• pulaskiwasright@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      He wants shitbag, astroturf, conservative, fascist “personalities” to be able to respond to and every prominent non-fascist post where they can be promoted to the top of the replies.

      As a bonus, it will also help the astroturfing oil companies better kill environmental efforts.

    • Hank@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      Maybe he wants to get rid off the somewhat smart people on Twitter so the rest can be easily radicalized with the intend that they vote against their interest and for the interests of rich people?

      I’d say it’s either that or he wants greater reach to feed his narcism.

    • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Probably something about eliminating echo chambers, but there are reasons to block people that aren’t for the purpose of creating an echo chamber.

  • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    “it makes no sense” literally every social media site in existence has the block feature, and the reason is to help people prevent harassment. Elon is like a fucking toddler, it’s obvious he just wants to get rid of blocking because he’s pissy about being blocked by other people.

  • alienanimals@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Literally every single day we have idiots doing Musk’s PR work for free.

    Downvote Musk spam. The billionaire doesn’t need your help making sure his businesses stay in the 24 hour news cycle.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Yeah, but every time these stories blow up, Mastodon, Threads, and BlueSky gets another user base boost. I’m ok with that. These stories keep making the alternative communities more and more viable.

  • Chenzo@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    So… Wait.

    This means someone can just @ someone else and destroy their feed with hate or dick pics or whatever?!

    • FaeDrifter@midwest.social
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      11 months ago

      What I suspect will happen is that Musk cronies will be free to harass anyone they want, but anyone harassing Musk or one of this cronies will be banned.

      • DreamySweet@lemmy.sdf.org
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        11 months ago

        If you mute someone, you don’t see their posts. They don’t get any notification that you have muted them. It’s the same as blocking but they don’t know they are blocked.

        • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          Blocking is a step up from muting. Muting just makes it so you don’t see the muted users’ posts and comments. Blocking makes it so that the blocked user is muted, plus they cannot see any of your posts and comments. Blocked users also cannot @ you.

          • pumpsnabben@sopuli.xyz
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            11 months ago

            Muted accounts can’t @ you either.

            The only difference between block and mute is that your are informing them they are blocked, prompting them to make an alt so that they can keep doing shit.

            • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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              11 months ago

              Thanks for the correction. I thought it was different at some point, but to be fair I haven’t used Twitter in many years now. I just assumed it was still similar to how most other apps handle it.

              • Cryptic Fawn@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                11 months ago

                It is different, he’s just being dishonest.

                If you block someone else on Twitter, they can’t even see your profile at all (muting still allows them to see your profile and interact with everything you post or retweet). Sure, it tells them they’re blocked, but this also means they can’t interact with anything you post at all. If they want too, they’ll either have to make an alt account (someone most are too lazy to do) or ask fellow toxic assholes to screenshot your posts for them to see.

                Muting is useless when dealing with harassers. It’s why the block feature was added; because minority communities begged for it.

    • XanXic@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Even better they can spam literal child porn at you because of “outrage” and youll get a exec from Twitter defending you to parliament!

  • Silverseren@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    The block “feature” is a required tool for being listed on the Google and Apple stores, among others.

    Removing it will get Twitter delisted from them as well.

    • Thee0023@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      That’d be nice if it actually applied, but Apple has already made exceptions for X among other large companies to allow them to play by different rules in the store. So I’m not holding my breath for any sort of punishment.

      Examples:

      • X got a one letter App Store name that was previously against the rules (other devs need their app name to be at least 2 characters) (more info)
      • YouTube had been blocking iOS PiP background playback (not sure if they still do) and put that feature behind the YouTube Premium subscription. Background playback and PiP is part of iOS’s system capabilities and the rule specifically says it’s not allowed. See Apple’s guidelines section 3.2.2 (ii) here. With this, one could make the argument that PiP would only support system supported video decoding, and YouTube uses DASH for higher resolution videos, but YouTube does offer video and audio streams that are natively supported by Apple as well so I don’t hold much support for this argument.
      • jamiehs@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        “Background playback” is behind the premium paywall; NOBODY gets YouTube PIP support on iOS; such a shame.

