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I don't understand the flap about this. Your public tweets will always be accessible by someone. There is no way to prevent them seeing things in retweets, or v

I don't understand the flap about this. Your public tweets will always be accessible by someone. There is no way to prevent them seeing things in retweets, or via an alt, or embedded, or whatever. If you are concerned who sees your tweets, you should be considering a private profile. If you want to avoid interacting with someone or seeing anything of theirs, you can block them. This seems very functional to me, and in line with the definition of "public" online communication.

rjknight 13y ago
I think the point is that some people had come to expect that blocking works a certain way, and they're not happy that it has changed. In particular, it seems that people were using blocking as a way of having a pseudo-private status - public to everyone except these people. Now, their tweets are public to everyone, and the people they're blocking are just hidden from their view. This seems odd to me because it never occurred to me that this pseudo-privacy was possible - I always assumed that anything tweeted from a public account is visible to the whole world. And, of course, it always was - blocking someone just made it more difficult for that person to see your tweets, not impossible. But perhaps that difficulty was enough, and this was important to people who used the feature. Logically, blocking people from reading your tweets seems almost silly, because you can't really control who sees your tweets from a public account, but the illusion of control probably did a lot for the peace of mind of people who were being harassed.
- cortesoft 13y ago
  It still was visible to those people; they just had to view the persons feed while not logged in or under a different account. If people were relying on this feature to control access to their tweets, they were not doing it right.
  - usea 13y ago
    Actually you didn't have to log out or switch accounts. If a user blocked me, I could simply navigate to their page manually and view their tweets. It only prevented me from following them.
- devindotcom 13y ago
  I see; how curious their interpretation of public and private must be! Let the disillusionment begin!
  - rjknight 13y ago
    I see your point, but you're bringing your own assumptions about public and private here, and Twitter doesn't have to obey those assumptions (for clarity: I share your assumptions about public and private). From another perspective, Twitter is an institution that makes rules to govern the conduct of its users. Those rules are made public, and users can construct their own order on top of those rules. This is pretty much the principle behind rule of law - we get to know what's allowed and what isn't, and we can then construct our own arrangements on top of this foundation. Some people came up with some creative ways of using Twitter's rules to control access to their tweets, which is exactly the kind of behaviour one should expect. Then Twitter changed the rules, invalidating the order that these users had constructed. They're upset, and that's not unreasonable. Sure, there's a principled argument to say that "public stuff should always be public". Twitter's new policy makes tweets much more like blog posts - you can decide which blogs and comments you want to read, but you can't decide who reads your blog. I have no real problem with that as a policy. But it's still the case that Twitter, seemingly without warning, changed a policy in a way that broke social conventions that their existing userbase had developed. That's legitimately annoying for those people.
- zem 13y ago
  more to the point, every point of friction introduced in the harassment process reduces the amount of harassment by some factor.
steveklabnik 13y ago
Friction matters. Yes, technically, they are public, but if you make it harder to get at information, a certain percentage of harassers will drop off.
- devindotcom 13y ago
  True, friction does matter. I think tweets should cost a penny, personally, retweets ha'penny, farthings for follows.
velis_vel 13y ago
Why do people bother closing unlocked doors? Anybody who wants to see or go inside can just open them. Why do people put passwords on their computers? Anybody who has physical access can just remove the hard drive. Why do people lock their cars? Anybody who wants to steal something can just smash the window.
- GrinningFool 13y ago
  Apples and oranges. There's no other comparable situation in which you'd make a public announcement and somehow expect some group of people who could hear it to not hear it. And let's be clear - every 'tweet' is a public announcement to the world at large. Would you make an announcement on the 6:00 news and expect only some of the audience to see it? Would you write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper and think you could exercise control over who reads it? To invert it a bit, would you flag an email as spam and expect you could not mail the sender ever again?
  - velis_vel 13y ago
    > There's no other comparable situation in which you'd make a public announcement and somehow expect some group of people who could hear it to not hear it. The problem is, it used to work one way and now Twitter is (or, was) changing it with some really flimsy justification (now they can't tell when you blocked them! except there are other ways that worked). It'd be one thing if blocking worked this way from day one, it's another entirely to suddenly change it.
brown9-2 13y ago
Who benefits from this change?

