Communities aren't a feature-supported thing. They're a spontaneous self-organization. People associate with others around some area of interest. They don't want it to be private; they want to be open and inviting. But they also want to be able to exclude those who make trouble.
Musk suggests using mute instead of block, but that throws off the way communities work. It means you yourself won't see troublemakers, but your followers will unless they've also muted them. People can come and pick fights, interrupting the conversation you had hoped to have among your community.
Musk seems to view Twitter at the high level, of everybody talking to everybody, and at the lowest level, of his own personal feed. But he's missing the spontaneous layers that occur in between, and if he doesn't support that, they'll leave.
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[0] I'm using the name "Twitter" to refer to the site for which the users developed their behavior. It sounds as if X will prove to be a very different thing, with a different user pattern.
I never wanted a car that was grown in the ethos of commercial computers and software in the first place.
He should talk big and wave his hands, and then have an employee pull him away before he says too much, and before technical decisions can be made.
Maybe he's a laughing stock on HN, but I think he still has good name recognition outside of very technical circles or really partisan bubbles.
Well either your perception of things Musk does at SpaceX is wrong or your perception of things Musk does at X is wrong, right ?
Unfortunately, modern American capitalism is obsessed with hero worship of CEOs and the myth of Elon Musk as a real life Tony Stark is just too compelling for people to shake off.
I give it 10 minutes after the feature is turned off and Musk is flooded with tweets that trigger him before he reinstates his personal ability to block people he doesn’t like.
Pretty great, actually. I'm a staunch believer in that strategy, although I'm on Mastodon and not Twitter.
Mastodon really perfects the block feature by adding a "Block from instance" button that filters entire websites from your feed. You can wipe *@threads.com off your timeline with 2 clicks, it's glorious.
