•  alyaza [they/she]   ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) 
    link
    fedilink
    English
    201
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    it’s unavoidable to center Elon here but can we just take a step back and appreciate how stupid, bad, and completely antithetical to a usable website this idea is? blocking has been a feature on like everything since phpBB forums because it literally just works. it’s an easy way to curate your experience without escalating and it’s a logical imitation of being able to simply avoid a person in real life. the idea of removing this in favor of nothing but mutes is just goofy as fuck (and if you make muting the new “block”, what’s even the difference between them? people will just use them basically the same way!).

          •  Hot Saucerman   ( @dingus@lemmy.ml ) 
            link
            fedilink
            English
            20
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            He ascribes to Longtermism and like his associate Jeffery Epstein, he thinks his genes are magically special, and so he wants as many offspring as humanly possible: while not actually giving one shit about the quality of life for any of them.

            It’s really interesting, because he fucking hates his own father (Errol is also a creep who fathered a child with his step-daughter, who he raised from childhood), but can’t put together that he is exactly the fuck the same as his creep ass father.

            •  fubo   ( @fubo@lemmy.world ) 
              link
              fedilink
              English
              51 year ago

              Longtermism doesn’t have to do with one’s own personal genetics or lineage, though, and it certainly doesn’t belong to Elon.

              Longtermism is a notion coming out of population ethics, that since there will be more people in the future than there are today, that we should take the well-being of all those future people into account when making decisions today.

              This can be taken in lots of different directions — ranging from humanist environmentalism, to space migration, to concern about exotic existential risks.

              But a fixation on one’s own personal DNA is not really related to it at all. That’s more of a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology.

      • That’s actually all that the “block” function on Lemmy does too - it makes it so that you don’t see any more content from a user, but they can still make comments on your stuff. In other words, Lemmy’s “block” is essentially a “mute” function, too.

        • lemmy, at least, would have the excuse of being constantly a work in progress and i guess that not having such a large community that hard blocking is necessary. but twitter would be appallingly bad without blocks–it already is with them!

          •  Hot Saucerman   ( @dingus@lemmy.ml ) 
            link
            fedilink
            English
            12
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Also, Lemmy has the bonus of federation allowing instances to defederate entirely from abuse and spam-happy instances. The smaller instances can have more tight-knit communities and defederating from instances full of jerks might be as worthwhile as a “block.”

            •  meldroc   ( @meldroc@lemmy.world ) 
              link
              fedilink
              English
              3
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              IIRC from reading about Bluesky, its strategy for dealing with spam, trolls, hate speech, etc., was to have various servers in the Federation tag posts, users & servers with a “Spam” tag or “Hate speech” tag, and server admins can set their servers to not display posts so tagged, and to not pass them on to other servers.

        • I hope it stays this way. It would suck being excluded from unrelated content on Lemmy just because I had a disagreement with someone at some point in the past (depending on how block happy people are of course).

    • It’s interesting to me that they made the argument that blocking is increasing server costs.

      1. How is that even possible, on a technical level?
      2. If true, how is changing to a “stronger mute” going to reduce said costs?

      I mean, it’s plainly clear that Musk has no idea what is going on at any of his companies and the narrative of him being a genius of some kind was simply that: a narrative.

      •  Redex   ( @Redex68@lemmy.world ) 
        link
        fedilink
        English
        211 year ago

        In a way, I could imagine it increasing server costs by like 0.001%, if even that, because if the algorithm finds a post to recommend but then realises it’s from a blocked account, it would have to search again (ofc it’s probably optimised so that it realises that at an earlier stage).

        But we’re talking about such small details it literally doesn’t matter and is outweighed by the functionality lost one hundredfold.

      •  777   ( @777@lemmy.ml ) 
        link
        fedilink
        English
        111 year ago

        I expect it’s accurate to say; their architecture is not like a database where you can add an index on a blocked state and then join against it. You have to get a list of potential posts that the user might want to see and then eliminate any in the block list. There will be a few edge case users who have thousands of block entries and a multithreading strategy is likely required to swiftly filter it in a reasonable timeframe.

        However, an architecture I’ve seen that works around this is to build this timeline in the background and present it to the user from a cache, I don’t know if this is what Twitter does as I never worked on that. However, if you want to not have a block feature but have some kind of mute feature anyway I don’t see how there is a meaningful difference.

        •  2deck   ( @2deck@beehaw.org ) 
          link
          fedilink
          English
          71 year ago

          Yeah, sounds like that’s the case. Funny how flaws in system architecture gets exposed to the public through vapid excuses these days.

          My guess is muting would likely result in a decrease of overall visibility. Every account gets a mute score.

      • As I understand it it’s because of block lists making large queries as soon as someone subscribes to it. I don’t condone the removal of the block feature, just trying to answer your question to the best of my knowledge.

    •  777   ( @777@lemmy.ml ) 
      link
      fedilink
      English
      221 year ago

      Haha, that’s a throwback to the days when I helped to manage a phpBB board and there were a few members that would just continuously get into arguments so I edited the database so both of them had each other on their block list. It was very telling when I discovered they unblocked each other a few weeks later and got back to arguing and derailing thread topics.