The Sport of Blocking

What is blocking?
Blocking stops another person from following you (they no longer appear in your list of followers) or being able to read your posts unless you respond (@reply) to someone the blocked person is following. Nor will you be able to read their posts unless they have responded (@reply) to someone you are following.

Why would you want to block someone?
Spam. Or being spammy. Or spamming spammy spam. I’m sure there are other answers but spam is probably the first reason. Spam is becoming a big deal on Twitter and some of us want to discourage people from being spammy spammers. Blocking them means that their number of people followed is reduced but so is the number for followers. Since the objective of spamming seems to be to increase numbers of followed and followers, blocking foils their evil plot to engulf Twitter in… but I digress.

What if I block someone by accident or change my mind?
When you click the button to block, you will be taken to a page that looks remarkably like the one above. Note that the button on the left confirms the block but the button on the right retracts it before it is put in place.

If, however, you have blocked and confirmed a block, then you can still unblock the person by reversing the process of blocking (see below).

What is the difference between blocking and unfollowing?
Unfollowing removes another person from your timeline but they can still read your posts. Blocking removes them from your timeline and you from theirs so that can’t read your posts.

What are the consequences of blocking someone — will s/he be punished?
No, s/he is sent to a special farm where no blocked tweeters are ever euthanized and where they can be adopted by a loving family or live out their days running and playing with the other blocked tweeters awaiting adoption.

Furthermore, the person will not be notified that you have blocked her/him. If the other person has a follower monitoring service (such as Qwitter), that person will be notified by that service that you are no longer following. The person being blocked will know that you have blocked if s/he goes to your profile page to follow you at which time the blockee will see:

How do you block/unblock someone?

1. Go to the profile page of the person you wish to block.
2. Click Block (under “Actions” in the sidebar) or Unblock
3. Click OKAY to confirm the block/unblock

Source: Twitter Support

Your First Tweet

Here are my first words on the Twitter account for this class which I found by entering my user name at My First Tweet:

Now that you know that these things hang around a while, you might want to decide what you want your first words to be.

If you want to see what the very first tweeters first said, take a look at the earliest tweets. The first tweet tends to be something like, “Well, here I am setting up my Twitter account. I’m not impressed so far.”

Remember that it is not literature — it’s conversation. Well, it is conversation that is posted on the Internet and stored somewhere with all of the other information on the Internet — forever. So, a bit of caution but do it.