If the block feature goes away, I guarantee it will come back for - at the very least - the highest tier of paid accounts almost immediately afterwards.
I can't imagine any of the large corps that still use Xitter for customer communication will be happy not being able to block serial trolls. Or people with legitimate grievances who won't go away.
I'm pretty sure both the App Store and the Google Play Store both require social media apps to have a block feature. Will be interesting to see what happens if he goes through with this.
The ones who are most vulnerable to this change are the ones who especially should've left this platform already. I'm sorry, but they're not being forced to use it, and everyone should leave it. I don't have much sympathy or care about wanting to make an alt-right social media platform safer, I want it to crash and burn.
When I comment that Twitter is trash and I'd never use it, the response I often get is 'it's actually pretty good after you block all the trolls and bots and corporate accounts and politicians and blue checks'... 🙄
Remember to contact your political representative and express your concerns on any public organization account having an account on twitter. Also contact any journali of a media you use to read/watch and express the same concern.
Once politics and journalists get out of twitter is game over.
As much as I despise Musk and Twitter and hope that both die a painful death, what is actually proposed here is honestly a change for the better: It’s not about preventing people from blocking users, it’s about blocked users being able to see public posts, which they could also see by just logging out. This is being honest about what a block does and avoids giving people a wrong sense of privacy that they simply don’t have on the platform. From what I’ve heard there is a possibility to post for followers-only which in combination with requiring approval to follow and that isn’t going away here either…
The billionaire this week posted his hoped-for change that “the block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, a public post”.
If I understand the change aright, that's an excellent move in my book.
What it sounds like Twitter is doing now is how Reddit used to work. When you ignore a user, you won't see their responses, but other users can.
Then Reddit changed it to "blocked user cannot respond", which people on Reddit promptly started abusing to, in heated arguments, make a comment and then promptly block the other person, so that it looked like they weren't responding. You wound up with people commenting all over a thread with stuff like "this user blocked me, but here's my response to this other comment". Was one of the several major moves that Reddit made that I think were in error and made me less happy with the site.
Lemmy works the same way Reddit originally did as well; that's how I'd want social media to generally work.
EDIT: It might also be that this is only a partial move in that direction, so that a block prevents a user from responding but not seeing a post. If so, that'd be an improvement, I think, but not as far as I'd like things to change.
Sacre bleu! It's almost like the free speech warrior does not know that the other aspect of free speech besides speaking freely is being able to choose whom to listen to! Does he think free speech means being forced to listen to specific people speak?