In the latest idiocy from Elongated Muskrat and his perpetual annihilation of what was once Twitter, there’s been talk over the past few days of the block feature being removed, because of course he wants to remove it.
What’s more, he’s being a real fuckwad about the reaction to this announcement
Really, that’s totally going to help the already-dying site: people not being able to be blocked, ensuring that anyone who wants to be a pain in someones ass can forever see and reply to someone’s content. Musk talks about mute remaining a thing but the two aren’t the same, and I guess this is something he can’t comprehend: Mute may just stop me from seeing what they say, but doesn’t stop others from seeing it. An outright block ends the issue — they can’t reply directly to the content and are thus cut out of the equation entirely.
It’s not a hard concept, and one I overly elaborated on two articles, both titled “Blocked for A Reason” which boils down to this: A person who’s blocked has been judged by me to be not worth interacting with. They only seem to seek conflict in some capacity or are otherwise not someone I wish to engage with, and locking them out of direct interaction, by blocking, solves the problem and eliminates the annoyance. It’s that simple.
In general, people like me, and many others commenting on this planned change, use block to make our experience more pleasant: we go online to enjoy ourselves in some capacity, not to be attacked, and we certainly don’t want to stay in a place where we feel we must explicitly accept such attacks.
Everything has blocking systems. Hell, even my BBS has a way to block users, at both an admin level and on a per-user level! This is just how social platforms work. They need this feature, or people will leave as they feel vulnerable and open. We shouldn’t have to lock our accounts just to negate unwarranted and unproductive conflict.
I’m just not about that kind of interaction, and if block does go, I’m more than likely going to say fuck off to X and move to BlueSky. Hell, right after typing the name “Bluesky” I signed up for the waiting list. I won’t even begin to bother with threads, as my presence on Meta (Instagram and Facebook) is far more tame and personal, so this side of my online personality isn’t quite welcome there. Mastadon I save for more tech oriented stuff, since I am on the SDF instance, so while that’s not going anywhere it certainly won’t become my main online social sharing platform anytime soon.
We’ll see what happens.