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Twitter reverts changes to blocking functionality
- steveklabnik 13y agoKudos, Twitter. I walked past your offices a few hours ago, shaking my head. It's nice to make it home and see the right thing was done in the end.
- TrevorJ 13y agoI'm not familiar with the discussion surrounding this, what was the major downside to not informing a user that they had been blocked? On the face of it, it seems like this would make it easier for users to control who sees their feed, without worrying about the social fallout.
- steveklabnik 13y agoThere's a lot to this, actually, but the biggest thing is that it made it significantly easier for harassers to share content from the harassed on their main account. Old way: 1. Sign out of twitter 2. Type in url of harassed 3. find something you want to share 4. sign back into twitter 5. tweet link to content With the changes, that turned into 1. Click 'retweet.' It may not seem like a whole lot, but trust me, it was. A big component of that was that because they couldn't follow you, they had to periodically check back in on a different account. Now, they can just follow you and see your stuff pop up into their feed right away. Incentives shape behavior. Nobody thinks that a public tweet is somehow never going to be seen by someone they've blocked. But barriers to actions do help reduce the number of those who commit a given action. It's the same way that a law against murder can't stop someone with a gun from shooting you, but the law provides a disincentive that causes people to really think about the hassle before resorting to taking that action.
- TrevorJ 13y agoAh, ok this makes more sense, thanks for explaining. I can see why this would be troublesome.
- steveklabnik 13y agoNo problem. I had no idea why it mattered until I had to start taking advantage of this functionality myself...