambers worse. If you want to shout out to people who agree with you already just send it to them directly.
- EasyMark 2y agoIt really isn’t because “out of sight, out of mind” is really a thing and it gives stalkers/ragers time to calm down after they’ve been rejected. I mean you can always use a second account to read it, but I’m sure that many people moved on after being blocked which is huge plus for people being harassed by trolls and even scarier people .
- fwn 2y ago> it gives stalkers/ragers time to calm down after they’ve been rejected But afaik it's just right click -> open in private window to see the profile as the open internet would see it. Takes a second. It's the same on reddit. If someone replies to you and immediately blocks you (which is a bit of a funny pattern lately), you'd normally switch to logged out mode to read it. Mobile takes this into account as well: In RedReader (for reddit), you can just use the three dot menu to view it as a not registered user. I feel that giving users the ability to play around with this kind of hoops and tricks stirs up emotions instead of calming them down. In general: I don't know of a single scenario where it would be wise to create a situation where logging in on a platform reduces access to its content.
- wlonkly 2y agoYou can see someone's profile and top-engagement tweets logged out, but if you want to see anything recent or specific you need to be logged in, which means there's the friction of a second Twitter account, at least.
- 2y ago
- brightball 2y agoBecause it’s not a big deal and people are looking for something to be mad about. They changed the rules for public accounts, so that if you block somebody they can still see your posts just not interact with them. That’s no different than somebody being able to create a second account to get past your block anyway.
- numpad0 2y agoAnything that don't require a package change don't require an approval.
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- SeanAnderson 2y agoFor reference, X has 611 million active users as of April 2024. So Bluesky is almost 2% as large.
- terminalbraid 2y agoAre bots considered "active users" in your statistic?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- parasti 2y agoWhere is that number from?
- mrtksn 2y agoI see very low engagement and half of my followers are obvious fakes. Although I previously said that Twitter as a product has improved, the content has become horrendous and I wouldn't be surprised if it shuts down after the US elections. I even subscribed to to premium, but only to use Grok. It's not only alright for most task, its also the only LLM integrated with the current events feed(which is twitter) and its actually very useful to get informed about recent events. Also, the app still has most of the interesting people but it feels like wandering into the most disgusting part of the town just to go to this cool club and I kind of feel like people wish those people move somewhere else. I don't know, maybe Elon should just put a pop-ups with the few talking points that he keeps pushing for so I can accept and hide those from my timeline? Something like "I agree that the following people are horrible: ..." then "I agree that only Trump can save us from those" and be done with it. It's just boring, the same BS over and over again just so I can keep up with a few interesting people and current events.
- bee_rider 2y agoAn ML algorithm with a news feed attached seems kind of interesting, like if it was going to try and make predictions about what’s going on and about to happen, it would be able to use the actual events later that day as a cost function, or something like that, haha.
- AlienRobot 2y agoBrazilians will not be pleased that their exclusive Brazilian social media will now have English-speaking users in it. Jokes aside, I hope the new users understand the risks of federation as they get on board, specially the privacy risks: whom you block, follow, and who follows you is public information in the platform.
- ck2 2y agowouldn't the work-around for that simply be like reddit where people have two accounts (or more) for work vs personal vs even more anonymous posting?
- AlienRobot 2y agoAs far as I know the only platform that really supports that is Tumblr, which lets you create as many secondary blogs as you wish with just one e-mail address (and Youtube if you count it). For every other platform users will be impeded by the fact they have to create a second e-mail to create a second account because they don't know how to use e-mail folders. You can't even switch accounts on Reddit which means you need to use a browser that supports switching cookie jars somehow. In summary, I'm willing to bet the average user just posts everything on a single account. And even if they used separate accounts, that doesn't change the fact that the blocks/follows of their identities isn't private.
- FireInsight 2y agoThis is mostly not a problem on the Fediverse (note: not Bluesky, since that is still pretty centralized). To make an alt for a different topic/identity/community/anything one can just pick another instance.
- FireInsight 2y agoThis is mostly not a problem on the Fediverse (note: not Bluesky, since that is still pretty centralized). To make an alt for a different topic/identity/community/anything one can just pick another instance.
- whatwhaaaaat 2y agoWhat a stupid thing to get mad about. Blocking someone should (and can only) prevent the blocker from seeing the blocked. It cannot prevent the blocked user from seeing the blocker’s posts because the blocked user can log out or worse create a new account. But that’s right elon bad so x must be doin hate crime.
