My contact with the medium is… thankfully peripheral (thanks a lot commercial entities that use their twitfeed for time-sensitive announcements rather than their own CMS…); but I’m always surprised at how difficult it apparently is, even for people who want to batten down the hatches, to avoid the vitriol of an endless swarm of more-or-less-zero-cost new accounts. When the barrier to entry is that low anyone who offers blacklisting but not default-deny and whitelisting doesn’t care much.
They also haven’t been terribly nimble when it comes to adopting 3rd party ideas like https://blocktogether.org that people who deal with harassment on Twitter but care about staying have proposed, and in many cases built to the degree technically possible for a 3rd party. I think they have block list import now(hurray! Parity with Usenet kill files!); not sure if they have the same low friction updating.
I can understand why a company desperate for ‘engagement’ and trying to drive new MAU would be jumpy about their quality humans retreating behind the barricades and leaving the noobs to fight it out with the bots; but the commercial incentive isn’t an excuse, not will it prevent users denied good barricade options from just walking away.