rjknight 13y ago

I think the point is that some people had come to expect that blocking works a certain way, and they're not happy that it has changed. In particular, it seems that people were using blocking as a way of having a pseudo-private status - public to everyone except these people. Now, their tweets are public to everyone, and the people they're blocking are just hidden from their view. This seems odd to me because it never occurred to me that this pseudo-privacy was possible - I always assumed that anything tweeted from a public account is visible to the whole world. And, of course, it always was - blocking someone just made it more difficult for that person to see your tweets, not impossible. But perhaps that difficulty was enough, and this was important to people who used the feature. Logically, blocking people from reading your tweets seems almost silly, because you can't really control who sees your tweets from a public account, but the illusion of control probably did a lot for the peace of mind of people who were being harassed.

cortesoft 13y ago
It still was visible to those people; they just had to view the persons feed while not logged in or under a different account. If people were relying on this feature to control access to their tweets, they were not doing it right.
- usea 13y ago
  Actually you didn't have to log out or switch accounts. If a user blocked me, I could simply navigate to their page manually and view their tweets. It only prevented me from following them.
devindotcom 13y ago
I see; how curious their interpretation of public and private must be! Let the disillusionment begin!
- rjknight 13y ago
  I see your point, but you're bringing your own assumptions about public and private here, and Twitter doesn't have to obey those assumptions (for clarity: I share your assumptions about public and private). From another perspective, Twitter is an institution that makes rules to govern the conduct of its users. Those rules are made public, and users can construct their own order on top of those rules. This is pretty much the principle behind rule of law - we get to know what's allowed and what isn't, and we can then construct our own arrangements on top of this foundation. Some people came up with some creative ways of using Twitter's rules to control access to their tweets, which is exactly the kind of behaviour one should expect. Then Twitter changed the rules, invalidating the order that these users had constructed. They're upset, and that's not unreasonable. Sure, there's a principled argument to say that "public stuff should always be public". Twitter's new policy makes tweets much more like blog posts - you can decide which blogs and comments you want to read, but you can't decide who reads your blog. I have no real problem with that as a policy. But it's still the case that Twitter, seemingly without warning, changed a policy in a way that broke social conventions that their existing userbase had developed. That's legitimately annoying for those people.
zem 13y ago
more to the point, every point of friction introduced in the harassment process reduces the amount of harassment by some factor.

steveklabnik 13y ago

Friction matters. Yes, technically, they are public, but if you make it harder to get at information, a certain percentage of harassers will drop off.

devindotcom 13y ago
True, friction does matter. I think tweets should cost a penny, personally, retweets ha'penny, farthings for follows.

velis_vel 13y ago

Why do people bother closing unlocked doors? Anybody who wants to see or go inside can just open them. Why do people put passwords on their computers? Anybody who has physical access can just remove the hard drive. Why do people lock their cars? Anybody who wants to steal something can just smash the window.

GrinningFool 13y ago
Apples and oranges. There's no other comparable situation in which you'd make a public announcement and somehow expect some group of people who could hear it to not hear it. And let's be clear - every 'tweet' is a public announcement to the world at large. Would you make an announcement on the 6:00 news and expect only some of the audience to see it? Would you write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper and think you could exercise control over who reads it? To invert it a bit, would you flag an email as spam and expect you could not mail the sender ever again?
- velis_vel 13y ago
  > There's no other comparable situation in which you'd make a public announcement and somehow expect some group of people who could hear it to not hear it. The problem is, it used to work one way and now Twitter is (or, was) changing it with some really flimsy justification (now they can't tell when you blocked them! except there are other ways that worked). It'd be one thing if blocking worked this way from day one, it's another entirely to suddenly change it.

brown9-2 13y ago

Who benefits from this change?