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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
by 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 agoIt 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 agoActually 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 agoI see; how curious their interpretation of public and private must be! Let the disillusionment begin!
- rjknight 13y agoI 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 agomore to the point, every point of friction introduced in the harassment process reduces the amount of harassment by some factor.