        I repeat, even if you pay for premium you simply can’t do PIP using the official app. You can however use a browser and use PIP that way I think (there used to be some weird workaround but I’m not sure if it still exists).

        Edit: I was (happily) wrong! I see now, they added it halfway though 2022 and I needed to go into settings and explicitly enable it. I’m a happy camper now! Thanks for the correction

          • jamiehs@lemmy.ml
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            11 months ago

            Fascinating… because I’ve been trying to get this to work for like years… literal years. I’m very happy to be wrong about this.

            HOW THE FUCK DO YOU DO THAT?

            • Piers@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              Assuming it works the same way as on android you just start playing a video then switch out of the YouTube app without stopping playback. In fact I just read the Google help page “Using picture-in-picture on your mobile device” and it says exactly that for any mobile device and only goes into iPhone Vs android specific details when it comes to ensuring you’ve not turned off any default on settings that are required for it to work.

          • jamiehs@lemmy.ml
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            11 months ago

            I see now, they added it halfway though 2022 and I needed to go into settings and explicitly enable it. I’m a happy camper now!

            Thank you for the correction.

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            11 months ago

            Anyone else realize he uses the music from Dustforce? It’s very nostalgic because I played it a lot in college.

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I don’t have premium and I get PiP on everything but music.

            Even then, sometimes live shows will work or lesser known musicians.

          • Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 months ago

            I don’t even have premium? I’m on iOS, I can’t keep up with what’s being criticized as real or not.

            • jamiehs@lemmy.ml
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              11 months ago

              Sounds like Apple may have forced their hand behind the scenes.

              https://9to5google.com/2022/07/11/youtube-pip-iphone-ipad/

              My initial experience is that it was missing, then tested, then removed again.

              Since you don’t have premium and can still use the feature on iOS, that means they were forced to make it available in general to iOS users. It was off by default for me though, so maybe they made it work but just didn’t turn it on by default?

              Someone else above was saying that Apple has rules about this, and another poster was saying that on Android you need premium for PIP. So maybe iOS did without it for years and then they were forced to add it for all iOS users regardless of the premium sub.

              • Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                11 months ago

                I will say it doesn’t work predictable with all my apps brought back into view. WefWef is one of the few where it does it every time.

    • seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org
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      11 months ago

      I feel sympathy for the people who are required to use it for work. Most users could quit it and replace it with Mastodon, though.

      • FrankTheHealer@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I tried deleting my twitter just now.

        The website is abysmally slow. I genuinely think they are throttling their deactivate account page to try stop users from leaving en masse.

        That or else the site is not functioning correctly after Musk’s optimizations’

      • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Honestly, this is a pretty clear case where federation should win out. I answered someone above, but governments using a private service like twitter for actual public announcements imo is broken. I hope that Mastodon and federated services take off and turn into a turnkey style service somewhere. Like, setting up your own Mastodon (or Lemmy!) instance I hope turns into something just about as easy as setting up an email account.

      • Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        With Twitter’s dwindling user base and each, people should just jump ship and migrate to mastodon. It’s honestly what Twitter used to be and better than everything Twitter is now nor what musk has turned Twitter into.

      • Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        It would be a godsend if there was a way to block certain results from search engines. I do not want to have want to have any more Twitter links or reddit links propagating my results. I don’t even care if I miss out on some vital piece of information to my query. I just don’t want those sites in my search results.

    • bdiddy@lemmy.one
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      11 months ago

      I’ve legit never understood it’s appeal. Like what even is the purpose of it?

      • whofearsthenight@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I wasn’t a heavy poster on Twitter, but I was a heavy user. Unlike the Lemmy/Reddit model, it’s much more real time. So when I wanted to see how things were going with a piece of news of any sort, basically, twitter was better at that.

        Its also much more person centered - you curate specifically a list of who you want to follow rather than just topics, so there could often be crossover. Usually for me, this meant I’d listen to some podcast or something for a while, figure out I like the host and their personality or often just taste, and then follow them. The added benefit being that most people I’d follow on twitter weren’t so big that if you tweet at them and you’re not an asshole, you’ll get a response.