- perihelions 2y agoIt's a great example of perception being more important than reality in business. Like the "close elevator door" buttons, whether they *do* anything or not is not the point—is not how you sell elevators.
- svantana 2y agoWho said anyone got mad? They simply prefer another service. Also, while anyone can create a burner account, most people don't. I'm guessing a lot of people didn't even know they were blocked, they just stopped seeing the posts.
- tock 2y ago> or worse create a new account Doesn't that make any form of blocking useless anyway. Most people don't go through the trouble.
- andrewinardeer 2y agoI think you are underestimating stalkers, psychopaths, people with obsessions and others who are unwell mentally.
- consteval 2y agoI think you're overestimated how many blocked users fall into those categories.
- freehorse 2y agoThat's not even what block was doing. This is the muting feature in X, which I personally find more useful. Blocking is about stopping the other user from being able to engage with your posts. I never block somebody without muting them, but it is prob good that they have them as separate features, because you can mute somebody without them being able to know it in this way.
- bearjaws 2y agoTwitter users really are something else. Theres outright misinformation spread daily, most discussions are toxic af, and theres no improvement in sight. But the people keep going back because they need to gossip about dumb shit that is going on. They NEED to be the first one to show everyone the latest happenings. If you're still there, just accept its only getting worse and you have no spine.
- qntmfred 2y ago> most discussions are toxic af look in the mirror.
- bearjaws 2y ago> look in the mirror. proceeds to be toxic
- sunaookami 2y agoSounds like Hacker News
- minimaxir 2y agoIn contrast to something like OpenAI, Twitter/X does indeed have a moat because the effort to switch to a competitor and lose the social network effects is significant. Many careers depend on Twitter/X unless there is an actual mass exodus.
- ghaff 2y agoFrom my perspective in tech, there has been an exodus along with a ratcheting down for many others.
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- ghaff 2y agoMusk basically destroyed whatever form of social media Twitter/X largely uniquely represented. Maybe that’s good, maybe not. But it used to be part of my daily routine. Mostly tech discussion. But so many people I know have dropped or way reduced their X presence and neither Mastodon nor Bluesky really repopulated with my network so it’s now something I glance at increasingly once in a great while.
- jrflowers 2y agoIn addition to the improved UX for blocked users, Twitter also announced in its new ToS that any disputes must be handled by a conservative friendly northern district Texas court, despite the new HQ residing in the western district (1). Under the new rules it is possible that disputes with Twitter may be handled by judge Reed O’Conner, who is a Tesla investor (2). 1 https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2024/10/19/x-new-terms-of-service-texas-courts-lawsuit-claims-third-party-data-sharing-ai-elon-musk/75734468007/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2024/10/19/x-new-... 2 https://www.npr.org/2024/10/16/g-s1-28620/texas-judge-elon-musk-x-case-tesla-shares https://www.npr.org/2024/10/16/g-s1-28620/texas-judge-elon-m...
- jsheard 2y agoThe new TOS also requires you to grant Twitter the right to use anything you post for AI training. They added an opt-out consent toggle for that not so long ago, but I guess they're still scrambling to sell all of the copper in the walls so they're already walking it back.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoQuite the "flood the zone with shit" of a tactic. Make things broadly worse in many dimensions all at once, to diffuse rgse against any specific one of these incredibly hostile anti-user capabilities. Impressive asshattery!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- torlok 2y agoLooks like everybody hates this feature. If Elon wanted to push his tweets on people he blocked, why not implement this only for his account?
- jrflowers 2y agoI’m guessing he got tired of switching between alts or it was a request from the cat turd/doge design/libs of tiktok cluster of users that he interacts with frequently
- ChocolateGod 2y agoElon probably has moderator perms and thus could probably see people blocking him posts anyway.
- jrflowers 2y agoHe does have at least one alt that we know of https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-discusses-strange-twitter-alts-deposition-1851396038 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-discusses-strange-twitter-alts...
- yapyap 2y agoCause that’d make it too obvious that he really only wants his tweets to be seen by everyone
- ixxie 2y agoIt seems a bit unlikely Musk is doing this to Twitter out of stupidity or ideology; I'm sure he has a good measure of both, but I doubt he has them in this quantity. Could Elon's actual play here be: 1. Radicalize Twitter as the ideal platform for right-wing American voters 2. Use this asset this to gain political leverage during a key election cycle 3. Use this juice to advance some of his long-term objectives
- andrewinardeer 2y agoThe first reason that occurred to me why Musk did this was to reduce compute costs. Perhaps the previous blocking algo was too resource intensive and he is looking to lower server costs.
