It’s a battle of the bans as Elon Musk announces that X users will lose the ability to block anyone except for DMs while Twitch is enabling another option. The feature that has long been used to avoid harassment, unwanted comments, or advertisers, or prevent the same from seeing posts by users who have blocked them, has been deemed unnecessary by Elon Musk who notified X users yesterday via a reply to Tesla Owners Silicon Valley that Block is going to be deleted as a feature.
It makes no sense
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 18, 2023
The upcoming change is one of the latest following Twitter’s rebranding as X. The Tesla group had asked if there ever was a reason to block instead of muting someone and following Musk’s reply another added the following.
Tesla Owners Silicon Valley User Reply (via Business Today):
“In my opinion, it’s worth having. Unfortunately trolls and spammers come out. Haters will always try to get some fame over trolling accounts and bashing their name through the mud and being able to control the experience matters. At least for the reach users.”
Twitch to enable blocking of banned accounts
Twitch Senior Product Manager Trevor Fisher revealed in the latest Patch Notes podcast that the streaming platform will be adding to its user’s streaming controls. The feature will soon be rolled out and when turned on it will by default both prevent the banned account from being able to join in the chat but also not allow it access to the stream.
Per Twitch (via Engadget):
“The way that it will work is if you ban somebody and they’re currently watching, then the stream playback will be interrupted for them so that they immediately lose the ability to view the stream,” he explained. “And then if you go offline, you stream again, they won’t be able to watch your subsequent streams either until you choose to un-ban them.”
The new tool is part of an ongoing initiative by Twitch to protect its users from harassment and misconduct during their streams. “We know that this is an area where people want us to do more, and it’s just been shipping off one part of the problem at a time,” added Fisher.