
Blocking people on Twitter now just mutes them - steveklabnik
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/12/blocking-people-on-twitter-now-just-mutes-them/
======
mikecane
This is a very unwise decision. I Follow people on Twitter who I've witnessed
being stalked and harassed. Blocking helped to end that. Now the rule change
lets the stalkers, trolls, and harassers have the upper hand. What Block was
always missing was _Mute._ Now it's all been changed to Mute without Block.
This is just screwy.

And saying to Protect your account is like a punishment to the innocent.
Unless Twitter has changed their TOS, it's a TOS violation to RT a Protected
account.

~~~
crystaln
If someone is stalking or harassing, they can just set up another account -
blocking has no affect but to antagonize.

If someone is being stalked or harassed, they need to decide whether they
should be posting publicly on twitter, because no amount of blocking will
prevent a stalker from seeing what they post.

The only thing the victim can do with regard to twitter is:

\- Stop posting publicly (post privately or don't post)

\- Stop themselves from seeing the harassing messages, which this new block
functionality does.

The change makes complete sense, as it doesn't deceive users into thinking
blocking makes something private.

~~~
rjknight
That's one answer, but it's not a very good one. Can we think of no better
option than for people who are being harassed to 'decide whether they should
be posting publicly'?

~~~
crystaln
If the goal is to post publicly, but not have the harasser see those messages,
then no - that's not rationally possible.

~~~
rjknight
Ah, but to hell with rationality! You think it's rational for someone to reply
to all of your tweets with mindless abuse, and to encourage other people to do
the same?

For better or worse (I think it's for worse, which is why I don't tweet all
that much), Twitter encourages rapid-fire think-before-speaking responses to
things. You see something you don't like, you hit reply and _boom_ , you've
just told that person to die in a fire. Or you've just retweeted it to your
small but equally annoying group of friends. The purpose of the old blocking
system, in a way, was to prevent trolls[1] from seeing things that might
provoke them into action.

The goal is not actually to prevent someone from seeing your messages, but to
prevent someone who is logged in to an active twitter account with a >0 number
of followers from seeing your tweet. That's a non-trivial difference. I
started out (in my other comments) thinking that the difference really _was_
trivial, but you actually have to think like a troll in order to understand
why it isn't. Unless they really cared about harassing someone, the old-style
block would probably be enough to stop most people from tweeting an insult, if
only because it forces them to 'cool off' by logging out, finding the person
they want to harass, and logging back in again in order to reply.

I can't shake the feeling that neither policy is really right, and there must
be a more elegant solution. But, it's 1am here and I should probably get some
sleep before trying to find the solution that has evaded the entire internet
for 20 years.

[1] I don't use the term 'trolls' lightly. Lots of things get called
'trolling' which really aren't, but in this case I think it's valid.

~~~
crystaln
That's a reasonable distinction you make. At least with the new system, the
victim will not see and hopefully never know about the troll responses,
perhaps discouraging the troll...

~~~
theevocater
What you are missing here is that the trolls friends still show up in the
original persons mentions. So rather than the troll disappearing and
interacting stopping it allows the abuse to spread.

The new system put the onus on the person being abused to keep blocking,
whereas the old one general just stopped it.

------
devindotcom
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
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
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
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.

------
tptacek
Good. I subscribe to the idea that blocking is the right reaction to people
who draw you into pointless arguments or who are a net drag on your
experience. I block a lot of people. But Twitter's old behavior was needlessly
punitive; it was just stupid to pretend that they could bidirectionally sever
my connection with someone else on the network, and so instead they were just
annoying people for no reason.

Net result: I can block more people now, and not feel guilty about it.

------
tartehk
To trolls, the silent treatment is the cruelest of all . And it works.

See Hellbanning - [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-
or-h...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-
hellban.html)

~~~
choult
Hellbanning only works when _noone_ can read your posts. If you can be read by
everyone but your "mark" then it's only one step removed from the harrassee.

~~~
rodgerd
Indeed. And better yet (from the POV of stalkers) the change will allow them
to easily join in conversations between their targets and other people in the
conversation.

