It might look like this, but thinking about it, I guess it's still useful in reducing unwanted interactions. People are lazy, and thus adding even a little friction can help a lot in preventing them from doing stalkering, spreading hate etc.

I.e. of course it's possible to login with another user, find the one who blocked you, make a screenshot or something and then quote it or perform any other interaction in your main account. But it's obviously not very easy.

So I'm sure it worked as a solution to reduce negative interactions on the platform. However, Musk doesn't want reducing these, his goal is spreading chaos and forcing his narratives, so the decision totally makes sense for him.

It provides friction for further misbehaving. Imagine you blocked someone who has serious issues with people who #foobar. It's better for you if they can't easily find you and repost your content to their community who also hate #foobar. It's not perfect, but the friction helps prevent drive-by bad behaviour.

To be fair, you can barely view any post while unauthenticated these days. Sometimes I click on a link to a tweet on my work laptop (where I'm not authenticated) and I get immediately assaulted by several pop-ups and cookie bars and redirected to the landing page when try to dismiss them.

I thought so too, but also fun to see people posting they've been blocked by person they're debating... well arguing with, whether the blocked deserved it because they're being an ass, or whether the blocker was simply thin skinned. I think the latter, seeing people rage quit because they can't rationalize their position, is actually pretty useful signal.

But the point is you can’t see these posts from a particular account. It makes interaction between the two accounts a bit more difficult and so a bit less likely.

AFAIK, you can't view any tweets unless logged in these days. But the sort of user being frequently blocked likely has multiple accounts anyway.

A well behaved blocked person will honor the restriction but this only antagonizes the unhinged who usually have multiple accounts.

Something that less aggravates people prone to bad behavior is the right move.

I assume it still blocks actions when someone tries to interact with the user, so the fact that they're blocked isn't a secret. It seems like more of a convenience feature for the person who got blocked (since they would otherwise need to log out), which is an odd direction to push a product.

You still can't interact with them, do you know you're blocked.

Isn't there always a sidechannel in a social network?

Even if it doesn't fully block, it makes stalking etc. more annoying.

It defeats the whole point of blocking as a safety mechanism against stalking, harassment, and mob dog piling behavior.

Once again, Elon utterly fails to understand the service he bought.

Sure it does. Very few people are going to obsessively look over every person's twitter account using multiple logins to check and see if that account maybe posted something that is being hidden from them.

There's an argument here that the previous blocking behavior might give users a false sense of security. In reality, you should not post any information publicly that you wouldn't want someone in particular to read, even if you've blocked that person.

I have no idea who that is, but Twitter/X increasingly sounds like it's degenerated into a schoolyard (where the richest kid asked his dad to buy the land next to the school building and put up a private playground for him).

>If you don't want someone to point out your stupid takes don't make them in public.

It's usually the other way around for me. I'd rather not have every post about some game I like devolve into a culture war.

from what I have seen, there is definitely a lot of bot/automated content. It feels totally un-moderated at times.

> all that noise was an attempt to get a discount

Was he complaining about bots before he signed? Genuinely can't remember.

The latter. Bots massively increased under Elon. I don't know why anyone wants to use this dumpster fire of a site. I don't.

I guarantee this move is because too many people blocked Elon.

What thread has Elon lost really? When Elon bought twitter there was a huge wave of people and the media telling us it was over in 6 months, when Elon fired staff they told us X would go down forever in a few months.

Under Elon imo X has gotten a lot better, I see more content that relates to me and has since found myself using X more than all the other social media platforms combined.

Blocking content makes no sense on a platform like X, if you block me and I still want to read your posts all I have to do is to make another account and read them. This just gets rid of the friction. If I block someone I just don't want to interact with them, I still want them to see me and my friends have fun.