Twitter Tried Removing The Block Feature Before. It Didn’t Go Well. Elon’s Doing It Again Anyway
Elon Musk’s superpower does not appear to be rocket science or electric cars—it’s an uncanny ability to misunderstand why ExTwitter’s features exist.
The clear takeaway from the book “Character Limit” about his Twitter takeover was that he only views the platform’s features through the lens of whether or not he, the richest man in the world, finds them useful or not, and never considers that not everyone else on the platform has the same experience he does.
He made that clear from Day One, when he decided to give anyone a bluecheck if they paid $8/month (without any corresponding verification). That was based on a misunderstanding of how verification works and why it’s important.
Similarly, Elon cannot wrap his head around the reasons why the “block” feature works the way it does. He cannot comprehend how block is often used as a tool to prevent harassment, especially of marginalized individuals, because that kind of harassment is not a problem to the richest dude on the planet.
Instead, he thinks it’s because people don’t want certain voices to hear what they have to say. So, as he’s done before, Elon is back to saying he’s getting rid of the block function.
As he says, “the block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing” public posts. While some people insist that this makes sense given that many people will switch to incognito mode to see content from accounts that blocked them, it ignores the reality (and years of evidence) of how block is an effective tool to stop harassment.
Elon not only misunderstands why block exists, but it also (yet again) highlights his near total lack of intellectual curiosity to understand why things are done the way they’re done.
Because Twitter tried this before. Eleven years ago. Twitter rolled out almost exactly this. Then everyone hated it and the company reverted just hours later. Apparently Elon is unaware of all of that because he got rid of anyone who might have told him about that history.
The replies to Elon’s post, which, of course, show all the suckers paying Elon money to get an anti-signal blue check, show that even his most loyal followers absolutely hate this idea. These are just the top set of replies to Elon’s post that I’m seeing, all of which are from bluecheck accounts, all of which are trashing his idea:
Of course, in Elon-land, no one in the company feels comfortable challenging Elon’s ideas, because the most likely result is a quick firing. Thus, he moves forward with the dumbest ideas imaginable, ones that have already been shown to be stupid.
There were so many ways that Elon could have made Twitter better. He chose none of them.