I don't think foreign currency reserves of a country that are being actively used are an adequate metric for comparison. The cash tech sits on would be more appropriate. Or even GDP of a country. But foreign exchange reserves of a country can be influenced by a number of factors that are not relevant to this article. Specially since you didn't even mention the country name or it's gdp, it doesn't give us an idea of the scale of the foreign currency reserves. For all I know, the us might as well have that amount of foreign currency because it's mostly using usd anyways. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit, why the scale of foreign currency reserves of a given country can be relevant?
You can still block people, the change just makes it so that the blocked party can still see the blocking party's posts. If your account is public, it has always been possible to look at the posts by using an alt or incognito.
And AFAIK this update is already how other social media platforms like Tumblr function.
It really isn’t because “out of sight, out of mind” is really a thing and it gives stalkers/ragers time to calm down after they’ve been rejected. I mean you can always use a second account to read it, but I’m sure that many people moved on after being blocked which is huge plus for people being harassed by trolls and even scarier people .
> it gives stalkers/ragers time to calm down after they’ve been rejected
But afaik it's just right click -> open in private window to see the profile as the open internet would see it. Takes a second.
It's the same on reddit. If someone replies to you and immediately blocks you (which is a bit of a funny pattern lately), you'd normally switch to logged out mode to read it.
Mobile takes this into account as well: In RedReader (for reddit), you can just use the three dot menu to view it as a not registered user.
I feel that giving users the ability to play around with this kind of hoops and tricks stirs up emotions instead of calming them down.
In general: I don't know of a single scenario where it would be wise to create a situation where logging in on a platform reduces access to its content.
You can see someone's profile and top-engagement tweets logged out, but if you want to see anything recent or specific you need to be logged in, which means there's the friction of a second Twitter account, at least.
You shouldn’t be able to stand on a soapbox and tell certain people to cover their ears.
Twitter allows you to send messages to your followers specifically, Facebook allows you to send it to your friends etc.
Social media is bad enough already for public discourse and the way blocks work on it just made things worse.
Reddit is arguably even worse, block is basically used to have the last word and the entire chain of comments is deleted only for you as others can continue to comment in it.
The reason why social media did this is because they were lazy and didn’t want to take responsibility for policing their userbase. But this doesn’t make a better product.
Places like Reddit shouldn’t allow you to block users at all other than from directly PMing you.
If you don’t want to participate in a public debate don’t. There shouldn’t be a tool that would allow you to decide who else participates in it.
I really don’t understand why this concept is so confusing to people this days.
Because it’s not a big deal and people are looking for something to be mad about.
They changed the rules for public accounts, so that if you block somebody they can still see your posts just not interact with them. That’s no different than somebody being able to create a second account to get past your block anyway.
I don't get how this is so hard to understand (in general, so many people seem to be reading this completely backwards).
Previously, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, Y can't see X's posts.
Now, if X blocks Y, X isn't recommended Y's posts, Y can't interact with X's posts, but Y can see X's posts.
The new system changes nothing in terms of what the person doing the blocking experiences. It fixes abuses of the previous block system, where scammers, grifters and impersonators hide behind blocks to reduce the chances of being caught. It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target on a platform that has free accounts and the ability to easily switch between multiple accounts.
Apple's policy is that apps must have "The ability to block abusive users from the service." They don't say that users should be able to block other users from seeing their posts. In fact, this is also how blocks work on other platforms like Discord. If I block a user, I don't see their posts unless I click on them, they can see mine, but they can't directly ping or reply to me. Similarly with Reddit, being blocked from a subreddit makes me unable to interact with it, but lets me continue to view it.
> It also eliminates the silly fiction that a block prevented stalkers from stalking their target.
I would have made the opposite move, adding an option for paying customers to be invisible to logged out users.
We will see how it goes, but unless you add a rule to prevent people to screenshot tweets from people who blocked them and sharing that picture to their followers, I don't see how the changes are more improvements than regression.
And to be honest, I'm not sure I really care about this change, the two person I know that were harassed on Twitter aren't using it anymore, so :/
Hopefully the platform improve thanks to this change :D
To me, this is an improvement. I don't care about the thing about preventing people from screenshot-ing tweets, since the barrier was so low it was happening often anyway. But, I've seen many cases of accounts being impersonated and used for scams, where the impersonated user only finds out after the damage has already been done. E.g. you sell commissions for something, impersonator makes an account, blocks you so you can't see him, then tricks potential customers into sending him money. You only piece things together weeks later when those customers start calling you out for running off with their money. Another variation involves someone commissioning something, then blocking when their order is ready as a way to harass the creator.
Can they subscribe to Y’s posts? (I mean, without creating another account.)
More generally, though, I agree. Twitter’s aggressive spamming of nearly every page with irrelevant posts (for example, the replies page) is a better reason to switch.
Seems to be unclear, apparently X doesn't do auto-unsubscribes, so you'd still be charged for the subscription. Previously it'd tell you that you can't access subscriber content anymore, but it isn't clear if that's still the case.
I've been looking at it and they are fortunately very open about how they are funded (search engines and bookmarks). Opera was my browser of choice, back in the days of Presto, so I trust the Vivaldi CEO/CTO who also ran Opera. My main annoyance with Vivaldi is that it's Chromium based, I really don't like the idea of a monoculture of rendering engines.