------
mikecane
I suppose people from Twitter will read this. You guys have a bigger problem
to deal with than this disastrous change to Block. I Protected my account in
protest tonight. And did it just in the nick of time -- over 1800 Follower
requests poured in. My account was bombed again by fake Followers. This is the
third time it's happened. It took over a month for Twitter to delete over
10,000 fake Followers I was bombed with the first time. And they still haven't
deleted the latest ~2,000 from a few weeks ago. And now tonight it happened
again. Twitter needs to get its priorities straight -- and changing Block is
not that priority. Stopping the fake Follower bombing should be. [typo edit]

~~~
GrinningFool
How do fake followers affect your ability to use twitter?

Too, this problem you've described isn't one that seems common - at least a
google search only turns up your comments about it.

Given this, it seems the priorities are about right...

~~~
mikecane
No, I'm just the one who has screamed the loudest about it. Most others suffer
in silence. Popehat was Follower bombed too:
[http://www.popehat.com/2013/09/17/spam-attack-immediately-
fo...](http://www.popehat.com/2013/09/17/spam-attack-immediately-follows-post-
on-brett-kimberlin/) [http://www.popehat.com/2009/12/07/it-says-a-lot-about-
twitte...](http://www.popehat.com/2009/12/07/it-says-a-lot-about-twitter/)

------
t3hSpork
It also disallows the blockee following the blocker and blocks the blocker
from seeing the blockees tweets.

I think the reasoning is that if someone @'s your username, you can see it. If
you block them, you can’t see their tweets and thus can’t see their @'s and
won’t be bothered by them. If your tweets are not private and if blocking
prevented a user from seeing your tweets, they could simply log out and see
your tweets; therefore any coded functionality that would block them from
seeing your tweets is useless.

It's been like this for at least six months. It used to be you could tell that
you had been blocked by getting an error when you try to expand a tweet, but
now you can’t even tell that you have been blocked unless you try to follow
the blocker.

------
steven2012
I just don't see the value in blocking people beyond muting them anyway. They
can just create a new account and view whatever they want anyway. This way,
they don't know if they are blocked or if they are just ignoring them, which
is probably better.

------
rjknight
I'd be interested to know more about the rationale behind this.

As I see it, the change means:

1) The blocked person doesn't know that they're blocked, so they cannot be
certain as to whether their tweets are being seen

2) The blocked person can now mention the username of the person who has
blocked them (obviously this is required by #1 - if they couldn't mention
them, then the existence of the block would be obvious)

3) The person who places the block cannot see any tweets by the blocked
person, except in search results or by visiting that person's profile page

So, it seems like a trade-off between the old situation in which blocking
someone would prevent them from mentioning your username, but would also
inform them of the block, and the new situation where the blocked person is
not informed. There's really no way of secretly blocking someone unless you
allow that person to continue tweeting at you, because if that were prevented
then the block would be revealed.

I may lack the necessary perspective on this, but to me this looks like a not-
unreasonable trade-off to make. If you inform someone that they're blocked,
they will know that they need to sign up another account in order to follow
you. Informing someone of the existence of a block may also be a trigger for
escalating harassment. On the flip side, if someone can mention your username
then they can make it appear as if they're engaging you in conversation and
you're actively choosing not to reciprocate, where in fact you have blocked
them.

It's a difficult balance to get right. An alternative long-term solution might
be to have different privacy levels per-tweet, or to allow a person to have
multiple personas, with one being private and another public, so that you can
have some tweets which are for everyone and some which are for family and
friends only, which would prevent a third-party harasser from hijacking
personal conversations. But any move in that direction dilutes the simplicity
and directness which is what differentiates Twitter from, say, email or IRC,
and also raises the stakes in situations where people mistakenly tweet
something to the wrong persona or privacy level.

EDIT: When I said that I may lack the necessary perspective, I was correct. It
seems that the main benefit of the old block system was that, if you have a
follower who actively dislikes you, you could prevent them from seeing your
tweets in real-time in their main account, which is often enough to stop them
responding, or retweeting you in order to encourage others to respond. It's
not entirely rational, but then abusing people on Twitter isn't rational
either, so perhaps this is one of those situations where behaviour of the
wetware nodes on the network needs greater consideration.

~~~
egypturnash
I know a lot of people - myself included - who have two personal Twitter
accounts. One is public, the other one is protected.

Most of these people use third-party clients rather than the website; Twitter
doesn't make it terribly easy to switch accounts, which makes for a good value
proposition to drop a few bucks onto a client.

~~~
eropple
Which is odd, because Twitter's own Mac client is pretty great at it.

