I rarely block people, but I love using the mute button. That feels like so much less drama since they don't even know the mute happened. (None of the fallout of those tweets with the blocked screenshot crying foul.) What am I missing out on that makes blocking worth it's more "public" nature?

I think the advantage over mute is that the blockee can't reply, so when others see your tweets there's one less person telling you you're wrong.

You get to tell them that they were bad without having to deal with their whining excuses or vitriol.

Personally I prefer being told I'm silenced, since it is a feedback mechanism that gives me the choice to reflect. Maybe it's reflecting on whether I was bad, or maybe it's reflecting on whether it was the right place and time to say what I said, or maybe it's reflecting on whether the person blocking me is worth my time and effort.

I get why people prefer not to offer this feedback, since far too many people get vindictive once they've been rejected. Ghosting someone is highly effective. Still, I wish it wasn't a necessarily available tool, because it gets abused by the overly offended and/or seems to me like passing the problem on to someone else to handle.

I feel this presumes that the blocking was done with an intent and context that the blocked person (and public audience) would agree with.

But: Will Garry Tan add a block button to HN?

Not that I would ever use it.

I wrote a browser extension for myself to "block" users on this board. It's just a list of username -> reason,evidence_url,action records, where "action" is either "make text invisible" or "make text harder to read (the cdd style that HN uses for flagged comments)". It makes the board much better.

Is it available somewhere? Sounds useful

Sounds like way too much customization for an ad-free and free message board.

This feels like déjà vu, because at one point the tech community was saying that a private company, a CEO, can do whatever they want. They can totally block people they don’t like politically. Now it seems one of their own is doing it and it’s not sitting well with people. A little hypocritical.

Presumably these are different people within the tech community which is extremely fragmented on whether it is more interesting to argue whether someone can do something or whether someone should do something.

> It can be an effective way to handle unwanted interactions from accounts you do not want to engage with,” Twitter says on a help page.

"unwanted interactions from accounts" --- when did people become accounts?