Elon Musk says users on X, formerly Twitter, will lose ability to block unwanted followers, eliminating key safety feature

Lanky_Pomegranate530@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 234 points –
cnbc.com
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It’s already been noted elsewhere that this will directly violate Apple’s and Google’s app store policies. The X app should be immediately pulled as a result.

A single character app name also violated Apple’s policies until a few weeks ago, so…

Just shows that if you're rich enough laws, regulations, and even the rules & procedures of private companies need not apply.

Hahah, Google and Apple lack the backbone to do this.

@silvercove @CaptObvious

Probably easier just waiting for X to go bankrupt.

Elon Musk has enough money to keep Twitter alive indefinetely.

It isn't clear that he does. If he did, he wouldn't have needed to dupe ::ahem:: "persuade" investors to bankroll his takeover.

@silvercove

Yes, but seeing as he didn't just use his money to buy the damned thing in the first place, why would he do it to save the company now?

Literally look at how much attention it's getting him!

Never mind the real goal - he's got an established far reaching platform, he doesn't care about those leaving it, he cares about those staying, that's who he's pandering to - the bigots and the companies openly willing to do business with bigots. And he now has his own media outlet that is aimed directly at them.

People think he's just some clueless manchild, and while he is the latter, he's definitely not the former, he knows exactly what he's doing, and that's building up an empire to secure his power indefinitely.

Honestly if you're still using Twitter, you're an idiot.

I agree with with you. I don't understand why anyone would still want to use this platform considering that their are better alternatives such as Mastadon and BlueSky. Hell even threads is better than twitter and that shit is invasive as fuck.

How do you even get a Blowski account, anyway? I guess they give out invitations, but they're slow to do it.

People on the platform can generate invites at some intervals and send them to friends. That's my understanding, while I don't know for certain as I personally am avoiding the platform due to not trusting Dorsey at the helm. But I'm still keeping an eye on it with popcorn ready.

With a block feature removed, you too can be absolutely hounded until you are forced to leave the site out of frustration, hopefully leading to an echo chamber circle jerk that kills the service by driving out a massive amount of people.

I honestly could not be happier at how Musk is destroying Twitter as a platform. Think there’s any way to convince him to buy Meta?

At this point if you're still using Twitter you might as well be literally licking Elon Musk's balls.

My sympathies go to creators who used this platform to engage with their fans and try to make a living, but it's time to cut losses and jump off this shit ship.

Like, why though?

Easier to harass people and flood the field with right wing non-facts if that content can't be blocked.

A while back he (Musk) posted that individual blocklists are relatively expensive (cpu wise) to run, which is true. This has been getting much worse with the whole blue check debacle. People are blocking those idiots en masse. I'm fairly sure this is just a cost saving measure.

This is probably why. If douchebags pay to self identify, you can't have them blocked by 1/3 of your users or they aren't getting their value.

He thinks it will make it impossible for people to not listen to him and his sycophants. What he forgets is that everyone always has the choice to just not use it.

Lol I guarantee that Elon will continue to block and restrict anyone who calls him out

I had to read that headline twice, at first I thought it was specifying users on ecstasy. That's such a bad name

Elon wants more trolls because it generates views.

I feel like we should have been calling Twitter users "twits" this whole time, because now we could call them "xits".

What in the actual fuck? Does he have to collapse the ambling corpse even further so he can discover why the ability to block existed and then re-invent it but shittier to convince himself it's necessary?

Don't worry, it will come back as a paid feature. Isn't he a marketing genius?

Not an Elon fan, but he's not removing the mute feature... Which makes a bad headline but is accurate.

There was this whole debate with Mastodon because at least it didn't originally have a block button either and a bunch of the Twitter converted were outraged.

The thing is, blocking is pretty meaningless when you have a public profile. In a sense it's a false sense of security, because if someone is really trying to stalk you, all they have to do is open another browser, open your profile, and not login to the site or just create another account...

Edit: The one thing of value I forgot about is that blocking does stop someone from commenting on your posts, which in theory lets you cater your community/content a bit better. Though, part of why I always forget this use case is that it never really seemed to work. The small people don't have trolls and the big people (understandably) aren't taking the time to block all the trolls.

Idk, there's definitely cases were blocking is super important. For example, small/ish institutions that attract a disproportionate amount of hate online but still serve important functions. One that comes to mind is @auschwitzmuseum... like it's always gonna attract holocaust deniers, and not blocking them just exposes people who want to support it to antisemitism all the time.

This is just one example I've witnessed, but there must be many many more. Planned Parenthood...Charities that help people that are considered undesirables. Generally any institution dealing with "controversial" fields. I could go on.

Yeah, when I remembered that sort of stuff I added the edit... I guess personally, I think that's better handled at the site wide moderation lvl vs leaving accounts to deal with that and just "block" people... but it's Musk so I don't see that kind of moderation happening anytime soon.

The whole "one person vs all the trolls" issue is part of why the reddit/community style format (where at least a team of volunteers can handle the issues) won me over vs the twitter/microblogging format for social media.