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I was thinking about my rambling the other day about friction in software and how the basic elements of usability are all necessarily frictional, and taking away friction almost invariably means taking away either functionality or agency from the user (you don't need to decide what's interesting in your tl, The Algorithm will decide for you, you stupid fucking animal).
Half of what makes twitter so goddamn poisonous is the lack of friction on sending. There's no fine-grained way to establish boundaries and there's no cost to spamming or harassment, just as there's no cost to sending any other sort of message to anyone, it's all infinitely easy. The only sorts of mechanisms available to control your experience are reactive measures: You can block or mute people. You can also set your account to private but that incurs a massive cost to you, while simultaneously still allowing assholes to fill up your notifications with anything they want if they know it's you! All the friction is incurred on the receiving end.
And twitter knows this is a problem! Until Musk took over, the big benefit of having a blue checkmark, besides the identity verification, was that it gave you more fine grained control over what people could send you.
So maybe this is something to think about, frictionless message transmission seems to be a pretty big negative, from spam to twitter harassment, or even up to the system level, viz. the fediverse's open federation model. Compare with the phone system that at its present most unusable clusterfuck state, scammers still can't just force you to listen to them, you at least have to pick up the phone and you can hang up any time you want!
