Twitter's Block

So Twitter changed the behavior of blocking and people are upset.

Back when I was on Twitter I had blocked and been blocked. No big deal. Twitter represents some of the worst aspects of people. First problem: People thought that "Their" twitter timeline was "theirs". Firstly, Twitter is a free online service owned by Twitter and not any of the individual users. The users of Twitter generate content for Twitter, which is then used by Twitter to generate advertising revenue. Twitter is about as much yours as the dollar in my pocket is yours. Or for a better analogy, Twitter is yours about as much as the apartment you rent each month is yours.

Secondly on this "my timeline" thing: If you have a public account, then anything you say there is about the same as speaking in a public forum. Anyone can "hear" you and is free to respond to your public pronouncements. If you don't like being responded to in public then don't speak in public. Seems simple but a LOT of people don't get that.

So here comes blocking. When I did the blocking all I was interested in was not seeing the dumb ass comments reach my timeline. Here I use "my" as my subscription rather than my property. I could care less about what or whether the person I had blocked could no longer see what I was saying. After all, I made "public" posts that ANYONE could see anyway.

But I think I understand the real reason behind the uproar over the blocking change. See there are a group of people who like to block and report people who have, shall we say, differing opinions on certain topics. In fact some of these people have created an app that will add these people to a block list for all subscribers. What this amounts to are people deciding that they want to be little censor police. Not only do they not want to "hear" what others are saying, they want to deprive those persons from being able to "hear" and respond.

I think Twitter's reasoning is quite right. If you have a public account ('cause you're looking for attention anyway) you shouldn't be able to prevent people from seeing what you wrote. Seeing what you wrote is NOT harassment. Commenting on what you wrote in public back in public is not harassment. bombarding you with commentary after asking to not be addressed is harassment. The new "blocking" does this.

This reminds me of the recent request for Twitter to add or change how you report abuse. Apparently some people, particularly in the UK were perturbed by a number of rape threats made to them by random twitter persons. In the UK making a rape threat is illegal. Rather than report the accounts to the police, the persons in question wanted Twitter to change how one reports abuse. The two questions I had were: 1) What exactly was wrong with the original reporting mechanism (I used the block and report all the time on tweet deck). 2) If one took the threats seriously, why not report to the police? Certainly a visit by the local constable would be far more effective a deterrent for actual rapists than a twitter ban (which of course could be removed by creating another account).

What a lot of these complaints (to a company that is neither profitable or charging to use its product) seem to me are about self centered people who are used to being able to demand things just because. I can understand a paying customer complaining about a product they paid for, but a service that is free? Take what you get or move along. I hear Weibo is a great service.

Ultimately there was nothing wrong with the change. The problem here are users who wish to police other people in a public forum because they do not understand the meaning of public.