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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

I liked that pmarca always retweeted @pmarca tweets that were positive and negative towards him. Basically unfiltered viewpoints from opposite angles.

I've heard that he has a large ego, but behaviour like that, plus the fact that he routinely 'likes' and retweets messages from people outside the tech elite circle (myself included) seems to disprove that... or is that just MY ego now kicking into conformance rationalisation mode?!?!? ;-)

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He also blocked pretty much anyone who got under his skin. Those he blocked were no longer able to see the stupid shit he said without special effort. In that way, it was an effective way of silencing critics.

Is that so bad? If he's on twitter to follow news or to have conversations that he enjoys or to promote himself, why allow that platform to be a way to criticise you? I certainly don't want a section of my phone or desktop to be devoted to all of the mean things said about me. I certainly wouldn't want such a thing hooked up to push notifications

Because it's not "turn off notifications from this person". It's "hide my tweets from this person, but only when they're logged in" which is a particularly useless (not to mention misleading) form of "security".

The point isn't security, though, it's happiness. It's basically "These person's tweets make me upset, and so I'm going to not interact with them", which is a very basic form of boundary-setting which is thankfully supported by Twitter.

Ah yes, I forgot about his rapid blocking of dissenters. Then again, I don't allow particularly obnoxious people into my household either, so I can't really blame anyone for not electing not to put up with abuse/complaints/harrassment if they don't wish to.

Once again, I am guessing it is a battle of egos - nothing irritates the ego more than being silenced when it feels it has something to say. :) [NB - not directed at you directly, just a general observation of the Twitterverse]

I completely agree with you. I'm all for muting. The issue is the semantics of blocking in Twitter, which prevents those blocked from seeing subsequent tweets.

You end up with situations where public figures can limit their audience to only those who agree with them, which isn't healthy for anyone.

Especially pathetic are the blockers that continue to discuss the people they blocked.

If the tweets were being retweeted, then they were being filtered unless every tweet was retweeted equally.

I am thinking perhaps sheer volume prohibits that. But I appreciate that he curates the tweets he sees/receives and gives equal weight to the pro and neg ones.

I follow many artists and public figures who ONLY retweet the positive stuff, and that tends to reduce my respect for them somewhat. At least address some of the less good stuff from time to time so that we know you don't live in some sort of Polyanna rose-coloured world.

Well, all that careful curation has now been fully filtered away.

I didn't realize how busy he was on Twitter until he retweeted one of my tweets. I have little visibility on social media so I was surprised to get noticed.

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