- Wingy 2y agoKeeping a cache of “users who have blocked me” for every user is probably not that expensive. If Bob blocks Oscar, update Oscar’s row to add Bob to Oscar’s blocked_by list.
- rsynnott 2y agoIn this particular case, I’d suspect it’s just stupidity, tbh. There’ve been a number of changes to Twitter which read as “things that Musk likes, and doesn’t realise that not all users like”; for instance, see the briefly-mandatory dark mode.
- sunaookami 2y agoMost Twitter users aren't americans.
- beginning_end 2y agoBluesky has become really good over the last few months, there's really no reason to support X anymore.
- loceng 2y agoYou can't think of any differentiation, pros/cons, that may warrant supporting multiple different approaches?
- beginning_end 2y agoI think it's pretty clear by now that the owner of X is using it as a political tool, so discussing technical details of the site seems pointless. I did like the new anti-toxicity features on Bluesky though: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/29/24231414/bluesky-anti-toxicity-features-detach-posts-from-quotes https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/29/24231414/bluesky-anti-tox...
- fwn 2y ago> I did like the new anti-toxicity features on Bluesky though: [The Verge article about a new Bluesky feature that allows cited accounts to remove themselves as a citation in other accounts' posts retroactively.] But this feature only reduces the usefulness of the quote/citation feature. In low trust quote scenarios, users would likely revert to sharing screenshots of the referenced post. This maintains control over the referenced content, but reduces authenticity since screenshots can be faked. Maybe I'm yelling at the clouds here, but I think all content in the post should be controlled by the account making the post - much like the original Twitter RT convention. ...or HN.
- jrflowers 2y agoDo you have any differentiation or pros/cons that may warrant supporting multiple different approaches that you care to share?
- daeros 2y agoI've been saying now for a while Bluesky is going to win, and it's easy to predict why. Mastodon has the completely wrong approach, its features are certainly interesting but the whole problem with it is most people are having trouble figuring out how it works and while they've produced a lot of content to help people figure things out they've forgotten it's supposed to be intuitive for most people. Bluesky has the same federated features, but it was smart enough to hide it under an intuitive and by now Familiar UI/UX. It's really not a good sign that there's increasing amounts of educational content explaining how to use Mastadon, it means they don't get the desperate need to simplify it so anyone can use it, ya'll who berated me that Simplicity is it's own form of Genius had a point. I might not like that point but, It's why Bluesky is going to win this fight.
- krick 2y agoThis seems to be an extremely silly upheaval. I don't use twitter, so maybe I didn't understand it correctly, but isn't it what "blocking" used to mean on all platforms ever? And what the word "public" meant in all contexts ever? Like, I'm blocking you so you stop bothering me, but it doesn't mean you will somehow automatically stop seeing my public posts. Of course you'll see them. They are public, goddamit. Even if a platform implements some cheesy sort of shadowbanning to stop showing them to you, you can just log out (delete cookies or whatever), and see them, because literally anybody can see them. They are PUBLIC, what isn't clear about it?
- krapp 2y agoYou seem to be under the impression that there is a single, objective, universally agreed upon and understood definition of "public" in the context of social media platforms, as well as for "blocking," which all platforms have hitherto implemented and enforced in the same manner, with the same expectations and behaviors. This is not in fact the case, even if you put it in all caps. What "public" and "blocking" mean are implementation and terms of service dependent, they aren't legally binding terms of art.
- fwn 2y agoWhile I personally think there is a universally agreed upon idea of public access (as in non-exclusive), I was thinking about how other platforms handle it, and Facebook, AFAIK, seemed to have moved to the "everyone" category at some point. Not sure about other platforms. With "everyone", you could also think of it as everyone [on the platform], which would be a subset of "public".
- jrflowers 2y ago> They are PUBLIC, what isn't clear about it? I like the idea that people are upset because they are dumb and categorically misunderstand the word “public” rather than some users find making a quality of life UX adjustment specifically for blocked users to be weird and off putting. A novice might ask whose user experience is improved by this change and in what ways, but a wise man knows to ask what intellectual failure has led to the presence of more than one opinion about how a popular website functions
- ElonChrist 2y ago[dead]
- nojvek 2y agoHaven’t used blue sky much. Do they have a bot problem like Twitter?