Before everything, there was something.
As for X, before it was acquired by Elon Musk, it was called Twitter. And X, despite the many changes Musk and his team made, still inherits Twitter's notorious and infamous toxicity.
Driven by the platform's open nature and the way it fosters both positive and negative interactions, X inherits Twitter's problems.
This time, X is launching a feature that would allow users to block others from direct messaging them, but in a way that's separate from the account blocking feature.
Before, when users blocked an account, that account could no longer interact with them in any way.
From public posts to DMs, blocking means that users out of reach.
But this time, X is making a slight tweak.
DM block now live
for when you want to still hear someone’s thoughts…just not directly https://t.co/0jXglwEw9w— X (@X) September 13, 2024
In a post, X said that:
This is another step towards our evolution of messaging on X - stay tuned!
What's changing here is that, X is introducing two separate blocking functions.
The first is for public posting, whereas the second is for personal messaging.
What this means, users should be able to block messages from someone, but still see their posts on their feed.
In Musk's words, the feature essentially decouples DMs from public posting.
DMs are being decoupled from public posting, so that if all you want to do is use this platform for messaging, but not post publicly, you can do so https://t.co/Z1hBwjcYJa
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 11, 2024
" [...] if all you want to do is use this platform for messaging, but not post publicly, you can do so," he said.
The idea is to provide another way to use X as a separate tool for their daily interactive process, like if they don't want to log into X to check posts, but still use it as a platform for messaging.
The feature is yet another step towards creating an “everything app,” which Musk has envisioned since he acquired it.