this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 131 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

it's unavoidable to center Elon here but can we just take a step back and appreciate what an unimaginably 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!).

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Muting means other people can still comment on your stuff, and everyone else but you can see it.

Its so transphobes and homophobes can continue commenting on LGBT people's content.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Elon Musk really fucking hates his trans daughter. Dad of the century, right here.

Seriously good on his daughter for dropping his scumbag ass. She deserves far better from a parent.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wasn't aware he had more children than the one with the weird-ass name. The private life section on wikipedia is a ride...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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 married 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Lemmy's "block" is essentially a "mute" function, 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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Also, Lemmy has the bonus of federation allowing instances to defederate entirely from abuse and spam-happy instances.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 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.

[–] taladar 2 points 1 year ago

I would assume that blocking is one of the few features that change what each user sees so it could reduce cache hit rates significantly.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

You took away their hobby.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Maybe nows the time to advertise Mastodon some more. What's he gonna do, block us?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago