Twitter :)

[Apple Cider]

What app do you use that lets you do all that? O_O

[mikemariano]

I block for a variety of reasons:

 

1.) Someone is bugging me

2.) Someone I don't know with a low post and follower count or objectionable content follows me

3.) Looks like a bot or a general business account spam-following me

 

All good rules!  I go further with rule 1 and if someone is sending mean tweets to someone I read, I will block them!

[osmosisch]

Basically, I disagree. There are legitimate reasons to block people, but I think there are also legitimate reasons to want to know why you were blocked.

There's a difference between wanting to know and bothering the blocker to find out why however.

[Twig]

Yes. I never suggested otherwise.

[JonCole]

What app do you use that lets you do all that? O_O

 

It's called Unfollowers (not a great name, but it works), but you just sign into it with your Twitter and it pulls all your contacts and their stats. At first I was a little hesitant to give them twitter API access but since I started using them they've never done anything outwardly dubious. Here are the filters you can put on your follower/following search -

 

 

So for instance, I frequently filter the people that I follow to see who is tweeting the most per day. If I notice that someone I follow tweets a TON but I never engage with their tweets, I unfollow them to clean up my feed. I also scan through the followers with really low followers/following ratios, sometimes blocking if I suspect spam accounts.

[osmosisch]

Yes. I never suggested otherwise.

Just clarifyin'. It's easy (for me anyway) to get the opposite from your post.

[Twig]

Fair enough!

[Apple Cider]

That's a great app, I will have to look into it. 

[SuperBiasedMan]

I use that Unfollowers thing but til now I literally just got emails when people unfollowed me. I gotta check out that other stuff.

[deleted user]

_

[juv3nal]

I use an app that filters my followers by various metrics, including tweets/day, following/followers ratio, account age, etc and I unfollow/mute/block based on internal criteria that I don't feel like telling anyone about. I use Twitter for a specific purpose and operate my account to meet those needs. I don't think this is particularly oppressive.

 

I wouldn't even know where to begin deciding on what I wanted to see with metrics like that. Like how would i even decide what is a good max/min tweets/day?

[Ninety-Three]

Nobody is entitled to anyone else's Twitter feed at their convenience. If you really want to know what a person who blocked you is tweeting and their account is unprotected, you can view their tweets with relative ease.

 

Those statements seem contradictory and I am confused. Nobody is entitled to information which is public and easily accessible at their convenience?

[JonCole]

Those statements seem contradictory and I am confused. Nobody is entitled to information which is public and easily accessible at their convenience?

 

You're missing "at your convenience". I'm just saying that being able to follow someone is a convenience, if you're blocked and the account is public you're still free to view it albeit not with ease. Blocking's primary effect is that it forbids you from interacting directly with that person, not making it so that your feed is completely inaccessible to them.

[Mangela Lansbury]

Those statements seem contradictory and I am confused. Nobody is entitled to information which is public and easily accessible at their convenience?

I'm really upset that my neighbors started closing their blinds. Why would they have open glass portholes into their lives if I wasn't allowed to look in?

[Ninety-Three]

You're missing "at your convenience". I'm just saying that being able to follow someone is a convenience, if you're blocked and the account is public you're still free to view it albeit not with ease. Blocking's primary effect is that it forbids you from interacting directly with that person, not making it so that your feed is completely inaccessible to them.

 

I saw that, you were saying that the information is publicly available "with relative ease", which seemed like practically the definition of "at your convenience". It's easy to open a new browser session and go to twitter.com/someaccount/with_replies, so I'd say I have anyone else's (anyone public) Twitter feed at my convenience.

 

 

Those statements seem contradictory and I am confused. Nobody is entitled to information which is public and easily accessible at their convenience?

 

I'm really upset that my neighbors started closing their blinds. Why would they have open glass portholes into their lives if I wasn't allowed to look in?

 

That's a terrible comparison and surely you know it. The privacy of one's own home seems like a perfect comparison for accounts marked private. Public Twitter accounts are public.

[JonCole]

I think we're in vehement agreement. Because basically, you're arguing that being blocked has no impact because one's public account is still fully viewable which is entirely my point. I don't really get why being blocked would be an issue for someone who purely uses Twitter for viewing things instead of actual interactions. It's just inconvenient, because the easiest way to keep track of someone's tweets is to subscribe to them so they appear in your feed.

[Mangela Lansbury]

That's a terrible comparison and surely you know it. The privacy of one's own home seems like a perfect comparison for accounts marked private. Public Twitter accounts are public.

It's not, though! Twitter is still private information that someone is choosing to make public. You aren't entitled to anyone's private information, no matter how public they choose to make it.

[Ninety-Three]

It's not, though! Twitter is still private information that someone is choosing to make public. You aren't entitled to anyone's private information, no matter how public they choose to make it.

 

We seem to disagree about the meaning of the term. Since Twitter has permanent (deletion notwithstanding) archives, posting to Twitter is literally entering something into the public record. That's more public than shouting something in the middle of town square, that's like putting up a poster, a poster that will never come down. Put simply, when you make information public, doesn't it become public information?

[Merus]

Yes, but in practice people do not treat public/private as binary, and it's a mistake to assume that just because don't want their stuff to be private, that must mean that they intend their stuff to be widely consumed.

[Twig]

I agree that there are certainly degrees of privacy but also feel that people need to understand that Twitter is public. I think a lot of people who use it don't realize that until it's far too late. The issues of privacy on the internet is something about which I think the vast majority of people who use it are... not educated. This is not necessarily their fault, but even so.

[JonCole]

A lot of the privacy stuff on the internet really makes me uncomfortable. I think it's actually quite realistic to take an otherwise cynical viewpoint that nothing on the internet is private, considering that many people are playing by the "everything is completely public" ruleset. I'm often pretty put off by people screenshotting and posting deleted content, or copying someone else's work wholesale and saying something to the effect of "well it's on the internet so you don't really control it anymore and it's free for everyone".

 

Anyways, I don't have much of a point in saying all that. Maybe I just hope that I/we could be a little above playing this game and allowing people to feel some degree of privacy even though they should have no reasonable expectation in having it.

[Twig]

Yeah I agree with all of that. It's a sad state of affairs. I think people just being aware of things would help a lot, but they really aren't. They treat it as complete freedom until the moment their own freedom is impeded upon.

 

...I guess that's kind of how people treat a lot of things in life, though. Bleh.

[Badfinger]

Yes, but in practice people do not treat public/private as binary, and it's a mistake to assume that just because don't want their stuff to be private, that must mean that they intend their stuff to be widely consumed.

 

I fully agree with you, but in practice I feel like 99% of the time that would be cited on twitter it's because someone is trying too late to back away from some horrible screed they put up and are trying to use their veil of ignorance as currency because they don't fucking know how twitter works.

 

Twitter is a public forum. Possibly the world's most public forum ever. I feel like the time when people want it to be otherwise is when they're being hideous racists. I share concerns of others here that the concept of internet != private is bad and being abused by many people, but at the same time by tweeting you are explicitly opting in to having your words available to everyone.

[clyde]

It's really annoying when someone deletes content they've put up that has been linked to.

[Apple Cider]

Anyone is absolutely welcome to read my tweets but if they are logged in and I have blocked them, it's because I do not want them to be able to interact with ME. They can read it all they want but they shouldn't be able to talk to me. Do I wish they'd not be able to read my stuff at all? Absolutely. My stalker did this all the fucking time even if he was banned on numerous parachute accounts a day but I don't want him contacting me.