From the article you posted, blocking still stops people from communicating with you.
The only difference with how it is now is they can still view your posts. I don't have a dog in this fight (don't have Twitter) but this seems like a good feature.
On reddit I've been blocked and then called a Nazi/reprehensible person/nonhuman scum. When blocked, you can't see what people say about you. I would like to report the comments for harassment, but I can't.
Blocking should stop someone from being able to communicate with you - but it shouldn't be a shield against reporting harassment.
Back when I still had an account, after never seeing his content in the previous ~15 years I had been using Twitter, he was suddenly all over my feed. I had to mute him, and then, when that didn't work, block him, within months of his takeover.
I made and follow my own "lists" and that blocks just about anything (including most ads). Also, having just under 10,000 block and mute words helps a bit.
To be fair, that's what it shows by default. I recently created an account just for a short-term purpose, after years of not using it, and the starting algorithmic TL was just right-wing rage-bait about either my country or the US; nothing else. I chose to experiment, and it took days of active curation and follows for the algorithmic TL to stop trying and just show me game/anime stuff for example.
I can see people which open an account without a specific purpose just letting themselves fall into the first rabbit hole Twitter shows them.
it is naive to think that twitter/x is a neutral platform when the owner of the site created a bot that called itself "mecha hitler". do you really think he isn't affecting everyone's feed as well?
Liberals, Fascists, and Communists always like to throw mud at each other as if they're not all cut from the same collectivist cloth (and all responsible for the deaths of millions). Best to pay them no mind.
Personally I'm not much a fan of Reddit or Twitter though, simply because the algorithmic nonsense is clearly there just to drive ad views and not to provide me with the interactions I'm there to have. Nostr is a much more pleasant experience.
Everything gets flagged? I don't think so. Moderation here is nice, but it could be more strict. I encounter comments I'd like to see flagged literally every day.
I don't even know what this means today. What things are "non-political"? Saying "there are no politics" seems like the same thing as "the status quo is the only possibility" - exactly the stagnation from which I want to move away on socials.
> the art or science of government: as [that] concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy, ... [or] winning and holding control over a government; political actions, practices, policies, ... affairs or business
Broad sense:
> the total complex of relations between people living in society
In my experience, the question is almost always disingenuous. Topics being "political" is clearly the exception rather than the norm. The subtext of asking is something like "you are a bad person for objecting to my political statements (but I will still reserve the right to object to yours, should you decide that turnabout is fair play)".
> Saying "there are no politics" seems like the same thing as "the status quo is the only possibility" - exactly the stagnation from which I want to move away on socials.
There are all kinds of projects and activities that can be discussed without touching upon the relations between people in society, let alone matters of governmental policy or the quest for power.
There is nothing at all "stagnant" about a community focused on such things. OP is about the Free Software Foundation; focusing on discussion of the software has nothing to do with politics, and is generally improved by consciously avoiding politics.
The mere fact of existence of other political possibilities does not necessitate discussing those possibilities at every opportunity.
The usual hodgepodge of policy and constituent packages that evolve election to election, pasted onto semi-tribal partisan affiliations. Politics (in democracies) is rarely ideologically coherent because the data pull the model, not vice versa.
Like, we can describe the illiberal wings of the right and left, MAGA and academic progressivism, respectively, and it will get readership in the New Yorker and Atlantic, but it’s not going to tell you much about who’s in power and why.
More specifically, complaining about “liberals who typically hate Musk” misses that most of Musk’s antagonism in the last 1 year has come from a different cohort than that which has soured on him since he bought Twitter which is again quite different from the crowd that never liked him at all. There is no “typical” Musk hater, even if we just focus on those who vote blue.
Putting "MAGA" and "academic progressivism" on equal footings is pure bothsideism. What do you mean by "illiberal" exactly, and why would that apply to progressives?
> Putting "MAGA" and "academic progressivism" on equal footings is pure bothsideism
One is a political movement that controls the Presidency and several states. The other has a seat at the table in a few cities. If you’re seeing equal footing, you’re squinting hard.
> What do you mean by "illiberal" exactly, and why would that apply to progressives?