  • stochasticity@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This is incredibly consistent with the “free speech” crowd thinking free speech entitles you to an audience.

  • Bongles@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Unreal. It’s not even incompetence, he really is just tanking the site on purpose.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      11 months ago

      No he’s not.

      He’s a right wing grifter and always has been. And like many on the right, he views harassment as a form of “free speech” which should be acceptable.

      He’s not tanking the site on purpose. He’s tanking it because his bullshit ideology naturally results in creating a hostile environment that people don’t want to be a part of.

  • HuddaBudda@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    The block feature is not there out of the goodness of their CEO’s heart.

    It is there to limit liability from harassment. After all, why police harassment laws at your expense. When you can get the end user to enforce it for you.

    It’s just Dumb evil.

    • Heresy_generator@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      It’s also a feature explicitly required by both the Apple and Google app stores for apps that have user generated content.

      https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

      1.2 User-Generated Content
      Apps with user-generated content present particular challenges, ranging from intellectual property infringement to anonymous bullying. To prevent abuse, >apps with user-generated content or social networking services must include:

      • The ability to block abusive users from the service

      https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9876937?hl=en

      User Generated Content
      User-generated content (UGC) is content that users contribute to an app, and which is visible to or accessible by at least a subset of the app’s users.
      Apps that contain or feature UGC, including apps which are specialized browsers or clients to direct users to a UGC platform, must implement robust, effective, and ongoing UGC moderation that:

      • Provides an in-app system for blocking UGC and users;

      Every day he further proves that he has no idea what he’s doing. He’s 100% going to reverse this decision when he find out all of the things he should have know before saying anything.

    • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      It’s chaotic good, because by destroying his platform, he is making the fedi grow. Surely there has to be a point where people will leave, right?

  • Anti-Face Weapon@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This is so dumb, what is he thinking? What’s the angle?

    Dumbness aside, Twitter is only usable if you block all of the blue check spammers who add nothing to any discussion.

    Maybe he’s doing it so you can’t block blue checks? But it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

    • krakenx@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I half wonder if he is running an experiment to see how much his users are willing to put up with so that all the other tech companies can figure out how far they can push us.

      • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I think it’s that and ads. Easier to sell promotional stuff when the whole user base is simply incapable of hiding your shill posts.

      • archchan@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        It’s been non-stop advanced bullshit after bullshit coming out of basically all corpos for the past year, but things were always headed in this direction. Muskrat just helped speed things along. The silver lining in all of this is the Fediverse and other platforms are finally popping off. Hopefully that trend gains more momentum and big tech dies before we end up further into a future we don’t want to be in.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        This but his goal is to find the line and step over it, not toe it. He didn’t like Twitter being a liberal leaning platform that pushed extreme conservatives out so he’s reversing that. The only nuance he’s using is to do it slowly enough that there’s still libs to pwn on his platform over the rather than having them all leave at once. Plus if he can chase them away rather than ban them, he can claim to be more about free speech. But this is all about suppressing opinions he doesn’t like, with an added bonus that he can ban people for not loving him.

      • kellperdog@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        That’s what I was thinking. Either a specific person blocked him that he got upset about or the amount of people that have him blocked upset him. Either way it’s personal and he’s throwing a tantrum like a toddler. Again.

    • Durotar@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      This is so dumb, what is he thinking? What’s the angle?

      I’d guess that he wants to control what people see for one reason or another. I blocked a lot of communities here to make my feed more enjoyable.

    • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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      11 months ago

      Less work needed to maintain the system? He fired most engineers, those remaining can only do so much at one time.

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        11 months ago

        What’s there to maintain, the feature is already there and should be relatively simple. I can’t imagine that Twitter backend is so bad that it requires active work on all components.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Lmao this is going to be incredible to watch unfold. I am assuming Elon himself has blocked an absolute fuckton of accounts that are just out to troll him, so either he’s gonna (rightly) get absolutely inundated by trolls, or he’s gonna make the devs disable it for everyone except him and whoever else he wants to give that feature to.