Musk: Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs

[jfengel]

Musk is missing a key way that people use Twitter[0]: for community.

Communities aren't a feature-supported thing. They're a spontaneous self-organization. People associate with others around some area of interest. They don't want it to be private; they want to be open and inviting. But they also want to be able to exclude those who make trouble.

Musk suggests using mute instead of block, but that throws off the way communities work. It means you yourself won't see troublemakers, but your followers will unless they've also muted them. People can come and pick fights, interrupting the conversation you had hoped to have among your community.

Musk seems to view Twitter at the high level, of everybody talking to everybody, and at the lowest level, of his own personal feed. But he's missing the spontaneous layers that occur in between, and if he doesn't support that, they'll leave.

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[0] I'm using the name "Twitter" to refer to the site for which the users developed their behavior. It sounds as if X will prove to be a very different thing, with a different user pattern.

[cpncrunch]

I think the only reasonable option would be for users to make all their tweets only replyable by their followers. It sort of defeats some of the point of twitter, but if the alternative is all the haters and trolls replying, it seems to be the least bad option.

[foderking]

blocking doesn't even stop troublemakers. They can just create another account. I agree with musk here. blocking is mostly useless

[jstx1]

To what extent is he eroding the trust in his other projects with everything he's done at Twitter so far? If this is how he runs things, I really don't want to be in/near a car built by a company run by Elon.

[karmakaze]

Perhaps in perception, but the more time he spends fiddling with X, the less meddling there is on other ventures.

I never wanted a car that was grown in the ethos of commercial computers and software in the first place.

[reportgunner]

What he's doing at X seems to be in line with his other projects. (I don't mean to say that what he's doing at X or his other projects is great, visionary and flawless)

[brucethemoose2]

Devil's advocate: Elon may still be great for drawing hype to good ideas, but not necessarily for micromanaging them.

He should talk big and wave his hands, and then have an employee pull him away before he says too much, and before technical decisions can be made.

Maybe he's a laughing stock on HN, but I think he still has good name recognition outside of very technical circles or really partisan bubbles.

[smoldesu]

Starlink has still been pretty great in my experience, but I don't know how much he meddles with that.

[TillE]

Ironically blocking is now more effective than ever, because the logged-out twitter.com experience has been weirdly broken for weeks. If you block someone, it's a real pain for them to look at your timeline.

[publius_0xf3]

Was Musk always this mercurial or was he more competent at his previous companies? I still have trouble understanding how this man created something as good as SpaceX despite displaying no obvious indications of genius, and every sign of mediocrity, in his current state.

[reportgunner]

> I still have trouble understanding how this man created something as good as SpaceX despite displaying no obvious indications of genius, and every sign of mediocrity, in his current state.

Well either your perception of things Musk does at SpaceX is wrong or your perception of things Musk does at X is wrong, right ?

[thrown1212]

I have the same question. It’s hard to judge from the outside like this but there are Trump-ian displays of arrogance, disconnection and incompetence that seem at odds with his massive successes with SpaceX and Tesla in particular. He’s clearly book smart, but seems like a petulant, chronically insecure man-child in most areas from the accounts both public and insider. I find the incongruence strange.

[altacc]

The more you know about something that Musk talks about as if he’s an expert in it, the more you realise that he’s a bluffer. He real skill may be his motivational & promotional skills but from all that’s known, he’s neither reasonable or honest when doing that.

[MallocVoidstar]

Now when someone spams you with images of rotting dead bodies you just get to wait the three weeks for Twitter's moderation to get around to banning them instead of being able to block them. Great!

[cubefox]

Mute them? (Btw I have never seen something like that on Twitter.)

[addisonl]

Best way to block people on Twitter after this: delete Twitter.

[altacc]

So many times I heard “but you can just block them” as a defence for allowing any speech on Twitter. How’s that plan working out?

I give it 10 minutes after the feature is turned off and Musk is flooded with tweets that trigger him before he reinstates his personal ability to block people he doesn’t like.

[smoldesu]

> How’s that plan working out?

Pretty great, actually. I'm a staunch believer in that strategy, although I'm on Mastodon and not Twitter.

Mastodon really perfects the block feature by adding a "Block from instance" button that filters entire websites from your feed. You can wipe *@threads.com off your timeline with 2 clicks, it's glorious.

[archo]

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