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.
I don't understand how this gives harassers the upper hand. If you can't see their messages any more doesn't that remove the harassment? I've seen multiple people say this today but I don't understand it. I've also never been outright harassed on Twitter so I'm sure there's something I'm missing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned how this relates to spam fighting. One could speculate that by switching to this "shadowban" system, spammers have less data to figure out whether their accounts are being banned/blocked or not. This is pretty common amongst other large web properties -- Reddit and Yelp are two that come to mind. Even if the banning is on a per-user basis, one could imagine that twitter uses ban counts as a metric for spam detection and so if a spammer cannot measure this metric themselves, they won't know when to taper/accelerate their spamming to game the detection algorithms.
The day twitter puts granular privacy options for each tweet is the day I will begin using it 10x more. Facebook has this nailed and I make religious use of this feature.
Having your side conversation with your family show up in your prospective customer's feed isn't acceptable.
[+] [-] mikecane|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MattGrommes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crystaln|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] devindotcom|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] steveklabnik|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] velis_vel|12 years ago|reply
Why do people put passwords on their computers? Anybody who has physical access can just remove the hard drive.
Why do people lock their cars? Anybody who wants to steal something can just smash the window.
[+] [-] brown9-2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|12 years ago|reply
Net result: I can block more people now, and not feel guilty about it.
[+] [-] tartehk|12 years ago|reply
See Hellbanning - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...
[+] [-] choult|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GrinningFool|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] __pThrow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CDRdude|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t3hSpork|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjknight|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] newhouseb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaidf|12 years ago|reply
Having your side conversation with your family show up in your prospective customer's feed isn't acceptable.
[+] [-] tedunangst|12 years ago|reply