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Comment by homefree | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to be able to unblock people. An unblock all would be nice to get back to baseline. A while back I blocked everyone that followed a specific user that kept appearing in my feed (this was prior to the musk acquisition where you can view accounts you follow explicitly which is nice).

This was around 50k people (it did make a noticeable difference). The unblock is broken though - I was able to unblock maybe 1k, but now it lists nothing and it's impossible to unblock any others.

As is I just do it occasionally when I see a blocked account appear in a reply.

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Your unblocking is rate limited, just as blocking is now. They keep changing the rate limit, but at one point it was 100/day. Unblocking en masse is possible with a chrome extension but you'll have to run it multiple times over days.

My account doesn’t load any of the blocked people so I can’t. It shows 52k blocked but when I go into the page it’s blank.

when I used it instead of block lists I filtered based on emojis and that got rid of most of the noise. I left X because either I couldn't escape my filter bubble in spite of following some very diverse accounts, or people on it were really just that mid.

it's optimized for engagement, so what you "like," and what keeps you there are probably not the same things. we complain about slop now, but the algos were the original slop, the future was here it just wasn't evenly distributed.

I think X is still really great and it's even better now that you can finally pay to have no ads (and verified means verified instead of 'friends of a twitter employee'.

It does require some effort to curate a worthwhile feed though (and you have to be mindful to not get sucked into junk/avoid the for you tab).

I somewhat agree that it is still great. I do not agree that it is better because you can pay or be verified, but my feed is okay

The option to not have ads seems strictly better to me.

I would like more controls to require unverified accounts to need approval before they can follow me (there's some low hanging fruit leveraging this sort of thing to fight back against the bots)

Almost none of the people I engage with have a blue checkmark, I just checked. If anything it is a red flag

You blocked 50k people? Don't you have to block people one by one? How did you even do this?

People used to superblock via "apps" e.g. block this person and all those that follow this person, block everyone in this thread, etc.

There were API endpoints that worked at some point, made it easy to do.

You could upload blocklists.

Sounds like people weren’t content with how bubble it was and needed extra double bubble.

blocking anyone who pays for the premium subscription contiunes to be a solid enough heuristic

But you still can’t block them with lists.

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