Comment by Spivak

2 years ago

This is honestly pretty great. It's the official scalable version of those browser add-ons that let you recursively block people, block twitter blue users, block anyone who's posted in x subreddit, masstagger. Big fan of making programmable blocklists a first-class feature.

I don't think it's going to save them from https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you... this kind of drama but it's nonetheless welcome. It will be interesting to see how people react to ending up on a popular 3rd party blocklist.

> block anyone who's posted in x subreddit

Careful. Just because someone posts in /r/conservative or /r/liberal does not necessarily make them either.

What's recursive blocking?

  • Yep, I stopped using Twitter so I don't need them anymore but they were a godsend at avoiding internet drama and discourse I had no desire to engage in. You pick someone famous at the center of the drama and let the algo do its thing blocking them, all their followers, all their followers followers and so on. It's a coarse heuristic to be sure but operating on the principle that I can live without any given person's tweets it made discovery so much nicer.

Can you name some such extensions? I was thinking about similar functionality and considered to create a similar service / extension / etc, even experimented a little long ago. Interesting to know what exists.