I’m specifically referring to the policing of speech. Brendan Carr telling broadcasters what they can and cannot say is illiberal. Same goes for the euphemism escalators that regulated the form, but not content, of classic political correctness. More broadly, liberalism triumphs tolerance while conservativism purity.
But to the point, LatinX and the Gulf of America being similarly dumb is an academic exercise. They’re functionally dumb and dangerous for entirely separate reasons. Compressing them into illiberalism is interesting, but not usefully descriptive.
Going back to OP, treating the world as pro- or anti-Musk is similarly uselessly reductive.
Make a new X account, open the front page. Within a few tweets, you can see neonazis casually discussing the jewish question or lunatics fantasizing about a coming race war. Reddit feels very, very milquetoast in comparison.
For that matter, if I check any random tweet link in an incognito tab and look over at the "What's happening" panel, it's all sports and celebrity nonsense, nothing "culture war" or political at all.
It happens A/B style even with old accounts. Crazy conspiracy stuffs and fake repost accounts pop up out of nowhere, and goes away after I've blocked few of them. It's as if a hatch on the floor comes popping up and back down.
Otherwise the site is at most, "egg prices had tripled" bad. Far from cash on wheelbarrows bad.
I dont use reddit much anymore, but even I noticed that between the gloating about Charlie Kirk's assassination, disinformation that the shooter was far-right regularly hit the front page to the tune of 100K upvotes. Is that acceptable?
Disinformation that the shooter was far-left was all over reddit as well. People constructed all sorts of explanations because officially nothing much was known.
Take a look at /r/conservative when they often suddenly completely change their shared opinion.
> Content glorifying terrorist groups such as the Al Qassam brigades can stay up for many days on Reddit, for example. I had to personally fill the special form for content illegal in the EU, and even then it took a long time to be removed.
I remember reporting open calls to violence in various socialist subreddits with no action ever taken as far as I could tell. That was about a decade ago.
There was also a comment (I still have the link saved and it was never deleted) from more than a decade ago, from a moderator at the time (account since deleted) of the main transgender subreddit, openly accusing transgender members of the sub of being drug addicts and prostitutes based on absolutely nothing beyond disagreeing with the moderation team's hard-line woke (it was called "SJW" back then, of course) posture.
I never visit twitter/X “for you” or homepage, but instead just use the timeline and see only people I follow. This is mostly interesting people in tech or hobbies. It is great for that!
Every platform has their extremists and if you let the algorithm suggest content to you it will be stuff designed to fester hated and rage. However twitter is one of the few platforms that let you curate your feed, and I couldn’t use it without that.
Why does everybody I see complaining about modern Twitter say the exact phrase "Nobody should be on that platform."? I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your point, just curious if there was some manifesto going around or if everybody suddenly started using the same phrase.
Is it just me or have people started using the same phrases more often and faster than before? Reminds me of when everybody started saying "God forbid" a few months ago.
I don't know about the phrase, but I share the sentiment. The owner is a racist promoting racist things. It's not a 'public square' because he controls the algorithm, so it'll never be a 'fair fight' for those who disagree with him.
Paying users are also explicitly given priority in the reply section, which naturally hands a megaphone to the type of user that is more willing to give money to Elon Musk and wear the "I gave money to Elon Musk" badge.
I did some searches for “nobody should be on that platform” and found:
- one hit on a Lana del Rey message board
- one bluesky post from 8 months ago with no likes, reposts, or replies.
If you widen the search to “should be on that platform” then you get more hits, but many are references to Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, TikTok etc. It seems that people are reaching for a noun that can refer to these social media properties that are not just “sites” and not just “apps.” It would appear that ”platform” is the word we’ve landed on.
The groupthink is real, and it's coming for a skull near you.
But in all seriousness I think it's a mix of bots on the dead internet leading the monkey see monkey do paradigm. If you see 80 out of 100 people doing a thing then you get swept up in the flood. Even if 50 of those 80 are bots.
Like pareidolia humans are great at seeing patterns that don't exist. Nobody should on that platform is an extremely common phrase. So you'll probably hear it more than once. However that doesn't mean there is a conspiracy.
It's mostly been on comments on various Reddit posts over the last few months. I unfortunately don't have any examples saved. I'm not accusing anybody of anything, just personally curious and remarking on a pattern I've perceived and was wondering if it was just a "me" thing.
