"Can be seen by anyone in the world except for tom because fuck tom" isn't a different "level of public", it's just caprice. As the GP mentioned, if you want to restrict who can see your tweets, set your account to private.
Maybe caprice except in the exceedingly common instances where someone is the target of harassment. I mean this is the obvious example, there are others. In that case "make your profile private if you dont want to be harassed/stalked" is not really that palatable.
> In that case "make your profile private if you don't want to be harassed/stalked" is not really that palatable.
If someone is harassing you on twitter, then blocking them still stops that, modulo them making a new account. Stalking, in the sense of looking at your public posts, can't be stopped, because it's trivial for them to open your posts in a private window, or create a new account just for stalking (which of course they wouldn't tell you about, hence you couldn't block it). So in fact the only option you have to avoid such stalking is to make your account private, period.
It’s an additional barrier. It also provides the blocking user the ability to block the new account. This isn’t very difficult to think through. And if it’s so easy, why the need for this new “feature” to begin with?
> also provides the blocking user the ability to block the new account. This isn’t very difficult to think through
The harasser can view from their new accounts and respond on their main account. Unless someone is very tightly curating their follower list, at which point it doesn't make sense for them to be publicly tweeting, there would be no indication which account was responsible.
The problem in harassment is the harassment. Not the harasser's access to the public domain.
Again, then why the need for this feature if it is so easy to get around a block? A harasser can do many things, but removing a barrier for the person being harassed to mitigate it because… reasons feels very odd to me. Can you explain what this new feature provides legitimate users that doesn’t already exist?
> Can you explain what this new feature provides legitimate users that doesn’t already exist?
In America we have case law that prohibits public officials from blocking their constituents from their official accounts [1]. Not every country does.
Also, that ruling doesn't cover material edge cases. Should a public figure be able to block journalists they don't like? Oil companies anyone with an environmental leaning to avoid tipping them off on something they weren't searching for?
We have a media-bubble problem in America that is increasingly defined by partisan lines. From a social utility position, clarifying that public means public strikes me as more important than edge-case harassment concerns. Particularly when the stakes are so low on both sides of the scale (due to the ease with which blocks can be circumvented and the fact that we're dealing with content the speaker has explicilty chosen to make public).
> In America we have case law that prohibits public officials from blocking their constituents from their official accounts [1].
Can’t they just make a new account to see the posts? Are you stating that you think this is the reason this is being implemented? As for the rest of your post, your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this thread.
> Can’t they just make a new account to see the posts?
Sure. But they may not know they've been blocked.
> you think this is the reason this is being implented?
No. I think it's being done to increase engagement. Engagement scales with outrage, and a pretty simple way to boost outrage would be by showing people stuff they've been blocked from.
> your whole argument is undermined by the arguments you’ve already made in this argument
Not really. Blocking users from seeing your public content degrades weak relationships. My interest in what my state Senator is doing is a weak relationship; I don't think I'd be able to tell if they stopped e-mailing me for at least a full election cycle. Harassment, on the other hand, is a strong relationship. That provides circumvention motivation.
My argument is that there appear to be marginal benefits to this policy. If the cost is making unmotivated harassers' jobs a little easier, inasmuch as it pertains to them viewing (not responding to) public content, that seems to be worth it.
There are two >100 comment/vote stories from them in the past two weeks, according to algolia. Maybe the others are being unfairly treated, but that seems pretty good to me.
Natural language syntaxes universally suck. A faux english syntax isn't easier to use if you don't know which english in particular will be accepted. A complex cli interface fundamentally can't be easy to use. A GUI can fix that by making things discoverable and by integrating the documentation into the UI, but the ffmpeg devs presumably see that as someone else job (and there have been people to step up).
> Guardrails are intended to keep cars from careening off the road at critical areas, such as over bridges and waterways, near the edges of cliffs and ravines and over rocky terrain, where injury and death in an off-the-road crash are much more likely. ... “Guardrails are kind of a safety feature of last resort,” Brooks said.
From what I've observed this is wrong. Guardrails seem to be used semi haphazardly along roads in places where it wouldn't be the end of the world to go into the ditch. On a bridge, or a median, or elsewhere where going outside the road boundary could be particularly dangerous, they use much better reinforced walls.
Is it a head on collision? The first angle in the video makes it look like it is, but the second angle makes it clearer that its actually hitting from an angle. It seems to be close to a 45 degree angle, which is slightly closer to a real world scenario.
No -- words like punishment and retaliation have a connotation of being personal and being emotional, or punishment can be linked to the justice system.
They're not appropriate words for mere policy. Like if you damage your apartment and don't get your security deposit back, that's not punishment or retaliation. It's just policy.
Same thing if you try to return something after thirty days and that's against policy. When they don't take the return, they're not punishing you.
The difference is in trying to highlight the "policy" as being fundamentally just and fair, versus arbitrary and capricious. If I have a "policy" of beating up anybody who looks at me funny, that doesn't make it any less retaliatory. On the other hand, the justice system has a habit of avoiding the term "punishment" because they don't like the connotation.
Beeper would have to have agreed to the ToS for them to have broken it. It's apple's users who agreed to a ToS, and apple users who got the boot. The lesson is that apple doesn't treat their users very well, not that some no name company who's fifteen minutes of fame are done isn't responsible enough.
Just because Beeper is delegating the ToS violation to a bunch of random people doesn't mean they aren't complicit. It appears they are acting in even worse faith than Apple here by suggesting their new mechanism is safe and has no side effects when it actually does.
If the cost for me to enjoy a relatively spam-free and stable iMessage experience is to simply not do dumb things, then I will voluntarily not do dumb things (at least not with an account/machine I care about).
Don't sacrifice your devices for another company's attempt at 15 minutes of fame.
These people are customers of both beeper and apple. Both beeper and apple made a set of decision that led to their own customers being hurt. Somehow the resolution is that beeper is uniquely responsible for course correcting. Maybe they should have put language in their ToS to the effect that if your device id is banned, they disclaim all responsibility. Surely that would have smoothed things over?
The only relevant browsers on mobile are google's and apple's, and (modern) web standards are created by enough popular browsers implementing them. Literally all it would take for this to be a reliable web standard would be apple choosing to implement it.
You can apply that logic to literally anything Google thinks up. Google writes something in a spec and no matter how stupid, insecure, or privacy violating it is, by this logic Apple is now falling behind and holding the web back because all it would take to make it a standard is for Apple to do what Google wants. Why are you so keen to hand the web platform entirely over to Google?
